Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore
Why you’ve probably never heard of the most popular Netflix show in the world
You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.
The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.
The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture.
“There’s a real lack of understanding of what’s going on across platforms,” Ryan Broderick, who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, told me. For the past six months, Broderick has been partnering with NewsWhip and other online-analytics companies and independently building intelligence reports, tracking the most popular content and personalities across sites such as Facebook, X, Reddit, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. In the 2010s, he said, a curious person was better equipped to take the temperature of the web: “The stuff going viral on Facebook was of a different flavor and demographic than, say, YouTube or Twitter, but it felt easier to look at it all, shuffle the decks together, and say, There’s the internet.” Sometime between mid-2021 and early 2022, Broderick noticed that information was moving differently. News stories blew up in corners of the internet and died out, completely bypassing his feeds, and fake “viral” trends popped up with increasing frequency, despite little evidence that anyone was participating in them.
Consider TikTok for a second—arguably the most vibrant platform on the internet. Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East or incendiary commentary on the mass bombings in Gaza? Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend or gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips racking up as many as half a billion views each—aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man. As a Verge headline noted earlier this month, “TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen.” Other platforms have the same issue: Facebook’s most recent “Widely Viewed Content Report” is full of vapid, pixelated, mostly repackaged memes and videos getting tens of millions of views.
The dynamic extends beyond social media too. Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers for most of the TV shows and movies in its library—more than 18,000 titles in all. The attempt at transparency caused confusion among some viewers: Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, which was streamed for 812 million hours globally. “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.
This confusion is a feature of a fragmented internet, which can give the impression that two opposing phenomena are happening simultaneously: Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming. It’s also easier than ever to assign outsize importance to information or trends that may feel popular but are actually contained.
Last month, a claim began to circulate online that TikTok was awash in viral videos of users reading from and praising Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.” The trend was quickly cited by journalists as a worrying indicator of rising anti-Semitism. But a quick analysis of the platform offered more nuance. Although some videos did exist, The Washington Post found that the “Letter to America” hashtag was on only 274 of them during the two-day period in question. The videos received 1.8 million views—far, far fewer than videos hashtagged with travel, skincare, and anime in another 24-hour stretch, according to examples named by the Post.
What followed was a messy postmortem, one that I fear might foreshadow the way 2024-election stories will play out: Internet-savvy reporters tried to offer important correctives to the notion that the letter had gone viral. But others rightly noted that the videos, at least one of which had more than 10,000 likes, were still troubling, even if they were not viral by TikTok standards. Politicians seized on the news to further their own long-standing grievances, namely that TikTok, which they fear is controlled by the Chinese government, is influencing and even radicalizing younger American users. TikTok did not respond to my request for comment.
As interested parties debated whether the trend was real, the coverage drew greater attention to the videos, causing them to go far more viral on secondary platforms; a video compilation of the TikToks has been viewed more than 41 million times on X. Should this cycle repeat in the same way next year, the 2024 presidential campaign will be an especially punishing affair: It will be the TikTok Shadowboxing Election, where virality becomes a meaningless descriptor that nevertheless justifies any number of conflicts.
After the “Letter to America” controversy, I reached out to Brandon Silverman, the founder of CrowdTangle, a platform that tracks the most popular posts across Facebook (which acquired it in 2016). Silverman quit Facebook in 2021, and he now says that big technology platforms are making it harder to verify trends and trace where they came from. Unlike Twitter before Musk, X is a black box, he told me, and TikTok only gives access to its research interface to academic researchers by application. “We’re mostly arguing over data that we don’t have” and “chasing our own tails around the internet,” Silverman said.
CrowdTangle itself paused new user sign-ups last year, arguably a major turning point in this entire conversation: Researchers and transparency groups argued that Meta defanged CrowdTangle’s team as part of an internal reorganization, and reporters have speculated that the transparency tool caused too many headaches for Meta executives when it became clear that conspiracy theories, election-denial content, and far-right influencers were popular across the social network. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told me that paid CrowdTangle accounts are still active and that, last month, the company rolled out a new series of tools to “provide access to near real-time public content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events” on Facebook, as well as from professional accounts on Instagram.
Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us. Likewise, politicians can take trends out of context to fit their own political agenda. Last month on the Senate floor, Senator Marsha Blackburn cited “the appalling popularity” of the bin Laden letter on TikTok. “This didn’t happen on its own,” Blackburn argued. “You had TikTok pushing along on this.” Some high-profile Democrats, including New York Governor Kathy Hochul, similarly called out TikTok. When we waste our time chasing shadows, Silverman argued, “we miss the more important issues that actually do deserve our time and attention and tell us something truly meaningful about platforms, ourselves, or the world.”
Not that a more centralized social-media experience was perfect. “What I saw at CrowdTangle is that, more often than not, it was actually just a few influential accounts that made something ‘go viral,’” Silverman told me. He argued that, because the platform audiences were less fragmented, a few large accounts dictated virality way more often than an army of small ones did. Broderick agreed, noting that, especially on networks such as Twitter, media organizations could identify and amplify trends, thereby increasing their reach—a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.
A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.