all right what's the best thing that you saw on social media this week for me I would say it is a tie between a group of tiger cubs adopted by a Golden Retriever and the pastor from the inauguration invoking the Lord Almighty to launch a scammy meeme coin immediately after the event what was the name of the meme coin oh just dollar sign Lorenzo his name incredible uh mine was probably that there is a fish in aquarium in Japan who stopped eating when they had to shut down the aquarium for a little bit and the
visitors couldn't come and then put up fake pictures of people in the window of staff and visitors and then the fish started eating again it reminds me of Drew I will I will I will do it but only for the attention this is impromptu from Washington Post opinions a show that brings you the conversations about the news we can't stop thinking about I'm Drew goens author of the today's opinions newsletter and I'm Molly Roberts a columnist here at the post today we're talking about the current status of social media in American culture a bunch of
people fled Twitter yeah I said it Twitter after Elon Musk took over uh recently Mark Zuckerberg at meta announced that Facebook and Instagram are done with fact checking and the future of Tik Tok is as shaky as an iPhone held by a dancing zillennial my gosh how can I match that the digital Town Square seems to have split into camps that mimic the country's political divides most platforms specialize in serving you up only the content you agree with anyway plus a ton of AI generated junk so it's a good time to talk about what we're
really using social media for in 2025 is it still even serving us we're joined today by Philip bump hi Phillip why hello so um before we get into the bigger stuff I feel it's important to you know disclose and just kind of set the table what are our relationships personally with social media where are we coming from Molly why don't you start my sense is is true right now for a lot of people in my generation I'm very solidly a millennial who came of age around the same time that social media did but personally I've
started to move away from the wide worlds of Twitter and even Instagram and toward smaller closer online communities so Discord servers are a good example Discord is the platform popular among video Gamers famous last year for the leak of some classified documents by an Air Force employee who also of course was a video gamer and the group text maybe counts as social media you tell me I think you mentioned one that you really love that is like a super Niche Community Drew oh are we talking about dive with Buddy um yeah yes this is this
is one of those very tiny um social media sites that is for scuba divers because never dive Alone um I might have just saved a life um you're always supposed to dive with a buddy and this pairs you up with them um but people also use it as a social media site and like 75% of the posts are just look at this beautiful fish which is a really nice corner of the internet uh mine is far more toxic than I oh we didn't get into my toxicity I used to track what's in the news and
so I had been an early convert to Twitter I was a Twitter back in 2007 um and it's just become an absolute garbage dump in Parts I write often about politics and this is this what happens uh 's Blue Sky now which is really coming of age as a a news and conversational Source um and you know other than that I the generally avoid meta products um but uh you know it's it's just it's it's broadly unhealthy I guess is the the short answer to your question would you say that the majority of your time
spent on social media is in a professional context like like you're on it for work otherwise you might be off it or are you on it for personal reasons too I I've got little kids and so there is some instagramming where I put pictures of the kids up for my for my family but of course I had to lock that down because people were leaving rude comments about politics and pictures of my kids before I did so so yeah I mean it's not entirely but yeah generally speaking yeah it is integrated into my professional life
and as such carries with it all the connotations of having to do it for work which makes it even less enjoyable yeah right I was thinking about those kid photos and the trend in the past I don't know exactly how many years of people posting photos of their kids but they put a giant emoji face on top of the kids face and it's for privacy but it does feel a little weird given when I look back at the old days of Facebook the whole point was to post your kids and you could actually see the
kids faces and people wanted to see your kids faces and you wouldn't have thought that anybody would be there saying something nasty about your kid or maybe stalking you using your kid and it is sort of a sense of how far we have fallen yeah yeah I um I heard that Philip is actually posting just cardboard cutouts of his kids so that all the fish following him will will not go hungry I won't eat unless I see them so I am off of Twitter very recently I am increasingly on Instagram also for like quasi professional
reasons where I'm uh publicizing my ongoing appearances on the game show Jeopardy um couldn't resist a plug I see I see tune in tonight um I feel like I'm deepening my relationship in some places and lessening them in others which leads me to my next question for you two which which is do you think we are past the age of peak social media or are we headed to it or are we just at this Plateau where we're going to stay you know substituting one thing for another but never ultimately changing our relationship with it r
