Social Media

openai-mocks-musk’s-math-in-suit-over-iphone/chatgpt-integration

OpenAI mocks Musk’s math in suit over iPhone/ChatGPT integration

AI, Antitrust law, Apple, chatbots, elon musk, everything app, generative ai, openai, Policy, Social Media, super apps, X, x corp, xAI / /

“Fraction of a fraction of a fraction”

xAI’s claim that Apple gave ChatGPT a monopoly on prompts is “baseless,” OpenAI says.

OpenAI and Apple have moved to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s xAI, alleging that ChatGPT’s integration into a “handful” of iPhone features violated antitrust laws by giving OpenAI a monopoly on prompts and Apple a new path to block rivals in the smartphone industry.

The lawsuit was filed in August after Musk raged on X about Apple never listing Grok on its editorially curated “Must Have” apps list, which ChatGPT frequently appeared on.

According to Musk, Apple linking ChatGPT to Siri and other native iPhone features gave OpenAI exclusive access to billions of prompts that only OpenAI can use as valuable training data to maintain its dominance in the chatbot market. However, OpenAI and Apple are now mocking Musk’s math in court filings, urging the court to agree that xAI’s lawsuit is doomed.

As OpenAI argued, the estimates in xAI’s complaint seemed “baseless,” with Musk hesitant to even “hazard a guess” at what portion of the chatbot market is being foreclosed by the OpenAI/Apple deal.

xAI suggested that the ChatGPT integration may give OpenAI “up to 55 percent” of the potential chatbot prompts in the market, which could mean anywhere from 0 to 55 percent, OpenAI and Apple noted.

Musk’s company apparently arrived at this vague estimate by doing “back-of-the-envelope math,” and the court should reject his complaint, OpenAI argued. That math “was evidently calculated by assuming that Siri fields ‘1.5 billion user requests per day globally,’ then dividing that quantity by the ‘total prompts for generative AI chatbots in 2024,'”—”apparently 2.7 billion per day,” OpenAI explained.

These estimates “ignore the facts” that “ChatGPT integration is only available on the latest models of iPhones, which allow users to opt into the integration,” OpenAI argued. And for any user who opts in, they must link their ChatGPT account for OpenAI to train on their data, OpenAI said, further restricting the potential prompt pool.

By Musk’s own logic, OpenAI alleged, “the relevant set of Siri prompts thus cannot plausibly be 1.5 billion per day, but is instead an unknown, unpleaded fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that number.”

Additionally, OpenAI mocked Musk for using 2024 statistics, writing that xAI failed to explain “the logic of using a year-old estimate of the number of prompts when the pleadings elsewhere acknowledge that the industry is experiencing ‘exponential growth.'”

Apple’s filing agreed that Musk’s calculations “stretch logic,” appearing “to rest on speculative and implausible assumptions that the agreement gives ChatGPT exclusive access to all Siri requests from all Apple devices (including older models), and that OpenAI may use all such requests to train ChatGPT and achieve scale.”

“Not all Siri requests” result in ChatGPT prompts that OpenAI can train on, Apple noted, “even by users who have enabled devices and opt in.”

OpenAI reminds court of Grok’s MechaHitler scandal

OpenAI argued that Musk’s lawsuit is part of a pattern of harassment that OpenAI previously described as “unrelenting” since ChatGPT’s successful debut, alleging it was “the latest effort by the world’s wealthiest man to stifle competition in the world’s most innovative industry.”

As OpenAI sees it, “Musk’s pretext for litigation this time is that Apple chose to offer ChatGPT as an optional add-on for several built-in applications on its latest iPhones,” without giving Grok the same deal. But OpenAI noted that the integration was rolled out around the same time that Musk removed “woke filters” that caused Grok to declare itself “MechaHitler.” For Apple, it was a business decision to avoid Grok, OpenAI argued.

Apple did not reference the Grok scandal in its filing but in a footnote confirmed that “vetting of partners is particularly important given some of the concerns about generative AI chatbots, including on child safety issues, nonconsensual intimate imagery, and ‘jailbreaking’—feeding input to a chatbot so it ignores its own safety guardrails.”

A similar logic was applied to Apple’s decision not to highlight Grok as a “Must Have” app, their filing said. After Musk’s public rant about Grok’s exclusion on X, “Apple employees explained the objective reasons why Grok was not included on certain lists, and identified app improvements,” Apple noted, but instead of making changes, xAI filed the lawsuit.

Also taking time to point out the obvious, Apple argued that Musk was fixated on the fact that his charting apps never make the “Must Have Apps” list, suggesting that Apple’s picks should always mirror “Top Charts,” which tracks popular downloads.

“That assumes that the Apple-curated Must-Have Apps List must be distorted if it does not strictly parrot App Store Top Charts,” Apple argued. “But that assumption is illogical: there would be little point in maintaining a Must-Have Apps List if all it did was restate what Top Charts say, rather than offer Apple’s editorial recommendations to users.”

Likely most relevant to the antitrust charges, Apple accused Musk of improperly arguing that “Apple cannot partner with OpenAI to create an innovative feature for iPhone users without simultaneously partnering with every other generative AI chatbot—regardless of quality, privacy or safety considerations, technical feasibility, stage of development, or commercial terms.”

“No facts plausibly” support xAI’s “assertion that Apple intentionally ‘deprioritized'” xAI apps “as part of an illegal conspiracy or monopolization scheme,” Apple argued.

And most glaringly, Apple noted that xAI is not a rival or consumer in the smartphone industry, where it alleges competition is being harmed. Apple urged the court to reject Musk’s theory that Apple is incentivized to boost OpenAI to prevent xAI’s ascent in building a “super app” that would render smartphones obsolete. If Musk’s super app dream is even possible, Apple argued, it’s at least a decade off, insisting that as-yet-undeveloped apps should not serve as the basis for blocking Apple’s measured plan to better serve customers with sophisticated chatbot integration.

“Antitrust laws do not require that, and for good reason: imposing such a rule on businesses would slow innovation, reduce quality, and increase costs, all ultimately harming the very consumers the antitrust laws are meant to protect,” Apple argued.

Musk’s weird smartphone market claim, explained

Apple alleged that Musk’s “grievance” can be “reduced to displeasure that Apple has not yet ‘integrated with any other generative AI chatbots’ beyond ChatGPT, such as those created by xAI, Google, and Anthropic.”

In a footnote, the smartphone giant noted that by xAI’s logic, Musk’s social media platform X “may be required to integrate all other chatbots—including ChatGPT—on its own social media platform.”

But antitrust law doesn’t work that way, Apple argued, urging the court to reject xAI’s claims of alleged market harms that “rely on a multi-step chain of speculation on top of speculation.” As Apple summarized, xAI contends that “if Apple never integrated ChatGPT,” xAI could win in both chatbot and smartphone markets, but only if:

1. Consumers would choose to send additional prompts to Grok (rather than other generative AI chatbots).

2. The additional prompts would result in Grok achieving scale and quality it could not otherwise achieve.

3. As a result, the X app would grow in popularity because it is integrated with Grok.

4. X and xAI would therefore be better positioned to build so-called “super apps” in the future, which the complaint defines as “multi-functional” apps that offer “social connectivity and messaging, financial services, e-commerce, and entertainment.”

5. Once developed, consumers might choose to use X’s “super app” for various functions.

6. “Super apps” would replace much of the functionality of smartphones and consumers would care less about the quality of their physical phones and rely instead on these hypothetical “super apps.”

7. Smartphone manufacturers would respond by offering more basic models of smartphones with less functionality.

8. iPhone users would decide to replace their iPhones with more “basic smartphones” with “super apps.”

Apple insisted that nothing in its OpenAI deal prevents Musk from building his super apps, while noting that from integrating Grok into X, Musk understands that integration of a single chatbot is a “major undertaking” that requires “substantial investment.” That “concession” alone “underscores the massive resources Apple would need to devote to integrating every AI chatbot into Apple Intelligence,” while navigating potential user safety risks.

The iPhone maker also reminded the court that it has always planned to integrate other chatbots into its native features after investing in and testing Apple Intelligence’s performance, relying on what Apple deems is the best chatbot on the market today.

Backing Apple up, OpenAI noted that Musk’s complaint seemed to cherry-pick testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, claiming that “Google could not reach an agreement to integrate” Gemini “with Apple because Apple had decided to integrate ChatGPT.”

“The full testimony recorded in open court reveals Mr. Pichai attesting to his understanding that ‘Apple plans to expand to other providers for Generative AI distribution’ and that ‘[a]s CEO of Google, [he is] hoping to execute a Gemini distribution agreement with Apple’ later in 2025,” OpenAI argued.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

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.

OpenAI mocks Musk’s math in suit over iPhone/ChatGPT integration Read More »

a-history-of-the-internet,-part-3:-the-rise-of-the-user

A history of the Internet, part 3: The rise of the user

Features, Google, history, Internet, Social Media, Tech / /

the best of times, the worst of times

The reins of the Internet are handed over to ordinary users—with uneven results.

Everybody get together. Credit: D3Damon/Getty Images

Everybody get together. Credit: D3Damon/Getty Images

Welcome to the final article in our three-part series on the history of the Internet. If you haven’t already, catch up with part one and part two.

As a refresher, here’s the story so far:

The ARPANET was a project started by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency in 1969 to network different mainframe computers together across the country. It later evolved into the Internet, connecting multiple global networks together using a common TCP/IP protocol. By the late 1980s, a small group of academics and a few curious consumers connected to each other on the Internet, which was still mostly text-based.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypertext system designed for graphical interfaces. At first, it ran only on the expensive NeXT workstation. But when Berners-Lee published the web’s protocols and made them available for free, people built web browsers for many different operating systems. The most popular of these was Mosaic, written by Marc Andreessen, who formed a company to create its successor, Netscape. Microsoft responded with Internet Explorer, and the browser wars were on.

