When an entire TV show shilled for Meta: Losing trust in social media

My TV watching habits are, by most standards, kind of lame.

The world is ugly enough. I want my TV shows to help me escape, not give me more tragedy and violence. Did I watch House of Cards and Game of Thrones? Sure, but I won't revisit them the way I do Gilmore Girls, Friends, or Fraiser. They don't leave me with the warm and fuzzies, or the hope that there's better in humanity, and that isn't just because their final seasons were flops. Black Mirror? I don’t know her.

This means I’m either perpetually in a re-watch era, bingeing that pre-cell phone, pre-social media life in the 90s and early 2000s, or I’m watching a show for the first time that’s been off the air for years, long past when everyone else stopped talking about it. Like, really long past–I was about 18 years late to the Dawson’s Creek premier (RIP James Van Der Beek).

A show about Millennials, social media, and trust

Lately, I’ve been working my way through Younger, the TV Land/MTV show circa 2015 starring Sutton Foster as Liza Miller, a 40-year-old GenXer posing as a 27-year-old Millennial. Setting aside the glaring issues you can expect from any Darren Star show, I was more intrigued by the show's narrative around social media, and how central it is to the portrayal of the Millennial characters.

I’m on season 6, where Hilary Duff’s character Kelsey meets with prospective investors (all Boomer men in their 60s, naturally) to keep their struggling publishing house afloat. One of the investors says he doesn’t understand why the publishing house considers its social media presence as an asset, and Kelsey says (I’m paraphrasing):

“People expect access. Social media provides authenticity and transparency, and it builds trust.”

Actual footage of me watching Younger sing the praises of social media.

I need to know: Did Meta pay this show under the table for some positive PR? I know there's such a thing as product placement, but damn. Younger is like a giant, multi-year billboard for Instagram.

My take on this line of bull is that social media hasn’t been a source of authenticity or transparency since the 'Gram lost the plot and enabled video. I’m not sure it ever was.

You can’t be authentic on a platform that rewards the most manufactured, over-engineered, filter-infused content. You certainly don’t get transparency on platforms where people can buy bot accounts to inflate their follower count and popularity. You lose trust when so many accounts have learned to game the system by shilling the most outlandish takes or completely fabricated lifestyles because they can monetize off people's outrage, curiosity, and gullibility to the tune of millions.

What social media is really selling

This is unlikely to shock you, but social media sells illusions, including the illusion that we can trust what we see. It trades on a version of itself it hasn’t been in decades, when we knew the people we followed and saw content from—friends, family, and probably that girl you bonded with at a bar while waiting in line for the bathroom and drunkenly decided to friend.

Seriously, wish them well and let the randoms go.

It’s pretty easy to call your cousin out for pretending to own a fancy car you know they don’t have, but today there’s so much distance between you and the accounts the algorithms shove at you, you have no idea who’s legit and who’s full of it.

I think people still want to believe what they see on social media is real, but deep down they know it isn’t. The trust is gone, but we're so hooked into these platforms we can't look away.

This is why small businesses and solopreneurs struggle so much on social media now. Your brand, maybe even you as a person, are smack in the middle of all this mess, indistinguishable from the slop, the scammers, and the hucksters. Nobody knows what’s real anymore, nobody knows who to trust, and you and/or your business are suspicious by association.

Taking the relationship offline

That’s the challenge of running a largely digital business in a time when people can’t easily trust what they can see with their own eyes. It’s why figuring out how your brand shows up in the real world, or in digital spaces away from social media, is critical.

People need to be able to experience you in-person. They need to meet people who've seen you in the real world, so people they know and trust can vouch for you. They need to know you’re a real human, a real company, something they could potentially experience in an analog way when it seems like there’s increasingly little we can reach out and touch.

In some way, Younger must’ve already felt this shift by the end of the series in 2021, since a core plot in the last season was the IRL ("in real life," for those who didn't experience AOL chatrooms in the 90s), social media-free speakeasy Liza and Kelsey launched to give writers a space to test new material. The message was pretty clear: being in community matters. The ability to meet people, to be vulnerable, to be seen without being offered up to the masses for judgment–that’s what we’re all craving.

It's why "analog islands" are gaining popularity. The brands that put time into building relationships in the physical world are the ones that’ll survive the trust cliff that's happening on socials.

And to my fellow Millennials, if you watched Younger and you’re still lowkey ready to rant about the way we were lampooned as a group by the worst tropes among us, let me know. I’m finally caught up enough to talk about it.