Posting less, posting more, and getting weary of it all: How the pandemic has affected social media

 What’s appropriate and not for social media has changed a lot in the past year. One hard truth of the pandemic was that, in order to someday be together safely, we had to be apart in the meantime. For many, this meant that social media has become one of the only ways to be with friends and family, so people have flocked to platforms new (TikTok) and old (Facebook). The new normal, where many more of our daily interactions are mediated by screens, has made us change the way we behave on those platforms, with the messiness and realities of pandemic life crowding out some of the social media’s posturing and perfection.

These sites have been a social lifeline as well as a way to get new information about the disease spreading across the globe and upending life as we knew it. Twitter, especially, shone as a real-time news source. The pandemic made social media, whose utility had languished and whose user growth was in decline, suddenly relevant. Some even mused that social media, though still under intense scrutiny for spreading misinformation and general toxicity, was good again. After years of social fragmentation, during which people were less likely to have watched the same shows or even share the same reality, people suddenly had something they could all talk about.

One thing that brings people together is shared experiences,” Karen North, a clinical professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California, told Recode. “All of a sudden we all have a shared experience.”

Americans spent on average 82 minutes per day on social media in 2020, a seven-minute jump from 2019 and a large upward revision from eMarketer’s original forecast. The media measurement firm previously estimated that time spent on social media would remain the same. But in 2020, concerns about screen time — and “time well spent” — went out the window. 

What’s less clear is whether or not people are posting more, but it seems to vary by person and platform. We asked Vox readers and people on our own social feeds to tell us how they use social media differently now compared to before the pandemic and received dozens of thoughtful responses about how that relationship has changed.

Some people told us that while they’re scrolling on social media more, they’re posting less — indeed, what’s there to post about when you’re stuck at home doing the same stuff over and over? Commonly shared milestones like birthdays and weddings were postponed or downsized, and people fear coming off as celebratory when there’s so much suffering, or at least so much judgment. 

But some say they’re posting to social media more, as an outlet for pent-up creativity and an anodyne to the lethargy, loneliness, and boredom of isolation. 

“The ability to connect via so many different platforms not only helps alleviate feelings of isolation but increases the sense of psychological comfort,” said Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center. “It makes people feel less lonely and less fearful to know they aren’t dealing with this alone.”

Others found that social media helped them feel like they could do something about what was happening in the outside world. 

Jordan Updike, a digital marketer in Indianapolis, Indiana, who “went from barely online to very online in a blink,” tried to convince people in his hometown about the realities of the coronavirus.

“They were coming from the foregone conclusion that this isn’t big deal,” said Updike, who had Covid-19 early in the pandemic and is still suffering from lung and heart damage a year later.

He previously treated personal time on social media “not as time well spent,” but that changed during the pandemic.

“I realized even if I have conversations with one person, there were hundreds if not thousands of people observing that conversation,” Updike told Recode. “If it meant 20 people changing their minds or taking this thing seriously, I felt that that was time well spent.”

All of this, of course, was happening amid historic events that also unfolded, at least in part, online. Black Lives Matter organized record turnout to protests against police violence, using social media sites and messaging platforms. By similar means, Capitol rioters plotted their deadly insurrection, egged on by tweets from former President Donald Trump. More recently, people on Reddit’s trading forum WallStreetBets brought about the astronomical rise — and fall — of GameStop and other meme stocks, upending previous conceptions of Wall Street in the process.

Less perfection, more real life

The pandemic has generally accelerated existing trends like working from home and shopping online. Another trend that sped up is the reversal, in some cases, of social media as an aspirational place of perfection. Whereas social media posts, especially grid photos on Instagram, have long been criticized for their unrealistic and idealized portrayal of people’s lives, there was less of that during the pandemic. Instead, things got a little sloppier: Houses were a mess, children were home and misbehaved, people didn’t wear makeup. And some of that made it to social media feeds. 

“The less polished, more real side is appealing and is going to stay,” eMarketer’s Williamson argued. “The idea of the airbrushed, perfect influencer is probably a thing of the past.”

Nadia Ahmed, a sexual health physician in London who’s alternated overuse with deleting her accounts completely, told Recode, “I’ve also tried to not look at influencer accounts as much. In fact, barely, because it upsets me big time.” 

Oxford, from We, Are Social, said she’s noticed fewer posts on Instagram’s grid. When people do post there, she says the posts feel more intimate and introspective than they had been.

Many have abstained from posting to not give the impression they were doing something they shouldn’t be — eating in crowded restaurants, hanging out in large groups — during the pandemic. When people do post outside of their homes, it’s often accompanied by a disclaimer that the activity was “Covid safe,” and the fear of being shamed in the comments is almost palpable. Indeed, many readers told Recode they avoided sites like Instagram because posts of people having fun and acting like there wasn’t a pandemic made them anxious and angry. 

“The pandemic has normalized the negative side of life”

At the same time, some people have found solace in social platforms’ seeming move to more honesty, with people expressing disappointment and negativity, and complaints about isolation and the state of the world. 

“People really want to share thoughts like that when people are similarly afflicted and right now everyone is miserable,” said North, the USC professor, saying that it’s a welcome development for many people who’ve had these thoughts but may have avoided voicing them on social media. 

“The pandemic has normalized the negative side of life,” North said.

Social media has also proliferated with posts about people’s deteriorated mental health and sensitivity to others’ problems. Social justice slide shows dominated Instagram Stories, as people sought to take social justice actions online or at least learn about everything from defunding the police to mail-in voting to combating racism.

What’s certain to gradually change is how we behave on social media, as our actions morph to meet our needs. Those who’ve felt like they have a toxic relationship with social media may have the chance to break out of bad habits, says Thomas Roach, a professor of cultural studies at Bryant University who recently wrote a book about intimacy on Grindr. It’s possible to embrace the alienation of being just a box on a screen: Instead of constantly branding ourselves as individuals, it can be liberating to be one of the crowd, he said.

“We shouldn’t use social media to reproduce pre-pandemic normality, we should be using it to create a new normal,” Roach said.