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An interesting analysis of social media from Dr. Eike Wenzel in February 2024 Megatrend newsletter from the Institute for Trend and Future Research, Heidelberg
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2. Digitalization / social media
Social media twilight – demagogue twilight? Where is the populist divisive discourse heading?
The major social media platforms are withdrawing from the sale of political communication. The reason for this: the fear of punishments and bans. However, it is negligent that the political center neglects social media - as shown, among other things, by the success of the AfD on TikTok.
According to Chartbeat, a market research firm that measures traffic between media companies and social media platforms, last year the amount of Internet traffic directed by Facebook to media companies fell by 48 percent and by X (formerly Twitter) by 27 percent. The former stars of viral social media posts are leaving: Last year, BuzzFeed News was closed and Vice News was drastically reduced.
But even for candidates willing to pay, it is becoming increasingly difficult to place their message in the new public square. For one thing, some of the new digital platforms don't want your money. TikTok bans political advertising entirely. Threads is less than a year old and doesn't sell ads at all. Streaming services, which account for a larger share of television viewing in America than broadcast or cable, are also cautious: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, the largest streamers, have so far refused to run political ads, although that could change .
The decline in sharing, posting and polarizing has led to the emergence of what the Reuters Institute calls the “passive news consumer,” who sees the news but does not comment, share or otherwise engage with it. (see also our analysis of how social media is regressing to 90s private television) This retro trend is currently most advanced in Western countries: in the UK, 68 percent of adults are now classified as “passive” news consumers, and only one in ten are posts about it.
The basic problem is that political ads on social media don't work as well as they used to. The anti-tracking adjustments introduced by Apple in 2021 have made it more difficult to target ads, reducing the return on investment. Facebook ad spending will be lower this election cycle than in 2020, AdImpact predicts, even as overall political ad spending is expected to rise by about 30 percent.
Retreating into the private sphere doesn't make the demagogue's job any easier
According to the Andrew Arenge, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, politicians spent $244 million on ads on Facebook and Instagram in America over the past six months, compared to $320 million in the same period of the 2020 cycle. Meta's advertising accounting, for example, reveals , that Donald Trump spent only about $90 on the two platforms in the 400.000 days leading up to the Iowa caucuses last month. “These are pretty frightening numbers compared to what we have seen in previous years,” explains Reid Vineis of Majority Strategies, a Republican consulting firm, told The Economist. His simple explanation: “The platform is less effective.”
The most difficult thing is to reach the millions of small group chats, especially WhatsApp, into which large parts of the social media bubble have retreated. What goes on in the encrypted rooms is opaque even to the platforms that operate them. But the exchange of messages also decreases in groups and becomes less political. The share of adults who post weekly news articles via instant messaging platforms rose from 2023 percent to 17 percent in the five years to 22, the Reuters Institute measured.
Importantly, however, and no less problematic than the toxic communication conditions on the Internet during the US election campaign in 2016 and 2020: the remaining hard core of active participants in the public online area is disproportionately male and politically radicalized. A third of politicians who describe themselves as “very” right or left are still actively involved, while only 22 percent of centrist politicians bother to show their faces on social media, according to Reuters. In Germany, the TikTok appearance of the right-wing extremist AfD is probably the decisive strategy that is responsible for its success in the polls.
The AfD actors quickly understood what TikTok was all about. They do not act as a party, but rather approach users through direct communication and simple messages. The neo-Nazi presents himself on the video platform Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the European election campaign, as approachable by taking his community with him into his everyday work and filming himself in the state parliament or at public events. He speaks directly to his followers on TikTok. “The others” are declared to be the enemy: the traffic light government, for example, or “the media”.
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