Peak Social Media

Discussion

"It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline."

John Burn-Murdoch:

"In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do. Don't show this again Both Meta and OpenAI have recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos. This assumes a reservoir of untapped demand for the ability to create and binge-watch yet more content, with a promotional video from OpenAI featuring absurd fantastical animations and deepfakes, hinting at some of what may be to come. … But the gradual merger of the weird guilty pleasure corner of the internet with the major social media platforms — part of a years-long degradation — appears to be turning people away.

It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has 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.

In the parlance of technology writer Cory Doctorow, late-stage social media is a particularly egregious case of the “enshittification” of digital platforms as they resort to ever more desperate methods to capture eyeballs. Many of these apps are no longer really social apps in any meaningful sense of the word; they’re screen time maximising apps, using whatever means necessary to eke out extra seconds and minutes. 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. But that brings me to the catch. There is one notable exception to this promising international trend: North America, where consumption of social media’s diet of extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop continues to climb. By 2024 it had reached levels 15 per cent higher than Europe."

(https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a863)