What to expect in 2025

Welcome to 2025.

As is customary for the start of the year, I’ve penned some predictions below. Do let me know what you think - am i missing something? Or am I missing the point?

At Rootcause we are putting the finishing touches to three services we want to offer our clients this year. The first is a cost-effective upgrade on your, probably expensive, media monitoring service. The second is a new way to find out what your audiences are thinking at speed, at scale and the third involves bespoke social media analysis around specific causes or issues….get in touch if any of this sounds interesting…..

Predictions for democracy in 2025

1. Media power keeps falling 

Power never disappears, it just shifts. The relationship between political power and public communication remains as tight as ever but the role of professional media as the gatekeeper of these conversations will continue to reduce. This is deeply confusing to politicians and journalists raised in a symbiotic relationship that worked so well for so long. The nature of this relationship created a generation of politicians trained to communicate in a way that feels dangerously out of date in 2025. Expect to see more evidence of how power can be built by politicians without relying on journalists. Expect howls of indignation from various quarters to continue as this reduces their relevance further. Hope to see some brave forward-thinkers begin to react. 

2. Social Media power keeps growing 

Social media platforms and AI companies (often the same thing) will keep growing, amassing terrifying quantities of power through unimaginable quantities of data. The UK government will continue to genuflect to Silicon Valley. Social media will continue to drive the emergence of newly powerful voices in public discourse and they will continue to not be held to account for the impact of their product design choices on democratic well-being. Especially whilst we can’t monitor these platforms properly.

3. Dismissing Disinformation 

We will see increasing dismissal of the impact of disinformation on democratic discourse and challenging times for those working to ‘tackle disinformation’. Contributing factors to this include the failure of AI generated content to impact 2024 elections, the results of those elections themselves and well-meaning misunderstanding of the issues at stake being about ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ rather than ‘trust’ and ‘belief’. If this plays out as best we can hope then influential people may come to realise that much of the content they want to call disinformation is actually people with opposing political views doing a better job of political communication. If it goes badly, it’ll provide further operational cover to bad actors seeking to unpick liberal democratic values. 

4. AI influencers on the march 

The steady flow of AI-generated content into social media posts and low-rate journalism will become a flood as AI tools are used to create entire information ecosystems incorporating newsletters, websites, podcasts and What’s App broadcast channels.  There are already AI generated avatars with millions of social media followers. If anonymous people can build AI profiles and create audiences and communities then their future influence on public discourse and politics could be significant. 

5. The language barrier begins to fall

Instant translation is pretty much upon us, especially in the majority languages spoken by most of the world’s population. This year we may see the first signs of how the removal of language barriers can drive new forms of organisation between people across borders. In time these may become more significant. 

Until next time…

Jonathan