“Social Media Is Increasingly Anti-Social”
“Social media is increasingly anti-social.” So says New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel. Only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time is spent interacting with content from friends or followed accounts. “The rest is algorithmic video from strangers,” he says. In Van Bavel’s opinion, this shift results from algorithms optimizing for watch time rather than real social engagement. “TikTok set the template; everyone copied it,” he said. AI only made things worse, with over half of the long posts on Meta now written by AI. “People are not engaging, or even creating the content on those platforms anymore,” the professor concludes. Does no one find any joy in the act of creation anymore? Van Bavel draws his argument from a newly published paper, “Towards a Post-Social Media Studies,” by University of Amsterdam researchers Petter Törnberg and Richard Rogers. I read this paper, but these guys are light-years sma...