How social media is changing and what it means for children

For much of the 2010s, social media meant participation. People photographed their breakfast, documented holidays, posted opinions, commented on friends' lives and shared ordinary moments with an audience made largely of people they had chosen to follow.

That version of social media is beginning to feel strangely distant.

Open a major platform today and much of what appears in the feed may have little to do with anyone you know. There are professional creators, brands, news, recommended videos, advertisements, viral clips and, increasingly, AI-generated content. The person you actually followed may appear somewhere between them.

This doesn't mean social media is dying. It suggests something more interesting: social media is separating into two different systems, one built for consuming content and another for maintaining relationships.

And for children growing up inside that transition, the distinction matters.

From the social graph to the recommendation engine

Technology writer Kyle Chayka describes part of this shift in The New Yorker as "posting ennui." The casual, mundane posting that once defined social media has become less attractive as platforms have professionalized and feeds have become increasingly shaped by algorithms, creators and commercial content. Chayka even proposes a possible endpoint: "Posting Zero," a world in which ordinary users largely stop publishing their lives while professional and synthetic content continues to fill the feed.

The technological shift behind this is important.

Traditional social networks were largely organized around a social graph: you selected people or accounts, and the platform showed you what they published. Recommendation-driven platforms operate differently. The system continuously predicts what might hold your attention next, including content from people you have never chosen to follow.

TikTok made this model particularly visible, but the logic has spread across the industry. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and other recommendation feeds increasingly blur the distinction between social network, entertainment platform and personalized television.

The result is a different relationship between user and platform. Participation is no longer required. You don't need to post, comment or even search. You can simply open the app and allow the feed to begin.

How teenagers use social media today

The data doesn't support a simple story that young people are abandoning social media.

In Pew Research Center's 2025 survey, 74% of U.S. teenagers said social media made them feel more connected to what was happening in their friends' lives, while 63% said the platforms gave them a place to express their creativity. At the same time, 45% believed they spent too much time on social media, compared with 36% in 2022, and 44% said they had tried to cut back.

That apparent contradiction is useful.

Teenagers can value what social media gives them while simultaneously becoming dissatisfied with how the platforms capture their time and attention.

Pew's 2026 research makes the changing function of individual platforms even clearer. Entertainment is one of the dominant reasons teenagers use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. On TikTok in particular, roughly eight in ten teenage users describe entertainment as a major reason for being there. Yet connection remains important too: most users across the three platforms say keeping in touch with friends and family is at least one reason they use them.

The same application can therefore function as a television channel, discovery engine, shopping guide, news source and communication system, sometimes within a few minutes.

Calling all of this simply "social media use" increasingly hides more than it explains.

The passive internet changes the problem of screen time

This distinction also changes how we should think about children's screen use.

Two teenagers can each spend two hours on a phone and have almost nothing in common in terms of experience. One may spend the time messaging friends, editing a video, looking up information and watching entertainment. Another may move almost continuously through algorithmically recommended short videos.

The same two hours can involve very different kinds of attention, interaction and engagement.

Pew's 2025 data illustrates why this matters. Forty-five percent of teenagers said social media hurt the amount of sleep they got and 40% said it hurt their productivity. Yet friendships were the one area in which significantly more teenagers said social media helped rather than harmed them.

Social media therefore resists simple classification as either good or bad. Its effects depend partly on what children are doing there.

This is also why "reduce screen time" is an incomplete description of digital wellbeing. Duration matters, particularly when digital activity displaces sleep, school, physical activity or relationships. But duration doesn't tell us whether a child spent an hour creating something, talking to a close friend or moving through a feed designed to remove stopping points.

The American Psychological Association makes a similar distinction in its guidance: adults should pay attention not simply to whether adolescents use social media but to its functionality, content and developmental fit. It specifically identifies features such as recommended content and endless scrolling as relevant to adolescent users.

Social media may be splitting in two

This brings us back to the apparent decline in posting.

If ordinary users publish less, it is tempting to conclude that social media is losing its importance. But the evidence points toward a different possibility.

The media layer is becoming increasingly professionalized, algorithmic and passive.

The social layer is becoming increasingly conversational and private.

Pew found that among teenage Snapchat users, for example, 57% privately message people on the platform every day, while around 30% post or share content daily. Daily posting is lower still among teenage Instagram and TikTok users.

In other words, a teenager can have an extremely active digital social life while maintaining an almost empty public profile.

That changes what "being online" means.

The internet of the next few years may contain less public broadcasting by ordinary people, not more. AI-generated and professionally produced content can fill the public feed almost indefinitely, while human interaction retreats into DMs, group chats and smaller communities.

What this means for children's digital wellbeing

As these changes unfold, the conditions in which children communicate online become increasingly important. Staying in touch with friends remains one reason to return to platforms that also work to hold their attention through recommended content.

Children's digital wellbeing depends in part on how much freedom they have to direct their own attention in this environment: to talk to others, watch what interests them and stop watching when they choose. That freedom is shaped by children's habits and family agreements, as well as by the design of the platforms themselves.

Sources

• Kyle Chayka, "Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?", The New Yorker
• Pew Research Center, Teens' Experiences on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, 2026
• Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and Mental Health, 2025
• American Psychological Association, Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence