It didn’t happen overnight.
Social media was built to connect people. Friends, families, communities, real relationships, shared in real time.
But somewhere along the way, the system changed.
As Mark Zuckerberg recently pointed out, platforms have shifted from connecting people with friends to connecting them with creators.
That sounds harmless until you look closer.
Because the algorithm doesn’t prioritize relationships.
It prioritizes attention.
And attention has a simple rule, whoever holds it longer wins.
So your closest relationships began competing with perfectly timed, highly optimized content from strangers.
And they lost.
Not because they mattered less. But because they performed worse.
Now, a second shift is quietly unfolding.
If strangers outperform friends, and AI can outperform humans, then the feed doesn’t need either.
It can generate content designed specifically for you. Faces that feel familiar, voices that sound trustworthy and opinions that mirror your own.
All calibrated to keep you scrolling.
You won’t notice when it happens.
Because the goal was never connection.
It was retention.
This is the dark side of social media. Not that it connects us to the wrong people but that it slowly disconnects us from the right ones. And while we stay engaged online, we risk becoming absent everywhere else.
