Have we passed peak social media?

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.

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.

To use a nutritional analogy, this is ultra-processed content. Dopamine-dense, with at best negligible informational value, at worst corrosively negative.

There is sadly considerable appetite for this “slop”. It feeds people’s primal instincts, as evidenced by the multibillion-dollar industry of selling ads against videos of bizarrely soothing sights and sounds, people doing outrageous things, “food porn” and, well, porn.

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.

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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 many ways, Meta and OpenAI’s new platforms (AI-generated content is already rife on TikTok and YouTube) are a fitting endpoint for social media’s warped evolution from a place where people swapped updates with friends and family, to one with less and less human-to-human interaction. We have now witnessed the transformation of social media into anti-social media with the progressive disappearance of most people from active participation on the platforms and the steady displacement of real-world interactions by scrolling.

Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing.

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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.

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The evidence that social media causes harm is highly contested, but these debates often fail to account for how the platforms have fundamentally changed from places of connection to isolation and distraction. One of the strongest cases for harm is that time on these platforms is time away from nourishing interactions with other people. If that trend is reversing, it would surely be no bad thing. If it eventually spreads to America, even better.

[email protected], @jburnmurdoch