From hawk tuah and Moo Deng to very demure, very mindful, it’s safe to say that 2024 has been one of social media’s most unhinged years yet. While most trends tend to disappear into the digital ether as quickly as they emerge nowadays, Charli XCX’s Brat album campaign will undoubtedly be referenced for years to come as a step-by-step on how to transcend internet virality. As well as defining the chaotic visual aesthetic of the summer, Brat’s sentiment crossed over into mainstream culture and even the world of politics, before taking its place in the history books as Collins dictionary’s word of the year.

While digital culture has been thriving in 2024, many of the big social media companies have been in a state of flux. None more so than X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that Elon Musk acquired in 2022. Following its controversial rebrand last year, there’s been a steady stream of users leaving the platform, but this turned into a mass exodus of its traditional userbase in the midst of a divisive US election where Musk was one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. Meanwhile, rival platform Bluesky has gained nearly 2.5 million users in the last couple of months alone.

TikTok’s future remains equally uncertain, at least in the US, where a federal court has ruled to ban the platform unless parent company ByteDance sells its assets to a non-Chinese owned company. It’s still unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will follow through with the ban, but ByteDance and TikTok are currently holding out hope for a favourable ruling, with CEO Shou Zi Chew reportedly having met with the President-elect.

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brat summer essentials

♬ 365 – Charli xcx