Newsletter April 3, 2025

How Social Media Made Us Less Social

Daniel A. Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond, Jae Grace

Ask the average teenager how they spend their time on social media, and you’ll probably get an annoyed expression and a multiplicity of answers. But there is one pattern that has become more apparent. Increasingly, Americans are not using social media to connect with their friends.

In 2024, we asked social media users how often they interact with their friends online. We were shocked to discover how many were not using these platforms to connect with the people they knew.

Less than half (46 percent) of Americans who use social media report that they connect with close friends often when using it. For most Americans, this is an occasional or infrequent part of their social media regime. They’re not using it to connect with more distant relationships either—whether they’re old high school friends or former work colleagues. Only 15 percent of Americans say they talk frequently with people they know but are not close to.

Younger adults tend to be more sociable online than older users, but even these users spend a lot of time engaged in other activities on these platforms. Sixty percent of young adults on social media say they often or always talk with friends when using it. Four in ten young adults say connecting with friends is a sporadic activity.

In 2018, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the platform was meant to “help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us.” If building and maintaining friendship was a core purpose of social media, it’s difficult to argue that many of these platforms are fulfilling their mission.

Perhaps the lack of social activity on social media platforms should not have come as a surprise. There were abundant signs of social media’s turn away from encouraging social connection to encouraging more passive activities.

On popular social media platforms, most of the content is produced by a minority of users. A 2020 study from the Pew Research Center found that 92 percent of the content on X (formerly known as Twitter) was produced by just 10 percent of users. A couple years later, Pew followed up with another study showing a similar pattern on TikTok. Nearly all the TikTok videos on the platform—whether it’s cooking videos, funny dances, clothing hauls or makeup tutorials—are posted by 25 percent of the users. Three-quarters of TikTok users are there to watch, like and swipe. The most popular social media platform—YouTube—is also one that has exponentially more content consumers than producers. Social media has become a place of rapid and repeated consumption rather than one fostering dynamic social engagement.

None of this happened by accident. Facebook implemented paid advertisements only a few years after it launched in 2007. Instagram launched in 2010, and its pictures-first design made it a perfect place for fashion and beauty bloggers of the late 2000s and early 2010s to expand their reach. Shortly after Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, they started rolling out “sponsored posts,” meaning brands could compensate individual content creators for promoting their products. It also meant that individuals could curate a personal “brand” —becoming the product themselves. Now professional content creators dominate many of the platforms producing the vast majority of the material for others to consume. While there are plenty of people who still connect with their friends on Instagram, social media has become a vehicle for selling content—both people and products—to the masses.

The way Americans use social media may be more important than we realized.

Passive social media use is associated with a variety of negative social and emotional outcomes.¹ Young passive users are more likely than active users to say they frequently feel that there is no one they can trust (44 percent vs. 34 percent). Active social media users report feeling more satisfied with the way things are going in their life than those who use these platforms more passively. Young passive users are also 10 percentage points more likely to say that they feel worthless or useless at least once in a while (52 percent versus 42 percent). Another survey found passive social media use was linked to less socializing in the real world. Seventy-one percent of young active social media users report having spent time with friends in the last 7 days, while only 54 percent of passive users say the same.²

Social media, like most technologies, isn’t inherently harmful. It can be incredibly useful. Young adults use social media to crowdsource travel tips, find out about new products, and learn about politics and current events. But when it comes to social media, it matters who is using it, how long they are using it for and the way they use it. There is also growing recognition that many young people are joining these apps too young and spending too much time on them. The average teenager spends nearly five hours online every day. We’re making progress, but we need to address the way young people use social media too.

Americans who frequently engage with their friends on social media are more likely than those who do not to feel more “connected to other people” after using it. One 2023 study found that both reducing time on social media and removing interactions with people you don’t know were associated with better mental health outcomes.

Complaints about perfectly curated content and sponsored posts telling users that they “need” to look a certain way, live a certain lifestyle or own a particular product are common. These posts often serve as reminders of what we don’t have—a boyfriend or girlfriend, a nice car or an exciting job. More social media users are starting to notice. Taylor, a college senior in California, started using social media at an early age, but grew increasingly uneasy about how it was impacting her life.

“[I was] wasting so much time scrolling when I could have been doing, you know, anything else, spending time with my friends or being with my family, doing things that actually brought me a lot of energy. And so last January, I decided to just delete Instagram off my phone. And I have never re-downloaded it.”

There’s a growing interest in returning to the days when social media prioritized conversation and connection. Many social media platforms have simply become tools of performance and passive entertainment. And while we are still attempting to fully reckon with the long-term mental health and social consequences, reclaiming its original purpose may be the key to making it a healthier space.

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¹ We define passive and active social media use based on our 2024 American Gender and Society Survey. Those who indicated they interact with close friends often, almost every time, or every time they use social media are defined as active users. Those who indicated they rarely or never interact with close friends when they use social media are defined as passive users.

² For this question only, we define active and passive use from our 2023 survey, Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence. We define active users as those who indicated they often, nearly always, or always interact with friends when using social media. Passive users are defined as those who indicated they rarely or never interact with friends when using social media.

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