I recently read an article in Marketing Brew by Ryan Barwick and Katie Hicks titled How Facebook lost its groove. I am not too interested in how Facebook lost its groove, not least because I have not had a Facebook account for about 15 years. To the extent I have covered Facebook, I recommended using feeds as an alternative to reading news and hot takes on the platform and made fun of its new AI integration dreams in dialogue form. But a few passages jumped out at me in this article – passages which tie in neatly to my recent February 19, 2025 article titled On Peacock’s Plan (referencing its users) to “feed them content” (which was in turn prompted by an article in Morning Brew, a sister publication of Marketing Brew). Before continuing to analyze a few passages from How Facebook lost its groove, please indulge me as I quote me from the Peacock article:
I have soured on using the term content to describe online writing and other media because the term itself lacks content – albeit that makes it oddly fitting for much of what is out there.
N.A. Ferrell
In short, content is a vague and seemingly meaningless way to describe writing and media. But when you consider the state of contemporary writing and media on the internet and beyond, perhaps it is fitting in a bleak way. But I digress.
Let us skip ahead to the middle of the Facebook groove article. The authors write: “Shortly before the TikTok ban was due to go into effect in January [2025], some TikTok creators said they didn’t see posting on Facebook as a truly viable alternative.”
TikTok should be banned. With that out of the way, let us focus on the use of the word creator. I do not think I have touched on this one yet. Creator is often used to describe people who post their purportedly original content on the internet. But much like content, creator is vague. Just as I once argued that a problem with contemporary productivity discourse is that productivity content creators often treat productivity as an abstract concept divorced from actual production, creator discourse divorces the concept of being a creator from creating a thing certain. To be sure, one could say describing someone as an author, writer, filmmaker, game designer, musician, sculptor, painter, or any number of similar examples is at least similarly vague. But there are two compelling counter-points. Firstly, all of these terms refer to people who create things within different categories, thus making them by default much more specific in their pursuits than generic “creators”. Secondly, I dare suggest that a passage describing an author or musician is more likely to come with a helping of details about what the author writes or what music the musician composes, makes, and/or performs than will an article about a TikTok creator.
Evidence? Let us continue to the next passage in the Marketing Brew article.
Having noted that many TikTok creators are less than receptive about the idea of gracing Meta properties with their creations, Marketing Brew turned to one such TikTok creator. I quote the passage from the article:
‘It’s something I would literally never do,’ creator Maddy Mitchell told us. ‘Facebook is really, really dead as far as I’m concerned.’
Those two quotes caused me pain (not literal pain, to be clear). It reminded me of the time I was counting likes in a high school presentation when I was in 10th grade, but in that case my classmates – not all of whom were all star students – noted, recognized, and were entertained by the deluge of likes problem. Here we have something akin in elegance to that high school presentation I listened to 20 years ago being presented as an expert take. While I am sure that it is possible there exists some edge case where the word literally could have a declaration that one will never do something, this is certainly not that edge case. All Ms. Mitchell needed to say is that she would never post her TikTok creations on Facebook. Literally serves no purpose other than reminding readers that literally has become one of the most abused throw-away words in the English language. So too has really as a word of description. She could have just said Facebook is dead as far as I’m concerned. One really would not have added anything there, much less two. I would have had more confidence in her sincerity if she had made a simple declaration of her beliefs about Facebook without presupposing that I do not believe that she is providing us with an honest account of her position on the matter. (Alternatively, really is being used in the same way as very, but Seinfeld tackled the degrees of death issue well before Facebook existed.)
But that nitpicking aside, let us turn our attention to what the Marketing Brew offers. Now in full disclosure I have no idea who Ms. Mitchell is. This is unsurprising in light of the fact that I would not touch TikTok with a 12-foot pole. Thus, I have no opinion of her creations. She may well be popular with some people on TikTok or wherever else she posts her creations, but were I the author of the article, I would had sought to provide some context for readers who may not be familiar with her and her work. For example, I have written many reviews of niche visual novel localizations from the mid-2000s. While the people who are most likely to read them will have some prior interest in the subject, I also work to provide context for people who may be interested in reading but do not have prior knowledge of the subject-matter. What does Marketing Brew tell us about Ms. Mitchell? “Mitchell, who worked in brand social media management before becoming a full time creator…” That is it. This is all we learn. We have to infer from context that she posts something on TikTok. She does this full time. What does she do? She is a creator who uses TikTok. What does she create? We can infer she makes videos from the fact that TikTok is a video and spyware platform, but what are these videos about? This would seem to be significant to evaluating her take on the TikTok-Facebook situation. I am sure some kinds of TikTok creations are more transferable to different platforms than others. But, alas, as the article has it, she is a creator in the abstract. The role of creator is divorced from any specific creations. This is not the only such case in the article. We later learn about “Creator Thoren Bradley” but we know not what he creates other than that he presumably creates something which is then posted on TikTok.
(What is a creator whose status as a creator is not tied to specific things? Perhaps this is the legendary “content creator.”)
