PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
Ever notice how your favourite social media platform is like a pizza you’ve ordered? By the time its delivered, it’s soggy, cold, and missing half the toppings you’ve asked for. The prospect of delightful, oily cheese and crispy crust that drew you in begins to fade, replaced by an unsettling sense that leaves you dissatisfied. Welcome to the phenomenon of ‘enshittification’, a coin termed by author Cory Doctorow, which describes the slow but inevitable decline of quality on online platforms as they prioritise profits over user experience. Initially, you may feel engaged with the content, form a sense of community with other users and just overall have a fun browsing experience. But as time goes on, you notice more ads, less organic content, more posts that seem intrusive and too personal. Your once-beloved digital space turns into something you feel you need to “consume” out of habit rather than enjoyment, and the genuine connections you once had start to feel like just another product for sale.
The enshittification of social media is a bigger problem than just a bunch of annoying ads and algorithm changes. First off, as platforms start prioritising profit over people, they tweak their algorithms to push out the most controversial or sensational content since that’s what gets clicks. The risk is that this fuels misinformation – misleading stories and fake stories that spreads faster than a viral meme. At the same time, we all become more hooked and rely on these platforms for everything from news to entertainment. This is especially true during polarising periods, like election cycles, when most of us rely on social media for news, political updates, and interaction. Simultaneously, we become more vulnerable to being manipulated by biased or fraudulent content as the algorithms amplify sensational, divisive, or outright false content. The risks include voter confusion, a lost sense of trust in the democratic process and susceptibility to polarising views.
So, will we ever learn from the cycle of enshittification, or are we doomed to watch our favourite platforms disintegrate into ad-filled wastelands? While platforms have repeatedly implied they’re willing to sacrifice user quality for profit, we users still have a lot of power. Doctorow himself said “more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.
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Our Digital Investigations Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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Ever notice how your favourite social media platform is like a pizza you’ve ordered? By the time its delivered, it’s soggy, cold, and missing half the toppings you’ve asked for.
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