In this week’s Roundup: could Meta’s Reels actually be… working? Would you be surprised if I told you Twitter’s ad revenue is not doing very well? And how do 23 “highly engaged users” perceive their life on social media?

News

For the past year or so, TikTok has been hoovering up younger users from Meta’s businesses.

Now, according to this piece from Business Insider’s Alistair Barr, a recent Morgan Stanley report appears to show Meta gaining ground on TikTok. The report, based on a survey of 2,000 people, shows a fairly rapid increase in the number of users engaging with Reels (Meta’s TikTok knock-off) on both Instagram and Facebook.

For Facebook in particular, the numbers are encouraging, with engagement climbing 18 percentage points in just over a year. Meanwhile, TikTok usage has grown fairly little. In March of 2022, 45% of those surveyed used the platform; by April of this year that number has risen to 49%.

That people are using Reels is encouraging for Meta. Whether Reels is attracting new users or reeling back old ones is another issue.

In news that will shock no one, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu at the New York Times write that Twitter’s US ad sales are circling the drain.

An internal presentation seen by the Times shows ad revenue between April and May down 59% from the year prior. The same presentation indicates that staff don’t see the situation improving in the near future.

Advertisers have been wary of Twitter due to the damaging content that has been an ever-growing issue since Musk’s takeover. The Times article relates that some companies such as Apple, Amazon and Disney have reduced their ad spending on the platform, while “several large ad agencies and brands, including General Motors and Volkswagen” have paused ad spending there altogether.

Reviving Twitter’s ad income is presumably at the top of its new CEO’s agenda, with Linda Yaccarino having started work on Monday.

Analysis

Understanding how people use social media is a big part of the job for many of us. Interesting new research from Pew sheds some light on just that.

The report, based on a focus group of 23 “highly engaged users” in the US, describes how different individuals perceive the role of social media in their lives, and how this is reflected in the way they engage with different social networks.

According to Wired’s Stephanie McNeal, the age of the influencer is coming to an end on Instagram.

Why? It seems that influencers are coming to the same conclusion that news publishers reached: the only path to financial security is to “own your own income streams.” As the manager of one of the influencers interviewed in the article sagely notes, “you never know what’s going to happen with any platforms, […] any single one of them at any given time can have an algorithm change and totally mess up your business.”

AI

In recent Roundups we’ve noted the new trend for AI company CEOs to loudly demand that the government regulates them so they don’t blow up the planet, or somesuch.

It’s a curious posture to maintain. But for The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong it’s all part of a calculated ploy, a piece of legerdemain designed to keep regulators looking the other way.

“[M]any of the experts I spoke with,” writes Wong, “were skeptical of how much AI will progress from its current abilities, and they were adamant that it need not advance at all to hurt people—indeed, many applications already do.”

By keeping focus on a catastrophic future, the thinking goes, these CEOs hope to escape a reckoning with the present.

Of course, not all tech CEOs pay lip service to concerns about the threat their technology poses. Step forward Alex Karp of Palantir.

You may remember Palantir as the company founded by Peter Thiel, whose altruistic defence of Hulk Hogan‘s right to a not-so-private private life led to the bankruptcy of Gawker. Or you may remember Palantir as the big data company whose early backers include the CIA and whose customers include the NSA. Or you may remember Palantir as the company which allegedly worked with Cambridge Analytica on analyzing the data of 50 million Facebook users which it obtained without their consent.

However you remember them, Alex Karp is concerned that the West will lose its “key commercial and military advantages in AI” should any type of temporary pause be imposed on the technology’s development.

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