# THE TAKE: Social Media Never Was Social This isn't decline—it's revelation. Social media platforms were always extraction infrastructure masquerading as connection. The "social" label was marketing. Facebook's internal documents (2018 leaks) showed the company explicitly optimized for engagement velocity over user wellbeing. Twitter's algorithm rewards outrage cascades, not dialogue. TikTok's bytecode remains a classified black box to Western regulators. The shift toward algorithmic feeds wasn't corruption of something pure. It was the business model revealing itself: you're the product being refined, not the customer being served. What's changed? We're finally admitting it. The parasocial relationships we mistook for friendship were always one-way extraction. The "town square" was always a storefront. The platforms didn't lose their social character. We lost our illusions about what that character was.
What the Documents Show
Post Petter Törnberg Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up.
Primary Sources
- Source: Hacker News
- Category: Surveillance State
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
Disclosure: NewsAnarchist aggregates from public records, API feeds (Federal Register, CourtListener, MuckRock, News), and independent media. AI-assisted synthesis. Always verify primary sources linked above.