In the years to come, historians may well mark 2025 as the moment the decline of social media truly began. What was once an undisputed force shaping social interaction, public discourse, and even individual behaviour has started to fracture under the weight of two converging pressures – AI and censorship.
The first is generative artificial intelligence, with its ability to produce text, images, and videos seemingly out of thin air. Authenticity and humanity, once the defining promise of social media, have largely evaporated. In their place is an endless stream of slop: a homogenous fog of recycled platitudes that masks any genuine human connection. As more individuals and organisations deploy AI-generated content to inflate reach and reinforce bot armies, social media is increasingly being produced by machines and consumed by machines, with real human engagement pushed to the margins.
The second force accelerating social media’s collapse is censorship. As Israel’s brutality in Gaza has continued, millions of people across the world have turned to digital platforms to protest and document it. That visibility, however, has been met with systematic efforts to suppress dissent. For Israel and its allies, social media has emerged as the next critical battlefield.
From public declarations by Benjamin Netanyahu to coordinated pressure by the Israeli lobby in the United States, the direction of travel has been unmistakable. The sale of TikTok to Israeli-linked billionaire Larry Ellison and his firm Oracle, algorithmic changes on Twitter under Elon Musk that have throttled critical voices, and the elevation of Israel-aligned figures such as Bari Weiss into senior editorial roles at legacy institutions like CBS all point to the same reality. Both the infrastructure and the narrative space of social media are being tightly managed.
This trend is reinforced by long-running policy experiments in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where access to social media is increasingly tied to digital identification and large sections of the internet are being barred to those under sixteen. Together, these measures have created a sanitised, heavily policed online environment.
The internet, and the vast domain once occupied by social media, is now controlled, propagandised, and increasingly populated by machines producing mountains of meaningless content to drown out dissent. In 2026, this slide is set to continue, and the great connector of the past two decades may finally begin its irreversible downfall.
