Is the Era of Social Media Ending?

June 15, 2026

Every relationship you have runs on context. The way you talk to your closest friend is not the same way you talk to your manager, your grandparents, or a stranger at a bus stop. You shift register, vocabulary, and disclosure automatically dozens of times a day. The sociologist Erving Goffman called this audience segregation: we perform different versions of ourselves for different audiences, and we rely on those audiences staying separate 1.

Social media broke that, as a structural consequence of putting every audience you have into a single room and asking you to speak to all of them at once. This was intentional and not malicious; we legitimately thought it would be cool to expand the audience!

Upon reflection, we cannot unsee this “context collapse” as the central problem of the social web.

Context Collapse

The media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz first traced this problem to broadcast technology. In No Sense of Place (1985), he argued that electronic media dissolves the walls between social situations that physical architecture used to keep apart 2. The anthropologist Michael Wesch describes speaking into a webcam as speaking to “the infinite possibilities of others,” meaning every imaginable audience, and therefore no specific audience at all 3. Around the same time, danah boyd was documenting how teenagers online lived inside “collapsed contexts,” where parents, employers, classmates, and exes all coexisted on a single profile 4.

In 2011, Alice Marwick and danah boyd studied how Twitter users cope with context collapse. They found that because you cannot see who is actually reading your posts, you write for an imagined audience; your (assuredly incorrect) mental model of who is out there 5. Jenny Davis and Nathan Jurgenson later split the phenomenon into two failure modes: context collusion, where you deliberately mash audiences together (the post meant for “everyone”), and context collision, where audiences you never intended to meet collide by accident: the joke for your friends that your boss reads, the vacation photo your insurer sees 6.

The consequences are consistently corrosive:

  • Self-censorship. When every audience is present, the only safe speech is bland speech. Users retreat to generic, inoffensive posts to avoid blindsiding an audience they cannot see 5.
  • Performance and self-commodification. The flip side of going quiet is going on stage. Posting to an imagined audience turns ordinary sharing into a managed exhibition, curated not for any real person but for the “lowest common denominator” of everyone who might conceivably see it 7. The behaviour it rewards is micro-celebrity: strategic self-branding, optimizing for reaction, and performing authenticity rather than simply being authentic 5.
  • Imagined surveillance and anxiety. Posting to an unknowable crowd produces a low-grade, persistent sense of being watched, never quite sure who is on the other side of the screen 56.
  • Defensive labour. People split into multiple accounts, prune their history, and retreat to ephemeral formats. This is essentially reconstructing the context boundaries the platform removed 5.

The misery so often blamed on “social media” is not primarily about algorithms, dopamine, or advertising. Those don’t help, but the glitch here is architectural. A medium that collapses all of your contexts into one is asking you to be the same person to everyone, forever, and on the record.

Communication technology is not inherently broken. We should treat context collapse as a bug to be designed out rather than an inevitability. Give people back bounded rooms (smaller audiences, conversations that are momentary and intimate, a history that doesn’t trail you forever), and the foundational injury heals. The goal was never to moralize about screen time. It’s to rebuild the walls that let people be authentic, and form real bonds with each other by being different in different contexts.

ESRB Similarities

In 1993, after public demonstrations of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl convened hearings on violence in video games. In February 1994, Lieberman threatened to create a federal commission to rate and regulate games if the industry didn’t act 13. The industry, fragmented and nervous about state control, decided to self-organize: the Entertainment Software Rating Board was founded in 1994, and the voluntary rating system “sufficiently placated the Senate and defused the immediate threat” of a government regulator or an outright ban 14. Three decades later, the ESRB is still a self-regulatory body. Games were never federally rated. The industry kept control by acting before it was forced to.

Social media tried to follow the same playbook, and it tried hard. Over the past decade the platforms poured enormous resources into staying ahead of the regulators: tens of thousands of content moderators, trust-and-safety teams, parental controls, screen-time dashboards, age-verification experiments, independent oversight boards, and one of the largest lobbying efforts in corporate history. The intent to self-regulate was real.

It didn’t work, but the reason why is interesting to contemplate. The games industry’s problem had a clean fix: rate the content, put a label on the box, and the threat dissolved. Context collapse is much harder to deal with. It isn’t a property of any single piece of content you could flag or any setting you could toggle; it’s baked into the shape of the medium itself. You cannot moderate your way out of an architecture. So the good-faith effort never placated anyone, because it never touched the thing actually causing the harm. The political will hardened.

Regulation

In December 2024 Australia passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, barring under-16s from designated platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch and others), with enforcement beginning December 2025 and penalties up to AUD $49.5 million 89. As of mid-2026, Australia is very much not alone 10:

  • United Kingdom: under-16s; announced June 2026, expected spring 2027 (Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X; WhatsApp and Signal excluded; AI companion chatbots restricted to 18+).
  • Canada: under-16s; bill introduced June 2026, with a carve-out for platforms that can demonstrate youth-protection policies.
  • France: under-15s; passed the lower house in January 2026, awaiting the Senate.
  • Spain: under-16s; proposed February 2026, paired with a push to hold executives personally accountable for platform hate speech.
  • Denmark: under-15s; secured parliamentary support in November 2025, law expected mid-2026, with a state age-verification app.
  • Greece: under-15s; implementation slated for January 2027.
  • Turkey: under-15s; passed parliament April 2026, awaiting presidential assent.
  • Germany (under-16s), Austria (under-14s), Poland and Slovenia (under-15s): all have draft legislation in 2026.
  • Indonesia and Malaysia: under-16s; both announced restrictions for rollout in 2026.

A dozen-plus countries across four continents, in roughly eighteen months, are all reaching for the same instrument. Whatever you think of these laws, the political verdict is in. Social media is officially unhealthy.

