If you spend much time wandering around what we used to call the social web — and by that I mean primarily the large social apps and platforms like Facebook and Instagram and X and Snapchat and even TikTok — you might find yourself sympathizing with the great Yogi Berra, who once said of a certain place that “No one goes there any more, it’s too crowded.” It would be hard to argue that social networks are empty, and yet it often seems as though no one is there any more, or at least no one we recognize and/or want to spend time around. There are lots of posts, and videos, and photos — so many posts — and yet there is a feeling that (to use another famous quote, this one from Gertrude Stein) there’s no there there. Is it just because suspect some of those people are actually AI bots simulating human activity? Possibly. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well.
What we do know with some level of certainty is that the decline of social networking broadly speaking is a real, observable phenomenon as well as a hunch. The Financial Times recently reported that a study it commissioned shows that social media use peaked in 2022 and has since gone into more or less steady decline. The study was an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries that was carried out by a digital-audience insights company called GWI. The study’s authors took pains to point out that this was not just an unwinding of a screen-time or social-media bump that took place during COVID lockdowns — usage has reportedly “traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade plus.”
Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users — teens and 20-somethings. Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing.
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John Herrmann, writing in New York magazine, noted that there are some caveats in the data, “chief among them the finding that in North America, social media growth has slowed but not yet turned around.” Broadly speaking, the same kind of data has been replicated elsewhere. Teens say they’re cutting back on social apps; Facebook reported losing users for the first time back in 2022, and Meta has adopted vague metrics like “family daily active people” that conceal how the platform is doing. Even TikTok, whose entry into the marketplace convinced Facebook and Instagram to try to metamorphose themselves into the same algorithm-powered feed of videos, has seen its growth stall over the past couple of years. A recent analysis found that overall platform use has declined, with the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media altogether.
Everything is television now
Derek Thompson also weighed in on this phenomenon, in a piece about how everything is turning into television, a transformation he says was driven for the most part by TikTok and also AI. In its recent antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, he notes that Meta filed a legal brief on August 6, in which it made the somewhat startling claim that it is not a social media monopoly because it isn’t really a social media company. Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking, the company said — that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of the time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, in most cases from creators whom the user does not know. From the FTC filing:
Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.
Noah Smith echoed many of these other analysts on the social-media decline, pointing out that according to a new report from a company called PartnerCentric, which surveyed nearly 1,000 Americans of all ages in May of this year, 41 percent of Americans — and about 48 percent of Gen Z — are planning to spend less time on social networks in 2025. The report says that that 16 percent of Americans had quit at least one social media platform so far in 2025, and 18 percent of Gen Z members surveyed. “Gen Z is essentially voting with their thumbs — nearly half are dialing back on social platforms and 35% are layering on screen-time blockers,” Smith quoted Stephanie Harris, the CEO and founder of PartnerCentric, as saying.
In keeping with that Yogi Berra quote, Herrmann says part of the reason for the decline is that “everyone is there already” but also “nobody is there anymore.” In 2024, a Pew survey found that nearly half of teens surveyed said they were online almost constantly, with 96 percent using the internet daily, sorted across a variety of platforms, nearly all of which have declined in the last two years, with sharper long-term declines for older platforms like Facebook and X. “This is an age range for which social media is a set of entrenched options in a saturated market that users can’t help but know about,” he writes. “Every young person who might become a TikTok user probably already is.” And yet, they are all saying they plan to use social media less, and many are consuming more than posting, which goes back to the “everything is becoming television” argument.
The great splintering
In the FT op-ed referred to above, the writer closes by saying that “in the parlance of technology writer Cory Doctorow, late-stage social media is a particularly egregious case of the ‘enshittification’ of digital platforms, and that it would be “a hugely welcome development to discover that we have not merely reached social media saturation point, but that the experience has been degraded to such an extent that it has shocked people out of their stupor and is causing them to pivot to healthier uses of their time.” Is that what’s happening, or likely to happen? I’m much more skeptical about whether people are pivoting to healthier uses of their time, but I do think that the decline of social networking is a welcome outcome in many ways.
I think we should also be clear about what we mean: when we talk about a decline in social media, it seems obvious that what we are seeing is a decline in mass social media apps and platforms — the ones that are trying to be everything to everyone. To some extent, I think the rise of services like Mastodon and BlueSky is part of a splintering of what was once the mass Twitter user base — in my experience at least, Mastodon seems to appeal mostly to the geeks who like to build and run their own things, and BlueSky seems to have pulled many of the more left-wing and liberal-thinking users from X that have been driven away by Musk’s increasingly unhinged dumpster fire. Others have gone to Discord, or to private WhatsApp groups.
Herrmann notes that in the Pew survey that tracked a decline in young peoples’ use of virtually every social media platform, WhatsApp was the one exception. He argues that the continued rise of chat apps — whether it’s platforms like Discord or more conventional messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal — “suggests as strongly as anything that at least some may be considering spending time in places where they have some semblance of control, privacy, and recognizable interpersonal dynamics.” Noah Smith talks about something similar, and his view on the reasons and the larger trends I think is closest to mine. He writes:
A lot of people wring their hands and lament these shifts, but I’m overjoyed. I’ve always believed that humanity isn’t meant to be thrown all together in one or two big rooms; we evolved to thrive in small groups and self-selected communities. I blame “town square” social media for at least part of America’s political chaos, and for at least part of the increasing unhappiness among young people. The early internet of moderated, fragmented forums and person-to-person communication seems like it was obviously superior to the rancor of the 2010s. So I think it’s good we’re moving back to something more like the internet we enjoyed in the 2000s
Social media, James O’Sullivan writes in Noema, was “built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog. But the attention economy, and more recently, the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion.” I think it’s entirely possible that social media in the early 2000s worked in part because there were weren’t a lot of people using it, and the real problems started when everybody showed up. Not just because that brought people with widely diverging and in come cases horrible opinions and the urge to share them, but because those massive numbers of people attracted the Facebooks of the world, who then proceeded to enshittify everything in the quest for profits.
It’s possible, as someone once said, that human beings were never meant to hear from or share their thoughts with so many people at one time. Maybe AI slop is just the rancid icing on an already rotten cake.