Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)

The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping.

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.

Do you remember how these things were called social NETWORKS, as in something you navigate and explore? Then they gradually became social MEDIA, as in something you consume...

<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

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 U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago.

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.

Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment:

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.)

After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.

This is just manufacturing consent for requiring ID and face scans to use social media.

COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.

i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see:

(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.

> As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).

The social media cycle:

1. Quality brings success

2. Success brings popularity

3. Popularity brings idiots

4. Idiots destroy quality

SM gives negative value, it is antisocial media and an experiment on human beings no one signed up for.

It would be interesting to see if the harms reported from social media go up or down. I can see people who want to make the case that harms are going up, but if use is coming down it would not be correlated.

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.

Shifts in U.S. Society, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization

Social media just reflects the state of its users.

One factor that I didn't see mentioned is enshittification. The platforms are prioritizing monetization at the expense of everything else. It's making the experience worse and, as a result, people are gradually leaving.

This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion.

"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.

AI slop or slop adjacent content will be the death knell for social media. Social media got soo big because it provided some pleasure to people and like anything that's plentiful, after a while you get sick of it. AI accelerates the volume of content, and also adds even more low value context into the mixer, and will accelerate how quickly society reaches the boredom phase again.

That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect

Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.

> Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

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.

Monetization through advertising is urinating in the pool

So... people actually converse and have civil debates on social media? I wouldn't know, I'm not on Facebook.

I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.

GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated.

Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?

I find the idea of "partisans" eg. affective idiots throwing tantrums over each other's because of some absurd current topic while everybody just leaves quitly somehow little amusing.

Deleting my Facebook account was the best thing I ever did. I did it nearly 10 years ago and never looked back. I don’t miss it or miss out.

Worked in the top 3 here

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

The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!

In the past, I could go onto Facebook and see what my friends were up to, and share updates with them about what I was doing. It was great for arranging nights out.

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.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

I feel like we're all glossing over the whole "pedophile billionaires colluded to throw the United States into chaos" part.