large uh I mean I would say that I think social media is sort of following the pattern that the broader web did which is that there was this emergent period in which there's a lot of enthusiasm a lot of sort of ad hoc creation happening on the site uh that eventually got got funneled into more professionalized systems uh but fundamentally what happened is people realized it could be used for power and money and as soon as it became obvious the extent to which could be used for power and money uh then it became less useful
for its prior purposes and less hospitable to people generally uh and you know people's creativity and and and Novelty and the things that made them great and so I as a member of gen xon who grew up with the emerging internet back in the 1990s and early 2000s and subsequently do the same with social media you know I've seen this happen twice and you know enjoyed both of those periods of sort of novelty and weirdness and and fun and creativity and Innovation uh that then got stamped about by the boot of capitalism and you know
such is the way of the world yeah I totally agree with that I think we're certainly past Peak social media if Peak means social media at its best I just think that even if you look back to say 2016 another time where everything seemed kind of scary and uncertain people were on these platforms feeling like speaking there gave them more power these were ways to magnify our voices we still held on to a little bit of that dream from the Arab Spring and it's just become super clear now that that is not true the trouble
isn't just that these platforms are hoovering up our data the trouble is that we're not really in control of what or who gets heard we know who is we're seeing them saying that explicitly on X not Twitter anymore literally Elon Musk tweets are what's appearing I mean there there there is no disguising who's in charge you go through your feed and there's so little valuable information there are so few thoughts even from your friends there are just AI generated t-shirts that say like in the keep Cal or carry on font there are just ads that
read and this is a real example mix Cola with Vaseline mix Cola with Vaseline and just watch and you're like is this a threat or did you try it did you try it I'm terrified I'm not gonna try it I really do think Eden is over I don't know that that means we're past Peak social media in terms of how much we use these platforms but the quality is certainly degraded I will say that it's important to point 2016 as an inflection point right because in 2016 particularly tied to the election we saw this big
emergence of both misinformation and abuse uh that occurred at that same time and the reaction to was hey we got to stamp this out right Twitter Facebook the other social media companies took active steps in the years that followed to try and reduce those things and part of what we've seen first with Elon Musk buying Twitter and creating this new company X which is fundamentally different a lot of ways and so I think it's actually useful that he renamed it because X is different than Twitter uh but first there and then with with meta we've
seen this backlash of of pulling away from those responses in part because it's perceived as being uh in tune with the political moment which I think is a misread but I feel like we're going to get get into you mentioned Blue Sky um which you said is coming into its own as as a source of news as a as a social media site um that feels like the maybe one exception in social media sites um that is not suffering from this rightward Lurch what's going on with that yeah I mean I would I would say
it's a couple things the first is that the the very nature of Blue Sky the way it's constructed there's a company blue sky that creates this this app it it can tie into other social media feeds and mechanisms um which makes it so that blue sky itself has less power over what's happening but it also means that it allows for more tools like one of the things that made Twitter great back in the day was it was very easy to create Bots uh that did positive things beneficial Bots as opposed to the toxic ones um
that you could do filters and and and apply tools to what was happening in your in your feed in a way that that made it more useful blue sky is very very hospitable to that which is beneficial I will say that it's not the only Bastion of of uh positivity if you will in the social media space like Reddit for example I think has proven itself to be pretty robustly uh friendly and this in the same way that blue sky is sort of distributed in its management Reddit is distributed in its management you know each
Reddit subreddit has a moderator that's able to to to shape and guide where it goes or moderators in in most cases uh and I think that that by having it not be a corporate entity instilling a topown set of how things are going to be and therefore having those corporate entities be subject to pressure from say incoming presidents um or election results means that they can be more resilient and more responsive to what the user base wants so yeah I really like that more hopeful gloss on it I think the kind of jargon people in
the industry would use is web 2 versus web three although that brings a bunch of blockchain stuff in that maybe we don't want in but the idea is is it centralized corporate control versus these more Federated systems and so perhaps I shouldn't have been so despairing perhaps we reached the peak for the centralized model but there's something better possibly ahead and with you 100% Reddit is a great example I spend a lot of time on knife Reddit they talk about Chef's knives it's not violent I spend some time on Goodyear welt Reddit which is about
