In 2024, social media will become small.
Not a small influence, of course. As the United States faces an election that is likely to be divisive and often straying from reality, social media will once again become a battleground for public opinion and perception. But the platforms on which these conversations will take place will be smaller in scale, more diverse, and less connected to each other.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump discovered that he could speak directly to an audience of tens of millions of people on Twitter. Kicked off the platform after the January 6 insurrection, Trump moved to the much smaller Truth Social, a network whose main selling point appeared to be his presence. Trump lost something valuable when he was ousted: the ability to speak to the “big room,” a platform that reached a broad swath of people interested in public affairs.
Large spaces, like Twitter and Instagram, are constant battlegrounds for attention. They are invaluable to activists, who want messages like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter to reach new converts to the movement, and to influencers who build power and revenue by building audiences. But they are also inherently conflictual spaces, as people with different points of view argue about what types of discourse are appropriate for the space.
Trump speaks in a smaller room now, but it’s a room where virtually everyone who listens agrees with him. He will never be kicked out of Truth Social, because his statements, no matter how provocative, are the network’s raison d’être.
Consciously or not, other platforms are moving in the same direction. Elon Musk’s compulsive destruction of Twitter is turning it into a smaller room, a safe space for extremists that makes it dangerous for those who don’t share their views. Reddit, long one of the hottest spaces for informed, topical conversation, is losing users as it implements unpopular and Muskian policies in hopes of generating much-needed revenue. Some subreddits are migrating to Discord, where their conversations won’t overlap with thousands of other topics on Reddit, but where they will have full control over their chosen rules of the road.
Small room networks can be profoundly important spaces where communities can find support and solidarity. When you seek support in living with diabetes or without alcohol (two struggles I am personally engaged in), you are not looking for confrontation, but camaraderie, comfort, and constructive advice. Millions of us find these spaces in subreddits, Facebook groups, or even on specific social networks, like Archive of One’s Own, which connects 5 million fan-fiction authors and fans every month.
But small rooms have one big downside: They’re just as useful for Nazis as they are for knitters. These conversations, insulated from external scrutiny, can normalize extreme viewpoints and lead people deeper into dark topics in which they have expressed a passing interest.
We need networks of small rooms: they get strangers to know each other, building social capital and connection between people who may never interact in the physical world. But they further fragment the public sphere, meaning the 2024 elections could be even more fragmented than we’ve seen so far in the social media age.