Okay, so a few things here. First of all, meta is in trouble. Twitter is in trouble, but TikTok isn't. And the upcoming apps like Be Real isn't. And even with meta, it's still making profit from its various companies in a way that Twitter really never has. There's a general squeeze coming for big tech, especially after their boom during the

pandemic when they were able to extract a lot of rent from the situation. Advertising revenues

now, because of inflation and recession worries, are falling substantially, and I suspect that

in terms of user growth, the legacy platforms were already hitting a ceiling. So there is that kind of

problem. But my sense is that the crisis of the social industry has actually been predominantly

political, meaning that a lot of its salience derives from its political role in organizing

communication on a mass scale. So they were close to the Obama White House, you know, the big sort of tech

giants, the social industry platforms and so on. They were supported by the Democratic leadership.

They were faded in the press as the cause of democratic revolutions. They had an inside track to political power.

And since 2016, they've had a series of crisis over how much to profit from a

rising far right, how much bullying and trolling they can allow, how fair its moderation practices are,

how justified monopoly ownership is, whether it can even be taxed for the revenue at sucking out

of journalism, you know, why doesn't it protect users' privacy from national states

and companies buying data and so on and so on, and so on. It lost access to the White House,

it lost the adulation of the press, it lost the inside track to power, and some of its most

active and money-spinning users, like Donald Trump, were causing political headaches.

But in response, the social industry has tried to improve its political management of users

by adjusting feeds, by excluding the most obvious Nazi accounts and others, and setting up various

journalism funds while also trying to look for news seems of value to exploit in the form of

cryptocurrencies and virtual reality as far as Zuckerberg is concerned.

So we've seen the social industry trying to neutralize the political critique.

Hasn't really rebuilt lost political clout.

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