Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)
arxiv.org148 points by vinnyglennon 6 hours ago
148 points by vinnyglennon 6 hours ago
The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping.
I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much.
It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.
Based on the time range, the decline of social media use after 2020 could be more strongly related to the decline of Covid and remote school/work
I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.
Did you see people mourning the demise of forum software, when neatly maintained places oriented towards specific topics gave way to noisy and all-encompassing places like FB at Twitter?
I think these fragmented Discords are the return to the idea of specific, uncrowded, neatly maintained places, with a relatively high barrier to entry for a random person. Subreddits are a bit similar, but less insular.
One of the only differences between new Reddit and Discord is that Reddit has the courtesy of a public index.
I don't know much about Discord (my only experience being some years ago when I joined for an open source project and left soon after I noticed how incredibly use hostile it is) but I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server" (which, despite the marketing is just a chatroom hosted on their servers).
We're gonna enter a new age/type of "lost media" as Discord remains popular year over year. It's a complete black hole unless you're manually backing things up. No possible Wayback Machine.
It's honestly a good thing. People should have social outlets where things are forgotten, not memorialized for all eternity.
They are forgotten for all useful intents and purposes, but a malicious asshole can and will memorialize everything you say on it.
Sure, but it's definitely not the return of forums and the fact it is being used in place of forums will cause trouble down the line.
Yes for social outlets. For niche hobbies? old photos of specific milling machines used in machine shops on board US navy vessels? For 80's european automotive restoration? For repairing and restoring retro-computing devices? Terrible. Terrible Terrible Terrible.
Tbf most old forums seem to have lacked photo hosting so all that’s left is photobucket placeholders
I've said this for quite a while now. Social media has turned into a bitch fest. It's all you ever read nowadays and I'm tired of it. I'm sure most people are tired of it.
I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.
What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.
It’s great.
If you optimize for engagement you create secondary effects that can drive users away.
If social media becomes addictive because it angers you constantly, that’s engaging but you may hate it. Enough people will realize it’s not worth the stress. The social media site just begins to be associated with negativity and anger - not fun.
It’s reasonable we hit peak social media in the US and enough people disengage to make the numbers come down. Though notably 2025 is not in this study.
Yes, this.
I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.
And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.
It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.
But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).
If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.
I'm always surprised that papers don't include some "chat" apps as social media. I don't see Discord mentioned in this paper but I use it almost identically to how I used Facebook in like 2010 and at least among people I know that's very common. I think the use cases from more traditional "social media" has migrated a lot back to chat apps and those still provide a lot of value and are more widely used than ever.
Terminology shifted somewhere along the lines, because the nature of sites like Facebook changed. These sites were called "social networking" in the early days, since they connected people. These sites are called "social media" these days, which I assume is a reflection that the top-down nature of these sites are much more like traditional print/radio/television media.
The treatment of chat applications, online forums, etc. as social media has always felt strange to me for that reason. While the companies that offer those services may control the platform, control of interactions is limited to moderation and the content of those interactions is rarely created by a commercial interest.
I read a quote once that went something like (paraphrased): every organizational app has to compete with email and every form of social media has to compete with group texts. And I think that's accurate.
If you pick random people they'll have often very old group texts. Family, friend groups, etc. These are used to organize, disseminate news and so on. 10+ years ago, a lot of people did these things on FAcebook. Group texts work on all platforms. They don't have ads. They're chronological.
From an engagement perspective, algorithmic recommendations and ranking (ie the newsfeed) has "succeeded" but it killed the use cases that people now use group texts for. And I think the two are fundamentally incompatible.
<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.
It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance.
Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
The article uses the word "partisan", the opposite of which I think is "independent", not "centrist" or "middle", but to be fair the article seems to conflate the two as well and never uses the word "independent". However to me there is a big difference between being a centrist and being independent. One could be independent with views that are at times deemed extreme right and at times extreme left. Similarly, some people are "centrist" yet somehow deeply partisan in the sense that their party can do no wrong and everything is the fault of the other party.
