Social media is in a death spiral – so what comes next?

On January 20, 2025, during the second inauguration of Donald Trump, the incoming president was flanked by many of America’s most important Big Tech CEOs. Elon Musk (X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Sundar Pichai (Google) occupied prime seats, with Shou Zi Chew (TikTok) not far behind. Their prominence at the ceremony could be seen as a show of strength from Trump’s team, showcasing Silicon Valley’s conversion to its cause after years of opposition. But the decision to place tech leaders centre stage also spoke to their profound influence on politics in 2025, through their collective control of almost everything we see online. What we were looking at, suggested New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, was America’s new “attentional oligarchy”.

Trump himself has made no effort to hide the influence of social media on the 2024 US election. He’s pointed to TikTok as the reason he “won the youth vote” last year (which isn’t entirely true) and has now postponed the ban on the Chinese-owned app that he proposed five years ago. The perceived value of X, meanwhile, helped propel Musk into his circle of closest advisors, and earned the billionaire a special thank you in Trump’s eventual victory speech. The president also walked back his threats to imprison Zuckerberg in the wake of the election, while the Facebook founder expressed his enthusiasm to work with the man he once banned from Meta apps for “incit[ing] violent insurrection”.

None of this has happened by mistake. Meta made a $1 million contribution to Trump’s inauguration fund in December, after Zuckerberg dined with the incoming president at Mar-a-Lago. Google, Microsoft, Uber, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and more made similar donations. 

Money is important, even in an age of political meme campaigns and “earned media” – but an even bigger concern is the cultural shift that came hot on the heels of Trump’s victory. In the last couple of months alone, a slew of major tech companies have abandoned DEI programs and workers’ rights promises. Meta severed its ties with third-party fact-checkers in January (note: right-wing populists tend to benefit most from a misinformed electorate). Some users have even accused TikTok and Instagram of enabling right-wing censorship in the early days of the Republican presidency, including Meta’s alleged shadow-banning of abortion non-profits. And of course, X’s right-wing swing under Musk is undeniable. All of these changes have implications far beyond the US, which has become painfully obvious amid a campaign by social media titans to erode international institutions (see: Elon telling X users, “You are the media now”) and throw their weight behind right-wing populists in Argentina, Germany, Italy and the UK.

How will these changes filter through to the ways our attention is captured, and where it’s directed, in years to come? Many users aren’t sticking around to find out. Millions fled X in 2024, for emerging social networks such as Bluesky. Facebook and Instagram faced a similar backlash thanks to Meta’s policy changes. And relatedly, more than half a million “TikTok refugees” joined competitors RedNote or Lemon8 in January, in response to the fragility of the app’s future in the US (others returned from a briefly-enacted nationwide ban only to find “the vibes were off”, reflecting a widely-held belief that the app’s golden age is over). 

Underlying all this upheaval is the fact that major social media apps just aren’t fun any more. More often than not, their algorithms serve up a torrent of nonsensical, AI-generated slop, boring engagement posts, violent fight videos, porn bots, and right-wing rants. (And that isn’t just a reflection of users’ morbid interests; this content is disproportionately amplified, pretty much across the board.) If you’re still on X, you also have to contend with every dumb opinion that passes through Elon’s brain, while at the other end of the scale, alternatives like Bluesky and Threads are written off as “boring AF” echo chambers.

All of this seems to confirm a suspicion that many of us have held for a long time: social media is broken. The Silicon Valley companies that promised to “bring the world closer together” in the 2000s and early 2010s are now doing the exact opposite, fuelling discontent, inflaming ideological divides and opening the door to a more extreme, authoritarian brand of politics. Meanwhile, their platforms are becoming almost totally unusable for anyone who does, truly, want to “connect”. 

At the same time, simply logging off is not a satisfactory solution. For all its faults, social media has had a positive impact on many people’s lives. People have formed lasting friendships on Instagram, shaped their sense of self on Tumblr or TikTok, and kept track of unfolding events on Twitter. YouTube has been used to organise and document very real struggles for political liberation. And even if we want to abstain from a culture of hedonistic hyper-consumption – the kind denounced by anti-tech writer and artist August Lamm – it’s easier said than done, when so much of our work, leisure and social lives are tangled up with it.

