Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
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.
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.
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).
The Discords I'm active in are all everyday conversations, like big group chats. Some of them are funny/interesting and occasionally someone gives useful advice, but the vast majority are forgettable.
I think that people should publicly share valuable information (like great conversations or useful advice) and some of their typical conversations (a context summary for outsiders and history). But privacy and ephemeral-ness make people more open. It may be better to have a space for most conversations where they're not expected to be saved, or (because "not expected" in Discord relies on weak evidence and today's norms) guaranteed not to be saved.
My wife and I were recently talking about how we kind of luck boxed into dodging a bullet when we had kids (which was rather late). But it's no wonder so many people had or are having so many issues growing up in a public social media era. It's not only your right, but responsibility, to say, believe, and generally do stupid things as a kid and a young adult. It's an important part of growing up. Nobody should ever have to worry about this period in their life following them around forever.
The point of this sort of thing is that whether it is fake or not doesn't matter. Because it is possible for someone to record a log of your activities, someone claiming they have an incriminating log of your activities will be believed (By a very large number of people).
It might not be believed in a courtroom, but for the other 99.99% of life, we do not apply the same standards for reviewing evidence.
Whether the platform keeps logs isn't important - the platform won't weigh in on this sort of stuff anyways, unless there's a subpoena.
Only if it's public. There are many private Discord servers.
The way they do it is that the default set of permissions is basically none, but then there's a server role which actually gives you permissions to see the channels and post in them. So, anyone can join the server, but only people who have been granted this role (e.g. by admin) can do anything on it, or even see others.
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.
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 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).
healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...
because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?
its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.
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.
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.
In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.
The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.
I could barely find any updates from my friends, my feed is now an endless stream of AI-generated videos.
What's the use for that?
You're right though, rarely do people post to their own timeline these days. I think it's the 90:9:1 social media stasis playing out.
And it's better than Reddit because it's more personal and you get to meet people or even make friends..?
It would be like a reputable industry conference putting a troupe of low budget clowns doing carnival tricks in front of their entrances.
My mom, for instance, she might just scroll through all the slop and even believe it's all true, and click on an ad every once in a while—perhaps by mistake.
There are still the Facebook groups, and I really wish we had forums instead of those.
I saw this on youtube yesterday. It is some animation directors micro social media website, limited to 50 people.
I dont care for the ethereum. But wouldnt it be cool if major social media platforms were like this?
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 rest are just going ‘WTF is this shit?!?’
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?
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.
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."
<< 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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 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.
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.
This is unavoidable. "The dignity of the platform" is a euphemism for moral cowardice masquerading as reason and civility.
Someone like Charlie Kirk - a bigoted troll who used "debate" as a weapon - would have fitted right in here, because he couched his bigotry in a civil manner.
MLK is relevant here, in his description of "moderates":
> more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
Some other references:
"Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/28/centri...
"Can the Center Hold Any Meaning?": https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/political-centr...
"A Critique of Pure Tolerance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
Status quo and its increasingly damaged institutions are some of the few things that keep events from spiraling out of control.
And I would personally abstain from spitting on Kirk's grave. At the rate things are going, it is hardly a given a newcomer will be willing to talk at all. [edit: overtly antagonizing section removed]
Reminds me of the trial of Socrates...
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.
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.
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.
Disagreements on the best day to provide services to the public are still attempting the same common objective.
Disagreements on which people will have their rights removed are not a "let's agree to disagree" sort of thing.
[1]https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/o/p.tornberg/k.p.tornberg.ht...
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 would say the opposite of partisan would be someone who actively seeks to understand and relate to the views of those who they disagree with, or who are from their out-group. This would also imply independence of thought.
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.
There's still great stuff out there, it's still as hard to find and navigate as it has always been. It's still as shady and as illegal (if you care about copyright) as it has always been. Most people still don't bother to do it, you just became a part of that category.
Here, let me try snapping you out of that bubble a little bit and make you one of the today's lucky ten thousand: find a category that interests you on fmhy(.)net (SFW, I promise), see how long it takes you to spot something you had no idea existed outside your bubble.
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 '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.
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?
It's devisive as much as it can be.
Vocal minorities vary but tend just to excite the others, not to affirm any point.
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.
Hyper-monetization killed it all
One thing is true: actual, active socializing is happening in chat apps (and Discord), not FB, X, or IG.
The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened.
Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12].
Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking."
Yup, nothing unexpected here.
1. "social media" is toxic
They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media.
This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter.
2. There is no central social media network anymore
I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c:
"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"
A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center.
(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)
I have 14 and 16 year old sons and they, and their friends, have the same feeling about social media. Their preferred way to communicate with friends is an iMessage group.
That "if I just browse around, I'll find the nexus of what I'm into" seems to not be a thing for teenagers these days.
It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
In that era I recall several US universities career offices gave students the blanket advice that not having a facebook page would raise an employer's eyebrows.
"(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)"
My impression of the college kids I deal with is that they now all use LinkedIn. (I think? It feels weird even saying that.)
I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years."
He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.
x.com (Twitter) was acquired by xAI. xAI is to be acquired by SpaceX. And rumor has it, SpaceX will IPO for big money soon.
He is just another Lucy, holding just another football.
The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.
I can see how this would change me unwillingly over time. Good wake up call to delete my throwaway account again.
"Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.
I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).
(1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise.
(2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer).
Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.
1. Quality brings success
2. Success brings popularity
3. Popularity brings idiots
4. Idiots destroy quality
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
> Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon...
Written in 2015
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
In short, the problem is ragebait. I might open up some app because I want to see cat videos, but when I'm presented with "Polly McPoliticianface LIES about FLOWERS" I'm likely to click in anger about Polly's nefarious actions. Do this enough and you end up with something that just tries to make you angry all the time.
I'm sure someone with a book to peddle will eventually say measured harms going up and use coming down just shows how toxic it is now.
Social media just reflects the state of its users.
Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing.
Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.
I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.
That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect
Seems false to me. Explosive growth in 2020 during Covid was widely recorded and seeming engagement. Flips of X were associated with massive drops in population and bots.
This seems entirely wrong to me
COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.
Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?
Once upon a time, people saw computers (then the Internet) as a way of lifting people up rather than pushing people down. They saw it as a way of equalizing people's access to knowledge, rather than subjecting them to a fire hose of information. They believed that it would encourage discourse to bring people together, rather than dividing people along ideological lines.
Yeah, we were naive.
Today, it's a dumpster fire, I can't see what anyone is doing, it's just AI videos and engagement bait.
Discord is the replacement for my friends at least.
and
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
Change your Facebook bookmark to one of these.
(I do use them on the desktop)
- worse tracking / privacy
- tilted toward passive consumption / scrolling due to UI and low impulse control threshold
- more vendor dark patterns
- far worse UI experience
- etc ...
Using your phone to consume content is always a bad decision.
Its kind of like treating social media as an addiction that everyone’s uncles “could give up at any time”
I see a parallel to smoking. In one generation everyone did it - at one point thought nothing of it - and in the next generation little kids are like “you know thats bad for you right?” and aren't tempted to use it, looking down on it
I like the trend, even stories are shorter form, I do it now too
Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?