‘Enshittification’ reaches social media: ‘For Zuckerberg and Musk, your ‘friends’ are a burden. They just want you to see ads’ | Technology
Publish Date: 2026-06-07 00:00:00
Source Domain: english.elpais.com
A friend is upset because you didn’t “like” a photo from her last trip, but the truth is you haven’t even had a chance to see it. Instead of displaying it on your feed, Instagram prioritized showing you ads for food.
Upon logging onto X, the cascade of posts with the heading “for you” includes a paid user launching into a pro-Nazi rant. You click to report it, but the content moderation system doesn’t work. And, to make matters worse, the Nazi actually earns money from the interaction.
There was a time when social media was useful for connecting with like-minded people, coordinating charitable initiatives, strengthening friendships, or forging romantic relationships. In recent years, however, these spaces have become more hostile, and not only because of hate speech, which social media giants are increasingly less willing to combat. Something seems to have broken down in the functionality of the internet, between Facebook’s erratic algorithm and Google search results now headed by fabricated, AI-generated content and sponsored ads (while the correct response to your query is buried at the bottom of the page).
In 2022, the Canadian-born writer and activist Cory Doctorow – a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a former observer delegate to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – coined a term for this phenomenon: “enshittification.” Named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by the Australian Macquarie Dictionary in 2024, it encapsulates both a clear description of the accelerated decline of these social media platforms and – as Doctorow writes – an analysis based on three key elements: “It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.” The 54-year-old compiled his thoughts on the subject in a book, titled Enshittification: Why Everything…