like leather shoes this all sounds very manly of me revealing new facets of my personality but that's what the internet's for right it's all about Discovery Molly traveled back to 2011 and she's on ironic mustache subreddits um so as far as these sites where there are Titans in charge at the top who have the ability to just wrench them in unsavory directions you know with meta and the end OFA checking and disbanding its di programs and obviously everything going on with Elon Musk we have so many people leaving those platforms is there any sense in
staying to avoid Silo isation does it does it matter that people are leaving is this you know polarizing us further I get that it's a collective action problem like who wants to stay on Twitter or on X rather Philip you made a great point about differentiating um what am I going to do as one person but but is there a downside to people leaving in droves yeah I mean your question reminds me a little bit of the question that people asked in 2016 and I suppose are asking again now about whether federal employees for example
should conscientiously object to the Trump Administration from within their workplaces but I feel when it comes to social media sticking around is not going to make things better it's not really the case that if only we expose the worst people on social media to our supposedly more enlightened view points going to change their minds and heal the country's wounds on the other hand I don't think leaving is going to do any good on a systemic level I really think it is just about doing what's best for each of us individually our own emotional health I
read just yesterday a great newsletter from the writer an Helen Peterson on uh reassessing our relationship with social media which I think a lot of people are doing now and the way she framed it is I have haven't come to Value it less instead it's become less valuable when we come back from the break we're going to talk about quitting social media but for now I need like 50 or 60 Minutes to uh check my Instagram we'll be right back [Music] [Music] welcome back I am here with Molly Roberts and Philip bump to talk about
the current state of social media so before we talk about getting off and quitting let's talk about the positives what do you think social media can be at its best what do you like about it yeah this is a pretty basic answer and obvious answer but I think it's still true which is that it does allow you to connect with people you'd otherwise never speak with what I think is perhaps less obvious is the way that even large social media communities can really feel like communities everyone who's ever spent any time on Twitter for example
knows who Bean dad is they know what it means to be corn cobbed I've always been fascinated by the way that chronically online people speak a similar language it's indecipherable to normies the word Normie would be probably part of that language and these people more or less wrote that language together just sociologically that's a pretty cool phenomenon yeah that's true I mean I think it's the extent to which a lot of that conversation comes from both drill and forchan I think is probably not ideal but there the central example of social media elevating news is
you know when there was the guy in Pakistan who's like hey there's helicopters at Abad and that's unusual in the middle of the night and it was you know Sweeping in get like that can still happen it can still happen that someone observes something unusual and elevates her to the world's attention in a really useful way um The Challenge now of course is that it's harder to sort of sift your way through all the mock and nonsense and toxicity in order to find those things uh but you know it is still the case those things
can be elevated and that's of you know literally historic significance uh and didn't exist prior to 20 years ago you are clearly more civically minded than I am Philip while I sift through my dgen forums but to each his own okay more and more people are talking about just getting rid of social media like totally disconnecting quitting where are you guys on that is that something you've thought about is that something you've tried I'm G to ask Molly first because I know she did a really interesting project recently where she spent I don't know how
many days it was how many weeks with a dumb phone and tried to disconnect as much as possible so tell us about that Molly I've spoken about it before on this very podcast but an a bridged version is basically that I spent about a month with a dumb phone Nokia flip phone and what I found at the end of it was that I'd kind of lost the reflex to be picking my phone up checking something and that that was genuinely freeing right so the question of quitting probably not quitting I think social media still is
an insight into our national mood or The Vibes in more Niche segments of society I think everything Philip said is totally true there are things about the world that you might not ever find out there's news that you might not find out without social media it's valuable but engage less absolutely I already do engage less I post less check it less that would be nice I should probably do the dumb phone project again to get rid of that reflex again it is very much back yeah I um it's interesting that the reflex went away for
