Leaving Parasocial Media Behind

I created my Facebook account 17 years ago, in the fall of 2007. Early Facebook was quite different from what it is today. It was about a new way of staying connected with old and current real-world acquaintances—whether childhood friends, coworkers or relatives. Networks were built primarily between people with some kind of real-world connection, and within these networks, we shared updates about life, relocations, jobs, and relationship statuses. It was called a social network, a term that fairly accurately described the concept at the time.

Over the years, the platform took a very different direction. People began generating more and more content for the platform—photos, videos, and personal hot takes about world events. While the idea was to share updates with one's connections, in reality, this content wasn’t being created for our friends but for the platform —free of charge. This content became raw material for the platform's real business—selling ad impressions—and users’ feeds began filling up more and more with personalized ads. The more people shared about themselves, the more detailed profiles the platform could sell to advertisers.

The platform’s primary metrics—frequency of use and time spent in the service —transformed feeds from a more-or-less chronological listing of updates from one’s contacts into a chaotic mix, designed primarily to boost those metrics. Content with the highest potential to capture users’ attention overshadowed everything else. This marked the rise of “influencers.” A few created content, while many consumed it. The social network had turned into social media.

The “social” aspect of this media is, of course, an illusion. The platform's goal is to maximize the time users spend consuming personalized content and generating ever more precise advertising profiles (and with advancements in AI, training language models to generate the personalized content on users' behalf). The relationship is parasocial—one-sided, with the user on one side and either an advertiser or an influencer on the other.

When you create content, you’re not creating it for your friends but for the platform. The platform’s algorithms then decide what, if anything, will be shown to whom to optimize its chosen metrics. As a result, your friends may not even see your updates, even if they’re active users. The last remaining social aspect disappears entirely.

Social media has lost its social essence, becoming merely another form of media. The parasocial nature of this media is most evident among young users, where time spent on these platforms strongly correlates with feelings of loneliness (and beyond correlation, there are strong arguments for causation as well).

Even ignoring moral and ethical arguments, this platform no longer serve the primary purpose I had when I started using it: staying in touch with friends. For these reasons, I’ve decided to delete my Facebook/Meta account during this spring.

What's the alternative, then? I don’t think we need a direct replacement for Facebook. I agree with computer science professor Cal Newport that the answer is not another global discussion platform where hundreds of millions of people generate content for a centralized algorithm to distribute to followers. Smaller, decentralized virtual communities avoid many of the pitfalls described above. We don’t necessarily need any new technology for this—Slack, Discord, WhatsApp groups, and small online forums already serve virtual communities perfectly well. To follow content creators online, the standard (RSS feeds) has existed for over 20 years. There are also good reasons for creators to keep control of their own content, such as through their own blogs, rather than handing it over to platform companies.

In my case, this strategy means I’ll continue publishing longer public writings on this site, though they’ll focus on more general topics I enjoy (and have time to write about) rather than personal updates. For personal conversations, WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, email, and face-to-face meetings remain excellent options.

(This post was originally published in Finnish on my Facebook page. I’m now reposting it in English on my blog so it remains available after the Facebook account is gone).