We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.
Here’s a look back some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:
GOODBYE TWITTER
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter‘s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what’s now known as X.
Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly replaced Twitter’s name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk posted on the site.
Because of its public nature and because it attracted public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter always had an outsized influence on popular culture — but that influence seems to be waning.
“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and X’s reason for existence is murky.”
HELLO X. AND THREADS. AND BLUESKY
Musk’s ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an “everything app” — like China’s WeChat, for instance. The problem? It’s not clear if U.S. and Western audiences are keen on the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague on the specifics.
While X contends with an identity crisis, some users began looking for a replacement. Mastodon was one contender, along with Bluesky, which actually grew out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.
When tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, began signing up for the (still) invite-only Bluesky in the spring, the app had less than 10 people working on it, said CEO Jay Graber recently.
Seeing an opportunity to lure in disgruntled Twitter users, Facebook parent Meta launched its own rival, Threads, in July. It soared to popularity as tens of millions began signing up — though keeping people on has been a bit of a challenge. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a surprise move that the company was testing interoperability — the idea championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks that people should be able to use their accounts on different platforms — kind of like your email address or phone number.
MENTAL HEALTH WORRIES
Social media’s impact on children’s mental health hurtled toward a reckoning this year, with the U.S. surgeon general warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens — and calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”
In October, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
In November, Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified before a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them.
The testimony came amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations aimed at protecting children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR IN ‘24
Your AI friends have arrived — but chatbots are just the beginning. Standing in a courtyard at his company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” — and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them. The company unveiled an army of AI bots — with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them — that social media users can interact with.
Analysts also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive revenue stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musk’s X, subscriptions “started as a way to diversify or boost revenues as social ad businesses took a hit, but they have persisted and expanded even as the social ad market has steadied itself.”
With major elections coming up in the U.S. and India among other countries, AI’s and social media’s role in misinformation will continue to be front and center for social media watchers.