What defines Social Media?

Which brings us to the deepest problem in all of this: we do not have a working definition of “social media.” The laws being drafted to ban it are broad-reaching and inconsistent. How do you design around them?

In People v. Lopez (2016), a California court confronted a statute that defined “social media” as “an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but not limited to, videos or still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations.” Read literally, that sweeps in your online banking, your email, essentially your entire internet presence 11. A social-media definition should be at once accurate, content-neutral, and precise enough to survive a vagueness challenge; we aren’t there yet 12.

Australia’s new law shows the same strain. It defines an “age-restricted social media platform” as a service whose “sole purpose, or a significant purpose” is to enable online social interaction between users, that lets users link to or interact with others, and that lets users post material 8. Almost any modern app clears that bar, including multiplayer games, dating apps, fitness trackers with a feed, comment sections of news websites. Recognizing this, the Act hands the Communications Minister and the eSafety Commissioner the power to decide, by decree, which services are in and which are out 9. The statute can’t draw the line, so a regulator draws it case by case, app by app.

Vagueness in the definition becomes arbitrariness in the enforcement. The thing no label could fix, we are now trying to outlaw without being able to name it.

The end of social media

People are not going to stop wanting to talk to each other, and the underlying technology, like email before it, will mature into something genuinely good.

What’s fading is the phrase. “Social media” was always a category defined by its worst design: the one-room, all-audiences, permanent-record machine that made context collapse the default condition of public life. The industry couldn’t reform it from the inside fast enough (not for lack of trying, but because the flaw was structural), and as a result the term is increasingly a word in statute books: a legal liability, an age-gate, a thing a Communications Minister can add to a list. Founders building the next good thing are quietly distancing themselves from the label, and parents trust it less every year. The phrase is falling out of favour.

So the next medium won’t call itself social media, for the same reason nobody sells “horseless carriages” anymore. The technology that earns back our trust will arrive under a different name, one that describes what it’s for rather than the behaviour it accidentally produced. Call it Human Media: connection designed around bounded context, human pacing, and authenticity instead of reach, permanence, and collapse.

Reform from the inside turned out to be a harder problem than the one the games industry solved in 1994. But the chance to build what comes after is still wide open.

Human Media

VanChat is built as an answer to context collapse, and it is the first app to label itself Human Media rather than social media.

The core metaphor is “a road trip with friends in a van”: conversations that are momentary, intimate, and bounded by context. Instead of one profile facing every audience you’ve ever had, forever, VanChat gives you small spaces to curate with your friends. Messaging is asynchronous and recent-topic-forward, which dissolves the imagined audience and the FOMO-driven compulsion to check; you are speaking to a known few, not performing for an unknowable everyone. The walls Goffman took for granted, and the platforms tore down, are put back.

It answers the trust failures that invited regulation, too. The Vanifesto commits to data that is private, secure, and never monetized; to a product with no mandate to maximize engagement; and to a Charter under which intolerance is not tolerated, with child safety treated as a first principle rather than a compliance afterthought. These aren’t features bolted on to dodge a ban; they’re what “Human Media” means as a design brief.

We are taking a side on the definition problem. The laws can’t say what social media is, so they reach for ministerial discretion. Human Media proposes the opposite: define the category by what it does to people, and build to the healthy side of that line on purpose. Be the thing that wouldn’t need to be banned, because it was never built to collapse your contexts in the first place.

The phrase “social media” is falling out of favour. Something better gets to take its name… and we intend to build it.

Citations

Footnotes

Academic sources

  1. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. (Origin of “audience segregation.”) ↩

  2. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩

  3. Wesch, M. (2009). “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam.” Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 19–34. (See also Wesch’s 2008 lecture, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.”) ↩

  4. boyd, d. (2008). Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. (On “collapsed contexts” in MySpace/Friendster.) ↩

  5. Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.” New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Davis, J. L., & Jurgenson, N. (2014). “Context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions.” Information, Communication & Society, 17(4), 476–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.888458 ↩ ↩2

  7. Hogan, B. (2010). “The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(6), 377–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610385893 (Source of the “lowest common denominator” audience and the performance/exhibition distinction.) ↩

  1. Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (Cth). Federal Register of Legislation. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00127/asmade/text; overview at Parliamentary Education Office. https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/history-of-parliament/history-milestones/australian-parliament-history-timeline/events/online-safety-amendment-social-media-minimum-age-act-2024 ↩ ↩2

  2. DLA Piper, “Australia’s Social Media ‘Ban’ and the eSafety Commissioner’s Social Media Minimum Age Regulatory Guidance,” Privacy Matters (Feb. 2026). https://privacymatters.dlapiper.com/2026/02/australias-social-media-ban-and-the-esafety-commissioners-social-media-minimum-age-regulatory-guidance/ ↩ ↩2

  3. “Here are the countries banning children from social media,” TechCrunch (June 15, 2026). https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/social-media-ban-children-countries-list/ ↩

  4. People v. Lopez, 2016 WL 297942 (Cal. App. Ct. Jan. 25, 2016); discussed in E. Goldman, “What’s the Legal Definition of a ‘Social Media Site’? Uh… (People v. Lopez),” Technology & Marketing Law Blog (Jan. 2016). https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2016/01/whats-the-legal-definition-of-a-social-media-site-uh-people-v-lopez.htm ↩

  5. “What Is Social Media?” City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-is-social-media ↩

Historical sources

  1. “1993–94 United States Senate hearings on video games,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993%E2%80%9394_United_States_Senate_hearings_on_video_games ↩

  2. “Entertainment Software Rating Board,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board ↩

Further reading