The web grew exponentially, and so did the hype surrounding it. It peaked in early 2001, right before the dotcom collapse that left most web-based companies nearly or completely bankrupt. Some people interpreted this crash as proof that the consumer Internet was just a fad. Others had different ideas.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met each other at a graduate student orientation at Stanford in 1996. Both were studying for their PhDs in computer science, and both were interested in analyzing large sets of data. Because the web was growing so rapidly, they decided to start a project to improve the way people found information on the Internet.

They weren’t the first to try this. Hand-curated sites like Yahoo had already given way to more algorithmic search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which both started in 1995. These sites attempted to find relevant webpages by analyzing the words on every page.

Page and Brin’s technique was different. Their “BackRub” software created a map of all the links that pages had to each other. Pages on a given subject that had many incoming links from other sites were given a higher ranking for that keyword. Higher-ranked pages could then contribute a larger score to any pages they linked to. In a sense, this was a like a crowdsourcing of search: When people put “This is a good place to read about alligators” on a popular site and added a link to a page about alligators, it did a better job of determining that page’s relevance than simply counting the number of times the word appeared on a page.

Step 1 of the simplified BackRub algorithm. It also stores the position of each word on a page, so it can make a further subset for multiple words that appear next to each other. Jeremy Reimer.

Creating a connected map of the entire World Wide Web with indexes for every word took a lot of computing power. The pair filled their dorm rooms with any computers they could find, paid for by a $10,000 grant from the Stanford Digital Libraries Project. Many were cobbled together from spare parts, including one with a case made from imitation LEGO bricks. Their web scraping project was so bandwidth-intensive that it briefly disrupted the university’s internal network. Because neither of them had design skills, they coded the simplest possible “home page” in HTML.

In August 1996, BackRub was made available as a link from Stanford’s website. A year later, Page and Brin rebranded the site as “Google.” The name was an accidental misspelling of googol, a term coined by a mathematician’s young son to describe a 1 with 100 zeros after it. Even back then, the pair was thinking big.

Google.com as it appeared in 1998. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

By mid-1998, their prototype was getting over 10,000 searches a day. Page and Brin realized they might be onto something big. It was nearing the height of the dotcom mania, so they went looking for some venture capital to start a new company.

But at the time, search engines were considered passée. The new hotness was portals, sites that had some search functionality but leaned heavily into sponsored content. After all, that’s where the big money was. Page and Brin tried to sell the technology to AltaVista for $1 million, but its parent company passed. Excite also turned them down, as did Yahoo.

Frustrated, they decided to hunker down and keep improving their product. Brin created a colorful logo using the free GIMP paint program, and they added a summary snippet to each result. Eventually, the pair received $100,000 from angel investor Andy Bechtolsheim, who had co-founded Sun Microsystems. That was enough to get the company off the ground.

Page and Brin were careful with their money, even after they received millions more from venture capitalist firms. They preferred cheap commodity PC hardware and the free Linux operating system as they expanded their system. For marketing, they relied mostly on word of mouth. This allowed Google to survive the dotcom crash that crippled its competitors.

Still, the company eventually had to find a source of income. The founders were concerned that if search results were influenced by advertising, it could lower the usefulness and accuracy of the search. They compromised by adding short, text-based ads that were clearly labeled as “Sponsored Links.” To cut costs, they created a form so that advertisers could submit their own ads and see them appear in minutes. They even added a ranking system so that more popular ads would rise to the top.

The combination of a superior product with less intrusive ads propelled Google to dizzying heights. In 2024, the company collected over $350 billion in revenue, with $112 billion of that as profit.

Information wants to be free

The web was, at first, all about text and the occasional image. In 1997, Netscape added the ability to embed small music files in the MIDI sound format that would play when a webpage was loaded. Because the songs only encoded notes, they sounded tinny and annoying on most computers. Good audio or songs with vocals required files that were too large to download over the Internet.

But this all changed with a new file format. In 1993, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute developed a compression technique that eliminated portions of audio that human ears couldn’t detect. Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” was used as the first test of the new MP3 standard.

Now, computers could play back reasonably high-quality songs from small files using software decoders. WinPlay3 was the first, but WinAmp, released in 1997, became the most popular. People started putting links to MP3 files on their personal websites. Then, in 1999, Shawn Fanning released a beta of a product he called Napster. This was a desktop application that relied on the Internet to let people share their MP3 collection and search everyone else’s.

Napster as it would have appeared in 1999. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

Napster almost immediately ran into legal challenges from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It sparked a debate about sharing things over the Internet that persists to this day. Some artists agreed with the RIAA that downloading MP3 files should be illegal, while others (many of whom had been financially harmed by their own record labels) welcomed a new age of digital distribution. Napster lost the case against the RIAA and shut down in 2002. This didn’t stop people from sharing files, but replacement tools like eDonkey 2000, Limewire, Kazaa, and Bearshare lived in a legal gray area.

In the end, it was Apple that figured out a middle ground that worked for both sides. In 2003, two years after launching its iPod music player, Apple announced the Internet-only iTunes Store. Steve Jobs had signed deals with all five major record labels to allow legal purchasing of individual songs—astoundingly, without copy protection—for 99 cents each, or full albums for $10. By 2010, the iTunes Store was the largest music vendor in the world.

iTunes 4.1, released in 2003. This was the first version for Windows and introduced the iTunes Store to a wider world. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

The Web turns 2.0

Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web was simply to deliver and display information. It was like a library, but with hypertext links. But it didn’t take long for people to start experimenting with information flowing the other way. In 1994, Netscape 0.9 added new HTML tags like FORM and INPUT that let users enter text and, using a “Submit” button, send it back to the web server.

Early web servers didn’t know what to do with this text. But programmers developed extensions that let a server run programs in the background. The standardized “Common Gateway Interface” (CGI) made it possible for a “Submit” button to trigger a program (usually in a /cgi-bin/ directory) that could do something interesting with the submission, like talking to a database. CGI scripts could even generate new webpages dynamically and send them back to the user.

This intelligent two-way interaction changed the web forever. It enabled things like logging into an account on a website, web-based forums, and even uploading files directly to a web server. Suddenly, a website wasn’t just a page that you looked at. It could be a community where groups of interested people could interact with each other, sharing both text and images.

Dynamic webpages led to the rise of blogging, first as an experiment (some, like Justin Hall’s and Dave Winer’s, are still around today) and then as something anyone could do in their spare time. Websites in general became easier to create with sites like Geocities and Angelfire, which let people build their own personal dream house on the web for free. A community-run dynamic linking site, webring.org, connected similar websites together, encouraging exploration.

Webring.org was a free, community-run service that allowed dynamically updated webrings. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

One of the best things to come out of Web 2.0 was Wikipedia. It arose as a side project of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales, with articles written by volunteers who were subject matter experts. This process was slow, and the site only had 21 articles in its first year. Wikipedia, in contrast, allowed anyone to contribute and review articles, so it quickly outpaced its predecessor. At first, people were skeptical about letting random Internet users edit articles. But thanks to an army of volunteer editors and a set of tools to quickly fix vandalism, the site flourished. Wikipedia far surpassed works like the Encyclopedia Britannica in sheer numbers of articles while maintaining roughly equivalent accuracy.

Not every Internet innovation lived on a webpage. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen created a program called Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which allowed real-time messaging between individuals and groups. IRC clients for Windows and Macintosh were popular among nerds, but friendlier applications like PowWow (1994), ICQ (1996), and AIM (1997) brought messaging to the masses. Even Microsoft got in on the act with MSN Messenger in 1999. For a few years, this messaging culture was an important part of daily life at home, school, and work.

A digital recreation of MSN Messenger from 2001. Sadly, Microsoft shut down the servers in 2014. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

Animation, games, and video

While the web was evolving quickly, the slow speeds of dial-up modems limited the size of files you could upload to a website. Static images were the norm. Animation only appeared in heavily compressed GIF files with a few frames each.

But a new technology blasted past these limitations and unleashed a torrent of creativity on the web. In 1995, Macromedia released Shockwave Player, an add-on for Netscape Navigator. Along with its Director software, the combination allowed artists to create animations based on vector drawings. These were small enough to embed inside webpages.

Websites popped up to support this new content. Newgrounds.com, which started in 1995 as a Neo-Geo fan site, started collecting the best animations. Because Director was designed to create interactive multimedia for CD-ROM projects, it also supported keyboard and mouse input and had basic scripting. This meant that people could make simple games that ran in Shockwave. Newgrounds eagerly showcased these as well, giving many aspiring artists and game designers an entry point into their careers. Super Meat Boy, for example, was first prototyped on Newgrounds.

Newgrounds as it would have appeared circa 2003. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

Putting actual video on the web seemed like something from the far future. But the future arrived quickly. After the dotcom crash of 2001, there were many unemployed web programmers with a lot of time on their hands to experiment with their personal projects. The arrival of broadband with cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL), combined with the new MPEG4 compression standard, made a lot of formerly impossible things possible.

In early 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim launched Youtube.com. Initially, it was meant to be an online dating site, but that service failed. The site, however, had great technology for uploading and playing videos. It used Macromedia’s Flash, a new technology so similar to Shockwave that the company marketed it as Shockwave Flash. YouTube allowed anybody to upload videos up to ten minutes in length for free. It became so popular that Google bought it a year later for $1.65 billion.

All these technologies combined to provide ordinary people with the opportunity, however brief, to make an impact on popular culture. An early example was the All Your Base phenomenon. An animated GIF of an obscure, mistranslated Sega Genesis game inspired indie musicians The Laziest Men On Mars to create a song and distribute it as an MP3. The popular humor site somethingawful.com picked it up, and users in the Photoshop Friday forum thread created a series of humorous images to go along with the song. Then in 2001, the user Bad_CRC took the song and the best of the images and put them together in an animation they shared on Newgrounds. The YouTube version gained such wide popularity that it was reported on by USA Today.

