“Social media is increasingly anti-social,” argues New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel. Only 7 percent of Instagram time and 17 percent of Facebook time is spent interacting with content from friends or followed accounts. “The rest is algorithmic video from strangers,” he says.
In Van Bavel’s opinion, this shift results from algorithms optimizing for watch time rather than real social engagement. “TikTok set the template; everyone copied it,” he said. AI only made things worse, with over half of the long posts on Meta now written by AI. “People are not engaging, or even creating the content on those platforms anymore,” the professor concludes.
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Van Bavel draws his argument from a newly published paper, “Towards a Post-Social Media Studies,” by University of Amsterdam researchers Petter Törnberg and Richard Rogers. The authors maintain that the era of “user-generated content, networked publics, and participatory culture . . . is drawing to a close” and outline three interrelated factors transforming the social-media paradigm: 1) “an algorithmic shift from social graphs to interest-based recommendation, which is remaking the active ‘user’ into a passive ‘viewer’”; 2) “the generative AI revolution, which is replacing user-generated content with synthetic media”; and 3) “an exodus from public platforms toward private, closed spaces,” like chats or messengers.
This seems accurate. Anyone active on social media can acknowledge that his or her feed shows fewer posts from friends or followers and more “general interest” content, which is increasingly AI-generated.
Why is it happening? The first explanation is, of course, AI. But AI is just part of the problem. The entire social-media ecosystem has reached its limits and is now bouncing to the opposite of what it was designed to be.
Late in the first decade of the 2000s, when social media were just beginning to reshape mass communication, the platforms were supposed to put users’ personal interests front and center. According to legend, Mark Zuckerberg said of this new medium: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea sounds callous, but the intention was to shift people’s focus from distant news delivered by mass media to personal news shared by friends and family.
It mostly succeeded. Totally meaningless in terms of public interest, personal news was empowered by platform design, making users aware of the private lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers as never before.
But these changes in how people curated their news intake had unintended consequences. Social media certainly boosted personal news sharing, but they also amplified users’ personal attitudes, however biased or uninformed, toward any news—especially politics.
As a result, an even deeper side effect flipped the original intent of Zuckerberg and other social-media pioneers. Instead of merely prioritizing the personal over the distant, social media made the distant personal, delivering it in agitated form through networks of attitudes.
According to the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, when a medium or technology reaches its limits or extremes, it reverses its effects into the opposite. A simple example is the car. Its primary effect is to increase mobility, but when too many cars get on the road, mobility reverses into traffic jams.
The same thing happened with social media. User engagement through expressing personal beliefs reached its most extreme forms by the end of the 2010s. It led to rage, animosity, censorship, and the split of the most dynamic political network, Twitter, into X and Bluesky—two highly polarized social-media environments.
People grew tired of partisan anger and were afraid of cancellation, bullying, and trolling behavior. Many became reluctant to expose themselves too much. Social media no longer brought moral or psychological benefits, except to the narrow circle of public figures, influencers, and trolls.
Users now try to engage less, avoiding comments, reposts, and even likes. Many have learned that algorithms track their every click for ad targeting—or worse, for policing and reporting. Some have resorted to self-censorship. Against the backdrop of political instability and psychological hazards, more people now choose to do little beyond scrolling.
People still spend enormous amounts of time on social media, but mostly browsing feeds with interesting “features,” much as they once skimmed features in magazines, or watching short videos, much as they once watched TV. It’s a true McLuhanian reversal: from engagement back to broadcasting.
The researchers from Amsterdam foresee new “post-social” conditions. They argue that social media are turning into algorithm-driven broadcasting platforms. They expect mass communication to dissolve into “semi-private groups and micro-communities.” And, of course, AI-mediated communication will evolve into “a new media form in its own right.”