The destabilization of social media

Teaching social media in journalism had reached a point of stability. That's gone now.

A few years ago, I noticed something about teaching journalism in the social media space.

After a decade of massive changes to the online world brought by the growth and adoption of social media platforms, by like 2021 or 2022, things had mostly stabilized.

Twitter was where news lived, where stories were broken and links were shared. Facebook was for the old heads and had defaulted into a kind of the online version of that bulletin board by the door of a local grocery store.

Instagram had emerged as a visual platform for individuals, business and brands. It became pop culture’s home base.¹ TikTok was the place for The Youth, and it had a bit of the energy and excitement that had been sucked out of Instagram. Snapchat was, for the most part, how young people communicated with each other without a real public-facing feed.²

Things were stable. As journalists and journalism professors, we had settled into a place where we knew how to use each platform and what each platform was used for. Best practices had emerged. It was, honestly, a nice spot to be in.

Social media journalism as created by the “Generate image” button.

The 2010s were a decade of (ugh I hate this word) disruption in media. When I started teaching for the first time in 2013, YouTube and Facebook were still less than 10 years old. Twitter was just emerging as a viable home for news, as the Arab Spring had just happened two years earlier. Snapchat and Instagram were brand new. TikTok was still four years from being created.

After a decade of figuring things out, the social media stability of the 2020s felt like a luxury. There was always a lot of fun in the discovery, in being one of the early adopters, in trying to figure out what this new thing was or how it could work in class or for reporting. It felt like an opportunity to redefine how journalism was practiced and taught.

But at the same time, that stability was lovely. It was nice to not feel like you have to learn a new app every semester. Your lesson plans could stay relatively intact. Teaching social media in journalism felt like teaching ledes - the basics were there and they were constant.

That’s no longer the case. For journalists and journalism professors, social media in the early months of 2025 is facing some of its biggest upheaval since the early years of the 2010s.

X has two problems.³ The first is political, in that being on that platform supports a racist Nazi supporter who is actively leading a financial and technological coup of the U.S. Government with the blessing of the president and tacit approval of Congress. There’s a really strong moral case to not be on the platform anymore.

The second problem is pragmatic. Even since Musk bought the platform in 2022, it’s become less useful for journalists. It throttles links to external sites, it’s algorithmically bogged down, the engagement that made it the place to be is simply not there anymore.

Meta has two problems.⁴ The first is political — Meta’s decision to scale back its fact checking operations at the same Mark Zuckerberg is openly currying favor from the Trump administration — gives people a motivation to not give their time and attention to supporting the company.

The second problem is pragmatic. Threads had a chance, but the company actively suppressed news on the platform from the start, and it defaulted to an algorithm view and so it devolved into home for engagement bait pretty quickly. Instagram and Facebook face the same problem — the user experience just isn’t great anymore. From Ed Zitron:

You log in, immediately see a popup for stories, scroll down and see one post from someone you know, a giant ad, a carousel of "people you may know," a post from a page you don’t follow, a series of recommended "reels" that show a two-second clip on repeat of what you might see so that you have to click through, another ad, three posts from pages you don’t follow, then another ad.

TikTok - I mean, the app is banned but not banned but sort of banned and also may become state-owned soon. Who even knows.

Bluesky has potential. I’ve found a home there, and it’s nice. It captures a lot of what Twitter was before Musk bought it. But it’s worth remembering that Twitter wasn’t always a great place even before Musk bought it. Personally, I’m finding myself slipping back into old Twitter habits at the new place and needing to be more intentional there.

But it’s all in flux. The stability and usefulness that had come to define social media is gone.

Anne Helen Petersen

wrote about this at her must-subscribe newsletter:

After years of people yelling at me in books, think pieces, and tweets (lol) to “break up with my phone,” “delete your social media accounts,” and “fuck Mark Zuckerberg,” turns out the thing that I needed was a whole conglomeration of quiet arguments and technological shifts that made my phone and the social media accounts on it feel less precious. Put differently, I haven’t come to value it less; instead, it’s become less valuable … The amount of space these technologies take up in our lives — and their ever-diminishing utility — has brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. I’ve sensed it over the last year, when my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.

And that’s a challenge for those of us who teach students how to use social media as journalists.

As journalism professors, we can’t ignore X and Facebook, because media companies are still using these platforms. So we’re in a spot where we need to prepare students for the jobs as they actually exist while also not wanting to put them in online spaces where misinformation thieves or they may be put in danger from trolls or bad actors.

It feels like we’re back in that era of 2011-2014 again, where the stability is gone and we’re in an era of disruption.

But now, it all feels less like an opportunity and more like a burden.

1. This really started to sink in for me the more I started following the theater community, which absolutely thrives on Instagram.

2. I’m sure this exists, but there is a great study to be done in looking at teen use of Snapchat as a reaction to the anxiety-inducing panic brought on by “if you post something on the internet, it’s there forever and could ruin your life” messaging schools used forever.

3. Well, three because the name X is stupid.

4. Well, three because the name Meta is stupid.