It is a valid question. I looked at the author's profile and while he is not from US ( Amsterdam ), his studies focus[1] appears to be on subjects that would suggest he should be relatively well acquainted with politics in US along with how they differ in terms of terminology from EU or UK. Sadly, I can't seem to say for sure how term was intended in the article itself. That said, the author does seem to reference individual US parties.
[1]https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/o/p.tornberg/k.p.tornberg.ht...
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Can you elaborate? Do you mean that the final version is not approved by the author/s for publication?
[removed as I don't wish to tank this guy's career. he knows what he's done though]
My point was a little more subtle. Does the human at the end of the process that presses 'submit'/'publish'/'do this thing' bear a responsibility for verbiage, claims and everything in the paper that bears his name regardless of whether or not he wrote it.
Your entire argument is a personal vibe.
Maybe your literacy is not as great as you think it is and unfamiliar written tones are difficult for you. The result is personal discomfort and it's easier to blame external reality rather than your own ignorance and inexperience.
I noticed that ZeroGPT has a high false positive rate. Put the same document in other checkers and it's says zero AI.
This. Partisanship is going along party lines (agreeing with the Party) where independence is thinking of your own free will. We desperately need more of those people in charge.
Why would the party support them?
Those are the people who do the nost work for the party. People who 'toe the line' are also those who tend not to do the work that gets people elected. People who care enough to think also knock of doors and the other work that gets someone elected. You won't find a thinking person you 100% agree with, but a mostly agree is better than a mostly disagree - and by doing that work you also get to talk to people and perhaps change minds.
For the team? For the influence? There used to be a time when people could work across the aisle.
You can have beliefs, but you also must have heart and a brain to open your world view to other perspectives. This is what being an adult is all about. Not this crap that we see today.
> Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
While I share the hope, it's probably not going to happen: most folks have moved from FB to use AI chats. Now it's the tool to manipulate opinions and habits. And it's working very well and nuanced. With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.
And there's no way back already! Even if the web search works well one day, the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.
> the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.
The 'younger' only because they're forming habits in the time of AI. Most all humans tend towards minimising cognitive load; the making hard decisions and consideration of complex topics and situations. It's all about the tools that were available to you at the time you started to need those tools. The core is the same. Low-level, essentially sub-conscious, human behaviour change doesn't happen on a noticeable time frame^.
^ my opinion, not based on research. ie. feel free to critique.
What has changed is the awareness of the hacks that work on the human lizard brain, and therefore pandering to all that makes us weak and powerless in exchange for money and convenience. That's the part that makes it feel, for me, more likely that there's no way back. Those hacks will only get more refined and more streamlined into exploitation.
> With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.
While I agree for less happy, I am not seeing AI chatbot been more divisive and polirised than social media in general. Am I missing something?
I mean it’s really not that hard to do a little research to find out that “most” people aren’t leaving Meta properties for ChatgpT
I don't think the social media landscape is inherently bad, but the ways in which it evolved. And I think the shift in social media towards consuming content instead of connecting with others is a direct reflection of the era we live in; one of abundant information.
Social media will stop becoming relevant when we stop treating each person as a mini corporation that needs to provide value, trying to optimize every aspect of your life in a life-long marketing campaign.
You may be onto something. It is a little bit like google when it first started showing ads. Initially, the ads were clearly marked and were promised to be relevant to the user, but that line has been moved slowly in a way to extract more and more value from the user.. while removing value that user already had.
I know social media had some real use cases. CL and FB marketplace are probably one good example of that. But the rest of it.. best I can say, my overall happiness jumped up after first month of going on a media diet.
I think a lot of what's happening is that individuals and their in-groups are replacing social media for comms with chat apps, leaving much of the remaining social media use being either reposting crap or for opinion blasts... or in the worst case, thoughtlessly reposting other people's [extreme] opinion blasts.
One thing is true: actual, active socializing is happening in chat apps (and Discord), not FB, X, or IG.
What do you mean exactly by lost so much of the original internet?
But to be more broad I'll present you the romantic version which is at least partly true. I miss that.
It used to feel like the internet was a place you went to explore and learn. It was harder to use and navigate, so most ordinary people did not spend much time there. Back then, a lot of people believed it would make the world better because everyone could access information and educate themselves.
