Is social media over?

Disquiet has been growing for years over the impact of social media on our brains, political discourse and – ironically – social connections.

But now the UK government’s independent terror legislation watchdog is warning that it has become a “portal to horrific acts of violence”.

The “most important development” is happening in Australia, said Jonathan Hall in The Telegraph, where a ban on social media for under-16s came into force in December. Although “partial and circumventable”, the world-first law has “echoes of other improving social legislation such as compulsory seat belts and the smoking ban”. Britain should “take back control” from the tech giants through similar legislation.

But the government may not need to: recent polling has found that nearly a third of social media users post less than they did a year ago.

What did the commentators say?

“It’s hard to think of anyone whose life has not been influenced by social media,” said Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. As an author, journalist and introvert, it “probably changed my life more than most.” But “the madness seeped into real life with increasing frequency”. Social media “made millions of us really quite dysfunctional”.

But what’s “killing social media more than the pile-ons and abuse” is that “it’s not social any more”. In 2025, I deleted LinkedIn, I’m down to two Facebook posts a year, and my X account is “sleepier than a Sunday morning on Sark”. And “I’m not alone”.

According to a Financial Times analysis of data on 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries, time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has been steadily declining ever since. This is “not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time” during lockdown – “usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus”. We may look back on 2025 as the moment social media “jumped the shark”.

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X have become “a concentrated sludge of conspiracy theories, violence, porn, spam, trolls, scams and AI”, said Kristina Murkett on UnHerd. But this week Reddit overtook TikTok as Britain’s fourth most-visited social media platform. It has seen an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches in the past two years, surprising given that it’s “utilitarian, unaesthetic and decidedly unglamorous”.

These are “precisely the reasons why it may appeal”. Comments are confined to subreddits, everyone is anonymous, and there are “multiple layers of moderation” that make it feel safer than “the Wild West of Meta or X”. Reddit “still feels human”. Its success is “a timely reminder” of what people want.

“What if we tried to make media that was truly social, without AI slop and political scapegoating?” asked Annalee Newitz in New Scientist. One possibility is “cosy media”, such as a group chat or online book club, “designed to help you connect with small groups of friends” and to limit your interactions with strangers. The game Animal Crossing is “an iconic cosy-media experience”. Social media “often leads to loneliness and isolation” – but the idea behind cosy media is to “rebuild community and trust”.

Indeed, there are a “whole set of new apps” we might call “slow social networks”, focused on connection, said The Independent. Location apps such as Find My Friends and Life360, exercise networks like Strava or music trackers like Airbuds, are “about the relatively simple but profoundly beautiful experience of knowing what your friends are up to”. They also remind us that “the social in social network did once mean something, perhaps something more important than anything else in the world”.

What next?

The social media landscape is “arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul”, said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. TikTok may end up being banned; generative AI “may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet”. Both Meta and OpenAI have announced new social platforms for AI-generated short-form videos.

Two “Silicon Valley veterans” (Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded Pinterest) have launched a new “intentional living” app, Tangle. It is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation of the human mind and heart” they say has been wrought by social media, said the Financial Times. They are “among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built”.