Social Media and the Vision for peer.
I started using social media when I was 9 years old. My mom had a Twitter account and had just gotten one of the first-gen iPads. I used it to read football (soccer) transfer news, often in the car on the way to school or at home.
When I was 11, I got my first phone—a Samsung Galaxy S3 (my mom's old phone). WhatsApp became my go-to app for chatting with friends. At 13, my mom let me get Instagram. For me, it was a place to share memes and post whatever I wanted.
As I got older, my social media habits became more information-focused, leading me to Twitter. It became my main source for updates on tech, politics, and sports.
My Social Media Platforms
- Twitter/X: My primary platform for staying informed about global events, despite its issues with misinformation and declining content quality.
- Instagram: I used Instagram consistently until 2021, when I deleted the app and all my posts. I stopped because I no longer had a purpose for using it, though I kept my account.
- TikTok: I briefly used TikTok during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown but deleted it as it became a time sink.
Information Shift
I love staying informed and seek to learn as much as possible. This is why I use social media today. However, social platforms increasingly control the flow of information, often prioritizing engagement over truth.
For instance, I once discovered personal news on Twitter before hearing it elsewhere. But over time, Twitter's quality has declined. Where I once found insightful content, I now have to sift through engagement bait, tacky ads, and misinformation. (quality content doesn't mean content that affirms what I think).
The Misinformation Crisis
Misinformation has become normalized on social media, shaping opinions and even behaviors in harmful ways. Here are a few examples:
| Event | Platform | Impact | Real-World Consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myanmar genocide | Facebook (Meta) | Algorithm promoted hate against Rohingya people of Myanmar | In 2017, thousands of Rohingya were killed, tortured, and displaced as Facebook's algorithms fueled real-world violence. |
| UK riots | X (formerly Twitter) | Misinformation about a murderer being a Muslim immigrant when they were not | Sparked anti-immigrant riots and fueled widespread hatred toward immigrants |
| False claims in Springfield, Ohio | X (formerly Twitter) | Baseless claims about Haitian immigrants abducting pets and eating them | The Haitian community faced threats and stigmatization, despite authorities confirming no evidence for the accusations. |
It seems as though social media platforms amplify misinformation to drive engagement and ad revenue, regardless of the consequences.
The Current State of Social Media
Today, social media feels like something we're forced to use, not something we want to use. Platforms are dominated by ads and engagement-focused algorithms, which compromise the user experience.
When I recently revisited Instagram after stopping in 2021, I found it completely cluttered. Ads appeared every four posts on average, mixed with suggested content and a few posts I actually wanted to see.
This is all driven by the ad revenue model:
Ad Revenue → Engagement Priority → Quality Decline → User Impact
Social media companies prioritize keeping users on their platforms to generate ad revenue. For example, Meta makes 97% of its revenue from ads. This misaligned incentive leads to manipulation tactics that exploit user attention. As a result, the quality of content and connections on these platforms has significantly deteriorated.
My Vision for the Future: peer.
My frustrations with social media inspired me to create peer., a platform designed to break away from the ad-driven model. Instead, Peer will operate on a subscription-based system. This approach will allow us to prioritize user experience, quality content, and authentic connections.
Peer will be synonymous with quality. We are a platform that values people over profit. It will be free from the attention and privacy exploitation that plagues legacy platforms.
We're Building Something New
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