From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell
Communities are different online and off, and pluralism that thrives in the real world can turn toxic in the digital world.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
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"?
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA
There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.
yoou.social (@yoousocial.bsky.social)
a social media that’s simple, beautiful, and built for you - not for advertisers. powered by atproto.
Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:
Free Our Feeds
Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter
The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."
eny.social – built for you
The way social media should be. Not built for corporations. Not built for clicks. Built for you.
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
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. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1 preprint w/ Richard Rogers
🐝 Social Media (SB Commentary)
things I said about social media
Bee 🐝 (@sweetbee.vip)
Bee 🐝 (@sweetbee.vip)
Bee 🐝 (@sweetbee.vip)
