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.
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.
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Reducing Polarization on Social...
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts...
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.
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.
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."
Bluesky COO Rose Wang On Building a Better Social Network
Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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.
The Nightmare of Eternal Spring: Why Social Media Can't Survive on "Niceness" Alone - Nightflight
Media and Social Capital
We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Guided by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital—from social and political participation to interpersonal trust—in its benign and destructive manifestations. The impact of media technologies hinges on their content (information versus entertainment), their effectiveness in fostering coordination, and the networks they create as well as on individual characteristics and media consumption choices.
Declaration of Social Media Rights
Five fundamental rights we need for a free, open, and humane social media ecosystem
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.
I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
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)