You have no chance to survive make your time.

Media goes social

In the early 2000s, most websites were either blogs or forums—and frequently both. Forums had multiple discussion boards, both general and specific. They often leaned into a specific hobby or interest, and anyone with that interest could join. There were also a handful of dating websites, like kiss.com (1994), match.com (1995), and eHarmony.com (2000), that specifically tried to connect people who might have a romantic interest in each other.

The Swedish Lunarstorm was one of the first social media websites. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

The road to social media was a hazy and confusing merging of these two types of websites. There was classmates.com (1995) that served as a way to connect with former school chums, and the following year, the Swedish site lunarstorm.com opened with this mission:

Everyone has their own website called Krypin. Each babe [this word is an accurate translation] has their own Krypin where she or he introduces themselves, posts their diaries and their favorite files, which can be anything from photos and their own songs to poems and other fun stuff. Every LunarStormer also has their own guestbook where you can write if you don’t really dare send a LunarEmail or complete a Friend Request.

In 1997, sixdegrees.com opened, based on the truism that everyone on earth is connected with six or fewer degrees of separation. Its About page said, “Our free networking services let you find the people you want to know through the people you already know.”

By the time friendster.com opened its doors in 2002, the concept of “friending” someone online was already well established, although it was still a niche activity. LinkedIn.com, launched the following year, used the excuse of business networking to encourage this behavior. But it was MySpace.com (2003) that was the first to gain significant traction.

MySpace was initially a Friendster clone written in just ten days by employees at eUniverse, an Internet marketing startup founded by Brad Greenspan. It became the company’s most successful product. MySpace combined the website-building ability of sites like GeoCities with social networking features. It took off incredibly quickly: in just three years, it surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. Hype around MySpace reached such a crescendo that Rupert Murdoch purchased it in 2005 for $580 million.

But a newcomer to the social media scene was about to destroy MySpace. Just as Google crushed its competitors, this startup won by providing a simpler, more functional, and less intrusive product. TheFaceBook.com began as Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommate’s attempt to replace their college’s online directory. Zuckerberg’s first student website, “Facemash,” had been created by breaking into Harvard’s network, and its sole feature was to provide “Hot or Not” comparisons of student photos. Facebook quickly spread to other universities, and in 2006 (after dropping the “the”), it was opened to the rest of the world.

“The” Facebook as it appeared in 2004. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

Facebook won the social networking wars by focusing on the rapid delivery of new features. The company’s slogan, “Move fast and break things,” encouraged this strategy. The most prominent feature, added in 2006, was the News Feed. It generated a list of posts, selected out of thousands of potential updates for each user based on who they followed and liked, and showed it on their front page. Combined with a technique called “infinite scrolling,” first invented for Microsoft’s Bing Image Search by Hugh E. Williams in 2005, it changed the way the web worked forever.

The algorithmically generated News Feed created new opportunities for Facebook to make profits. For example, businesses could boost posts for a fee, which would make them appear in news feeds more often. These blurred the lines between posts and ads.

Facebook was also successful in identifying up-and-coming social media sites and buying them out before they were able to pose a threat. This was made easier thanks to Onavo, a VPN that monitored its users’ activities and resold the data. Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013. It was shut down in 2019 due to continued controversy over the use of private data.

Social media transformed the Internet, drawing in millions of new users and starting a consolidation of website-visiting habits that continues to this day. But something else was about to happen that would shake the Internet to its core.

Don’t you people have phones?

For years, power users had experimented with getting the Internet on their handheld devices. IBM’s Simon phone, which came out in 1994, had both phone and PDA features. It could send and receive email. The Nokia 9000 Communicator, released in 1996, even had a primitive text-based web browser.

Later phones like the Blackberry 850 (1999), the Nokia 9210 (2001), and the Palm Treo (2002), added keyboards, color screens, and faster processors. In 1999, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was released, which allowed mobile phones to receive and display simplified, phone-friendly pages using WML instead of the standard HTML markup language.

Browsing the web on phones was possible before modern smartphones, but it wasn’t easy. Credit: James Cridland (Flickr)

But despite their popularity with business users, these phones never broke into the mainstream. That all changed in 2007 when Steve Jobs got on stage and announced the iPhone. Now, every webpage could be viewed natively on the phone’s browser, and zooming into a section was as easy as pinching or double-tapping. The one exception was Flash, but a new HTML 5 standard promised to standardize advanced web features like animation and video playback.

Google quickly changed its Android prototype from a Blackberry clone to something more closely resembling the iPhone. Android’s open licensing structure allowed companies around the world to produce inexpensive smartphones. Even mid-range phones were still much cheaper than computers. This technology allowed, for the first time, the entire world to become connected through the Internet.

The exploding market of phone users also propelled the massive growth of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. It was a lot easier now to snap a picture of a live event with your phone and post it instantly to the world. Optimists pointed to the remarkable events of the Arab Spring protests as proof that the Internet could help spread democracy and freedom. But governments around the world were just as eager to use these new tools, except their goals leaned more toward control and crushing dissent.

The backlash

Technology has always been a double-edged sword. But in recent years, public opinion about the Internet has shifted from being mostly positive to increasingly negative.

The combination of mobile phones, social media algorithms, and infinite scrolling led to the phenomenon of “doomscrolling,” where people spend hours every day reading “news” that is tuned for maximum engagement by provoking as many people as possible. The emotional toil caused by doomscrolling has been shown to cause real harm. Even more serious is the fallout from misinformation and hate speech, like the genocide in Myanmar that an Amnesty International report claims was amplified on Facebook.

As companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook grew into near-monopolies, they inevitably lost sight of their original mission in favor of a never-ending quest for more money. The process, dubbed enshittification by Cory Doctorow, shifts the focus first from users to advertisers and then to shareholders.

Chasing these profits has fueled the rise of generative AI, which threatens to turn the entire Internet into a sea of soulless gray soup. Google is now forcing AI summaries at the top of web searches, which reduce traffic to websites and often provide dangerous misinformation. But even if you ignore the AI summaries, the sites you find underneath may also be suspect. Once-trusted websites have laid off staff and replaced them with AI, generating an endless series of new articles written by nobody. A web where AIs comment on AI-generated Facebook posts that link to AI-generated articles, which are then AI-summarized by Google, seems inhuman and pointless.

A search for cute baby peacocks on Bing. Some of them are real, and some aren’t. Credit: Jeremy Reimer

Where from here?

The history of the Internet can be roughly divided into three phases. The first, from 1969 to 1990, was all about the inventors: people like Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Robert Taylor. These folks were part of a small group of computer scientists who figured out how to get different types of computers to talk to each other and to other networks.

The next phase, from 1991 to 1999, was a whirlwind that was fueled by entrepreneurs, people like Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos. They latched on to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web and created companies that lived entirely in this new digital landscape. This set off a manic phase of exponential growth and hype, which peaked in early 2001 and crashed a few months later.

The final phase, from 2000 through today, has primarily been about the users. New companies like Google and Facebook may have reaped the greatest financial rewards during this time, but none of their successes would have been possible without the contributions of ordinary people like you and me. Every time we typed something into a text box and hit the “Submit” button, we created a tiny piece of a giant web of content. Even the generative AIs that pretend to make new things today are merely regurgitating words, phrases, and pictures that were created and shared by people.

There is a growing sense of nostalgia today for the old Internet, when it felt like a place, and the joy of discovery was around every corner. “Using the old Internet felt like digging for treasure,” said YouTube commenter MySoftCrow. “Using the current Internet feels like getting buried alive.”

Ars community member MichaelHurd added his own thoughts: “I feel the same way. It feels to me like the core problem with the modern Internet is that websites want you to stay on them for as long as possible, but the World Wide Web is at its best when sites connect to each other and encourage people to move between them. That’s what hyperlinks are for!”

Despite all the doom surrounding the modern Internet, it remains largely open. Anyone can pay about $5 per month for a shared Linux server and create a personal website containing anything they can think of, using any software they like, even their own. And for the most part, anyone, on any device, anywhere in the world, can access that website.

Ultimately, the fate of the Internet depends on the actions of every one of us. That’s why I’m leaving the final words in this series of articles to you. What would your dream Internet of the future look and feel like? The comments section is open.

Photo of Jeremy Reimer

I’m a writer and web developer. I specialize in the obscure and beautiful, like the Amiga and newLISP.

A history of the Internet, part 3: The rise of the user Read More »

after-kirk-shooting,-utah-governor-calls-social-media-a-“cancer.”-will-we-treat-it-like-one?

After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one?

culture, Social Media / /

This is an extremely online style of writing—cryptic, meme-driven, and jokey even about serious or disturbing issues. Was the alleged shooter helped toward his act of violence by the communities he was in online? And are millions of Internet users helping or hurting their own moral and civic identities by watching detailed video of the murder, which was immediately shared on social media?

As his press conference wrapped up, Cox made a plea for everyone to follow Kirk’s tweeted advice (which he cited). He said that “we are not wired as human beings—biologically, historically—we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery… This is not good for us. It is not good to consume.”

And he added that “social media is a cancer on our society right now. I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.”

This could have been useful to Extremely Online People like the alleged shooter, who was turned in by some of his own family members and who might have been dissuaded from his actions had he engaged more directly with them. (Of course, simplistic advice like this is often wrong; difficult family members and broken relationships might mean that in-person connection is also unhelpful for some.)

It might also be good advice for the kinds of Extremely Online People who lead the country by posting social media threats to unleash the “Department of War” upon Chicago, shown burning in the background.

