The social media apocalypse

“In the new world slowly emerging by the end of 2018, people begin to read long 18th-century English novels, go to the symphony, and watch 12 to 14 hours of terrestrial television a day. They also play board games as a family.”

2018 will be the year social media ends.

Bold! But no more foolish, in retrospect, than my 2010 prediction that The New York Times would abandon its paywall after a mere few more months of public outrage and financial pressure. Unlike that dour piece of speculation, this is a prediction I would actually like to see come true. 2017 has been a depressing year. Here’s to hope. 

Twitter first. In April 2018, following the release of the Mueller report and Trump’s blanket pardon of not only his entire family but himself, Twitter management will finally suspend @realDonaldTrump. But it’s too late — the political backlash and upheaval from the decision send Twitter’s stock price tumbling. The company finally sells itself to Circa for pennies on the dollar, but the entire userbase and profile information is set on fire by a departing engineer. Circa is left with nothing. 

Facebook, surprisingly, ends sooner. Well, not really ends. In February, the company will be forcibly nationalized following more revelations about the extent of Russian hacking and espionage carried out by a clever manipulation of website algorithms. Mark Zuckerberg tries to shut the News Feed down completely, but not before Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz make common cause in the Senate to appropriate Facebook’s liquid assets, its digital data, and its property. Both the GOP and the newly rebranded National Farmer-Labor-Democratic Party have a very different understanding of what it means for “Facebook to serve the state”…but crisis makes for strange bedfellows.   

Instagram goes the way of Facebook, its corporate parent. In the space left free by the transformation of the photo-sharing  platform, Marissa Mayer tries to revitalize the recently spun-off Flickr. She fails. 

Weibo, finally, stakes everything on its forcible acquisition of Bitcoin, but the global energy crisis caused by the 37th hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season in November 2018 blocks Bitcoin from the world’s grid. Bitcoin’s ensuing bankruptcy drags down the Chinese social media behemoth.

In the new world slowly emerging by the end of 2018, people begin to read long 18th-century English novels, go to the symphony, and watch 12 to 14 hours of terrestrial television a day. They also play board games as a family. Columnists for the nation’s “little magazines” reconsider the typewriter, and tell us about it at length. Newspapers begin to regain advertising market share. And, slowly but surely, people begin to know less and less about how many times Donald Trump has golfed, the most recent campus free-speech controversy, and North Korea’s latest missile launch. Everyone grows a little bit more ignorant, but also a lot more relaxed. It’s unclear whether to count 2018’s great social media die-off as a triumph, or a tragedy — or both. Pundits point to the looming 2020 American election as the moment when we’ll finally figure it out.

C.W. Anderson is a professor of media and communication at the University of Leeds.

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Jesse Holcomb   Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms

Aron Pilhofer   We can’t leave the business to the business side any more

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Sara M. Watson   Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Helen Havlak   Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Alan Soon   The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Tanzina Vega   It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Errin Haines   At the ballot, it’s time to count black women

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Susie Banikarim   R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Burt Herman   Things get real

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg   (Hint: It’s about your brand)

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Eric Ulken   The year local publishers get smart(er) about change

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Jim Moroney   Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Dan Shanoff   You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy   Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Jake Levine   The return to now

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Paul Ford   Go global

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Julia B. Chan   Looking for loyalty in all the right places