An Internet Of Lurkers

I’ve been doing a round of conferences recently, both with folks working in traditional media and, more recently, folks working in traditional politics. And both groups have been asking the same the question, a question they always tend to ask me, but one that’s being asked with a lot more urgency these days: How do we get people to see our stuff online?

I’m used to the question. Back when I worked in the content mines, established journalists and big-shot editors wanted to know the secrets to going viral. Secrets they didn’t have to learn because they went to good schools and got good jobs before the internet flattened everything. And, while there was never a simple answer, it was easier to answer. Make your headline shareable, your thumbnail sensational, find some kids in your newsroom that are comfortable on camera, maybe write about cats, idk. But these days, I don’t quite know what to tell them.

Social media, whatever that means now, is more popular than ever, at least according to the views we can see and the culture we can measure and the vibes we can feel. But it has also never felt more over. The numbers we track every month for Garbage Intelligence are shrinking. The same creators are stuck at the top. The memes don’t really stick around like they used to. And, well, AI, you know…

So I felt a bit relieved reading through a new research paper from Petter Törnberg, an assistant professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam. “Overall platform use has declined, with the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media altogether,” the study reads. “Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have grown modestly, reflecting a more fragmented digital public sphere.” Törnberg went deeper into his findings on Bluesky, writing, “Fewer people are talking — but those still talking are more politically extreme.”

Now, a few caveats. Törnberg used data from American National Election Studies, comparing 2020 to 2024. So we don’t actually know if 2020 was a spike in social media usage, due to COVID lockdowns. It’s possible we’re coming back to a baseline. He was also measuring political extremism online during election years, when I’d wager it would be at its highest. The study also only measures public platforms, as reported by ANES surveys. And my first question, particularly for the data surrounding young Americans, is if those Americans think that platforms like Discord and other dark social platforms count as social media. But the publicly shared digital content Americans are still consuming has never felt more inauthentic and people do seem to be noticing.

Bloomberg reported this week that mega-creators like MrBeast are working with a firm called Clipping, paying them to flood these broken platforms with short clips of their content. This makes a certain amount of sense. Facebook and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, X, and TikTok are effectively the same bucket, with slightly different content requirements, so why not outsource it? But the presentation of those clips circulating across those platforms is what makes this feel insidious. These clips are being posted to accounts that look like they’re being run by fans or, at the very least, accounts that actually like the creator’s content. And I think it’s safe to assume if creators are doing this, celebrities and politicians are, as well. Zohran Mamdani didn’t pay creators to clip his recent events, but, as we wrote this week, he did roll out the red carpet for them. And, as one of them told us, some of these creators aren’t even Mamdani supporters. And if you take all of that and add it to what Törnberg found, you get a pretty stark portrait of how bleak things are right now.

The digital public square in America, the center of our digital lives, that nexus of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, and TikTok we replaced TV and radio with, is a ghost town. And the majority of the content we see on those apps is being created by unhinged maniacs, bots, and paid “fan” armies. But we — you, me, the vast world of normies that open up their TikTok clone of choice every night, and even Kim Kardashian, apparently, who was recently convinced by short-form video that the moon landing was faked — haven’t intellectualized this new reality yet. We know something is off. We know that the internet — or at least parts of the internet — does not accurately reflect consensus anymore, but we can’t figure out which parts are lying to us.

And while it’s still too early to predict where this is all headed, I think the safest bet is that we are going to be constantly surprised. We will be surprised by what makes money, by what becomes popular, by how people vote, by what makes them show up. Even though we are surrounded by numbers convincing us we know what’s going on.

Trump Did The Candy Thing Again

The DHS Recreated A Racist Lord Of The Rings Meme They Saw On X

The right-wing meme account @middleearthmixr shared a Lord Of The Rings meme on X earlier this week and one of its followers tagged the Department of Homeland Security X account in the replies, saying, “this would go hard” if it had “join ICE” written on it.

Strangely enough, the DHS X account didn’t just reshare the edited meme that was posted in @middleearthmixr replies, but, instead, made their own version and shared it to their account. Screenshot below.

This confirms what we’ve already known. That Trump administration X accounts are monitoring their mentions on X. They are using them to crowdsource deportation targets and source memes for propaganda.

Embarrassing? Yes, of course. But it’s also a useful loop to build. And it ties back into what I wrote above. Trump’s digital team cherrypicks content from their supporters and distributes it on their main accounts, both because it’s easier/faster than making their own horrible memes and because it creates the illusion that these are even memes, as in, something popular being shared by lots of people. When in reality it’s one weird idiot sharing another weird idiot’s photoshop.

Geert Wilders Heben Een Serieus Problem

The Netherlands appears to be politically bifurcating similar to the US right now. Last night, Dutch Donald Trump cosplayer Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) tied with the left-leaning Democrats 66 (D66) in the country’s parliamentary elections. Both beat out the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). And, of course, Wilders is already moaning about election tampering.

The Netherlands is far from a 1:1 with the US in terms of how their politics work, but the cratering of the center-right does carry over. As does the waning popularity of the far right. All of the parties that were part of PVV’s coalition performed poorly yesterday.

As Leiden University professor Bernard Steunenberg argued in an interview this week with Radio France Internationale, PVV was effectively a single-issue and single-politician party, orbiting entirely around anti-immigration and Wilders. And, apparently, that kind of party does not do well if it’s up against a party like D66 that stays focused on simple policies that are easy to understand and matter to voters. A lesson there for our Democrats, perhaps!

A Waymo Killed A Cat

A self-driving Waymo in San Fransisco’s Mission district hit and killed a beloved bodega cat named KitKat this week. Waymo hasn’t put out a statement yet, but there was a small memorial for KitKat on Tuesday night in the neighborhood.

The reactionary Silicon Valley set is already running defense for Waymo. Elon Musk, on X, argued that actually autonomous cars kill less pets than cars driven by people. There’s a secret third option here, besides driven and self-driving cars btw. Click here to open your third eye.

The Napster Phase Of AI Music Is Over

The sad losers in the Suno AI subreddit are extremely upset over the announcement that Udio, an AI music generator, has partnered with Universal Music Group. “In partnership with UMG, we will be working closely with their extraordinary artists, songwriters and catalog to help bring your favorite music onto the platform while providing artists with control over how AI is used to make music and connect with fans,” Udio’s CEO Andrew Sanchez wrote in the announcement.

The big difference right now is that Udio users can no longer download their AI generations. “It's over for Udio yeah. If Suno does the same, someone else will take their place. This is just the dying screams of greedy record labels scrambling to stay relevant,” one Suno AI user on Reddit wrote. As much as it goes against all of my millennial programming to say this, the record labels are not the baddies in this instance.

But this also brings us one step closer to what will assuredly be the new status quo for generative AI. There will be models that are copyright safe and there will be ones that aren’t. For such a supposedly revolutionary, disruptive technology, it’s fascinating how quickly it’s settled into the exact same space that digital downloads and streaming have.

Three Really Good Recipes For Onionade

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s birthday hog.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***