Social Media

The Millennial Internet Is Dead, and Politicians Killed It.

Social media use is declining, and what's left has shifted from conversation to passive scrolling.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | From the November 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson; Source images: Unsplash, iStock)

It's 2019, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) is in a video. It shows her dancing on a rooftop with friends. Everyone on Twitter has an opinion about it, after an anonymous account suggested in a widely circulated post that it showed what a "clueless nitwit" she was. AOC is just starting her first term in Congress, Twitter is a hotbed of histrionics, and this video may actually be a secret time capsule, harkening back to the carefree early days of social media and the Millennial Internet.

As the video went around, few people stopped to ask why AOC was dancing on this rooftop. But I knew as soon as I saw it. She was copying my friends.

In March 2009, someone took old clips of Brat Pack actors dancing, set them to a song by the art-punk band Phoenix called "Lisztomania," and posted the video on the then-4-year-old platform YouTube. A group of friends in Brooklyn, my friends, decided to recreate the viral video on a graffiti-adorned Williamsburg waterfront rooftop, dancing the parts of Molly Ringwald and associated brats themselves and posting it with the title "brooklyn brat pack mashup."

It soon became a viral meme. People all over the country, then all over the world, started creating and posting their own Brat Pack mashups, filmed from rooftops and other outdoor spaces in Houston, San Francisco, Scranton, Madrid, Moscow, Nairobi, Taipei, Amsterdam, and many more cities. Most were amateur efforts, filmed by friends for the fun of it. My friends' video eventually topped 550,000 views, but most had far fewer views.

AOC's dancing video was part of the craze. Although it went viral in 2019, it was actually shot in 2010 when she was a student at Boston University. It was a silly online lark. Few people noticed it at the time. Only after she became a member of Congress, and the video became culture war fodder, did it hit a million views.

When AOC, my friends, and everyone else made these videos, no one was monetizing this content. The point was simply participation. The goal was to have fun. We were young, and so was social media.

A lot of early social media was like that. Cheesy. Collaborative. Pointless. People posted pictures of themselves "planking"—lying face down in weird locales, like the kitchen counter—just to be a part of a trend. They dumped ice water on their own heads and posted it, allegedly for Lou Gehrig's disease awareness but mostly just because it was the thing to do. They posted old photos on #ThrowbackThursday, lists of accounts they liked on #FollowFriday, and the results of whatever BuzzFeed personality quiz was new that week.

There were wedding, party, and conference hashtags, so everyone at an event, or following along online, could catch all the pictures and updates. If you ran into friends, made new friends, or just saw someone you vaguely knew at an event, you absolutely had to take and post a selfie. Bloggers dove into this new medium with gusto, expending countless words responding directly to each other and dissecting each other's posts as if in some massive virtual writers workshop.

Politicians either ignored or celebrated this new development. Some campaigns, most notably President Barack Obama's, seemed excited about using it to connect with young audiences who weren't reading mailers or watching cable news.

This was the early Millennial Internet. It was driven by new technology (smartphones, social media), a new generational ethos (post everything), optimism, earnestness, venture capital, connection, and possibility. It was weird and beautiful, but also brief.

By the mid-2010s, things had shifted. What would come to be known as "cancel culture" started setting in. We started talking about Twitter's "main character of the day." Social justice politics and MAGA rhetoric began drowning out mashup videos, funny animal memes, and bar bathroom selfies. Social media updates became "content" instead of just "my friends' posts."

But remnants of the earlier internet remained. Even in the late 2010s, it still felt right to have a wedding hashtag and to post #Caturday pics.

Happy #caturday morning from Gem pic.twitter.com/lVMmtR13oI

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) June 1, 2019

This was the late Millennial Internet. We were more serious, and angrier. Politics intruded, as lawmakers called tech CEOs in for hearings.

Yet social media still felt authentic. It was still a place for community and collaboration. Yes, professional influencers existed, but posting was still largely by and for amateurs.

The Millennial Internet was friendly, personal, and above all, participatory. People talked to each other. It was sometimes performative, but very often real—an ongoing conversation among friends—and a place where genuine connections could be made.

The Millennial Internet is now over. Social media as it once existed is dead. What remains isn't very social. It echoes traditional media and entertainment culture more than the freewheeling early social media years. It's become more like a broadcasting platform, a one-way, top-down system rather than a decentralized free-for-all. There are some upsides to this, of course. But we're losing a lot of internet vitality, usefulness, creativity, and fun in the process.

Much of the blame for these changes has been pinned on corporate decisions involving algorithms, advertising, and content moderation. There are people who blame the COVID-19 pandemic, people who blame influencers, people who blame Elon Musk, or TikTok, or MAGA, or woke.

There's at least some surface truth to these charges. But we can't overlook the role that politics has played in bringing about social media's demise. The real story of the Millennial Internet's decline is one of government meddling, bullying, and soft, or even overt, censorship. These same factors now threaten the remnants of social media's golden era.

'Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization'

One need only open the X app or visit facebook.com to see that social media isn't literally dead yet. Even on the most staid social media platforms, people are still flirting and fighting, sharing pet photos, and sounding off without reading the articles.

But the data paint a picture of decline. An increasing number of people, particularly in younger (18- to 29-years-old) and older (65 ) cohorts, use no social media at all, as the University of Amsterdam's Petter Törnberg showed in his March 2026 paper "Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization."

Signs of social media's stagnation and decline are everywhere. In Pew Research Center surveys of American adults, the share who have ever used Facebook is up just three percentage points from 2016 through 2025 (from 68 percent to 71 percent). Twitter/X use peaked at 24 percent in 2018 and has decreased since. Snapchat use was also down from its 2018 peak.

Some evidence suggests the number of active users on many platforms is dwindling too. Törnberg's research found visits and posts on Facebook and Twitter/X went down almost 50 percent between 2020 and 2024. A June 2026 survey from the data removal service Incogni found more than half of respondents saying they post less these days than they did five years earlier.

Even when people are logging in, their experience is fundamentally different from what it was a decade ago. An analysis of online habits commissioned in 2025 by the Financial Times found fewer people using social media........

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