For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests. A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive - and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up. Titled 'Common People', the episode is from series 7 of Black MirrorNetflix The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.A recent article looked at how generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.For a second.And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car? What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn't the best way to get there?Depositphotos Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.An article in the Columbia Journalism Review asked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence. LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look likeDepositphotos ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggested memory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990sPublic Domain I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work. Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication. If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it's pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop. “We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?” Ted Chiang

Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments

Seeking closure Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial How many ads is too many? Meta denies ad load harms users in bid to end trial early. Ashley Belanger – May 16, 2025 12:01 pm | 13 Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm. "Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads. Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “pretty broken and duct-taped” together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless." "What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive'—adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." Meta hopes to avoid breakup The monopoly trial is supposed to run through June, but Meta is hoping that US District Judge James Boasberg will agree that the FTC has failed to make its case and end the trial early. Granting Meta's motion would remove any threat of a breakup of its family of apps while also letting Meta off the hook of raising its defense. This could spare Meta any potential further embarrassment of having its founder's unvarnished internal emails picked apart in public. For Boasberg, it will likely come down to the FTC's market definition alleging that Meta dominates and forecloses rivals in a personal social networking services market that Meta says is a "fiction." If Boasberg buys Meta's argument that TikTok is actually Meta's biggest rival—and not Snap or MeWe—Meta could have an easier time shutting down the case. The FTC has not yet commented on the motion, but the agency was determined to go through with the trial, rejecting a reportedly $1 billion settlement offer from Meta. Holding out for $30 billion, the FTC appeared confident in presenting its case, arguing that TikTok—which attracts users broadcasting to strangers—is not a substitute for Meta's apps, which are designed to connect friends and family. The FTC likely expects to see the trial through to the end, when the agency, in a win, will likely try to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's not necessarily an inevitability in a Meta loss, though. If Boasberg denies Meta's motion, Meta will have to present more evidence and deliver closing arguments before a second phase of the trial would litigate potential remedies. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 13 Comments