Is Social Media Dead?

Most nights, as I lie in bed before sleep, I’ll tap and scroll through multiple social media apps on my tablet to varying degrees of satisfaction.

This evening send-off is more habit than helpful, as I’d be better served tiring myself out by reading a book or over-analyzing whatever public interactions I had that day than staring into the unblinking, unfeeling feed.

There is a cottage industry of academic research on the impacts of social media use before bed, particularly among young people. Still, I scroll.

What I’m looking for on these apps has changed over time. The early days of Myspace, Facebook, Twitter (now X) and Instagram were geared toward connection. “Friending,” “following” and even “poking” were all means of direct, digital interaction.

That was the original promise of the online social networks. It’s in the name. Since my teenage years, it’s been my primary means of staying in touch and up to date with friends and family. If you were savvy, you could even network and promote yourself into new social circles or careers.

You can still do those things, sure, but the platforms and their purpose are different now. Bleaker, blander, infinitely commercialized and optimized to steal your focus for as much time as possible, you can almost feel the extraction process in action — our attention has long been used as a natural resource.

Still, I let the apps strip mine me. I continue to post, however infrequently and impersonally. No one can tell me getting a handful of likes doesn’t feel good.

Most often, though, I simply scroll. There’s a directness to the entertainment value the social feeds provide that’s hard to beat. When an unexpected flash of non-sequitur brilliance crosses my timeline and makes me involuntarily guffaw like Goofy or stare slack-jawed at the screen, also like Goofy, it’s akin to hitting a jackpot. Which is the feeling by design.

Those moments have felt fewer and farther between in recent years. As the platforms became more enmeshed with our lives, they began serving as filters for the outside world, catching fragments of news and gossip and presenting them as whole. Discourse slams around painfully inside them, and important information gets misinterpreted and misused. Connection has been rapidly replaced with bile.

Toxic is the easy, clichéd way to describe the state of these apps. Enshittified is more apt. Sinking also fits the bill; I’ve experienced the apps’ noticeable, appreciable decline.

Because they weren’t always like this. Or maybe they were, but not so much like this. If there was a turning point, perhaps it was 2014, when Gamergate, the rabid and hateful online harassment campaign, took root in forums like 4Chan before spreading to social media. It feels like we’ve been living in its aftermath ever since.

That’s why I cherish those brief oases of online entertainment whenever I find them. A video on X of a pomeranian walking in circles on its front legs? A tour de force. A clip of a coyote on the roof of a house, drinking rainwater that’s pooled on its skylight? A masterpiece.

It’s difficult to appreciate them for long.

After watching the video of that quirked-up pomeranian, a number of posts from Grok, X’s AI chatbot, began to show up in my feed. The chatbot was in the middle of a meltdown.

After every prompt users gave it, Grok inexplicably responded by arguing with itself about the veracity of the South African “white genocide” conspiracy theory. “When the X account for a baseball podcast asked Grok about the stats for Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson, it answered the question, then monologued about white farmers being attacked in South Africa,” tech journalist Matthew Gault reported in 404 Media on May 15.

The far-right theory has been supported by X owner Elon Musk, the billionaire from South Africa who has led President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency for the first half of 2025, and is now allegedly “off-boarding” from his role.

Trump himself would later make false claims about the theory in a meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office on May 21, claims that have since been debunked and widely fact-checked.

From cute animal videos to broken bots to racist tirades, this presented a tidy summation of what using social media has often come to feel like: small moments of dopey revelry followed by some new horror that breaks containment into the physical world.

The social network, minus friends

On my nightly scroll, I don’t stay long on Instagram. Once the ideal way to keep up with friends and peacock in a socially acceptable manner, the platform has become so bogged down with advertisements, suggested posts and general algorithmic tampering that I rarely see anything from the accounts I choose to follow.

There’s data to back this up, as presented by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, at a recent Federal Trade Commission antitrust trial.

In the New Yorker this spring, Kyle Chayka wrote how Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, while defending against allegations of being an illegal monopoly in the “personal social networking services” industry, “displayed a chart showing that the ‘per cent of time spent viewing content posted by “friends”’ has declined in the past two years, from 22 per cent to 17 per cent on Facebook, and from 11 per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.”

Are you using a personal social networking service if only seven per cent of what you see on it is from your actual social network?

Zuckerberg doesn’t think so, saying his company is engaged more in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.”

The general idea of entertainment is so purposefully vague that it could describe a TV screen mounted over a urinal.

For Meta, that imprecision is key, as Chayka explains.

“The antitrust case was already dismissed once, in 2021, partly because the ‘personal social networking services’ market was too loosely defined,” he writes.

“Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the 2010s, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for — the digital consumption of all kinds of content — has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.”

So what are people consuming on Meta’s platforms? Increasingly, AI-generated slop. Meta even created an AI social feed, which the Verge called “nightmarish” and “confirmation of AI skeptics’ biggest criticisms.”

Perhaps part-and-parcel with the rise of AI slop, people are also getting scammed on Meta’s platforms at an alarming rate.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “[Meta’s] internal analysis from 2022 described in company documents likewise found that 70 per cent of newly active advertisers on the platform are promoting scams, illicit goods or ‘low-quality’ products.”

A Meta spokesperson described it as “an epidemic of scams.”

I deleted Facebook years ago after its user experience became one that felt legitimately deleterious to my mental well-being, as I watched friends and loved ones post their way into the depths of QAnon conspiracies and the like.

