Social media has changed our lives in a way we never imagined. What is the future of the industry and its leaders?

In less than a decade, social media have gone from being a fun extra to becoming a part of almost every aspect of life.

Facebook’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Libra , its proposed cryptocurrency, and alternative financial system was met with skepticism. Justin Bieber, a heartthrob in politics, tweeted President Obama asking him “to let those kids out from cages.” The Philadelphia Police Department terminated more than a dozen officers for racist remarks made on social media.

Elon Musk has hinted that he will eventually create a brain implant which connects human tissues to computer chips.

All of this in a span of a few days.

Social media continues to change at a rapid pace, making it difficult to predict what direction it will take next. SixDegrees.com and Makeoutclub.com all used to be the next big things. One survivor, however, has grown in astounding ways. Facebook had 7.3 million registered users in 2006 and turned down an offer of $750 million to buy it out. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook could boast 2.38 billion users with a valuation of around $500 million.

In 2007, I predicted that Facebook would not exist in 15 years. Jonah Berger is a Wharton professor of marketing and the author of Contagious: Why Things Spread. He says that the challenge is to stay relevant and not just have the best features. “Social media doesn’t have the same utility as power or water. It’s unlike power or water, where people only care if it works. The young are concerned about how their platform choice will reflect on them. “It’s not cool for your parents or grandparents to use the same website, so they are always looking for a new thing.

Kevin Werbach is a Wharton professor who teaches legal studies and ethics. At that time, the discussion was about technology start-ups.

Werbach says, “Today Facebook is the world’s most valuable company and at the forefront of a wide range of public policy discussions. The scope of the issues we are thinking about now with social media has widened.”

Werbach stated that Cambridge Analytica and the impact of social networks on the last presidential election may have eroded the public’s trust. But “social media is now fundamental to how billions of people access information and communicate with one another, raising the stakes tremendously.”

Just Say No

Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio, said at the July hearing of the Senate Banking Committee that “Facebook was dangerous.” Facebook has told Americans to “just trust us,” and every time they do, it seems that they get burned.

Do Americans share Brown’s view on social media? In 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey , 42% of respondents had stopped checking Facebook for several weeks. 26% had removed the app from their phone.

Despite the damage social media had done to its reputation, in the 2019 version of the same Pew study, social media usage was unchanged from 2018.

Pinar Yildirim is a Wharton professor of marketing. She says that Facebook has critics. They are concerned with two main things: the mismanagement of consumer data, the poor management by third parties to access it, and disinformation spread on Facebook.

“Social media aren’t utilities.” It’s unlike power or water, where people only care if it works. “Young people care what their use of a platform says about them.” – Jonah Berger

“The question that we need to ask is: Are we at a stage where social media organizations, and their activities, should be regulated in the interest of consumers? “I don’t think that more regulation is going to help. But this is certainly on the table,” Yildirim says. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections, there will be a variety of discussions on regulation in the tech industry.

Yildirim notes that some proposals are related to stricter regulations on the collection and use of consumer data. The European Union has already adopted stricter regulations in the past year with the General Data Protection Regulation. She says that a number of U.S. companies and others around the globe have adopted the GDPR protocol to cover all their customers. This is not limited to EU residents. We will probably hear more about the regulation of these data and see more strict regulation.”

The separation of Big Tech into smaller, more easily regulated units is another topic that will intensify. Most academics don’t think that breaking up organizations into smaller units will improve their compliance. Yildirim says that it does not mean they are less competitive. For example, It is still unclear how Facebook would be broken up because it has no clear divisions between its different business units.

Yildirim points out that even if the regulations are never implemented, “the discussions may still hurt Big Tech’s financial position, as most of the companies are listed on the stock exchange and this adds to uncertainty.”

Jaron Lanier is a prominent critic of the negative effects of social media. His fervent opposition can be seen in the title of his book, 10 Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Now. Lanier cites the loss of freedom of choice, the erosion of truth, the destruction of empathy, and its tendency to make users unhappy. The last chapter is entitled “Social media hates your soul.”

Lanier is not a tech troglodyte. He is a polymath who bridges digital and analog worlds. He has been a writer and musician, worked as a Microsoft scientist, and co-founded the pioneering virtual reality firm VPL Research. He writes that the savagery that online life brings out in people “turned out like crude oil for social media companies and behavior manipulation empires who quickly became dominant on the internet because it fed negative behavioral feedback.”