Have We Passed Peak Social Media?
Saturday, October 4, 2025. This is for my gentle reader, Joe Milam.
Social media once felt like the mall on a Saturday — crowded, noisy, fluorescent, alive. Today it feels like a mall in decline: the lights buzz, the escalator groans, and the only kiosk left is an AI screen trying to sell you sunglasses no one wants.
In 2025, Meta and OpenAI doubled down on this ghost mall.
Meta launched Vibes, an AI-powered short-video feed. OpenAI rolled out Sora, a TikTok-style platform where every single clip is synthetic.
If that sounds less like“social media” and more like a novelty conveyor belt, you’re catching on.
And just as they flooded the feed with auto-generated spectacle, people started slipping quietly out the side door.
The Peak and the Slide
The high-water mark was 2022. A Financial Times analysis of GWI data — hundreds of thousands of adults across 50+ countries — shows daily time on social media has fallen nearly 10% by 2024, especially among the teens and 20-somethings who once treated these apps as oxygen.
Yes, the daily average is still hefty — about 2h20m globally (DataReportal) — but the key is the direction. The trendline isn’t climbing anymore. It’s kinda curling down.
This is hard to see because North America is the outlier: still scrolling, still outraged, usage 15% higher than Europe. If Europe has left the mall, Americans are still standing at the food court, waiting for a fucking Cinnabon that never comes. But research tells us change is in the wind.
From Social to Anti-Social
Once upon a time, people joined Facebook to see their cousins’ kids. Now they open TikTok to kill time before bedtime.
The shift is stark: the number of people who say they use social media “to stay in touch” has cratered; those who say they open it “to fill spare time” has surged (FT/GWI).
That’s not social engagement. That’s anesthesia.
Is it morphing into some sort of anti-social media? Anyway you slice it, from a global perspective, it’s no longer the town square; it’s just the waiting room TV.
In my writing on Limbic Capitalism, I’ve argued this is junk food for attention: dopamine-dense, engineered for craving, devoid of nutrition. The rest of the world has already caught on.
Enshittification and the Synthetic Flood
Cory Doctorow coined the perfect word for the lifecycle of social media : enshittification.
Social media platforms start out charming, then pivot to advertisers, and finally become hostile to everyone except shareholders.
AI has sped up the rot.
When the cost of content drops to zero, so does the value of your presence.
Your vacation photo is garnish on an endless buffet of AI reels.
Already, Sora and Vibes have raised alarms: deepfake violence, copyright chaos, and the creeping sense that the internet has become an unmitigated slop fest.
What began as human connection now looks like a test kitchen for synthetic distraction.
The Human Cost
The argument about whether social media “causes” mental illness is mostly a distraction. The better question is: what is it doing to the texture of daily life?
A massive 2025 meta-analysis — 143 studies, 1.1 million adolescents — found small but consistent links between social media time and internalizing symptoms like anxiety and depression (Orben et al., 2025).
A review of social media overload shows information floods and constant notifications predict exhaustion and withdrawal (Zhang et al., 2025).
Restriction experiments, where people cut back, often barely nudge mood scores. Which tells us the problem isn’t just how much — it’s what kind (Schmuck et al., 2025).
Pew Research finds 45% of U.S. teens now say they spend too much time online. Nearly half report trying to cut back.
From my chair as a Marriage and Family Therapist:
Couples often scroll in parallel solitude.
Parents vanish into reels, children tend to follow.
Partners snap at each other, primed by an ambient outrage.
Intimacy collapses under the sugar rush of novelty.
It’s like bad couples therapy: endless talking, no listening, and a third party egging you on to fight harder.
After the Feed
People don’t abandon the internet. They migrate.
We’re already watching it happen:
Private chats instead of public feeds.
Hobby Discords over global platforms.
Newsletters instead of timelines.
And a modest return to the unthinkable: offline rituals.
Sprout Social finds users want one-to-one connection, not infinite churn. Deloitte predicts hyperscale AI video will eventually dominate the algorthym metrics, but the real action will be in smaller, fragmented communities.
The future isn’t post-internet. It’s more like post-feed.
What Next?
Here’s where we are headed:
The Ghost Mall: The platforms keep humming, but they’re hollow. Social media as background noise, not as a cultural epicenter.
The Private Turn: Human connection moves to smaller, slower spaces — group chats, closed communities, real-world rituals. They’re harder to monetize, and harder to watch.
The Synthetic Spectacle: AI slop takes over “time spent” metrics. Folks will binge, and then burn out. The machine doesn’t care — it measures minutes, not meaning.
Final thoughts
None of these futures restores what social media once promised. But they do force us to ask: what do we want technologically-assisted human connection to look like?
If this really is the end of the “social” era, I won’t mourn the feeds.
I’ll text: Come over. We’ll look each other in the eye — rarer than any algorithmic trick.
Because the real novelty now isn’t infinite content. It’s bestowing human attention upon each other.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Deloitte. (2025). Digital media trends survey. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption-habits-survey/2025.html
Doctorow, C. (2023, January 21). TikTok’s enshittification. Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Meta. (2025, September 25). Introducing Vibes: A new way to discover and create AI videos. Meta Newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2025/09/introducing-vibes-ai-videos/
Orben, A., Przybylski, A. K., & Dienlin, T. (2025). Social media use and adolescent mental health: A meta-analysis of 143 studies. Journal of Adolescent Health, 76(2), 200–214. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38913335/
Pew Research Center. (2025, April 22). Teens, social media, and mental health. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social-media-and-mental-health/
Schmuck, D., et al. (2025). Restricting social media use: A meta-analytic review of experimental interventions. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 23456. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-90984-3
Smart Insights. (2025, February). Global social media research summary. Smart Insights / DataReportal. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/
Sprout Social. (2025). The state of social media 2025. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/the-state-of-social-media/
The Financial Times. (2025, October 3). Have we passed peak social media? FT. https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a863
The Guardian. (2025, October 4). OpenAI’s Sora app plagued by violent and racist images. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/04/openai-sora-violence-racism
Wired. (2025, September 30). OpenAI launches Sora: A TikTok-like app for AI-generated video. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/openai-launches-sora-2-tiktok-like-app/
Zhang, L., et al. (2025). Social media overload and its effects: A meta-analysis. Information & Management, 62(1), 103-117. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585325000097