I witnessed one former middle school classmate go from sharing increasingly defiant climate change denialism to, in a matter of days, his belief that the Earth and its oceans are contained by an ice wall perimeter. He was becoming a flat earther in real time, and neither the gentle repudiations from friends nor one of his uncles calling him an “idiot” in the comments could convince him otherwise.

Platform moderation can both veer into censorship and be used as a strawman by “free speech” absolutist charlatans, but what can’t be equivocated is that these platforms have allowed misinformation and anti-science perspectives to flourish at an incomprehensible scale.

Would my former classmate have benefitted from third-party moderation, some sort of flag that the articles he was sharing were bogus, or at least limited their reach or what reached him? Perhaps, but do those platforms even care to try?

With over three billion active monthly users from all over the world, and a seemingly unknowable amount of posts made and shared per day, a platform like Facebook would appear both impossible and a necessity to moderate.

As Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of global public policy, makes clear in her tell-all book Careless People, the company has historically refused to take moderation at scale seriously. This has allowed all kinds of dangerous misinformation to spread, from COVID-19 conspiracies to the hateful fear-mongering that led to the company being credibly accused of enabling a genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

Where else is there to go if all you want to do is see some good social media posts without getting radicalized by @QPatriot420 or scammed out of $2,300 in Apple gift cards?

The rot is glaring

Bluesky, the upstart, decentralized alternative to X, which was initially a side project within the latter before setting out on its own, is fine.

The level of entertainment value per post is not as high as its progenitor’s once was, and there’s a steadily growing consensus that the self-seriousness of the flood of liberal Twitter escapees calling it home has made the sacred art of shitposting a drag, but if being boring and scoldy is Bluesky’s main issue, it could always be worse.

I can’t bring myself to download TikTok, so my last, best resort to find something entertaining on the social web remains, despite all odds, X. This is where the best posters remain, among the decay. Jokes, political takes, sports commentary — unfortunately, it all still happens on X, the everything app.

I check in on my favourite accounts before calling it a night, going directly to them via the search function to avoid as much of the base-level radiation that populates the main feeds as possible. Because everywhere else, the rot is glaring.

The platform’s future and functionality were shaky before Musk’s famously messy takeover in 2022, but they’ve since been purposefully sabotaged by the billionaire techno-fascist who seems more concerned with whether people find him funny than if his businesses are run well.

Since Musk’s reign began, X has suffered a reported 80 per cent cut to its workforce, moderation on the site has gone nearly extinct, and its owner has actively welcomed, promoted and financially benefitted from far-right and white nationalist extremists, making it known that the worst impulses of humanity are not only welcome there but encouraged.

These days, my direct message inbox on X is flooded with crypto scams. As its advertising revenue craters, bot networks have flourished, paying for ads targeting everyone from Howie Mandel to the latest Canadian federal election.

If I peruse X’s “For You” feed long enough, I’ll be subjected to a repulsive mix of crypto-bro-isms, abject racism, literal murders and any other imaginable awfulness alongside a couple of good one-liners and some New York Knicks highlights.

And besides boosting “white genocide” conspiracy theories, Grok will also create deepfake pornography of anyone you ask it to.

Considering all this, does still lurking on X make me complicit in its owner’s aims? I’m not sure it does, but I’m also not confident it doesn’t, as Charlie Warzel asked in The Atlantic.

“You may not have any interest in participating in a culture war. The problem is that on X, everything is a culture war. Culture war is the very point of the MAGA AI slop the platform traffics in and the viscerally cruel White House X account,” Warzel writes.

“You’re not a Nazi simply because you use X — but also, what exactly are you doing there?”

Who is the content for?

This is what happens when the online world is built and maintained by the greed of hollow-headed narcissists. It doesn’t become a place for people, but a reflection of their ideals or lack thereof. Zuckerberg’s original iteration of Facebook was Facemash, a website that allowed you to compare the “hotness” of two people, and the photos Zuckerberg used he’d obtained via a hack and uploaded without consent.

To those like Zuckerberg and Musk, we users have always been merely content, data points to sell ads against, and now, nodes in their political projects.

The untold hours we spend posting on their platforms are theirs to scrape and train their bunk AI models. Depending on where you live, the content you create for them is as likely to get you pulled into a windowless van by ICE as it is to connect you with friends.

What does it mean that the promise of social media, for me, has been reduced to the fleeting hope that I might catch a video of a dog doing something wacky without being subjected to some outrageously bigoted bullshit?

Is there any promise left? A recent study out of the United Kingdom found that 70 per cent of 16- to 21-year-olds felt worse after using social media, and “almost half… would prefer a world without internet.”

Can efforts like Bluesky or Mastodon offer not just a safe harbour but also a social networking experience that is vibrant, compelling and fun? We’ll have to wait and see.

What about newsletters? Remember websites? Is there a hunger for a return to the blogosphere? Personally, my bookmarks bar has never been hotter as I spend my mornings drinking coffee and hopping around to the sites I like with content I choose to look at.

There’s no going back, of course. The social networks, in whatever mutant form they exist in now, are too ingrained in our everyday lives. They did this by once offering a legitimate form of connection, even if it was stunted. Now, it’s increasingly harmful. That harm is baked into the business model.

If the platforms balk at moderation, we can moderate our use of the platforms. As each indignity mounts, the appeal of the possibilities on the other side of these digital walled gardens grows.

They’ve convinced us we need them, but who’s going to water those gardens when we’re gone?