In other words, it’s hard to imagine, given all the connectivity and coordination that social media affords us, that we’d ever willingly give it up for good… unless something better came along. As the internet theorist Joshua Citarella said in a recent episode of his podcast, Doomscroll, “there needs to be a kind of positive proposal” if we want anything to actually change. We need to start thinking hard about what comes next.

The writer and tech critic Mike Pepi has spent a lot of time doing just that. In his new book Against Platforms, he traces the techno-utopian origins of the “platform” – a term that covers social media, alongside software-powered services like Uber or Amazon – and how it usurped traditional institutions as a way to “govern the flow of goods, information, [and] communication” in so many aspects of our lives. In doing so, he also lays out a kind of manifesto (or a guide on what not to do) for how to imagine and build a radical alternative.

“The reason we think that a platform is the ideal form is all embedded in this overarching idea of capitalist expansion and growth” – Mike Pepi

The first point that’s important to make, he suggests, is that platforms – including the social media kind – don’t just appear out of thin air. “Platforms try to appear neutral, and as if they’re kind of natural,” he tells Dazed. In reality, though, the increasing dominance of platforms “is all embedded in this overarching idea of capitalist expansion and growth”. This fundamental aspect of platforms has a significant effect on the way they actually operate. “They’re not really willing to stand up for anything,” as Pepi suggests. “They don’t want to alienate any one political ideology, persuasion or party, because that alienates a potential customer.” (See: Mark Zuckerberg’s shameless 180 on Trump once it became clear he might win the election.) Then, there’s the endless need to expand and maximise profits for shareholders, which doesn’t necessarily align with what’s best for users – or the human race as a whole.

The writer and game designer Ian Bogost is similarly pessimistic about social media’s roots and where it’s headed, writing in the Atlantic in 2022: “It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end – and soon.” Like Pepi, he describes a disconnect between the goals of major tech companies – shaped by venture capitalists and Wall Street investors – and the health and flourishing of humanity, tracing it back to a shift in the very fabric of the tech platform around 2009, when “social networking became social media”. In other words, the platforms changed course: they were no longer about connecting, but about broadcasting content and building your personal brand. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, among other right-wing figures, seem to understand this very well, and have reaped the rewards.

It wasn’t just individual platforms like Twitter or Instagram that drove this evolution away from genuine social networking. For Ellis Hamburger, a former Snap employee and tech reporter for the Verge, it’s “a pattern that all social media apps seem doomed to repeat” thanks to the warped incentives of Big Tech. No matter how utopian their initial goals might be, they appear bound to converge on a familiar protocol: grab users’ attention, hold it as long as possible, and rake in the resulting advertising dollars. Where does this leave us? As Bogost writes in the damning conclusion to his social media takedown: “We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure.”

If that’s the case (and there’s ample evidence to suggest it is) then the answer to our big platform problem probably isn’t: ‘Just build more big platforms!’ Alternatives might come along and talk a big game, but something more fundamental needs to change. As Bogost himself puts it in a 2024 update on the state of social media: the rise of Bluesky “is a relapse, not a fix”. 

One quite radical alternative to the major, centralised social media platforms is the smaller, ‘Balkanised’ communication space that flourishes on platforms like Discord or Substack, Pepi suggests. Yancey Strickler, the founder of Kickstarter and Metalabel, has referred to these spaces as the “Dark Forest” – others have called it Web 2.5. Essentially, it’s a place where users can hide from the algorithmic hype, omnipresent ads, trolls, and data harvesting of the mainstream internet (AKA “clearnet”). Communicating via invite-only group chats, password-protected Discord channels, and subscriber-based newsletters, users also enjoy a greater degree of freedom to share their spiky opinions and radical ideas. On Discord, Pepi notes: “I get my dopamine from not tweeting to 30,000 people, but having a little bit more [of an] interesting, in-depth conversation on the same stuff with 150 people, many of whom I actually know.”

Even these spaces come with their downsides, though. One: by removing themselves from mainstream platforms, users risk retreating even further into their own cultural and political echo chambers. Two: many users depend on mainstream platforms’ size – and massive audience – for income and networking.

