Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.

It's obvious why we hate social media

We need better internet platforms. We're already building them.

As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren't people, says study

A big chunk of those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your Twitter account may not be coming from human hands.

People, Not Posts - Real Housewives of San Francisco

Why do we still call it "social media"?

People, Not Posts - Real Housewives of San Francisco

Why do we still call it "social media"?

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image 📝 #WSocial state of the network - Friday July 10th 📣 for those who are curious about it, considering the enthusiastic endorsement by prestigious European institutions #OpenData allows me to crunch numbers. On day 23 since its beta launch in Brussels, W Social has 11291 accounts: - 469 new users since yesterday - 899 users have published one or more posts - 72 new users posting since yesterday - 92% have never* published a single post *may be related to #WIdentity and its 13-step process

1 Year on the AT Protocol: Part I - Real Housewives of San Francisco

Putting Social Media Back on the Internet

1 Year on the AT Protocol: Part I - Real Housewives of San Francisco

Putting Social Media Back on the Internet

1 Year on the AT Protocol: Part I - Real Housewives of San Francisco

Putting Social Media Back on the Internet

Platform Stats — blogs.social

Discover and follow blogs across Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and the open social web.

Directing the Herd

Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows.

It’s time for movements to rethink social media

Movements can still find people on social media. But the real organizing has to happen somewhere else — and that's the part we keep skipping.

Sex workers are the unlikely beneficiaries of Twitter Blue

“Twitter is the biggest adult-friendly platform out there.”