GWI: Time spent on social media globally peaked in 2022 and is steadily declining; North America is the exception, with usage up 15% in 2024 compared to Europe
Time spent on the platforms is declining in every age group, though is most pronounced in younger generations … Stefano Santinelli : AI floods our feeds - and social media's ceiling is showing. — 📊 The Financial Times highlights a critical shift … Bluesky: Alberto Acerbi / @acerbialberto.com : Society adapts to technology. — Link to Financial Times article: www.ft.com/content/a072... [image] Philip Stafford / @staffordphilip : Social media use looks like it's on the decline except in two areas, the over 55s and N America. — Which would explain a lot. — www.ft.com/content/a072... Christopher Mims / @mims : With rare exceptions like all my 38 year old friends on Bluesky, social media just doesn't seem all that social anymore [embedded post] Alex Hern / @hern : My big question for this is the extent to which it's demand vs supply driven. My hunch is that people's preference for keeping up with their friends is undiminished, but we've seen a boom-bust cycle in people's desire to see the more easily-monetised churn of influencer content and now pure slop [embedded post] Scott Horton / @robertscotthorton : In years to come, we may well look back on Sep 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through an Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do. Threads: Eric Benjamin Seufert / @eric_seufert : “It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.” https://www.ft.com/... Mastodon: Miguel Afonso Caetano / @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org : “It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. … Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. / @BenjaminHCCarr@hachyderm.io : Have we passed peak #socialmedia? — As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away — It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 #adults in more than 50 countries. … Forums: Msmash / Slashdot : Have We Passed Peak Social Media?
Context & Ripple Effects
The finding broadens a fragmented picture of the social web: earlier coverage documented platform disruption, including user unrest and product changes across major social services, rather than a simple migration from one app to another.
It also puts the reported decline in X’s US mobile audience in a wider attention-market context. The North American and over-55 exceptions matter because they show that aggregate saturation is uneven across regions and cohorts.
First-order effects
- Platforms and advertisers gain a less growth-friendly benchmark for audience attention: time spent is falling across age groups globally, especially among younger users, while North America and over-55s remain relative pockets of resilience.
- GWI’s cross-country data shifts the immediate focus from raw account reach to engagement time, making regional and age segmentation more consequential for campaign and product assessment.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies may have to work harder to sustain impressions and engagement among younger audiences outside North America, reinforcing the slower social-ad spending growth already observed in the 2022 social advertising outlook.
- Platforms competing for younger users face greater pressure to win share of a shrinking time-spent pool; this favors products that can demonstrate distinct engagement rather than relying on category-wide usage growth.
Third-order effects
- If the decline persists, social media’s economics could shift from expanding total attention to reallocating a more constrained pool among platforms, formats, regions, and age groups.
- The uneven pattern suggests that global platform strategies will be less reliable as a single playbook: mature markets and older cohorts may monetize differently from younger and non-North American audiences.
The trend: Social media is moving from broad, time-spent expansion toward a mature attention market in which growth depends more on segment-specific engagement than on rising overall usage.