Treating cancer

At its heart, though, Cox raises a question about whether social media is 1) a powerful force capable of both great good and terrible incitement and misinformation, or whether it is 2) a mere cancer.

I assume Ars readers are divided on this question, given that the Ars staff itself has differing views. One can point, of course, to the successes: The powerless can call out the lies of the powerful, they can gin up “color revolutions” to topple dictators, and they can publish their views with an ease and at a cost that not even the printing press—itself an extremely disruptive technology—could manage. On the flip side, of course, is all the “cancer”: the floods of misinformation and bile, the yelling, the “cancel culture,” the virtue signaling, the scams and hoaxes, the ethnic nationalism, the casual sharing of both gore and pornography, the buffoonish natures of the tech overlords who run too many of these services, and that feeling you get when you log in to Facebook and realize with a shock that your aunt is a closet racist.

After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one? Read More »

reddit-bug-caused-lesbian-subreddit-to-be-labeled-as-a-place-for-“straight”-women

Reddit bug caused lesbian subreddit to be labeled as a place for “straight” women

AI, reddit, Social Media, Tech / /

Explaining further to Ars, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said:

There was a small bug in a test we ran that mistakenly caused the English-to-English translation(s) you saw. That bug has been resolved. Unsurprisingly, English-to-English translations are not part of our strategy, as they aren’t necessary. English-to-English translations were not a desired or expected outcome of the test.

Reddit pulled the test it was running, but its machine learning-powered translations are still functioning, Rathschmidt said. The company plans to fix the bug and run its unspecified “test” again.

Reddit’s explanation differs from user theories floating around beforehand, which were mainly that Reddit was rewriting user-created summaries with generative AI, possibly to boost SEO. Some may still be perturbed by the problem persisting for weeks without explanation and the apparent lack of manual checks for the translation service. However, Redditors can now take comfort in knowing that Reddit is not currently using generative AI to alter user-generated content without notice.

Paige_Railstone, however, maintains frustration and wants to tell Reddit admins, “STOP. Hand off.” The translation bug, they noted, led to people posting on a subreddit for parents with autism that their child might be autistic, “and how terrible that would be for them,” Paige_Railstone recalled.

“These are the kind of unintentionally insulting posts that drive autistics into leaving a community, and it increases the workload of us moderators,” they said.

Paige_Railstone also sees the incident as a reason for moderators to be more cautious.

“This never used to be a concern, but this translation service was rolled out without any notification that I’m aware of, and no option to disable it within the mods’ control. That has the potential to cause problems, as we’ve seen over the past two weeks,” they said.

Disclosure: Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

Reddit bug caused lesbian subreddit to be labeled as a place for “straight” women Read More »

bluesky-now-platform-of-choice-for-science-community

Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

bluesky, Science, Science communication, science outreach, Social Media, Twitter / /

It’s not just you. Survey says: “Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky”

Credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas

Marine biologist and conservationist David Shiffman was an early power user and evangelist for science engagement on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Over the years, he trained more than 2,000 early career scientists on how to best use the platform for professional goals: networking with colleagues, sharing new scientific papers, and communicating with interested members of the public.

But when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, renaming it X, changes to both the platform’s algorithm and moderation policy soured Shiffman on the social media site. He started looking for a viable alternative among the fledgling platforms that had begun to pop up: most notably Threads, Post, Mastodon, and Bluesky. He was among the first wave of scientists to join Bluesky and found that, even in its infancy, it had many of the features he had valued in “golden age” Twitter.

Shiffman also noticed that he wasn’t the only one in the scientific community having issues with Twitter. This impression was further bolstered by news stories in outlets like Nature, Science, and the Chronicle of Higher Education noting growing complaints about Twitter and increased migration over to Bluesky by science professionals. (Full disclosure: I joined Bluesky around the same time as Shiffman, for similar reasons: Twitter had ceased to be professionally useful, and many of the science types I’d been following were moving to Bluesky. I nuked my Twitter account in November 2024.)

A curious Shiffman decided to conduct a scientific survey, announcing the results in a new paper published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. The findings confirm that, while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice.

Shiffman, the author of Why Sharks Matter, described early Twitter recently on the blog Southern Fried Science as “the world’s most interesting cocktail party.”

“Then it stopped being useful,” Shiffman told Ars. “I was worried for a while that this incredibly powerful way of changing the world using expertise was gone. It’s not gone. It just moved. It’s a little different now, and it’s not as powerful as it was, but it’s not gone. It was for me personally, immensely reassuring that so many other people were having the same experience that I was. But it was also important to document that scientifically.”

Eager to gather solid data on the migration phenomenon to bolster his anecdotal observations, Shiffman turned to social scientist Julia Wester, one of the scientists who had joined Twitter at Shiffman’s encouragement years before, before also becoming fed up and migrating to Bluesky. Despite being “much less online” than the indefatigable Shiffman, Wester was intrigued by the proposition. “I was interested not just in the anecdotal evidence, the conversations we were having, but also in identifying the real patterns,” she told Ars. “As a social scientist, when we hear anecdotal evidence about people’s experiences, I want to know what that looks like across the population.”

Shiffman and Wester targeted scientists, science communicators, and science educators who used (or had used) both Twitter and Bluesky. Questions explored user attitudes toward, and experiences with, each platform in a professional capacity: when they joined, respective follower and post counts, which professional tasks they used each platform for, the usefulness of each platform for those purposes relative to 2021, how they first heard about Bluesky, and so forth.

The authors acknowledge that they are looking at a very specific demographic among social media users in general and that there is an inevitable self-selection effect. However, “You want to use the sample and the method that’s appropriate to the phenomenon that you’re looking at,” said Wester. “For us, it wasn’t just the experience of people using these platforms, but the phenomenon of migration. Why are people deciding to stay or move? How they’re deciding to use both of these platforms? For that, I think we did get a pretty decent sample for looking at the dynamic tensions, the push and pull between staying on one platform or opting for another.”

They ended up with a final sample size of 813 people. Over 90 percent of respondents said they had used Twitter for learning about new developments in their field; 85.5 percent for professional networking; and 77.3 percent for public outreach. Roughly three-quarters of respondents said that the platform had become significantly less useful for each of those professional uses since Musk took over. Nearly half still have Twitter accounts but use it much less frequently or not at all, while about 40 percent have deleted their accounts entirely in favor of Bluesky.

Making the switch

User complaints about Twitter included a noticeable increase in spam, porn, bots, and promoted posts from users who paid for a verification badge, many spreading extremist content. “I very quickly saw material that I did not want my posts to be posted next to or associated with,” one respondent commented. There were also complaints about the rise in misinformation and a significant decline in both the quantity and quality of engagement, with respondents describing their experiences as “unpleasant,” “negative,” or “hostile.”

The survey responses also revealed a clear push/pull dynamic when it came to the choice to abandon Twitter for Bluesky. That is, people felt they were being pushed away from Twitter and were actively looking for alternatives. As one respondent put it, “Twitter started to suck and all the cool people were moving to Bluesky.”

Bluesky was user-friendly with no algorithm, a familiar format, and helpful tools like starter packs of who to follow in specific fields, which made the switch a bit easier for many newcomers daunted by the prospect of rebuilding their online audience. Bluesky users also appreciated the moderation on the platform and having the ability to block or mute people as a means of disengaging from more aggressive, unpleasant conversations. That said, “If Twitter was still great, then I don’t think there’s any combination of features that would’ve made this many people so excited about switching,” said Shiffman.

Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.

According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “Muskification,” and suddenly Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “the blog post that’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” said Shiffman.

Ars social media manager Connor McInerney confirmed that Ars Technica has also seen a steady dip in Twitter referral traffic thus far in 2025. Furthermore, “I can say anecdotally that over the summer we’ve seen our Bluesky traffic start to surpass our Twitter traffic for the first time,” McInerney said, attributing the growth to a combination of factors. “We’ve been posting to the platform more often and our audience there has grown significantly. By my estimate our audience has grown by 63 percent since January. The platform in general has grown a lot too—they had 10 million users in September of last year, and this month the latest numbers indicate they’re at 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience has remained fairly static across the same period of time.”

Bubble, schmubble

As for scientists looking to share scholarly papers online, Shiffman pulled the Altmetrics stats for his and Wester’s new paper. “It’s already one of the 10 most shared papers in the history of that journal on social media,” he said, with 14 shares on Twitter/X vs over a thousand shares on Bluesky (as of 4 pm ET on August 20). “If the goal is showing there’s a more active academic scholarly conversation on Bluesky—I mean, damn,” he said.

“When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.”

And while there has been a steady drumbeat of op-eds of late in certain legacy media outlets accusing Bluesky of being trapped in its own liberal bubble, Shiffman, for one, has few concerns about that. “I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics,” he wrote in his accompanying blog post. “I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.” He compared the current incarnation of Twitter as no better than 4Chan or TruthSocial in terms of the percentage of “conspiracy-prone extremists” in the audience. “Even if you want to stay, the algorithm is working against you,” he wrote.

“There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning,” Shiffman told Ars. “I haven’t seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it’s relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either.” And given his focus on ocean conservation and science-based, data-driven environmental advocacy, he is likely to find a more engaged and persuadable audience at Bluesky.

The survey results show that at this point, Bluesky seems to have hit a critical mass for the online scientific community. That said, Shiffman, for one, laments that the powerful Black Science Twitter contingent, for example, has thus far not switched to Bluesky in significant numbers. He would like to conduct a follow-up study to look into how many still use Twitter vs those who may have left social media altogether, as well as Bluesky’s demographic diversity—paving the way for possible solutions should that data reveal an unwelcoming environment for non-white scientists.