That optimism did not survive contact with reality. Today you can carry essentially all human knowledge in your pocket, yet much of the internet is funneled through a handful of corporations whose business model is advertising and attention. Instead of helping people discover things, the dominant platforms optimize for keeping you scrolling with outrage, dopamine hits, and low value content. Worst thing is of course politics which moved in here.
The joy of exploring is done, but honestly I think that it atleast partly that the og users got older. Hackernews somehow reminding me the "old Internet", somehow alike people with desire to explore and have honest discussion on genuinely interesting topic.
I feel like this misses what's actually going on. The "small, sharp, ideologically extreme" discussions aren't going away, they're just happening elsewhere. From the abstract, the reason for the decline is: "the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media". The young people are talking in private Discord groups, and the old people are talking in private text groups. These private groups don't show up in social media studies. The paper even states this directly: "everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps".
YC does have brakes ... Accounts are rate limited for engaging in conversations that are determined to be beneath the dignity of the platform. It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.
FB and Twitter seem to drive heavy political ideological content at the slightest hint of engagement.
I think a problem with loud poles and a quiet middle is the political class takes its queue from the internet discourse. The algorithms drive content, but in a reverse fashion they also poll the electorate, providing signal the political scientists use to calibrate messaging.
> Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet.
Hyper-monetization killed it all
That's the result of excess censorship and PRs on those platform, you can play with people more or less easily but you can't re-program them at such speed. They understand and start rejecting the narrative.
Vocal minorities vary but tend just to excite the others, not to affirm any point.
There is some slight irony talking about a vocal minority in a top comment, heh.
It's worth questioning how much of the polarized rhetoric out there is rooted in reality, and how much of it is just social media selecting and promoting extreme views. The answer seems to be that it really depends on where you are.
As a Canadian, I feel that people on opposite ends of the spectrum, although they might literally call for the deaths of those on the other end, have a huge amount in common with each other. Canada has problems, but its still a pretty great country. If people would step outside of the hyper-partisan identities they've been constructing for themselves online and try to see the concerns of the other side, they'd probably find they're not as horrible or misguided as they might think while reading facebook or reddit. If the reasonable centre that dominates public policy can continue to ween itself off of American social media, there's hope for a strong, unified country that's capable of having adult political discourse between people who disagree on finer points. We clearly have some challenges to face (e.g. separatism) in getting there though.
If you're in the U.S. though, things appear very different. While both political parties seem to have been co-opted by billionaire interests, one party has fallen into what can be described as, if we're being charitable, a cult of personality. Unfortunately, that personality has been doing things that are impossible to dismiss as the online hysteria of the other side. Threatening allies with military invasion. High seas piracy. Kidnapping of a foreign leader (admittedly a not very nice one) from his nation. Betraying allies to cozy up to dictators like Putin. Torching global markets with constantly changing tariffs. The list goes on. Then there's what's going on within U.S. borders. If you're in the U.S., the polarization isn't just online. It's something very real. I feel that somebody opposing what ICE is doing in Minnesota and a die-hard Trump supporter really don't have a lot in common and I don't think removing them from online social media will result in civil discourse between the two. There are very real differences there that are coming to a head.
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I would usually keep quiet and ignore post like this because they are extreme timesinks, but to give a perfect example: Waco. It happened under the other side. The official story is bunk and half the country that is supposedly anti-authoritarian cheered it on.
I don't care to have the conversation or change anyone's mind but your post is the perfect example why people in the middle disengaged from the loud minority that takes over online spaces.
I'm old enough to remember Waco and there was widespread criticism of Janet Reno's handling of Waco. This idea that the Dems "cheered it on" is ahistorical post facto justification for a position you likely already held.
I see this all the time. It's some combination of "X was hypocrditical" or "X was mean to me", which leads to "and that's why I support [the opposite of X] as [a centrist, a moderate, someone with common sense]". And reaching for a ~30 year old siege is the reachiest of reaches.
This is the Myth of the Moderate. There is no such thing a "moderate" or a "centrist" in the modern day. Ask them about issues and they're just conservatives who are embarrassed about it.