“There’s a political problem with [the Dark Forest], too,” notes Pepi. Say you have a favourite political theorist, for example, who you admire for their distinctive insights and ideas. “[That theorist] is on Substack now, and they have 500 subscribers that love their stuff, but they used to have a column at the Guardian, or used to be able to blast all their stuff out on Facebook and Instagram and reach five million people.” If everyone’s retreated into “their own house of mirrors, their own little niche,” he adds: “You have this winnowing down of radical possibilities. If your favorite theorist, who’s providing a post-capitalist vision of the future, is now on Substack or in these Dark Forest spaces, they’re not going to reach an on-the-fence or independent voter.”

Yancey Strickler described something similar in 2019, after he unfollowed everyone and deleted all social apps from his phone. “This was without a doubt a good decision,” he wrote. “I’ve been happier and have had better control over my time since. […] But even as my personal wellness grows, I see a risk in this change.” He made a comparison to the inward turn of hippie culture in the 70s, as documented in Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self, where: “A focus on personal wellness created an unintended side effect: a retreat from the public arena, and a shift in the distribution of power ever since.” Going to hide in the Dark Forest is tempting, but could it entail a similar side effect? Would it really lead to the downfall of mainstream social media, or would it just remove whatever resistance remains on those platforms, clearing the path for Big Tech to seize total power?

Other alternatives for social media focus less on the spaces where users interact, and more on the question of new models for ownership or monetisation, like subcription models (based on the often-cited idea: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”). Another big idea? Nationalisation. Back in 2018, then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn floated the idea of a state-owned Facebook rival that could ensure “real privacy and public control over the data” extracted by Big Tech. In 2021, Ethiopia actually began building its own social media site as a response to Facebook’s alleged incitement of ethnic massacres. And more recently, Japan funnelled taxpayer money into the dating app Tapple, in a bid to fix the nation’s declining marriage and birth rates.

No good state-owned social app has actually materialised, though. The experiments that have been run – in Uzbekistan, North Korea, Cuba, Turkey, and Iran – have been ineffective at best, and at worst have raised big concerns about state propaganda and surveillance. Similar questions are now being asked about newly-minted “special government employee” Elon Musk turning X into a megaphone for the Republican party: do we really want to give any state so much say over the attention and moderation of its citizens?

These are all good questions, but they don’t get us much closer to an answer. On the one hand, you can surrender to the dysfunctional machine that is social media, or let it absorb even more of our institutions. On the other, you can reject it, and throw away any hope of standing up to Big Tech. It’s no surprise, as Pepi says, that the prevailing attitude toward social media in 2025 is “just exhaustion” – but why is it so hard to imagine a meaningful, positive alternative? “I think it’s because of the way digital utopianism has been entrenched in all of the ways that we think,” he explains. “It’s really hard to break out of this dominant ideology.”

“Rather than just dropping out of the Dark Forest and the clearnet, we basically need to put forward a vision of how we can use technology to make our cultural and political institutions more robust” – Mike Pepi

Even so, he adds, you should try: “You can’t be a nihilist.” Criticising the platforms put forward by Silicon Valley doesn’t mean you need to tap out completely, retreat into the forest (real or virtual) or go around smashing up data centres like a 21st-century Luddite. For Pepi, the future lies in institutional reform – in rebuilding the public institutions that have been “eaten” by the profit-driven platforms from Silicon Valley. “Rather than just dropping out of the Dark Forest and the clearnet, we basically need to put forward a vision of how we can use technology to make our cultural and political institutions more robust,” he explains, “not have platform technology extract from our institutions.”

This doesn’t mean returning to the institutions of old (whose failure is partly to blame for landing us in this mess in the first place). “These rejuvenated institutions will look, sound, feel and move differently than those of the previous century,” Pepi writes in Against Platforms, as they’re updated for the digital age. After all: “This is a crisis of political design, not a crisis of technology.” In this sense, the disruption and disorder of the 2010s and 2020s – years dominated by the Silicon Valley elite – won’t have been for nothing. Looking back, those decades contain many lessons to aid in the building of better, more human communication tech, designed “not for the profit goal of a small group of owners but rather for the publics that use them”. That’s the dream, and everyone can play a part in making it a reality – artists, technologists, critics, and politicians alike. When we look at the broken social media landscape today, we might feel angry or exhausted. But we should also feel hopeful. Every pointless porn bot or dumb Elon tweet is a small step toward building something better.