The Digital Monopoly: Why Social Media Giants Are Just Getting Too Big for Their Own Algorithms

Have you ever felt that sharing your hard-earned creative products qualifies as “spam”? You are sharing them on a platform where you’ve built relationships. Welcome to the new era of social media monopolies. Imagine wanting to simply share a link to your personal website’s stunning new art pieces with friends. Instead, an algorithm judges you and throws you under the bus. This is a Facebook marketplace, but please — don’t try sharing from your own site. If you’d like it “safe,” just sell through their store. Syncing? Enjoy that tech circus.

The year is 2024. The world of “social media” is a far cry from the freewheeling digital landscape we had in the early days. Instead, the big players — think Meta, Google, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok — have become sprawling behemoths. They hoard data and control the flow. Through lovely little algorithms, they decide who sees what, where, and when. Control has become the name of the game. It’s ironic that we live in an age obsessed with “connection.” Yet, you have so little say in what reaches your own followers.


The Pros and Cons of a Social Media Monopoly

It’s not all doom and gloom. At least not if you’re a social media exec cashing in on ad revenue. There’s also digital real estate for them. For the average user, though, the list of benefits is short.

Pros

  1. Unified Experiences: Every platform starts to feel familiar — a little too familiar — and offers a unified user experience. If you know one, you pretty much know them all.
  2. Standardization of Tools: Consolidation means all platforms often roll out similar features at the same time. Now everyone can livestream, create “stories,” and enjoy that same mediocre level of algorithmic feed control.
  3. Advertising Reach: Large social media companies offer a massive reach. This is helpful if you’re a big spender on ads. It is especially helpful if you can afford their fees.

Cons

  1. Content Gatekeeping: The major players decide which content is “acceptable.” Too often, your creative, rule-abiding posts become casualties in their crusade against spam. It is as if you were the problem all along.
  2. Stifled Innovation: When a handful of giants own the entire space, new ideas do not have a chance to flourish. They go out the window. Why would Meta, or anyone else for that matter, let some new upstart with a revolutionary idea creep in?
  3. Data Control: We like to say the user is in control of their own experience. Nonetheless, this is not really true. These companies collect, filter, and resell your data and then conveniently tell you it’s all for “better personalization.” Spoiler: it’s really all about ad revenue.

The Tightening Noose Around Users’ Freedom

With fewer platforms in the market, there are not many spaces left for real, organic community-building. These spaces can seldom thrive without interference from profit-driven algorithms. Remember that brief, unhinged era when MySpace let us rank our top friends? Or when you post something without an algorithm deciding if your family members even saw it? Those days are gone, buried under a wave of “refinement” that’s more about maximizing engagement than fostering genuine connections. Facebook wants a monopoly over where you share, where you sell, where you exist online. And for what? So they can keep peddling the ads they want to sell. They declare they’re “protecting us” from the supposed dangers of “bad content.”

Why This “Protection” is a Scam

Let’s get one thing straight: these companies are not the White Knights of the internet. The content they serve you is guided by what makes them the most profit. If it’s a barely credible article because it gets clicks, you’ll see it. If it’s a well-researched piece, it might just get buried. If you try to share a link to your own website? Spam. They control us under the guise of concern. The so-called “protections” are a convenient excuse to shape what we consume. Ultimately, they shape how we think.

Is There a Way Out?

The situation has become so dire that only a revolution will shake things up. We need a modern-day David to bring down these digital Goliaths. We require a fresh platform with no strings. There should be no hidden algorithms. There should be no limits on what users can share.

Until then, we’re left with a compromised experience where “engagement” and “visibility” are served up only on their terms. It’s time to face facts. Real choice in social media is dying. With it goes the very freedom the internet was meant to protect. If we want that back, we must stop accepting their curated feed of “what’s good for us.” We need to demand platforms that genuinely empower the creators. They should not just serve the controllers.

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