Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends
You have to dig through this entire article to get to the punchline, but here it is:<p>&gt; &quot;These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be top of the list. None of this matters, though, without engagement.&quot;<p>Relevant quote:<p>&gt; &quot;The junk merchant doesn&#x27;t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.&quot; ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch<p>This is slightly more complex with the social media business model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish.  The heroin-like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive entertainment content.  The actual client buys the fish (the viewer) from the social media outfit.  The actual client is an advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc.<p>The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be paying the social media providers to control the content stream as a means of manipulating their audience.  Weapons manufacturers might want Facebook&#x2F;Instagram&#x2F;Twitter to bury anti-war content; corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off the recommendation algorithm results; established political parties might want independents hidden from view; etc<p>It&#x27;s very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just the delivery of targeted advertising content to the &#x27;engaged&#x27; audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc.<p>Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.