Is the end nigh for social media?

The early years of the 21st century were a period of astounding technological progress.

Many of the concepts we regard as mainstream today debuted in the Noughties, including video streaming, smartphones and home broadband.

It was also the decade when social media platforms arrived.

Every year heralded a new brand which would go onto become hugely successful, including LinkedIn (2002), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006).

These services have dominated our lives for over two decades, while a second generation of companies (notably TikTok and Snapchat) followed in their wake.

Yet a recent series of legal rulings may finally herald the beginning of the end for social media platforms which once seemed ubiquitous – and unconquerable.

Ruling party

In the space of 24 hours, two high-profile court cases concluded in America late last month.

Both were brought on behalf of young women who had become addicted to social media.

Both alleged that social media giants Meta and Google intentionally designed their services to be addictive.

And both cases concluded with the defendants found guilty of causing harm to their users.

Not only were these results profound, but they also negated a core defence relied on by social media platforms – the claim that they’re merely content aggregators, rather than publishers.

It’s the defence that saw Lucy Connolly sentenced to 31 months in prison because of a tweet, while X – the platform the tweet was published on – escaped liability.

It’s also the defence deployed worldwide to defend social media platforms against regulation; how can they be held responsible for the content their users post?

The key difference in the American court cases was the prosecution’s focus on how content is selected and presented by the algorithms which power news feeds and timelines.

You don’t have to be a regular user of social media to know that helpful tools once used to keep in touch with friends have devolved into an endless feed of often irrelevant content.

Algorithms are honed to keep people on-site as long as possible by presenting more and more controversial, extreme or hyperbolic content – often from unrelated ‘suggested’ accounts.

Concepts like the ‘infinite scroll’ and auto-playing videos dominate, especially on TikTok, which is a technicolour tsunami of fast-cut short-form videos offering minimal mental nourishment.

Even LinkedIn has succumbed to an endless timeline of AI slop and irrelevant posts.

And that’s before we consider the many harms propagated via social media nowadays – deepfakes, cancel culture, cyberbullying, echo chambers, toxic influencers, trolling…

Too big to fail?

It would be fanciful to suggest all social media platforms will disappear entirely. YouTube and WhatsApp are too widely used to fail – at least in the short term.

Yet many once-ubiquitous social media sites have already vanished, from Myspace, Flickr and Yik Yak to Friends Reunited, Bebo and Tumblr.

On the same day as those American court rulings, the AI-generated video portal Sora was discontinued, only six months after its launch.

The same day also saw the House of Lords voting in favour of a social media ban for under-16s, mirroring similar political action around the world.

There are legislative echoes of the smoking ban, or even the opioid crisis, with lawmakers suddenly feeling emboldened to tackle a longstanding cause of societal harm.

Although both American court rulings will be appealed, Meta and other social media platforms may now face thousands of individual legal claims and class action lawsuits.

In response, firms could redesign their algorithms to be less addictive, albeit reducing average user engagement times – and thus advertising income, turnover and profitability.

On the consumer side, people are increasingly aware that excessive screen time damages their mental and emotional health, with social media a leading culprit.

And for the first time in social media’s tumultuous history, a rapid decline in usage over the coming years seems likely.

Some portals will survive, particularly those with little competition, but others may find the impending avalanche of legislation and lawsuits impossible to weather.

As politicians look to protect children from excess screen time, and adults recognise the hidden costs of free online services, social media’s golden age is surely over.