There was a time when social media actually felt social.
Before feeds became carefully engineered, before every other post looked like an advert and before we had to wonder whether the person behind an account was even real, social media felt like somewhere you went to connect.
You could log onto MySpace and customise your page. You could find an old school friend on Facebook. You could follow people who shared your interests, discover new music, post a picture and disappear again.
It wasn’t necessarily perfect. But it felt personal.
So, what happened?
When social media was about being social
The early days of social media were never completely free from commercialisation. Platforms needed to make money, advertisers were always going to see an opportunity and, as these companies grew, advertising was inevitably going to become a major part of the business model.
Mark Zuckerberg did not create Facebook as some kind of charity project.
But there was still a distinction between using a platform to connect with people and using a platform designed to keep you there because your attention has become the product.
That distinction feels much harder to see today.
Social media became more than a place to share what you were doing.
It became a place to build a personal brand.
Then an income.
Then an advertising channel.
And eventually, an entire economy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Creators deserve to be paid. Businesses need to advertise. Small businesses can reach customers they could never have reached through traditional advertising.
The problem is what happens when the commercial incentive begins to shape what we see, what we feel and even how we interact with one another.
Welcome to the age of rage bait
Perhaps one of the biggest changes in social media culture is the rise of rage bait.
The principle is simple.
Make people angry.
They comment.
They argue.
They share it.
The post receives more engagement.
More engagement means more visibility.
And more visibility can mean more money.
Suddenly, being reasonable isn’t necessarily rewarded.
Being controversial is.
You can disagree with someone and scroll past.
But if a post makes you furious, you might stop.
You might write a paragraph explaining why they’re wrong.
Someone else responds.
You respond again.
And before you know it, you’ve spent twenty minutes arguing with a stranger you’ve never met.
The creator gets the engagement.
The platform gets the attention.
And you get an elevated heart rate.
Maybe that is the real business model.
Then came AI
Artificial intelligence has introduced another problem.
We are now entering a world where the amount of content that can be produced is almost limitless.
Images can be generated in seconds.
Videos can be manipulated.
Text can be produced instantly.
Accounts can be automated.
Comments can potentially be generated.
And content can be created without a human sitting behind a keyboard in the way we have traditionally understood.
This creates a strange contradiction.
Social media was built around people.
Now we are increasingly surrounded by content that may not have been created by people at all.
And that raises an important question:
If we cannot always tell what is real, who are we actually connecting with?
So, should the law intervene?
This is where the conversation becomes more complicated.
There is a temptation to say: “Social media is harmful. Regulate it.”
But regulate what?
People’s opinions?
Algorithms?
Advertising?
AI?
Bots?
Harmful content?
And who decides what crosses the line?
Social media also exists alongside important principles such as freedom of expression, privacy and access to information.
The answer therefore cannot simply be to remove everything controversial from the internet.
Instead, perhaps we should focus on transparency and accountability.
If something is being deliberately designed to influence us, we should know.
If we are interacting with a bot, we should know.
If an image has been artificially generated or significantly manipulated, we should know.
If someone is being paid to promote something, that commercial relationship should be clear.
The user should not have to become an internet detective just to understand what they are looking at.
Two laws to introduce to make social media social again
1. The Authenticity Act
The first would focus on transparency.
Large platforms would have stronger obligations to clearly identify AI generated content, automated accounts and commercial relationships.
The Algorithmic Accountability Act
The second would look at something slightly bigger: the algorithms deciding what we see.
Platforms have enormous influence over what becomes visible.
A post can reach ten people or ten million people.
But how much do ordinary users actually know about why certain content appears repeatedly on their feeds?
If a platform’s recommendation system repeatedly amplifies harmful or deliberately inflammatory content because it generates engagement, should the platform have some responsibility for that amplification?
That doesn’t mean making platforms responsible for every post uploaded by a user.
It means asking a more difficult question:
Where does responsibility sit when the platform isn’t simply hosting content, but actively recommending it?
That is a conversation worth having.
Maybe social media isn’t the problem
Perhaps the problem isn’t that social media became commercial.
Commercialisation was always going to happen.
Perhaps the problem is that the commercial model became so sophisticated that we stopped noticing it.
We aren’t simply scrolling anymore.
We are being advertised to.
We are being entertained.
We are being influenced.
We are being encouraged to engage.
And increasingly, we are interacting with content that may not even have been created by another human being.
Social media didn’t necessarily stop being social.
We changed what we rewarded.
We rewarded the post that made us angry.
The video that kept us watching.
The influencer who made us buy.
The controversy that generated millions of comments.
The content that could be produced in seconds.
And now we are asking why the internet feels less like a social space and more like a marketplace.
Maybe the question isn’t simply:
“What happened to social media?”
Maybe the better question is:
“What do we want social media to become?”
Because if we are going to spend our time there, perhaps we should have some say in what kind of space we are actually building.
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