Social Media

The End of Social Media

Algorithms and short-form video drove engagement. They also made it easier to quit.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 10.5.2026 11:15 AM

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(Midjourney)

I joined Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2007, and Instagram in 2012—and I loved them. Really loved them. Especially Twitter. There was a time where my interior monologue happened in tweets.

No one is sadder than me to say it, but social media is over. Dead. Done.

Those platforms still exist. So do newer contenders. But they bear little resemblance to the mediums I fell in love with.

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In Reason's latest print issue, I've got a long piece that attempts to grapple with why and how this tragedy—yes, I'm calling it that unironically—happened. (Come for the pointing fingers at politicians, stay for my personal connection to AOC dancing on a rooftop!) It could have been a much longer article. To keep it tight, we focused mainly on political factors that have hastened social media's decline.

But there's a lot more to this story. So I'm going to use today's newsletter to wax a little nostalgic, flesh out a few more theories, and share some fun commentary from others that didn't make it into the final piece.

How it Started…

First: the nostalgia—a little for nostalgia's sake, a little because understanding what we lost requires understanding what we had. And what we had felt, for a while, fun and friendly and magical. Remember?

A little scene setting, courtesy of the print piece:

When AOC, my friends, and everyone else made these videos, no one was monetizing this content. The point was simply participation. The goal was to have fun. We were young, and so was social media.

A lot of early social media was like that. Cheesy. Collaborative. Pointless. People posted pictures of themselves "planking"—lying face down in weird locales, like the kitchen counter—just to be a part of a trend. They dumped ice water on their own heads and posted it, allegedly for Lou Gehrig's disease awareness but mostly just because it was the thing to do. They posted old photos on #ThrowbackThursday, lists of accounts they liked on #FollowFriday, and the results of whatever BuzzFeed personality quiz was new that week.

There were wedding, party, and conference hashtags, so everyone at an event, or following along online, could catch all the pictures and updates. If you ran into friends, made new friends, or just saw someone you vaguely knew at an event, you absolutely had to take and post a selfie.

We tweeted about where we were going out, and "checked in" to coffee shops on Foursquare. We made surveillance so easy, and we were too caught up in the hype of constant communication to care.

We were all in a big poly-parasocial relationship with one another, but the lines felt blurrier. It wasn't that weird for online friendships to eventually spill over into real life. And it wasn't weird to know—and genuinely care—about the lives of the people you interacted with online. (Perhaps the key to that sentence is "interacted." Social media was a much less passive medium then, and the parasocial-to-just-social bridge gets much shorter when you're mutually interacting day in and out.)

Before it became a platform for fighting, Twitter was a platform "where you had conversations with people and tried out ideas," says Ben Smith—lately of Semafor but once editor-in-chief of that bastion of the old internet, Buzzfeed News. People turned away from it and many of the old-school platforms "because they became toxic and horrible. But also, remember how nice they were?" he asks. "Like, I feel like I know you and we're total strangers. I used to really enjoy your tweets, and you would DM me once in a while and be like, 'great story!' or whatever. And I made a lot of really good friends on there, and it felt like all those........

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