2023: the year in social media

There used to be a rule on Twitter – before it was bought by Elon Musk in 2022, rebranded X and gradually became more user-unfriendly, more swamp-like, more racist, antisemitic, transphobic and misogynist – that there is one ‘main character’ on the site every day, one user who, usually through the outrageousness or stupidity of their piping-hot take, becomes the object of scorn and ridicule. In 2023, things were different on X, especially its haphazard cinephile subsection, still generally referred to as ‘Film Twitter’: there was one person whose ability to rile the masses was so potent that he became the main character on Film Twitter every day, as well as on Film TikTok (‘FilmTok’) and the film social media site Letterboxd. All of this he managed while making and promoting one of the finest films in his half-century career. Take a bow, Martin Scorsese.

As Film Twitter limped on, it played out a greatest hits of its most tedious arguments, with Scorsese acting as unintentional firestarter. The 206-minute runtime of Killers of the Flower Moon proved unconscionable to many – 24 minutes longer than Avengers: Endgame (2019), and without even the threat of universal apocalypse to keep you occupied, won’t somebody think of the poor bladders! – provoking the most Twitter-brained into accusing the octogenarian Scorsese of bias against elderly viewers. The pro- and anti-Marvel camps set out their positions once more, with Marvelites scoffing at the paltry eight-figure sum earned in the US to date by Killers of the Flower Moon. The spat reached a climax after an innocuous TikTok posted by Scorsese’s daughter Francesca, a silly riff on the Kuleshov effect featuring a miniature schnauzer named Oscar. Marvel director Joe Russo responded with a video with his own miniature schnauzer, which he claims is called Box Office.

Back on X, freelance film critics struggled to make their voices heard above the stream of full-time opinion-havers whose often less informed, more incendiary points of view tend to be boosted by the platform’s algorithm. A site that only a couple of years ago felt like the best place to make connections and share published writing now feels unfit for that purpose, especially with links to other sites having been made less attractive to click on, in a futile attempt to promote publishing directly on X. There is clear demand for an alternative, as shown by the excitement surrounding the launch of Meta’s Twitter-imitating app Threads (usage soon dropped off, though) and by a slow migration towards Bluesky, at present still invite only. Nevertheless, X’s doomscrolling siren call is still seductive for many.

If a future for online film criticism exists, it may be with Letterboxd. The site – which allows users to track their viewing, post reviews and make lists – has changed remarkably little since it was launched in 2011, but exploded in popularity after the pandemic shut millions of people indoors with little but streaming sites for company. What was once a place where passionate amateur film criticism (including embarrassing teenage efforts from your writer, since excised) flourished, has now gained several levels of professionalism. Many full-time critics post capsule reviews there, or link to their full reviews on other sites, while actors and comedians post meme-like one-liners: Ayo Edebiri, star of Emma Seligman’s riotous high-school comedy Bottoms posted her own review of the film, which read in full “I’m in it with my friends so’’, with a five-star rating.

Like Film Twitter, Letterboxd is now a space shared by film fans and professional critics – which is great for consumers wishing for a variety of viewpoints, less helpful to writers who hope to earn a living plying their trade and find themselves having to explain why their work is worth a fee when thousands of others will perform the same function for fun (and for free). But a further layer of legitimacy was added to Letterboxd by our man of the year Marty, who joined in October and overnight became the site’s most-followed person.

The blurred line between critics and fans is something that PR agencies are all too happy to exploit for marketing purposes; the online ad campaign for Emerald Fennell’s class-drama Saltburn prioritised quotes from X users (“Might need clinical help, literally all I can think about is Saltburn,” said @Dyl_Bows) over reviews in the legacy media. And yet what might be this year’s most unusual X news story demonstrated that approval from critics is still craved. Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO, briefly took the mantle of main character off Scorsese when it was revealed that he had sent a “secret army” of staff “on a mission” to anonymously push back against a tweet by Kathryn VanArendonk, TV critic for the entertainment website Vulture, criticising his company’s reboot of the classic legal drama Perry Mason. Some tweets are worth more than others, it appears.