Social media seems inescapable today, especially if you want to build an audience as an artist. But, knowing all the problems caused by social media platforms, is it ethical for me to use them? And if not, then how else can I build an audience as a writer?
There used to be institutions gatekeeping who could create art and who couldn't. Now, it seems like everyone can do it, thanks to the social media platforms that concentrate most of our attention. To the point that it seems like you can't build a career as an artist if you don't have any presence on social media. As Mina Le explains in her recent video about the luxury of privacy, the myth of the solitary artist as opposed to the attention seeker is outdated. She cites the article Everyone is a sellout now, about musician Ricky Montgomery who complained on TikTok about having to make short content on the platform to promote his work, or else no one would be exposed to his music and discover it.
Mina Le states the ideal that "the work should speak for itself", and that is an ideal that I try to live by. I try to avoid being seen as an attention-seeker. But then I wonder: Am I being arrogant? Is it self-sabotage? But there is more to it than just my reluctance to expose myself, or not knowing what to post.
Social media platforms are centralized, and owned by companies that don't have the public's interest in mind. They are skewed towards creating as much ad revenue as possible, not "showing the best work" to as many people as possible.
When we provide them with our free work, we don't own our content anymore, with no guarantee that it will have a positive impact on our visibility. The content we create becomes shaped by the platform we want to post it on, which makes us captive to that platform:
"Each algorithmic feed, each platform, generates its own signature culture that fits into it. So we’re familiar with Instagram Face, the kind of influencer plastic surgery aesthetic. We’re familiar with TikTok influencer voice, which is the kind of monotone, syncopated, packing as many words into a sentence as possible. So I think there are forms of content that work for each different platform."
Kyle Chayka on The Verge's Decoder podcast1,
In the end, a TikTok is made for TikTok, and you can't always reuse the content you have created for a specific platform on another platform. You probably wouldn't have created your content in the same way if you had planned to post it on YouTube. You are now captive to that platform, and your creation process has been altered in the interest of that corporation.
A particular pet peeve that I have with platforms such as TikTok and Instagram is their censorship. In an attempt to avoid being shadow-banned or outright banned, you will often see words such as unalived instead of "killed" or "dead", asterisks or numbers replacing a letter in an offensive word, etc... It makes sense from the point of view of content moderation, but just banning words is a lazy way of limiting offensive content (and may not be effective against dog whistles or other strategies the far right uses to escape moderation). Words mean something, and censoring ourselves, removing the real words and ideas we want to talk about, rendering them inoffensive, also depletes them of their meaning.
"If the government fails to prevent monopolization of our speech forums – like social media – and also declines to offer its own public speech forums that are bound to respect the First Amendment, we can end up with government choices that produce an environment in which some ideas are suppressed wherever they might find an audience – all without violating the Constitution."
As presented in this article, the majority of censorship is self-censorship. In order to cater to algorithms, creators remove some ideas or even choose not to post about some subjects because it could impact their outreach on the platform.
When everything is content, and the process of creation is deeply changed by the platforms, is it still art? Do we want what we create to be dictated by the interests of companies?
The problem with current social media platforms is that, despite what they would have us believe, they are not public spaces. Even though they contributed to removing the barrier for entry in a lot of domains, allowing anyone with only a computer or a smartphone to reach an audience, they are not neutral spaces.
They platform people regardless of their ideologies, as long as they bring more eyeballs to their websites. Platforms encourage extreme content, which drives more outrage, more attention, and more ad revenue. They simply don't care if the content they are hosting and promoting does harm. Platformer chose to leave substack earlier this year for this exact reason.
Another example of this is Twitter, which Elon Musk has taken over with the goal of promoting free speech, which in his case means far-right extremism, as reported by the Guardian. Users left Twitter for other platforms such as Bluesky or Threads, but (except for the Fediverse), the problem remains the same, just in a different flavour and on a different timeline.
As Catherynne M. Valente tells us, all platforms eventually want us to stop talking to each other and start buying things. This problem has been there for decades, and migrating from one platform to the next one does not protect you from the enshittification that eventually happens on all platforms. Taking the example of TikTok, Cory Doctorow shows that new platforms try to lure in users and creators in different phases, with algorithms that push creators' content to more users than they would naturally reach, convincing them to invest in the platform, until they are trapped and TikTok can serve users as many ads as possible.
The same thing is happening with YouTube trying to eradicate ad-blockers. Inescapably, platforms start pushing more and more advertisement on their platforms, stop showing your content to users who have subscribed to your page, and become unusable. But you can't leave, because that's where the people you follow are, or that's where you've built an audience.
That is what happens not only on social media, but also in the music industry with Spotify, or in the retail industry with Amazon, as deomnstrated in the book Chokepoint capitalism. We end up with monopolies from big companies who, instead of just being benevolent intermediaries between people who have something to sell and people who want to buy it, capture all of the market and then apply their conditions on it for their own benefit.
Some communities seem to shift towards group chats instead of social media, but the main alternative to traditional social media is the Fediverse, a decentralized platform free of ads and algorithms, where anyone can create their own instance without having to depend on a company's whims. The technical barrier to entry may be a bit higher than usual social media platforms, but if you are able to use emails, you should be able to use the Fediverse. With no algorithms to push viral content to new users, it's harder to build an audience, but the growth happens more authentically.
Creating alternative platforms owned by creators may be a solution too, such as Nebula, a streaming platform created by and owned by creators.
We have to take matters into our own hands in order to create the platforms we want to use, instead of being used by them.
1: I invite you to listen to this episode of Offline with Jon Favreau which also features Kyle Chayka, as well as a discussion about the Introvert Economy. It might appear in a future article, who knows!