It is a major simplification to put the political spectrum on a single line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum). If we put it as a triangle, the Overton window can be as far from left to right as left/right is to the middle.
The Overton window is not involved in defining the middle, and the middle definitively do not need to agree 50% with any specific decision done by the left or right.
Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters is still not within the Overton window though.
>Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”
This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.
US law enforcement kill over 1000 people every year, way more than any comparable country [1]. The raw data of incidents on Wikipedia has to be broken down by month [2]. And here's a chart showing the number has been going up basically every year for at least a decade [3].
What "historic lows" are you talking about?
[1]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
[3]: https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-people-are-...
Right on cue
What is the point of your three words here? Legitimately I don't get it.
The parent comment was about how the most partisan users post the most on social media and sure enough, the first response was by a partisan user.
Or, you know, they actually have a point, and framing them as just another partisan is an uncharitable response. Which, ironically, is typical of partisans.
Neither the paper nor the original comment said the most partisan commenters are wrong. It found a strong correlation between how partisan a social media user is and how often they post.
You're being uncharitable by assuming the commenter is disagreeing that with the point that the Overton window has moved. Which, I've heard, is typical of partisans.
And you are replying to a partisan user.
Not sure why this is relevant.
The paper says partisanship is strongly correlated with frequency of posting. Are you also pointing out that the commenters here are very partisan and this shows the paper is correct?
It is relevant, reread it.
Best I can tell, you're indicating that more partisan users post more, as the paper found.
The problem is that "partisan" doesn't automatically mean "wrong".
People wield "the middle" as if it is some magic incantation that makes them correct or immune to criticism. In fact, it is generally the "middle" or, as I prefer to call them, the "inert" that tend to be wrong since they are always behind the curve rather than ahead of it.
In Milgram's experiment, only the most "partisan" refused to deliver the shocks. The "middle" dutifully continued right to the end and delivered the highest voltages even as their own distress mounted.
You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
I am ok with being called inert. In the context, this would suggest I am less easily swayed than most.
That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
Someone very famous who predates social media had words for you:
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
... There are layers to your post that need to be properly disassembled to be properly appreciated. And I assure you that I do appreciate it. Deeply. ...
<< That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
It is bold of you to assume that your ideas are correct and, consequently, my ideas are not.
It is not just bold, but also kinda well, not smart, to assume what my ideas are. For all you know, I believe circles are, in fact, round. Are you going to argue against roundness of circles now?
But to top of it all off with a quotable quote that seems like it should mean something, and yet manages to mean nothing, because, apart from it being -- lets say -- misapplied in general, it is also ridiculously wrong in the context.
How does work for an outright rejection?
We can stop talking now. We have no useful thoughts to exchange.
There isn't exactly a "curve" to be behind, just as there isn't one single "history" that you can end up "on the wrong side of". Politics is just the constantly shifting borders in a formalised war for power between different groups, long term there is no single direction of "progress".
>You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
This is the correct view, in the sense that if you don't belong to some kind of tribe, you'll get ripped off by someone who does. The inert group are not wrong, but by participating less than the others in the battle for their collective self interest, they will end up being the ones taken advantage of.
(De)legitimation is the dominant meta. Much more than arguing on the merits of ideas, folks argue on the legitimate status of their opponents real or perceived stance. A lot of it attempts to play to the audience rather than either side open to changing their minds. That's how I read it at least.
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Jan 6 suggests those are merely tourists, not terrorists, even if they are trying to assassinate the VP.
All of the people there were trying to assassinate the VP? How come no one's been charged for assassination attempt?
"According to an F.B.I. affidavit the panel highlighted ... a government informant said that members of the far-right militant group the Proud Boys told him they would have killed Pence 'if given the chance.' The rioters on January 6th almost had that chance, coming within forty feet of the Vice-President as he fled to safety."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington...
Sorry I didn't catch that, how many? And government informant? This is your source?
What is your argument? That not every person there was trying to kill Mike Pence?
There sure were a lot of people in that crowd chanting "Hang Mike Pence" but I guess if your point is just that not all of them were doing it then I suppose you're right.