There are certainly limitations to the present survey. “Because this is such a dynamic system and it’s changing every day, I think if we did this study now versus when we did it six months ago, we’d get slightly different answers and dynamics,” said Wester. “It’s still relevant because you can look at the factors that make people decide to stay or not on Bluesky, to switch to something else, to leave social media altogether. That can tell us something about what makes a healthy, vibrant conversation online. We’re capturing one of the responses: ‘I’ll see you on Bluesky.’ But that’s not the only response. Public science communication is as important now as it’s ever been, so looking at how scientists have pivoted is really important.”

We recently reported on research indicating that social media as a system might well be doomed, since its very structure gives rise to the toxic dynamics that plague so much of social media: filter bubbles, algorithms that amplify the most extreme views to boost engagement, and a small number of influencers hogging the lion’s share of attention. That paper concluded that any intervention strategies were likely to fail. Both Shiffman and Wester, while acknowledging the reality of those dynamics, are less pessimistic about social media’s future.

“I think the problem is not with how social media works, it’s with how any group of people work,” said Shiffman. “Humans evolved in tiny social groupings where we helped each other and looked out for each other’s interests. Now I have to have a fight with someone 10,000 miles away who has no common interest with me about whether or not vaccines are bad. We were not built for that. Social media definitely makes it a lot easier for people who are anti-social by nature and want to stir conflict to find those conflicts. Something that took me way too long to learn is that you don’t have to participate in every fight you’re invited to. There are people who are looking for a fight and you can simply say, ‘No, thank you. Not today, Satan.'”

“The contrast that people are seeing between Bluesky and present-day Twitter highlights that these are social spaces, which means that you’re going to get all of the good and bad of humanity entering into that space,” said Wester. “But we have had new social spaces evolve over our whole history. Sometimes when there’s something really new, we have to figure out the rules for that space. We’re still figuring out the rules for these social media spaces. The contrast in moderation policies and the use (or not) of algorithms between those two platforms that are otherwise very similar in structure really highlights that you can shape those social spaces by creating rules and tools for how people interact with each other.”

DOI: Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2025. 10.1093/icb/icaf127  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Bluesky now platform of choice for science community Read More »

study:-social-media-probably-can’t-be-fixed

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

agent-based modeling, Features, LLMs, polarization, Science, Social Media, social psychology, social sciences, social works / /

“The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.”

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

It’s no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers. A small number of high-profile users garner the lion’s share of attention and influence, and the algorithms designed to maximize engagement end up merely amplifying outrage and conflict, ensuring the dominance of the loudest and most extreme users—thereby increasing polarization even more.

Numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, but according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv, none of them are likely to be effective. And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we’re probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.

Co-authors Petter Törnberg and Maik Larooij of the University of Amsterdam wanted to learn more about the mechanisms that give rise to the worst aspects of social media: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. So they combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs), essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior. “What we found is that we didn’t need to put any algorithms in, we didn’t need to massage the model,” Törnberg told Ars. “It just came out of the baseline model, all of these dynamics.”

They then tested six different intervention strategies social scientists have been proposed to counter those effects: switching to chronological or randomized feeds; inverting engagement-optimization algorithms to reduce the visibility of highly reposted sensational content; boosting the diversity of viewpoints to broaden users’ exposure to opposing political views; using “bridging algorithms” to elevate content that fosters mutual understanding rather than emotional provocation; hiding social statistics like reposts and follower accounts to reduce social influence cues; and removing biographies to limit exposure to identity-based signals.

The results were far from encouraging. Only some interventions showed modest improvements. None were able to fully disrupt the fundamental mechanisms producing the dysfunctional effects. In fact, some interventions actually made the problems worse. For example, chronological ordering had the strongest effect on reducing attention inequality, but there was a tradeoff: It also intensified the amplification of extreme content. Bridging algorithms significantly weakened the link between partisanship and engagement and modestly improved viewpoint diversity, but it also increased attention inequality. Boosting viewpoint diversity had no significant impact at all.

So is there any hope of finding effective intervention strategies to combat these problematic aspects of social media? Or should we nuke our social media accounts altogether and go live in caves? Ars caught up with Törnberg for an extended conversation to learn more about these troubling findings.

Ars Technica: What drove you to conduct this study?

Petter Törnberg: For the last 20 years or so, there has been a ton of research on how social media is reshaping politics in different ways, almost always using observational data. But in the last few years, there’s been a growing appetite for moving beyond just complaining about these things and trying to see how we can be a bit more constructive. Can we identify how to improve social media and create online spaces that are actually living up to those early promises of providing a public sphere where we can deliberate and debate politics in a constructive way?

The problem with using observational data is that it’s very hard to test counterfactuals to implement alternative solutions. So one kind of method that has existed in the field is agent-based simulations and social simulations: create a computer model of the system and then run experiments on that and test counterfactuals. It is useful for looking at the structure and emergence of network dynamics.

But at the same time, those models represent agents as simple rule followers or optimizers, and that doesn’t capture anything of the cultural world or politics or human behavior. I’ve always been of the controversial opinion that those things actually matter,  especially for online politics. We need to study both the structural dynamics of network formations and the patterns of cultural interaction.

Ars Technica: So you developed this hybrid model that combines LLMs with agent-based modeling.

Petter Törnberg: That’s the solution that we find to move beyond the problems of conventional agent-based modeling. Instead of having this simple rule of followers or optimizers, we use AI or LLMs. It’s not a perfect solution—there’s all kind of biases and limitations—but it does represent a step forward compared to a list of if/then rules. It does have something more of capturing human behavior in a more plausible way. We give them personas that we get from the American National Election Survey, which has very detailed questions about US voters and their hobbies and preferences. And then we turn that into a textual persona—your name is Bob, you’re from Massachusetts, and you like fishing—just to give them something to talk about and a little bit richer representation.

And then they see the random news of the day, and they can choose to post the news, read posts from other users, repost them, or they can choose to follow users. If they choose to follow users, they look at their previous messages, look at their user profile.

Our idea was to start with the minimal bare-bones model and then add things to try to see if we could reproduce these problematic consequences. But to our surprise, we actually didn’t have to add anything because these problematic consequences just came out of the bare bones model. This went against our expectations and also what I think the literature would say.

Ars Technica: I’m skeptical of AI in general, particularly in a research context, but there are very specific instances where it can be extremely useful. This strikes me as one of them, largely because your basic model proved to be so robust. You got the same dynamics without introducing anything extra.

Petter Törnberg: Yes. It’s been a big conversation in social science over the last two years or so. There’s a ton of interest in using LLMs for social simulation, but no one has really figured out for what or how it’s going to be helpful, or how we’re going to get past these problems of validity and so on. The kind of approach that we take in this paper is building on a tradition of complex systems thinking. We imagine very simple models of the human world and try to capture very fundamental mechanisms. It’s not really aiming to be realistic or a precise, complete model of human behavior.

I’ve been one of the more critical people of this method, to be honest. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine any other way of studying these kinds of dynamics where we have cultural and structural aspects feeding back into each other. But I still have to take the findings with a grain of salt and realize that these are models, and they’re capturing a kind of hypothetical world—a spherical cow in a vacuum. We can’t predict what someone is going to have for lunch on Tuesday, but we can capture broader mechanisms, and we can see how robust those mechanisms are. We can see whether they’re stable, unstable, which conditions they emerge in, and the general boundaries. And in this case, we found a mechanism that seems to be very robust, unfortunately.

Ars Technica: The dream was that social media would help revitalize the public sphere and support the kind of constructive political dialogue that your paper deems “vital to democratic life.” That largely hasn’t happened. What are the primary negative unexpected consequences that have emerged from social media platforms?

Petter Törnberg: First, you have echo chambers or filter bubbles. The risk of broad agreement is that if you want to have a functioning political conversation, functioning deliberation, you do need to do that across the partisan divide. If you’re only having a conversation with people who already agree with each other, that’s not enough. There’s debate on how widespread echo chambers are online, but it is quite established that there are a lot of spaces online that aren’t very constructive because there’s only people from one political side. So that’s one ingredient that you need. You need to have a diversity of opinion, a diversity of perspective.

The second one is that the deliberation needs to be among equals; people need to have more or less the same influence in the conversation. It can’t be completely controlled by a small, elite group of users. This is also something that people have pointed to on social media: It has a tendency of creating these influencers because attention attracts attention. And then you have a breakdown of conversation among equals.

The final one is what I call (based on Chris Bail’s book) the social media prism. The more extreme users tend to get more attention online. This is often discussed in relation to engagement algorithms, which tend to identify the type of content that most upsets us and then boost that content. I refer to it as a “trigger bubble” instead of the filter bubble. They’re trying to trigger us as a way of making us engage more so they can extract our data and keep our attention.

Ars Technica: Your conclusion is that there’s something within the structural dynamics of the network itself that’s to blame—something fundamental to the construction of social networks that makes these extremely difficult problems to solve.

Petter Törnberg: Exactly. It comes from the fact that we’re using these AI models to capture a richer representation of human behavior, which allows us to see something that wouldn’t really be possible using conventional agent-based modeling. There have been previous models looking at the growth of social networks on social media. People choose to retweet or not, and we know that action tends to be very reactive. We tend to be very emotional in that choice. And it tends to be a highly partisan and polarized type of action. You hit retweet when you see someone being angry about something, or doing something horrific, and then you share that. It’s well-known that this leads to toxic, more polarized content spreading more.

But what we find is that it’s not just that this content spreads; it also shapes the network structures that are formed. So there’s feedback between the effective emotional action of choosing to retweet something and the network structure that emerges. And then in turn, you have a network structure that feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network. The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It’s quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes.

