It’s Bad: What Now?

Summary

In this tenth-anniversary reflection for Social Media + Society, Nancy Baym revisits her 2015 manifesto “Social Media and the Struggle for Society” to ask whether the four threats she named then — wealth inequality, opaque algorithmic feeds, precarious creative labor, and unchecked data extraction — have improved. Her answer is bluntly negative: every one has worsened, with tech “broligarchs” converting platform fortunes into political power, generative AI scraping user content for new harms, and outrage-amplifying feeds eroding trust and authenticity. The essay’s pivot is reflexive and self-critical: a decade of sharp scholarly critique has not bent the trajectory of platforms, and Baym calls on researchers to move beyond critique-as-virtue toward interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration capable of actually shaping more just sociotechnical futures.

Key Contributions

• A longitudinal, personal-scholarly stocktaking of social media’s trajectory across the lifespan of Social Media + Society.
• A self-critical challenge to platform studies: critique alone has been insufficient, and the field must reckon with its limited real-world impact.
• An agenda for engaged, cross-sector research collaboration with NGOs, governments, worker organizations, and even platforms themselves.
• Naming of emergent priorities — broligarchy, generative AI’s appropriation of user data, and the authenticity crisis — as urgent objects for future inquiry.

Methods

A reflective anniversary essay that revisits and reassesses the author’s own 2015 manifesto, synthesizing prior critical scholarship (Baym, Burgess, Phillips, Dean, Gillespie) with contemporary illustrative evidence (Forbes wealth data, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X, Grok-generated deepfakes) to track change over a decade.

Findings

• Tech wealth has exploded: Zuckerberg from $44B(2015)to$216B (2026); Brin to $237B;Muskto$730.6B — a concentration now translated directly into political power.
• Algorithmic feeds were never genuinely optimized for prosocial ends; they amplify harm even if they are not the sole driver of democratic decline.
• Twitter/X shifted from ephemeral connection to outrage amplification well before its rebranding.
• The influencer economy reproduces the unattainable startup-billionaire dream while feeding platforms through precarious labor.
• Generative AI tools like Grok are producing non-consensual violent imagery of women and children from social media data, while covert AI content erodes trust even in mundane posts.
• Glimmers of alternatives persist in decentralized platforms (Mastodon, BlueSky), mutual aid networks, and durable online communities of care.

Connections

Baym’s call to move past pure critique resonates directly with companion anniversary reflections in this register — particularly Marwick2026-ss and Marwick2026-qd on the limits and obligations of critical platform scholarship, Boyd2026-op on rethinking what a decade of internet research has actually achieved, and Swartz2026-zb on the political economy of platforms under intensifying tech-capital power. Together these pieces form a collective field-level reckoning rather than isolated essays.

Podcast

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