While we still have no idea what Ms. Mitchell is creating, she does, per a quote in the article, offer a take on why she does not want to create unspecified things on Facebook: “[S]he said that she finds that Facebook feels ‘decades behind’ in terms of its relevancy and views its feed and the AI content on the platform as a detriment to using it.” Facebook was created in 2004, so I suppose it cannot be more than two decades behind. (With that being said, she is probably right about the “AI content” being detrimental, but I would confidently speculate that it cannot be much worse than whatever is happening on TikTok.)
But what if I told you that the worst is yet to come?
The next quote comes from Mae Karwowski, who is described as “founder and CEO of the influencer marketing agency Obviously…” Influencer is probably worse than creator. Is it someone who influences in the abstract? How does this person influence? What is this person influencing people to do? Do you have to actually influence a certain number of people to do something before you become a bona fide influencer? Assuming arguendo that I am correct in inferring indirectly that most so-called influencers are creators who are seeking ad and sponsor revenue, how are they different than pitchmen and women? There is no need to go too far into the influencer weeds; I venture that much of my analysis of the disembodied creator applies with almost equal force to the ill-defined influencers.
The article quoted Ms. Karwowski about Facebook. Specifically, she was opining on what it would or will take for Facebook to lure the ill-defined creators and influencers from TokTok. “The big thing is going to be, what’s the content experience when you log in [to Facebook], and is it going to be enjoyable?” I know not what life experience one needs to have to casually say content experience, and I will file this thought away in the ignorance is bliss folder. I believe she is saying that it will be important for Facebook to be enjoyable for account-holders (although I suspect she would use users). The article continues with her quote: “Am I going to want to stay there and consume more and more content?”
We have come full circle!
In my article on Peacock’s plan to “feed them content,” I re-printed a quote from the prompting Morning Brew article by Karen Kovacs, an executive at NBC Universal. Ms. Kovacs said that the Peacock streaming service had a plan to ensure that “Gen Z” customers would be engaged, “and then we’re going to feed them content that we know they’re going to be really excited about.” I understand now. The people publishing the content (whether it is NBC-U or the TikTok creators and influencers) want to “feed” content to people who use a “platform”. How do they know which platform to use? According to Ms. Karwowski, the platform should inspire in users the passive desire to “stay there and consume more and more content.” According to some creators and influencers, Facebook is not set up in a way to make young people want to stay on Facebook to passively consume unfathomable amounts of content.
(Does that mean Facebook is off the hook now?)
These articles are creepy. These people, from the marketing level all the way down to the creator level, speak the language of people who have spent far too much time thinking about users and trying to create and influence more users and/or passively consuming content as users themselves. Back in March 2021, I published an article titled Murakami on Bad Social Media Content wherein I focused on the idea that social media is conducive to creating insipid writing and media. I was using content in the old content is king sense. While I agree with my takes in the 2021 article (granting I would use content more precisely were I writing it from scratch in 2025), I wrote that article presupposing that people on Facebook, Twitter (it was still Twitter back then), and the like were exercising some agency in posting reaction porn and other types of bad content. The vision articulated in the Morning Brew and Marketing Brew articles is far worse, far darker. The goal is for users to have no agency beyond choosing one platform or another – where they will consume what they are fed. (When you put it like that our current Ozempic moment starts to make sense.)
I conclude with a public service announcement. No matter how much big tech, big media, or ill-defined creators and influencers claim otherwise, no one has to play their games. There is no requirement to go to the content trough, much less to eat from it. One need not accept the linguistic ingenuity of the entities and people seeking to feed content to mindless, susceptible users. It is better to laugh at it. I submit for the record that the writer who has published multiple articles citing favorably to the works of Thomas Sowell is not offering you, the visitor, some sort of anti-capitalist take. This is a humane take, a defense of human agency. It is a take in support of good aesthetics and against ill-defined content designed to flood the zone.
(I do not think it is the legendary hot take but it may be a warm enough take to prepare before touching it.)
Having criticized the content creator and influencer industries for their strange use of words, allow me to re-introduce myself and The New Leaf Journal. I am a writer and I write articles on the internet about things that interest me. Many things interest me, which means that we have articles on a variety of subjects. Visitors to The New Leaf Journal are guests of The New Leaf Journal. While it follows from the fact that I publish my articles on the internet that I want people to read my articles, it does not follow that I want them to consume my articles. Instead, I invite discerning guests who find interesting articles at The New Leaf Journal to enjoy the articles with coffee or tea and something to eat instead of eating the articles: “After you brew and procure your own [coffee or tea], enjoy the lively discourse about aesthetics and the life lived well.” If a visitor or guest finds sufficient topics of interest to become a New Leaf Journal regular, I trust that he or she must find something of value in my articles (or our articles) to make perusing a small online writing website worth his or her time. I am not an expert in the more lucrative field of fattening up users on a content conveyor belt-platform, so I will leave that to the experts.