Ars Technica: I was frankly surprised at the ineffectiveness of the various intervention strategies you tested. But it does seem to explain the Bluesky conundrum. Bluesky has no algorithm, for example, yet the same dynamics still seem to emerge. I think Bluesky’s founders genuinely want to avoid those dysfunctional issues, but they might not succeed, based on this paper. Why are such interventions so ineffective? 

Petter Törnberg: We’ve been discussing whether these things are due to the platforms doing evil things with algorithms or whether we as users are choosing that we want a bad environment. What we’re saying is that it doesn’t have to be either of those. This is often the unintended outcomes from interactions based on underlying rules. It’s not necessarily because the platforms are evil; it’s not necessarily because people want to be in toxic, horrible environments. It just follows from the structure that we’re providing.

We tested six different interventions. Google has been trying to make social media less toxic and recently released a newsfeed algorithm based on the content of the text. So that’s one example. We’re also trying to do more subtle interventions because often you can find a certain way of nudging the system so it switches over to healthier dynamics. Some of them have moderate or slightly positive effects on one of the attributes, but then they often have negative effects on another attribute, or they have no impact whatsoever.

I should say also that these are very extreme interventions in the sense that, if you depended on making money on your platform, you probably don’t want to implement them because it probably makes it really boring to use. It’s like showing the least influential users, the least retweeted messages on the platform. Even so, it doesn’t really make a difference in changing the basic outcomes. What we take from that is that the mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve given the basic structure of these platforms.

Ars Technica: So how might one go about building a successful social network that doesn’t have these problems? 

Petter Törnberg: There are several directions where you could imagine going, but there’s also the constraint of what is popular use. Think back to the early Internet, like ICQ. ICQ had this feature where you could just connect to a random person. I loved it when I was a kid. I would talk to random people all over the world. I was 12 in the countryside on a small island in Sweden, and I was talking to someone from Arizona, living a different life. I don’t know how successful that would be these days, the Internet having become a lot less innocent than it was.

For instance, we can focus on the question of inequality of attention, a very well-studied and robust feature of these networks. I personally thought we would be able to address it with our interventions, but attention draws attention, and this leads to a power law distribution, where 1 percent [of users] dominates the entire conversation. We know the conditions under which those power laws emerge. This is one of the main outcomes of social network dynamics: extreme inequality of attention.

But in social science, we always teach that everything is a normal distribution. The move from studying the conventional social world to studying the online social world means that you’re moving from these nice normal distributions to these horrible power law distributions. Those are the outcomes of having social networks where the probability of connecting to someone depends on how many previous connections they have. If we want to get rid of that, we probably have to move away from the social network model and have some kind of spatial model or group-based model that makes things a little bit more local, a little bit less globally interconnected.

Ars Technica: It sounds like you’d want to avoid those big influential nodes that play such a central role in a large, complex global network. 

Petter Törnberg: Exactly. I think that having those global networks and structures fundamentally undermines the possibility of the kind of conversations that political scientists and political theorists traditionally talked about when they were discussing in the public square. They were talking about social interaction in a coffee house or a tea house, or reading groups and so on. People thought the Internet was going to be precisely that. It’s very much not that. The dynamics are fundamentally different because of those structural differences. We shouldn’t expect to be able to get a coffee house deliberation structure when we have a global social network where everyone is connected to everyone. It is difficult to imagine a functional politics building on that.

Ars Technica: I want to come back to your comment on the power law distribution, how 1 percent of people dominate the conversation, because I think that is something that most users routinely forget. The horrible things we see people say on the Internet are not necessarily indicative of the vast majority of people in the world. 

Petter Törnberg: For sure. That is capturing two aspects. The first is the social media prism, where the perspective we get of politics when we see it through the lens of social media is fundamentally different from what politics actually is. It seems much more toxic, much more polarized. People seem a little bit crazier than they really are. It’s a very well-documented aspect of the rise of polarization: People have a false perception of the other side. Most people have fairly reasonable and fairly similar opinions. The actual polarization is lower than the perceived polarization. And that arguably is a result of social media, how it misrepresents politics.

And then we see this very small group of users that become very influential who often become highly visible as a result of being a little bit crazy and outrageous. Social media creates an incentive structure that is really central to reshaping not just how we see politics but also what politics is, which politicians become powerful and influential, because it is controlling the distribution of what is arguably the most valuable form of capital of our era: attention. Especially for politicians, being able to control attention is the most important thing. And since social media creates the conditions of who gets attention or not, it creates an incentive structure where certain personalities work better in a way that’s just fundamentally different from how it was in previous eras.

Ars Technica: There are those who have sworn off social media, but it seems like simply not participating isn’t really a solution, either.

Petter Törnberg: No. First, even if you only read, say, The New York Times, that newspaper is still reshaped by what works on social media, the social media logic. I had a student who did a little project this last year showing that as social media became more influential, the headlines of The New York Times became more clickbaity and adapted to the style of what worked on social media. So conventional media and our very culture is being transformed.

But more than that, as I was just saying, it’s the type of politicians, it’s the type of people who are empowered—it’s the entire culture. Those are the things that are being transformed by the power of the incentive structures of social media. It’s not like, “This is things that are happening in social media and this is the rest of the world.” It’s all entangled, and somehow social media has become the cultural engine that is shaping our politics and society in very fundamental ways. Unfortunately.

Ars Technica: I usually like to say that technological tools are fundamentally neutral and can be used for good or ill, but this time I’m not so sure. Is there any hope of finding a way to take the toxic and turn it into a net positive?

Petter Törnberg: What I would say to that is that we are at a crisis point with the rise of LLMs and AI. I have a hard time seeing the contemporary model of social media continuing to exist under the weight of LLMs and their capacity to mass-produce false information or information that optimizes these social network dynamics. We already see a lot of actors—based on this monetization of platforms like X—that are using AI to produce content that just seeks to maximize attention. So misinformation, often highly polarized information as AI models become more powerful, that content is going to take over. I have a hard time seeing the conventional social media models surviving that.

We’ve already seen the process of people retreating in part to credible brands and seeking to have gatekeepers. Young people, especially, are going into WhatsApp groups and other closed communities. Of course, there’s misinformation from social media leaking into those chats also. But these kinds of crisis points at least have the hope that we’ll see a changing situation. I wouldn’t bet that it’s a situation for the better. You wanted me to sound positive, so I tried my best. Maybe it’s actually “good riddance.”

Ars Technica: So let’s just blow up all the social media networks. It still won’t be better, but at least we’ll have different problems.

Petter Törnberg: Exactly. We’ll find a new ditch.

DOI: arXiv, 2025. 10.48550/arXiv.2508.03385  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed Read More »

toy-company-may-regret-coming-for-“sylvanian-drama”-tiktoker,-experts-say

Toy company may regret coming for “Sylvanian Drama” TikToker, experts say

calico critters, copyright infringement, Instagram, online advertising, parody, Policy, satire, Social Media, sponsored content, tiktok, trademark infringement / /

Possible legal paths to revive a shuttered video series on TikTok and Instagram.

A popular account on TikTok and Instagram stopped posting suddenly at the end of last year, hit by a lawsuit after garnering millions of views on funny videos it made using adorable children’s Calico Critter dolls to act out dark, cringe-y adult storylines.

While millions of followers mourn the so-called “Sylvanian Drama” account’s demise, experts told Ars that the creator may have a decent chance at beating the lawsuit.

The “Sylvanian Drama” account derived its name from “Sylvanian Families,” a brand name used by Epoch Company Ltd., the maker of Calico Critters, for its iconic fuzzy animal dolls in some markets outside the US. Despite these videos referencing murder, drugs, and hookups, the toy company apparently had no problem, until the account, managed by Ireland-based Thea Von Engelbrechten, started accepting big brand partnerships and making sponsored content featuring the dolls.

Since Epoch, too, strikes partnerships with brands and influencers to promote its own videos marketing the dolls, the company claimed “Sylvanian Drama” risked creating too much confusion online. They also worried viewers would think Epoch had signed off on the videos, since the sponsored content was marked “paid partnership” without specifying precisely which featured brands had paid for the spots. They further accused Von Engelbrechten of building her advertising business around their brand without any attempt to properly license the dolls, while allegedly usurping licensing opportunities from Epoch.

So far, Von Engelbrechten has delayed responding in the lawsuit. As the account remained inactive over the past few months, fans speculated whether it could survive the lawsuit, which raised copyright and trademark infringement claims to get all the videos removed. In their complaint, the toy company requested not only an injunction preventing Von Engelbrechten from creating more “Sylvanian Drama” videos, but also sought all of her profits from her online accounts, in addition to further damages.

Von Engelbrechten declined Ars’ request to provide an update on her defense in the case, but her response is due in early August. That filing will make clear what arguments she may make to overcome Epoch’s suit, but legal experts told Ars that the case isn’t necessarily a slam dunk for the toy company. So all that “Sylvanian Drama” isn’t over just yet.

Epoch’s lawyers did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

“Sylvanian Drama” needs the court to get the joke

Epoch raised copyright infringement charges that could hit Von Engelbrechten with fines totaling $150,000 per violation.

For Von Engelbrechten to defeat the copyright infringement claim, she’ll need to convince the court that her videos are parodies. A law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, Eric Goldman, told Ars that her videos may qualify since “even if they don’t expressly reference Epoch’s offerings by name, the videos intentionally communicate a jarring juxtaposition of adorable critters who are important parts of pop culture living through the darker sides of humanity.”

Basically, Von Engelbrechten will need the court to understand the humor in her videos to win on that claim, Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment law professor at Harvard Law School, told Ars.

“Courts have varied in their treatment of parodies; the complaint’s definition of parody is not controlling but humor is one of the hardest things to predict—if the court gets the joke, it will be more likely to say that the juxtaposition between the storylines and the innocent appearance of the dolls is parodic,” Tushnet said.

