Analysis: Time spent on social media platforms peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, especially among teens and twentysomethings
When I post on Instagram, which happens rarely now, it's primarily to offload gig tickets or reshare a post from someone else. Mostly, I casually scroll through other people’s stories or use the messaging feature. The last time I posted on the grid was March 2020. Unlike many who might have turned to social media for connection while we were all stuck at home, I quickly withdrew from the information overload and never quite got back into it.
I gave up on Twitter (now X) not long after (though I still haven’t deleted my account). My Facebook feed gets the odd annual glance, but I maintain my account because Messenger is (inexplicably) where all my family group chats are.
Lately, however, it feels like I’m not the only one quietly observing social media rather than actively partaking in it. This downward trend in social media use is well documented. Time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to a recent Financial Times analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries.
From Financial Times, time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline
The study found 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% since 2022. The decline was most pronounced among teens and those in their 20s. (North America, however, where social media use continues to climb, bucked the trend with 15% higher levels of consumption than Europe by 2024).
Elsewhere in the FT, Jo Ellison writes about how it's now "cool" to have less than 500 followers and a private account. In The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka has written both about growing the "posting ennui" and why it’s cool to have no followers now. Chayka writes that we might be heading towards a "Posting Zero": "a point at which normal people—the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses—stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure."
So has the novelty of sharing our lives online reached its natural conclusion? Has our relationship with privacy and being seen online changed? Are we being driven off platforms by warped algorithms, AI generated content and a stream of #gifted and #sponsored posts from celebrities and influencers?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Dr Constance de Saint Laurent from Maynooth University, on why AI could turn people off social media
The answer might just be all of the above. "I think we are definitely turning away from social media and it's been a long time in the making," says Dr Constance de Saint Laurent from the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University. "If you look at how people have been feeling about social media for about the past 10 years, the feeling has been quite negative. All the misinformation probably puts people off a lot. But it's not just that, it's also the feeling that we spend too much time online and that it's replaced absolutely everything when it shouldn’t."
De Saint Laurent points to the general 'enshittification' of the internet, a term coined by journalist Cory Doctorow to describe the gradual degradation of online platforms over time. "The more we fall out of love with social media the less we use it in ways that create a positive experience for others, so we stop posting, for instance. We're still there watching but we stop posting, which makes your feed feel more like a giant advertisement, which is quite unpleasant. It's slowly going downhill."
For a long time social media has benefitted from the bandwagon effect, she says. "We all know it's bad but we're all on there, so although we know there are other platforms that could be better, it's really hard to move there if no one is doing it."
From BBC Global, why did our friends stop posting on social media?
Now, we've reached a "tipping point" where people are using social media less. "Although, if you look at it, the global usage is going down but it's still way too much of our time that we spend mindlessly across scrolling online. So I'm not sure we can call that a victory yet."
"The big social media companies have been quite terrible because they have business models where they exploit our attention and they exploit our need for shocking news," says de Saint Laurent. "But social media has had amazing uses for minorities, for marginal people, where you can find other people who think like you and you feel a little bit less like a weirdo, or share a great strategy on how to to deal with a lot of different issues."
De Saint Laurent says that she spent many hours on mom forums when breastfeeding. While she, of course, came across misinformation on vaccines, "you also have a lot of community that we don't have anymore in real life, especially myself as a migrant it was great to have that. We tend to ignore that a little bit. So the issue is not necessarily social media, it's the one(s) we're using, and it's a bit of a shame that we are not always replacing that with positive social media use."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Ciara O'Brien, Business & Technology Journalist at the Irish Times on the rise and fall of social media platforms
But has the "social" aspect of social media gone or is it just harder to find? "It is a bit of a chicken and egg issue," she says. It seems people first started to post less around six to seven years ago, at which point "Meta, especially Facebook, started having issues with the fact that people were posting a lot less private stuff" and moved to the type of feeds pushing content from advertisers and people you don't know.
The downturn in posting, at first at least, "didn’t seem to come from social media fatigue as much as the realisation for most people that you could not post private pictures anymore and be fine with it", De Saint Laurent explains. "There was a realisation that what we say online matters, so people started becoming a lot more careful. Then, slowly, platforms, instead of trying to think what kind of privacy settings would make people more comfortable sharing things, they were like, OK, they are still watching so we're going to push this content they watch because they don't see anything interesting from their friends anymore. This is also the period where they realised how much money they could make from advertisement."
There was a bit of a "double movement" where both evolved at the same time, says de Saint Laurent. The social media companies realised "we can make money from all this sponsored and bad content, and anyway people don't really want to post anymore."
You can't go anywhere without wondering if the content you're reading is AI generated or not, and if it's completely inaccurate because of that
Sometimes we see trends online that try to recapture some of the authenticity that we liked about social media in the early days, whether it’s unfiltered non-aesthetic posts or 'photo dumps’ that, at least on the surface, come across less curated. "I’m not sure what will be the solution, but there is clearly an appeal to try to reclaim that," she says. "The whole Bluesky thing was this kind of semi-decentralised network. There was a moment where it felt like with Elon Musk destroying Twitter it could be the next thing - it's not really going anywhere I wouldn't say, they are not reaching a mass that is significant."
"But there are reasons to believe that at one point something might happen, especially because AI is destroying the Internet so much," she says. "You can't go anywhere without wondering if the content you're reading is AI generated or not and if it's completely inaccurate because of that. So I suspect that there is something of this free, open space of the Internet that will have to change in some ways, and once that happens it might create the spaces for new forms of social media that recapture the bits of the early days, that’s my hopeful wish for the future."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
