The new social club

If you’re lucky to be old enough to remember the ‘birth’ of social media, you’ll realise that it’s a very different beast today to what it was then.

Somehow, it felt more personal but without the threatening bit. You were invited to join MySpace by Tom (real name Tom Anderson, but even now most people know him as MySpaceTom). Or there was Friends Reunited, where you tracked down old pals from university and marvelled at how the cool, unreachable kids now just look and sound like everyone else. 

Fast-forward nearly three decades and all we seem to talk about is cancel culture, AI slop, Twitter wars, TikTok shopping and deepfakes. Australia and, latterly, the UK have moved to ban under-16s, some of social media’s most active users, from the platforms altogether, and there are rumblings this may go even further (e.g. bans on VPNs to stop teens finding a workaround).

Interestingly, social media is where brands, both large and small, have flocked to build audiences and create deeper relationships, allowing them to extend beyond product marketing into content creation. And even here, many look set to ditch the platforms and retreat back behind their own branded websites.

The more I learn about social media and its impact on our lives, the more cautiously I approach it – and the more aware I am of its powerful ability to push every one of my buttons if I let it. I am also aware of how difficult a place it is to police.

The pub used to be a microcosm of society. You’d have the reasonable ones, the extreme ones shouting at walls (and, hopefully, largely being ignored), the rabble-rousers and the tastemakers. But it also benefited from being bound by four walls and an age limit. No children at the bar please.
If you think about a social media ban in those terms, it doesn’t seem so extreme. It wasn’t just the alcohol that was the problem in a pub; it was being given access to a world that teenagers just aren’t able to deal with yet.

Just as the spicier side of life was less likely to intrude on a Saturday afternoon at the local bowling alley or leisure centre, well-managed brand communities can provide a safer online space. If brands are able to curate these environments effectively and make them accessible to all, not just teenagers, then perhaps that is something to be welcomed.

But ‘policing the internet’ still seems like a Sisyphean task and our ability as humans to catch every falsehood or misrepresentation is limited. We spoke with one such human in our Data of Beauty piece, as she single-handedly (currently) is crunching the data on claims made by influencers and brands about beauty products.

How could technology help her? Could it delve into the data more effectively? Do the work of ten when it comes to debunking claims? Possibly. We see so much potential in AI, yet it is still stuck in AI slopsville.

We also explore why some companies are starting to mandate AI literacy among executives at all levels. If we could learn how to use it properly – not just the tool but its strategic purpose – then perhaps we could make these needed leaps. Perhaps we could finally find transparency, crunch the numbers and make the internet a safe place for all of us to play.