But if the court does get the joke, Goldman suggested that even the sponsored content—which hilariously incorporates product placements from various big brands like Marc Jacobs, Taco Bell, Hilton, and Sephora into storylines—could possibly be characterized as parody.

However, “the fact that the social media posts were labeled #ad will make it extremely difficult for the artist to contest the videos’ status as ads,” Goldman said.

Ultimately, Goldman said that Epoch’s lawsuit “raises a host of complex legal issues” and is “not an easy case on either side.”

And one of the most significant issues that Epoch may face in the courtroom could end up gutting all of its trademark infringement claims that supposedly entitle the toy company to all of Von Engelbrechten’s profits, Alexandra Jane Roberts, a Northeastern University professor of law and media with special expertise in trademark law, told Ars.

Calico Critters may stumble on trademark hurdle

The toy company has raised several trademark infringement claims, all of which depend on Epoch proving that Von Engelbrechten “knowingly and willfully” used its trademarks without permission.

However, Roberts pointed out to Ars that Epoch has no trademarks for its iconic dolls, relying only on common law to assert sole rights to the “look and design of the critters.”

It’s likely impossible for Epoch to trademark the dolls, since trademarks are not intended to block competition, and there are only so many ways to design cute dolls that resemble cats or bunnies, Roberts suggested. A court may decide “there’s only so many ways to make a small fuzzy bunny that doesn’t look like this,” potentially narrowing the rights Epoch has under trade dress, a term that Epoch doesn’t use once in its complaint.

Roberts told Ars that Epoch’s trademark claims are “not so far off the mark,” and Von Engelbrechten’s defense was certainly not strengthened by her decision to monetize the content. Prior cases, like the indie band OK Go sending a cease-and-desist to Post cereal over a breakfast product called “OK Go” due to fears of false endorsement, make it clear that courts have agreed in the past that online collaborations have muddied the waters regarding who is the actual source of content for viewers.

“The question becomes whether people are going to see these videos, even though they’re snarky, and even though they’re silly and think, ‘Oh, Calico Critters must have signed off on this,'” Roberts said. “So the argument about consumer confusion, I think, is a plausible argument.”

However, if Epoch fails to convince the court that its trademarks have been infringed, then its other claims alleging false endorsement and unfair competition would likely also collapse.

“You can still get sometimes to unfair competition or to kind of like a false endorsement, but it’s harder to win on those claims and certainly harder to get damages on those claims,” Roberts said. “You don’t get trademark infringement if you don’t have a trademark.”

Possible defenses to keep “Sylvanian Drama” alive

Winning on the trademark claims may not be easy for Von Engelbrechten, who possibly weakened her First Amendment defense by creating the sponsored content. Regardless, she will likely try to convince the court to view the videos as parody, which is a slightly different analysis under trademark law than copyright’s more well-known fair use parody exceptions.

That could be a struggle, since trademark law requires that Von Engelbrechten’s parody videos directly satirize the “Sylvanian Families” brand, and “Sylvanian Drama” videos, even the ads, instead seem to be “making fun of elements of society and culture,” rather than the dolls themselves, Roberts said.

She pointed to winning cases involving the Barbie trademark as an instructive example. In a case disputing Mattel trademarks used in the lyrics for the one-hit wonder “Barbie Girl,” the song was cleared for trademark infringement as a “purely expressive work” that directly parodies Barbie in the lyrics. And in another case, where an artist, Tom Forsythe, captured photos of Barbie dolls in kitchen vessels like a blender or a margarita glass, more robust First Amendment protection was offered since his photos “had a lot to say about sexism and the dolls and what the dolls represent,” Roberts said.

The potential “Sylvanian Drama” defense seems to lack strong go-to arguments that typically win trademark cases, but Roberts said there is still one other defense the content creator may be weighing.

Under “nominative fair use,” it’s OK to use another company’s trademark if it’s necessary in an ad. Roberts provided examples, like a company renting Lexus cars needing to use that trademark or comparative advertising using Tiffany’s diamonds as a reference point to hype their lower prices.

If Von Engelbrechten goes that route, she will need to prove she used “no more of the mark than is necessary” and did not mislead fans on whether Epoch signed off on the use.

“Here it’s hard to say that ‘Sylvanian Drama’ really needed to use so much of those characters and that they didn’t use more than they needed and that they weren’t misleading,” Roberts said.

However, Von Engelbrechten’s best bet might be arguing that there was no confusion, since “Sylvanian Families” isn’t even a brand that’s used in the US, which is where Epoch chose to file its lawsuit because the brands that partnered with the popular account are based in New York. And the case may not even get that far, Roberts suggested, since “before you can get to those questions about the likelihood of confusion, you have to show that you actually have trademark or trade dress rights to enforce.”

Calico Critters creator may face millennial backlash

Epoch may come to regret filing the lawsuit, Roberts said, noting that as a millennial who grew up a big “Hello Kitty” fan, she still buys merch that appeals to her, and Epoch likely knows about that market, as it has done collaborations with the “Hello Kitty” brand. The toymaker could risk alienating other millennials nostalgic for Calico Critters who may be among the “Sylvanian Drama” audience and feel turned off by the lawsuit.

“When you draw attention to something like this and appear litigious, and that you’re coming after a creator who a lot of people really like and really enjoy and probably feel defensive about, like, ‘Oh, she’s just making these funny videos that everyone loves. Why would you want to sue her?'” Roberts said, “that can be really bad press.”

Goldman suggested that Epoch might be better off striking a deal with the creator, which “could establish some boundaries for the artist to keep going without stepping on the IP owner’s rights.” But he noted that “often IP owners in these situations are not open to negotiation,” and “that requires courts to draw difficult and unpredictable lines about the permissible scope of fair use.”

For Von Engelbrechten, the lawsuit may mean that her days of creating “Sylvanian Drama”-sponsored content are over, which could risk crushing a bigger dream she had to succeed in advertising. However, if the lawsuit can be amicably settled, the beloved content creator could also end up making money for Epoch, considering her brand deals appeared to be bigger.

While she seems to take her advertising business seriously, Von Engelbrechten’s videos often joke about legal consequences, such as one where a cat doll says she cannot go to a party because she’s in jail but says “I’ll figure it out” when told her ex will be attending. Perhaps Von Engelbrechten is currently devising a scheme, like her characters, to escape consequences and keep the “Sylvanian Drama” going.

“Maybe if this company were really smart, they would want to hire this person instead of suing them,” Roberts said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

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.

Toy company may regret coming for “Sylvanian Drama” TikToker, experts say Read More »

everything-that-could-go-wrong-with-x’s-new-ai-written-community-notes

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

AI, AI agents, Artificial Intelligence, community notes, conspiracy theories, disinformation, fact checking, misinformation, Policy, Social Media, Twitter, X / /

X says AI can supercharge community notes, but that comes with obvious risks.

Elon Musk’s X arguably revolutionized social media fact-checking by rolling out “community notes,” which created a system to crowdsource diverse views on whether certain X posts were trustworthy or not.

But now, the platform plans to allow AI to write community notes, and that could potentially ruin whatever trust X users had in the fact-checking system—which X has fully acknowledged.

In a research paper, X described the initiative as an “upgrade” while explaining everything that could possibly go wrong with AI-written community notes.

In an ideal world, X described AI agents that speed up and increase the number of community notes added to incorrect posts, ramping up fact-checking efforts platform-wide. Each AI-written note will be rated by a human reviewer, providing feedback that makes the AI agent better at writing notes the longer this feedback loop cycles. As the AI agents get better at writing notes, that leaves human reviewers to focus on more nuanced fact-checking that AI cannot quickly address, such as posts requiring niche expertise or social awareness. Together, the human and AI reviewers, if all goes well, could transform not just X’s fact-checking, X’s paper suggested, but also potentially provide “a blueprint for a new form of human-AI collaboration in the production of public knowledge.”

Among key questions that remain, however, is a big one: X isn’t sure if AI-written notes will be as accurate as notes written by humans. Complicating that further, it seems likely that AI agents could generate “persuasive but inaccurate notes,” which human raters might rate as helpful since AI is “exceptionally skilled at crafting persuasive, emotionally resonant, and seemingly neutral notes.” That could disrupt the feedback loop, watering down community notes and making the whole system less trustworthy over time, X’s research paper warned.

“If rated helpfulness isn’t perfectly correlated with accuracy, then highly polished but misleading notes could be more likely to pass the approval threshold,” the paper said. “This risk could grow as LLMs advance; they could not only write persuasively but also more easily research and construct a seemingly robust body of evidence for nearly any claim, regardless of its veracity, making it even harder for human raters to spot deception or errors.”

X is already facing criticism over its AI plans. On Tuesday, former United Kingdom technology minister, Damian Collins, accused X of building a system that could allow “the industrial manipulation of what people see and decide to trust” on a platform with more than 600 million users, The Guardian reported.

Collins claimed that AI notes risked increasing the promotion of “lies and conspiracy theories” on X, and he wasn’t the only expert sounding alarms. Samuel Stockwell, a research associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute, told The Guardian that X’s success largely depends on “the quality of safeguards X puts in place against the risk that these AI ‘note writers’ could hallucinate and amplify misinformation in their outputs.”

“AI chatbots often struggle with nuance and context but are good at confidently providing answers that sound persuasive even when untrue,” Stockwell said. “That could be a dangerous combination if not effectively addressed by the platform.”

Also complicating things: anyone can create an AI agent using any technology to write community notes, X’s Community Notes account explained. That means that some AI agents may be more biased or defective than others.

If this dystopian version of events occurs, X predicts that human writers may get sick of writing notes, threatening the diversity of viewpoints that made community notes so trustworthy to begin with.

