The year of social media soul-searching: Twitter dies, X and Threads are born and AI gets personal

By BARBARA ORTUTAY
AP Technology Writer

We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between. Social media’s impact on children’s mental health hurtled toward a reckoning this year, with the U.S. Surgeon General calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”