Facebook was the first ubiquitous social network (still with some three billion users worldwide) but was now seen by the youth as a crumbling home for the elderly, isolated, and paranoid. Instagram, founded as the first entirely photo-based network, had created a sort of image-based language made up of carefully staged visuals, entire human lives distilled down to an aesthetic. Twitter, with its character limit that required all thoughts to be boiled down to a sentence or two, was frequently cited as a cancer on democracy and society in general, as it rendered detail and nuance all but impossible (this is why a large portion of the posts on Twitter were about how Twitter should be destroyed). Also, it was technically no longer called Twitter—these platforms frequently rebranded for no discernable reason. And then there was TikTok, which was the new kid on the block, a video version of Twitter that fed users a stream of clips mostly less than fifteen seconds in length, just enough time for a striking visual or a single thought before the user swiped up to the next, and the next, consuming literally hundreds of them in a session. Key believed TikTok was possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created, and she understood why multiple countries had already outlawed it.
Still, she believed the scariest platforms were those that didn’t cater to short attention spans at all. Charismatic streamers would stay on camera for twelve hours or more on YouTube and Twitch, their cultlike followings sending in actual money purely for the right to hear their name said on the broadcast. Among the youth, the most famous celebrities were almost all streaming personalities, their most popular uploads often drawing viewership that rivaled the Super Bowl. If one of them suddenly started spouting reactionary rhetoric, the ripples could instantly be felt across an entire demographic.
And all that was just a sip of the septic tank; there were literally dozens of similar platforms, and these days, some of the most important vectors of radicalization weren’t even social media but online games in which the voice chats had birthed entire subcultures of their own.