Post-social media studies

Petter Tornberg, at Bluesky:

"Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met.

But we're still studying social media like it's 2010.

We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up."

"Exhibit A: in a recent antitrust filing, Meta argued it isn't a social media monopoly because it isn't really a social media company anymore.

Only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers."

"For two decades, "social media" meant a specific setup: users produced content, content circulated through social ties, platforms extracted value from mediating this.

Networked publics, digital trace data, platformization — a generation of research rested on that configuration."

"Three dynamics are now dissolving it.

First: the algorithmic shift.

Platforms moved from social graphs to interest-based recommendation.

You see what the model predicts will hold your attention, not what your network shared. TikTok set the template; everyone copied it.

The social network is dead."

"We are no longer commenting or even liking. Just watching.

Likes, shares, comments — "active" signals — are being displaced by watch time, dwell time, scroll hesitation. Preference is inferred from micro-reactions.

The 'prod-user' has become the user-spectator."

"Second: generative AI is breaking the link between platforms and human content production.

Over 40% of long-form Facebook posts likely AI-generated by late 2024. More than half of long-form LinkedIn posts in 2025.

"Slop" is the word of the year."

"Platforms aren't just tolerating this — they're building it in. Meta launched AI Studio and piloted its own AI personas. X put Grok in the interface. If engagement is the metric, it doesn't matter whether a human or a model produced the content.

Users have become optional."

"Third: a retreat from public posting. A ~50% drop in posting on Facebook and X between 2020 and 2024 (see my previous thread).

Ordinary public participation is hollowing out, while sustained conversation moves to WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, Substack."

"So 'social media' is fragmenting into three post-social formations:

(a) Algorithmic broadcasting platforms — few-to-many flows from creators, brands, and bots, delivered as personalized feeds. Broadcasting, but individualized. Endpoint: the fully synthetic feed."

"(b) Semi-private spheres — group chats, invite-only communities, subscription spaces. Reciprocity over reach, trust over virality. Structurally invisible to most existing research methods.

"The claim isn't that social media is dead (yet). It's the assumptions that made it coherent as an object — human production, social circulation, public observability — can no longer be presupposed.

We need new concepts and methods capable of studying what comes next."