you how long was the project it's just like a month because toward the end of December over the holidays I downloaded one of those Diamond dozen apps where you have to like take deep breaths before you access Instagram the the one that I set up was you had to literally do push-ups um on a motion capture camera um so just like the idea being like something to really really disrupt you if you want to look at these particular apps um and so I blocked Instagram I blocked you know other various like Reddit even other social
media and I found myself spending so much time in my email app or I would pull up you know a cooking app because I was just like I need my eyes on something or you'd watch back the videos of yourself doing push-ups exactly I did not find that reflex go away I found that I needed to find something to substitute social media I mean I think there's this like promised land on the other side where eventually it does go away and you know you get up and do the dishes or you go write you know
that thing that you've been meaning to write for yourself for forever and ever but like right now you know after just 3 weeks in December I I felt like I was still stuck in the Valley of the shadow of death Philip do you do you feel like ever trying to get off yeah I mean I I constantly feel like trying to get off but I just it's it's it's not that I like physically can or I'm dependent on it's just you know I need to know what's going on in the world like you know we
work for a newspaper it's just it's sort of hard to be like well who cares what's happening out there you know it's just it's not a luxury that I can afford I mean that's that speaks to a certain point right that a lot of people need to keep tabs on what's going on in the world and I'll push back and for a second and I mean you're in a particular bin of people as a journalist who needs to be so to speak we're we're we're all in a particular bin of people but a lot of
the a lot of the people out there like can wait to get it in a reputable newspaper like the Washington Post I don't think everybody needs to be getting those minute to- minute updates no matter how much you know we've become accustomed to them yeah let me out of the bin yeah no you're exactly right but of course the flip side of that is that the social media companies have done a very good job of figuring out how to make it so that people do feel like they need to do that right you know and
so yeah this goes to your entire point which is that there is this counterveiling pressure it's not as though people woke up one day and were like I wonder what's happening everywhere in the world right now right like that was in the same way that no one had a concept of a million you know back in the caveman days because they had no use for it we had no use for that level of information but the social media companies figured out that both by presenting that information to people and getting them mad about 80% of
it uh they can make money and here we are that gets to the question of whether we'd be better off without social media and I do think it feels a little you mentioned cavemen Philip I think it feels a little primordialist to say the country would be a better less divided place if we' never had this you can say that about almost any technology certainly you can say it about cable TV and maybe it's right that there'd be less Strife if we all lived in the places where we grew up that we wouldn't think of
boredom the same way that we wouldn't be disturbed by the absence of a stimulus right in front of us all the time that we don't even really have to do anything active with to be entertained we might read more books we might touch more grass but there'd also be less opportunity for any of us to become something other than what we were when we were born and there'd be less opportunity to see the rest of the world so here here before we go what is the funniest social media app you've seen out there I mean
mine would be there was an app that was popular for like three months in like 2011 called yo and you had contacts on Yo and you would go into yo and you would hit your contacts name and they would get a little alert on their phone that said yo and that was it and it was just like it was fun just because it was is so incredibly dumb amazing mine is similarly a single utterance which is gretan susteren's sorry app um which was just for sending apologies to people and uh other users could rate the
sincerity of those apologies and I have to say that mine was the official Jeremy rener app that was was devoted exclusively to the movie star Jeremy rener there was a problem with it though which was that anybody who posted on it would send a push notification to other users that made it seem as if they were speaking in the voice of Jeremy rener and some people as often do on the internet took advantage of that and sent some suspect stuff in the voice of Jeremy Renner so sadly the app is no longer with us all
right uh with that we have got to wrap this up thank you both for joining me for this episode of impromptu course thanks so much [Music] Drew this episode was produced by Hadley Robinson edited by deir marusik Chris cantop and Allison Michaels and mixed by Emma Munger special thanks to Millie MRA and dearra bur thanks for listening to impromptu tell us what you're thinking about social media these days email impromptu washpost.com with your thoughts and if you're enjoying the show please be sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app or just send
us a yo [Music]
