Why the debate about social media is not about tech or the internet at all.

Isn't social media there to help us connect with people?

You might think that Threads has done the best job with that task out of any other Twitter alternative. After all, there's now more than 100M users there and importing your followers or follows from Instagram is just a couple of clicks.

But I disagree with you. Because social media is not there just to connect with people you already know.

If that's what you're looking for, then you have much better tools: group texts, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, a private message board, a giant Zoom call. Why would you post every interaction with your friends to the public, where an algorithm could take an innocent inside joke and plop it in the feed of a potential malicious party?

Instead, social media is there to help us do something much more nebulous, yet also more important. Social media helps us discover new people. Social media is one of the easiest ways for people in 2023 to make new friends. Social media is a way of connecting us to the wider world and embedding us in a social fabric beyond our nuclear families and office buddies.