Brenden's Universe: Social Media

Twitter Wipe
Social Media was a popular way to chat online. But they became very unpopular after the alt-right and alt-left took over. On January 1st, 2020, Twitter had a system wipe deleting all accounts and all posts essentially starting over. This caused mass hatred towards the platform, because a lot of people had put things on there they could never have gotten back, and a lot of people had worked hard to get a lot of followers.

Many of the people who suffered included politicians, actors, comedians, and news outlets. A large mass protest against Twitter sprouted up, with many petitions for Twitter to restore the lost items. Twitter resulted in less then 50 million users because a lot of people didn't want to start over just to have their stuff deleted again, and because most of them had the same amount of followers on other platforms. This killed Twitter. They kept their site alive until 2025 when they were forced to shut down.

Fall of Facebook and the Peter Pan Scandal
On June 14th, 2019 Mark Zuckerberg was arrested by the FBI. The FBI had concluded that Facebook had sold over 20 terabytes of data for high prices. They sold the same data to multiple people. On October 3rd, 2019, Zuckerbergs' trial was held. He lost and was sentenced to 15 years in jail. The company had a 15 billion dollar fine, which would be used by the government to help with the cleanup of Hurricane Karen, which had left 130 billion in damages to the entire East Coast. Most employees for the company quit, but the servers stayed up by the few people who stayed. Anyone still at the company did not censor the website, and manual review was gone. This meant if someone reported something, it wouldn't get deleted because no one at Facebook would have seen it. Facebook was abandoned by most users as well. The only people left were people who loved posting uncensored content. White supremacy, far left and far right people joined the site. The same thing that happened to Twitter (overload of extremists) happened to Facebook. The website was quickly filled with porn. This sparked the Peter Pan Scandal. Terrorists began using the website to buy and sell children, and slaves. They posted these messages publicly to show the world how little they cared about them. (This would later hurt them). They even at one point started posting videos of their new purchases, and even filmed them. Over 800 children, and 1,400 slaves were sold using Facebook before the government intervened in 2022. They were tracked back to a small village in Iran. President Trump said they were stupid to use social media. The CIA sent a mission to raid that village, and they got important terrorist intel. Apparently, in the power vacuum of ISIS a new group had risen called أنا مثل الغنم (Me Like Sheep). They were treating everything they did like a joke and refused to take anything seriously. Not even their name. Facebook was ordered to be shut down by Congress on a 78-22 vote on December 13th, 2022 to prevent anything from happening. It was shut down on December 31st, 2022. Although the US stopped the Peter Pan Scandal from continuing, Iran declared all out war.

Instagram Migration
All of the users who abandoned Twitter and Facebook, hit Instagram hard. Instagram got an additional 50 million users in the first week of the Social Media Purge. By February 2020, Instagram had 400 million total users. Instagram had finally integrated a way to upload up to 10 minute videos. Since Zuckerberg was gone, Instagram was sold to Paradox Development for 2 billion dollars. Paradox continued to work on Instagram.

Privacy Worries
Following the downfall of Facebook and Twitter, users got frightened that the information they had stored would be sold, or gotten into the wrong hands. President Trump signed the America Security Act which would make it illegal for businesses and corporations, both public and private, to save information they received from their users in any form unless it was on the platform itself.