Social media are undergoing a profound but little-noticed transformation. Status updates from friends have given way to videos from strangers that resemble a hyperactive TV. Public posting is increasingly migrating to closed groups, rather like email. What Mr Zuckerberg calls the digital “town square” is being rebuilt—and posing problems.

The striking feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections.【G1】____________________________Debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

The lights have gone out in the town square. Social media have always been opaque, since every feed is different.【G2】________________________Private messaging groups are often fully encoded. Some of the consequences of this are welcome. Posts on messaging apps are ordered chronologically, not by an engagement-maximising algorithm, reducing the incentive to sensationalise. In particular, closed groups may be better for the mental health of teenagers, who struggled when their private lives were analyzed in public.

In the hyperactive half of social media, behaviour-based algorithms will bring you posts from beyond your community. Social networks can still act as “echo chambers” of self-reinforcing material. But a feed that takes content from anywhere at least has the potential to spread the best

ideas farthest. Yet this new world of social-media brings its own problems.【G3】________________________But Telegram’s groups of 200,000 are more like unregulated broadcasts than conversations.

As people move to closed groups, the open networks left behind are less useful because of the decline in public posting.【G4】________________________Today those conversations are disappearing or moving to closed channels, slowing the spread of ideas.

What’s more, the open-network algorithms driven by users’ behaviour seem primed to spread the spiciest videos. For something to go viral on a social network, people had to choose to share it. Now they endorse it simply by watching, as the algorithm rewards content that attracts the most engagement. Deliberate arrangement has been replaced by a system that taps straight into the ID. Provocateurs stand to benefit, as do misinformation merchants.

【G5】________________________But since the network’s pivot to entertainment, news makes up only 3% of what people see on it. Across social media only 19% of adults share news stories weekly. Publications like BuzzFeed News, which relied on social distribution, have perished. That is their lookout (and ours). But it is everyone’s problem when nearly half of young people say that social media are their main source of news.

Some people argue that social networks’ defects can be fixed by better governance, clever coding or a different business model. Such things can help. But the problems raised by the new generation of apps suggest that social media’s flaws are also the result of the balancing acts built into human communication. When people escape their echo chambers, they may well face more extreme content. When users embrace harmless entertainment, they see less news. As social networks decline, platform operators and users should devote less time to the old battles and more to contend with the new.

[A] During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and doctors contributed to an online debate which contained real insight as well as misinformation.

[B] Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.

[C] However, Instagram has launched new tools to increase transparency, allowing users to see how their data is used and how posts are recommended.

[D] Messaging apps are largely unsupervised. For small groups, that is good; platforms should no more police direct messages than phone companies should monitor calls.

[E] More urgent even than the rise of fake news is a lack of the real sort. Mr Zuckerberg once said he wanted Facebook to be like a personalised newspaper.

[F] Despite the surge in user-generated content, there’s an increasing demand for verified, high-quality journalism on social media platforms.

[G] But TikTok is a black box to researchers. Twitter, rebranded as X, has published some of its code but tightened access to data about which tweets are seen.

【G5】