Conspiracy, monetisation and weirdness: this is
why social media has become ungovernable
Nesrine
Malik
The royals are perennial clickbait, but the wild
online bunkum over the Princess of Wales reveals new and darker forces
Mon 1 Apr
2024 01.00 EDT
On TikTok,
there is a short clip of what an AI voiceover claims is a supposed “ring
glitch” in the video in which Princess of Wales reveals her cancer diagnosis.
It has 1.3 million views. Others, in which users “break down” aspects of the
video and analyse the saga with spurious evidence, also rack up millions of
views and shares. I have then seen them surface on X, formerly known as
Twitter, and even shared on WhatsApp by friends and family, who see in these
videos, presented as factual and delivered in reporter-style, nothing that
indicates that this is wild internet bunkum.
Something
has changed about the way social media content is presented to us. It is both a
huge and subtle shift. Until recently, types of content were segregated by
platform. Instagram was for pictures and short reels, TikTok for longer videos,
X for short written posts. Now Instagram reels post TikTok videos, which post
Instagram reels, and all are posted on X. Often it feels like a closed loop,
with the algorithm taking you further and further away from discretion and
choice in who you follow. All social media apps now have the equivalent of a
“For you” page, a feed of content from people you don’t follow, and which, if
you don’t consciously adjust your settings, the homepage defaults to. The
result is that increasingly, you have less control over what you see.
And the
less control you have, the more these platforms become a jostling market of
attention-seeking and selling. Sometimes the product is clear, resembling an
old-fashioned advertisement, although often you have to look carefully to
realise that. Content creators link items they love on “shop fronts” and it
looks as if they’re just helpfully recommending things you might be interested
in paying for, whereas in fact they earn a commission when you buy. Other
times, the simple act of you watching, sharing and engaging is enough to
generate revenue for those users who have posted it. The result is a system
that incentivises the creation of content that triggers high engagement, and
there’s little that achieves that better than conspiracy theorising.
Conspiracy
theories online are not new, but they seem to have migrated, in substance and
source, from the sensationalist to sober, from something you would stumble upon
sometimes, to something that appears as part of your everyday feed. I’m not
sure exactly when it started happening, but in my user experience, it burst its
banks with the new X regime under Elon Musk. The changing of verification rules
means that people who pay for blue tick badges (as opposed to being awarded
them based on profile and credibility) get preferential treatment in how their
posts are viewed by non-followers, and have come to understand that their style
must sound authoritative.
And so the
tone of conspiracy has become gentrified. People are now just “asking
questions”, posting grainy videos and asking, “What do you notice?”, or
threading, like those sober TikTok video creators, a series of observations and
expressing concern that something is just not right. If you thought that the
Baltimore bridge collapse was an accident, there are now several posts, by
verified users, implying there is simply no way that is true.
There is a
tendency to treat all online behaviour – even that which is legitimately
questioning and rightfully irreverent – as the manifestation of real-life “mob”
activity, of collective meanness and moral failure. But the internet simply
isn’t that easy to get your head around. There is no simple formula, but
monetisation now drives more content than you realise from a cursory scroll.
Social
media in the past was just that, a social place, one that mainly intersected
with personal brand-building and professional ambitions only in so far as it
helped in raising a user’s public profile. It is now a job, a place where users
can get paid and become full-time “content creators”. Virality of videos or
tweets enhances users’ ability to unlock monetisation and grow follower counts,
which then attract brands and partnerships, and the more that model works, the
more it brings in revenue for social media platforms, which in turn charge for
monetisation as a service.
Look at
claims that a Kremlin-linked network was involved in stirring conspiracy
theories about Kate Middleton; according to a report in the New York Times, the
motives were probably not only political, but commercial, whereby Russian
networks capitalised on the interest in the Middleton story to boost their own
traffic.
Legacy
media look down on all of this, of course, avoiding uncomfortable questions.
Cynically manipulating news stories, spinning them, and presenting the results
as fact for clicks and shares is in many ways an evolution and refinement of
what has been going on for decades on the pages of the tabloids and rightwing
media – particularly when it comes to celebrities and members of the royal
family.
The
Princess of Wales is “too good for mean spirited Little Britain”, the Telegraph
printed in mid-March. Ten days later, the paper headlined a story about Sean
Combs’ indictment with “Prince Harry named in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexual assault
lawsuit”, even though he was only referenced in passing. (The headline appears
to have been later changed to “Prince Harry dragged into …”) When parts of the
press admonish social media users for speculating about the royals, the
insinuation seems to be: that’s our job.
This is
just one small example of how the old system of mediation between the palace
and the media, steering the public towards whom to love and whom to hate, is
now gone for ever. Some of that is because of how the profile of the royals has
changed since the death of Queen Elizabeth. The family has been relegated to a
cruder celebrity, with the added twist that we feel we are owed more by them
than other famous people we do not pay for. We are at a new juncture in social
media activity that the Middleton case has merely brought to the surface.
It’s not
just a nasty place that we can conveniently assume hosts the worst of human
behaviour, triggered into derangement by anonymity and a goading algorithm.
There are new commercial players that are simulating, and then trying to
replace, legacy media by attacking them as a purveyor of narratives that keep
you in the dark. They are disparate and atomised and ungovernable, and their
posts and videos mislead users with head-spinning virality that a static
front-page could never achieve. And for established media, reckoning with how
that is happening in all its complexity is far harder and far more
incriminating than reducing it all to the moral shortcomings of the public.
Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
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