This was the year that social media got blamed for everything, from Trump winning to grandparents wasting their time on smartphones. In the digital world, over the year the tide turned against social and towards the niche. One of the prime drivers of this change was the damage caused by an incessant flow of news, or what masqueraded as news, on social platforms. Silicon Valley’s social media giants who had projected themselves as knights in shining armour to media houses in distress, are now squeamish about news after getting their fingers burnt with the Trump fiasco. Advertisers becoming jittery about seeing their products next to any kind of political news have not helped either.
Numbers and the story
This squeamishness is starting to show in the numbers as well. Facebook tweaked its algorithm in the latter half of the year to give less priority to news in timelines, compared to posts from friends and family. Data published by Parse.ly, which tracks audience engagement for websites, shows that Google overtook Facebook mid-year as the top referrer to sites on their network. On January 10 this year, Facebook accounted for 40% of traffic to the sites and Google for 33%, while now the numbers are 45% via Google search and 25% via Facebook. Facebook first overtook Google as top referrer in 2015. Many see this as trend that will be definitive in 2018. In NiemenLab’s journalism predictions for 2018, Taylor Lorenz of The Daily Beast predicts that the social and media will split, with digital social interaction happening in closed personal spaces, and news consumption becoming an active, intentional behaviour instead of being passive and serendipitous. “As users migrate to these closed systems, they’re also shifting away from the type of broad-based algorithmic feeds packed with news and media content that were the hallmark of first-generation social media,” she says. This means you will probably spend more time on messenger apps like WhatsApp and following your favourites on Instagram, than on your FB timeline.
While the predominance of assorted photos of food, babies and beaus on your Facebook timeline will be a welcome change, this has implications for a generation that has gotten used to consuming news via social feeds. In the NiemanLabs predictions, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism says that social media, however problematic, was a platform for political engagement and consumption of news from varied sources. This is true even while accounting for the ideological bubbles that their algorithms created.
A politically engaged community is the basic requirement for a vibrant democracy, and availability of news is the basic requirement for political engagement. For many in the younger generation, taking news off the table on social media would be the equivalent of the newspaper boy missing his beat in the morning. How this group accesses news in such a situation will have implications for media organisations; while how political engagement evolves in 2018 with a less news-driven social media would have implications for society as a whole.
