Weekly Scroll: All Hail New Media
Censorship, platforms, and exactly who are we empowering?
Better late than never, it’s the Weekly Scroll! After spending last week wallowing in the inevitable nihilism of these troubled times, we’re back with a mostly non-political1 update. And this week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll is fully free - if you want to support the blog and get every paywalled post, become a paid subscriber today!
The Return of Censorship
In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, censorship has come back with a vengeance. Conservatives, once outraged about their ideas being suppressed, have decided that suppression is great when you’re the one pressing the Big Red Suppression Button. Or has it? Is the supposed censorship a conspiracy?
It’s hard to get at ground level truth here, because apps are updated quickly and companies tend to deny anything’s ever wrong. But there are widespread reports of TikTok censoring the word fascism and Palestinian content, Instagram censoring searches for ‘Democrats’, Meta forcing people to follow JD Vance’s account, and that TikTok’s algorithm has all of the sudden stopped algorithming the way it used to.
Some of these I could verify myself - several of the TikTok and Instagram blocks on certain searches were really happening. The JD Vance thing seems more like people who are confused they followed @VP for Kamala Harris and now follow the same handle for Vance? But overall there’s a darker, more conspiratorial feel to our largest social media sites that feels appropriate for our new era of cynicism and nihilism.
Remarkably, as Zoomers noticed that TikTok feels very different under Trump, rather than blaming ByteDance or the CCP they’ve decided it’s a conspiracy from Meta. There are dozens of posts claiming that Meta has already secretly bought the company and that you need to block Meta accounts and delete Meta apps to make your TikTok algorithm work again. It’s an incredible form of brain rot and I can only think that these users are getting the platform they deserve.
Old Media Flops
Meanwhile, the mainstream media seems to have realized 12 years too late that this new-fangled ‘internet’ thing is here to stay. The Washington Post is experimenting with something they’ve called ‘Third Newsroom’ and ‘WP Ventures’ that basically seems like newsletters and podcasts. CNN is laying people off and talking about the need for drastic change. Fox News is turning Sean Hannity’s show into what is basically a televised podcast, calling it ‘longform conversations’. Disney channel is functionally dead and Nickelodeon is pivoting to YouTube. Amazon surrendered to MrBeast.
They’re correct to be terrified. Pundits like Nate Silver, Paul Krugman and Jennifer Rubin have all departed mainstream institutions for Substack and all instantly had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Joe Rogan’s endorsement is (at minimum) 10x more important than the New York Times’s endorsement. YouTubers routinely have 10x the reach that mainstream journalists do, even when they’re interviewing the same subjects. It’s more important to have podcast dominance than IRL political campaigns and the internet is more real than real life.
I don’t know that many of these moves will be successful. It seems like a last-gasp-too-late attempt to make a switch that should have been made years ago. To use a non-political example, how are the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon realistically going to survive on YouTube when the competition like CocoMelon already has nearly 200M subscribers and years of experience gaming the algorithm? They’re not. They’re just going to slowly wither and die. Welcome to the era of new media.
New Media… Also Flops
The consequence of new media’s ascendancy is that you have a lot of weird and disreputable stuff floating to the top thanks to algorithms, influencers and the general slop that permeates the internet.
Say what you will about the mainstream media, but they do have some level of standards. You might think they distort the truth, or selectively present one side of issues more than some other side, but it’s rare for prestige media to outright lie to you or present you with garbage, slop content. Some people celebrate traditional media’s downfall, but I would like to remind you that the platforms replacing them often look like this:
AI-generated slop content like our buddy Shrimp Jesus is typically associated with Facebook, but it’s slowly spreading to other platforms as well. Just this week, as I searched for scenes from the movie Training Day on YouTube, I was presented with these as search results:
Every one of these is an AI-generated trailer for a movie that does not exist. There’s nothing wrong with AI videos in theory, and nothing wrong with fans creating trailers for hypothetical movies. But what’s really concerning as a heavy user of YouTube is that I didn’t search for any of this. These AI-slop videos are what YouTube’s algorithm is starting to push now, and they each have millions of views. These are the decisions being made by the platforms that have replaced mainstream media, that are now the center of our political and cultural discourse. Hooray.
Influencers Will Not Save You
Another way to think about this problem is to think about who these platforms empower. Traditional media tends to empower people with journalism degrees, credentialed experts and officials who wear uncomfortable suits. New media tends to empower Joe Rogan-like figures - so much so that we spent multiple news cycles wondering who could be the Democratic Joe Rogan. But while Rogan is curious about the world and can often be funny and interesting, he’s also a conspiratorial kook who’s not all that smart. That’s pretty common amongst podcasters, YouTubers, and livestreamers.
Even the liberal/progressive influencers floated as the left’s alternative to Rogan end up in weird, disgraceful areas. Hasan Piker platforms Houthi terrorists and encourages people to shoot politicians. Destiny is dealing with multiple lawsuits from women who claim he leaked sexual images of them without their consent. Social media influencers (and livestreamers in particular) tend to be politically insane. And we’ve handed them the keys to the kingdom.
I don’t really know how to end this section, so I’m going to leave you with this snippet from a Rolling Stone interview about right-wing TikTok influencers celebrating Trump’s election at a party:
Everybody thinks mainstream media is the worst until they see what comes after it. Welcome to the new world of platforms and influencers.
An Incredible Startup Name
Do you want to PostHog?2
Links
There’s a new book about the history of Black Twitter. These kinds of books often risk going into ‘that friend who’s too woke’ territory, but it is absolutely true that a lot of online culture originated from Black Twitter. I’m looking forward to reading it.
An insightful article from Francis Fukuyama about how Silvio Berlusconi invented the playbook that Trump and Musk used to win the 2024 election.
Instagram has rolled out a new video-editing app to attract TikTok users in the wake of TikTok’s potential ban. They’re also courting TikTok creators with cash bonuses to post on Instagram.
Hundreds of subreddits are banning links to X after Elon Musk’s Nazi salute last week.3
Trump wants either Oracle’s Larry Ellison or Elon Musk (both major donors) to purchase TikTok.
OpenAI introduced its first ‘agent’, an AI that can natively perform tasks in browser.
Aella on how OnlyFans took over the NSFW creator industry.
BlueSky is dealing with a wave of AI reply-bots
Posts
hahaha ‘non political’ sure
This feels like it’s a sign of a bubble. Short tech now?
It's funny how everyone complains about "the gatekeepers" and now we're finding out (in both media and art) how much absolute garbage "the gatekeepers" were saving us from. Also, at what point can we all just agree that people who post literal lies and clickbait to social media platforms should be launched directly into the sun?
The “Democrat Joe Rogan” argument is so crazy. First, Joe Rogan WAS a Democrat at one point, endorsed Bernie Sanders, etc etc. but fine, that’s not what people mean.
What they mean, apparently, is “can there be a podcaster as popular and influential as Joe Rogan but who toes the liberal line when it comes to politics?” I mean, no? Obviously?
Joe Rogan owes his popularity in part to being apolitical - the idea of “Joe Rogan, but pushing the Democratic Agenda” is like asking for a Socialist Andy Griffith or a Howard Stern, but all-in on prison abolition. You’re missing why they’re popular in the first place. One of the reason Joe Rogan’s audience is so huge is that he doesn’t talk politics all the time.