And for any human writers and reviewers who stick around, it’s possible that the sheer volume of AI-written notes may overload them. Andy Dudfield, the head of AI at a UK fact-checking organization called Full Fact, told The Guardian that X risks “increasing the already significant burden on human reviewers to check even more draft notes, opening the door to a worrying and plausible situation in which notes could be drafted, reviewed, and published entirely by AI without the careful consideration that human input provides.”

X is planning more research to ensure the “human rating capacity can sufficiently scale,” but if it cannot solve this riddle, it knows “the impact of the most genuinely critical notes” risks being diluted.

One possible solution to this “bottleneck,” researchers noted, would be to remove the human review process and apply AI-written notes in “similar contexts” that human raters have previously approved. But the biggest potential downfall there is obvious.

“Automatically matching notes to posts that people do not think need them could significantly undermine trust in the system,” X’s paper acknowledged.

Ultimately, AI note writers on X may be deemed an “erroneous” tool, researchers admitted, but they’re going ahead with testing to find out.

AI-written notes will start posting this month

All AI-written community notes “will be clearly marked for users,” X’s Community Notes account said. The first AI notes will only appear on posts where people have requested a note, the account said, but eventually AI note writers could be allowed to select posts for fact-checking.

More will be revealed when AI-written notes start appearing on X later this month, but in the meantime, X users can start testing AI note writers today and soon be considered for admission in the initial cohort of AI agents. (If any Ars readers end up testing out an AI note writer, this Ars writer would be curious to learn more about your experience.)

For its research, X collaborated with post-graduate students, research affiliates, and professors investigating topics like human trust in AI, fine-tuning AI, and AI safety at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Washington.

Researchers agreed that “under certain circumstances,” AI agents can “produce notes that are of similar quality to human-written notes—at a fraction of the time and effort.” They suggested that more research is needed to overcome flagged risks to reap the benefits of what could be “a transformative opportunity” that “offers promise of dramatically increased scale and speed” of fact-checking on X.

If AI note writers “generate initial drafts that represent a wider range of perspectives than a single human writer typically could, the quality of community deliberation is improved from the start,” the paper said.

Future of AI notes

Researchers imagine that once X’s testing is completed, AI note writers could not just aid in researching problematic posts flagged by human users, but also one day select posts predicted to go viral and stop misinformation from spreading faster than human reviewers could.

Additional perks from this automated system, they suggested, would include X note raters quickly accessing more thorough research and evidence synthesis, as well as clearer note composition, which could speed up the rating process.

And perhaps one day, AI agents could even learn to predict rating scores to speed things up even more, researchers speculated. However, more research would be needed to ensure that wouldn’t homogenize community notes, buffing them out to the point that no one reads them.

Perhaps the most Musk-ian of ideas proposed in the paper, is a notion of training AI note writers with clashing views to “adversarially debate the merits of a note.” Supposedly, that “could help instantly surface potential flaws, hidden biases, or fabricated evidence, empowering the human rater to make a more informed judgment.”

“Instead of starting from scratch, the rater now plays the role of an adjudicator—evaluating a structured clash of arguments,” the paper said.

While X may be moving to reduce the workload for X users writing community notes, it’s clear that AI could never replace humans, researchers said. Those humans are necessary for more than just rubber-stamping AI-written notes.

Human notes that are “written from scratch” are valuable to train the AI agents and some raters’ niche expertise cannot easily be replicated, the paper said. And perhaps most obviously, humans “are uniquely positioned to identify deficits or biases” and therefore more likely to be compelled to write notes “on topics the automated writers overlook,” such as spam or scams.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

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.

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes Read More »

false-claims-that-ivermectin-treats-cancer,-covid-lead-states-to-pass-otc-laws

False claims that ivermectin treats cancer, COVID lead states to pass OTC laws

cancer, fda, health, ivermectin, Social Media / /

Doctors told the Times that they have already seen some cases where patients with treatable, early-stage cancers have delayed effective treatments to try ivermectin, only to see no effect and return to their doctor’s office with cancers that have advanced.

Risky business

Nevertheless, the malignant misinformation on social media has made its way into state legislatures. According to an investigation by NBC News published Monday, 16 states have proposed or passed legislation that would make ivermectin available over the counter. The intention is to make it much easier for people to get ivermectin and use it for any ailment they believe it can cure.

Idaho, Arkansas, and Tennessee have passed laws to make ivermectin available over the counter. On Monday, Louisiana’s state legislature passed a bill to do the same, and it now awaits signing by the governor. The other states that have considered or are considering such bills include: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

State laws don’t mean the dewormer would be readily available, however; ivermectin is still regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and it has not been approved for over-the-counter use yet. NBC News called 15 independent pharmacies in the three states that have laws on the books allowing ivermectin to be sold over the counter (Idaho, Arkansas, and Tennessee) and couldn’t find a single pharmacist who would sell it without a prescription. Pharmacists pointed to the federal regulations.

Likewise, CVS Health said its pharmacies are not currently selling ivermectin over the counter in any state. Walgreens declined to comment.

Some states, such as Alabama, have considered legislation that would protect pharmacists from any possible disciplinary action for dispensing ivermectin without a prescription. However, one pharmacist in Idaho, who spoke with NBC News, said that such protection would still not be enough. As a prescription-only drug, ivermectin is not packaged for retail sale. If it were, it would include over-the-counter directions and safety statements written specifically for consumers.

“If you dispense something that doesn’t have directions or safety precautions on it, who’s ultimately liable if that causes harm?” the pharmacist said. “I don’t know that I would want to assume that risk.”

It’s a risk people on social media don’t seem to be concerned with.

False claims that ivermectin treats cancer, COVID lead states to pass OTC laws Read More »

florida-ban-on-kids-using-social-media-likely-unconstitutional,-judge-rules

Florida ban on kids using social media likely unconstitutional, judge rules

Policy, Social Media / /

A federal judge ruled today that Florida cannot enforce a law that requires social media platforms to block kids from using their platforms. The state law “is likely unconstitutional,” US Judge Mark Walker of the Northern District of Florida ruled while granting the tech industry’s request for a preliminary injunction.

The Florida law “prohibits some social media platforms from allowing youth in the state who are under the age of 14 to create or hold an account on their platforms, and similarly prohibits allowing youth who are 14 or 15 to create or hold an account unless a parent or guardian provides affirmative consent for them to do so,” Walker wrote.

The law is subject to intermediate scrutiny under the First Amendment, meaning it must be “narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest,” must “leave open ample alternative channels for communication,” and must not “burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests,” the ruling said.

Florida claimed its law is designed to prevent harm to youth and is narrowly tailored because it targets sites that use specific features that have been deemed to be addictive. But the law applies too broadly, Walker found:

Even assuming the significance of the State’s interest in limiting the exposure of youth to websites with “addictive features,” the law’s restrictions are an extraordinarily blunt instrument for furthering it. As applied to Plaintiffs’ members alone, the law likely bans all youth under 14 from holding accounts on, at a minimum, four websites that provide forums for all manner of protected speech: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. It also bans 14- and 15-year-olds from holding accounts on those four websites absent a parent’s affirmative consent, a requirement that the Supreme Court has clearly explained the First Amendment does not countenance.

Walker said the Florida “law applies to any social media site that employs any one of the five addictive features under any circumstances, even if, for example, the site only sends push notifications if users opt in to receiving them, or the site does not auto-play video for account holders who are known to be youth. Accordingly, even if a social media platform created youth accounts for which none of the purportedly ‘addictive’ features are available, it would still be barred from allowing youth to hold those accounts if the features were available to adult account holders.”

Florida ban on kids using social media likely unconstitutional, judge rules Read More »

discord-lures-users-to-click-on-ads-by-offering-them-new-orbs-currency

Discord lures users to click on ads by offering them new Orbs currency

ads, discord, Social Media, Tech / /

Sellis also announced that Discord is working with brand measurement firm Kantar to help advertisers track ad success. With Kantar technology, advertisers can measure things like “awareness, recall, and intent,” Sellis said. The partnership further underscores Discord’s growing reliance on advertising revenue.

“Our partnership with Discord is helping marketers better understand Discord as an advertising platform for new generations,” Nicole Jones, Kantar’s chief commercial lead, said on Discord’s blog.

Rethinking ads

Discord also announced this week that it will soon sell Play Quests to more advertisers. The announcement follows the company’s introduction of video ads to the Discord mobile app in June. Video Quests, as they’re called, allow advertisers to show trailers, announcements, and other types of content.

Overall, Discord’s new ad-friendly approach to business is very different than its previous strategy, which kept Discord ad-free from its 2015 launch until last year. Because the company is expected to go public soon, its leaders have determined that it’s no longer sufficient to rely completely on premium add-ons and subscriptions. Discord isn’t profitable, forcing the firm to reconsider its use of ads, which cofounder and CEO Jason Citron felt were too intrusive as recently as 2021.

Currently, Discord’s ads are limited to clickable sidebars within the platform and offer direct benefits to users. Introducing ads can be a slippery slope, though, especially for social media companies that prioritize ad revenue to please investors. On the other hand, another social media company, Reddit, has seen success by boosting its ad business. Reddit went public in March 2024 and became profitable in October 2024 after reporting a 60 percent year-over-year increase in ad revenue. Reddit has hinted at plans to introduce new and more types of ads, and we can expect Discord to consider the same after its IPO, which a March Bloomberg report suggested could happen as soon as this year.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

Discord lures users to click on ads by offering them new Orbs currency Read More »

meta-hypes-ai-friends-as-social-media’s-future,-but-users-want-real-connections

Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections

antitrust, decentralization, facebook, Features, ftc, Instagram, interoperability, Meta, meta monopoly trial, Policy, Social Media / /

Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends.

A rotting zombie thumb up buzzing with flies while the real zombies are the people in the background who can't put their phones down

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

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.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

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.

Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Read More »