From Social Media to Social Circles: We Are Seeing Youth and Teens Looking for Smaller, More Intentional Online Communities

Caveat - This article is a follow up to one we posted last week titled, “From Social Media, to Social AI, to Trusted Digital Communities: The Next Digital Migration Is Happening With Youth (1). 

There is an interesting shift taking place in the online world, at least with youth and teens in Canada that we are interacting with, that we believe parents, caregivers, and educators should be paying attention to. For much of the past two decades, social media was largely understood as a digital extension of our existing social lives. Young people joined platforms because their friends were there, followed people they knew or found interesting, posted pictures and updates about their lives, and used these platforms to communicate and maintain relationships. Although entertainment, advertising, influencers, and recommended content have always played a role, the underlying promise of social media was relatively straightforward, these were places where people connected with other people. However, that original model has changed significantly. Many of today’s largest social platforms are increasingly less focused on showing users content from people they intentionally chose to follow and more focused on predicting what content will keep them watching, scrolling, clicking, commenting, and returning to the platform.

We believe this distinction matters because it represents a fundamental change in what we have traditionally called “social media.” For many youth and teens, opening a social media app today does not necessarily mean checking in on friends, seeing what classmates have posted, or catching up with people they deliberately chose to follow. Instead, they may immediately enter an algorithmically curated stream of videos, memes, products, influencers, news, opinions, entertainment, advertisements, and increasingly AI generated material selected primarily because the platform predicts they will find it interesting. In many ways, some social media platforms are becoming less about the social graph, the network of people we intentionally connect with, and more about the interest graph, the collection of topics, behaviours, preferences, and patterns that algorithms believe will capture our attention.

Social Media Is Increasingly Becoming “Interest Media”

Think about what happens when a teenager opens one of today’s major social media platforms. They may spend twenty or thirty minutes scrolling through videos about hockey, makeup, gaming, relationships, fitness, celebrities, politics, fashion, humour, cars, music, or whatever else the recommendation system has learned interests them. During that entire session, they may see relatively little content from their closest friends. They may not personally know any of the people appearing on their screen, and they may not have intentionally followed many of the accounts producing the content they are consuming. Yet the platform continues feeding them material because their previous behaviour suggests that these topics are likely to keep them engaged. Every pause, replay, swipe, search, share, comment, like, or follow can provide another behavioural signal that helps refine what appears next.

This is why we believe the term “social media” is becoming increasingly inadequate for describing what some of these platforms have evolved into. A growing portion of the experience could arguably be described as what social media influencer Gary  Vaynerchuk calls “interest media.” The organizing principle is increasingly not relationships, but relevance as determined by an algorithm. Rather than asking, “Who have you chosen to connect with?”, the platform is increasingly asking, “What can we show you next that you are least likely to swipe away from?” This does not mean algorithmic recommendations are inherently harmful. Recommendation systems can expose young people to extraordinary educational resources, hobbies, communities, music, art, sports, cultures, perspectives, and creative ideas they might never otherwise encounter. However, there is an important difference between discovering something interesting and connecting meaningfully with another person, and those two experiences are increasingly being blended together under the broad label of social media.

When Following Someone No Longer Means Seeing Them

There was a time when following someone online had a fairly obvious purpose. You followed an account because you wanted to see what that person posted, and your feed was largely constructed from the collective choices you had made about whom you wanted to hear from. Today, those intentional choices increasingly compete with recommendation algorithms that continuously introduce content from creators, influencers, businesses, organizations, and complete strangers whom the user never asked to follow. The feed is therefore no longer entirely something the user builds. Increasingly, it is something the platform builds for the user, based upon what its algorithms predict will maintain attention.

For youth and teens, this means the social media experience can become strangely unsocial. A teenager can spend an hour consuming content created by hundreds of people without actually interacting meaningfully with anyone they know. They can watch strangers discuss friendships without talking to a friend, consume relationship advice without having a conversation about their own relationship, or watch endless videos about gaming without actually playing or talking with the friends they game with. Again, this does not automatically make the experience negative. Entertainment has value, curiosity has value, and discovering new interests has value. However, parents and caregivers should recognize that time spent on a social media platform and time spent being social are no longer necessarily the same thing.

Now Add Artificial Intelligence to the Feed

Artificial intelligence adds another important layer to this transformation. Until recently, producing convincing digital content usually required some combination of time, creativity, equipment, writing ability, photography, video production, editing, design, or artistic skill. Generative AI has dramatically reduced those barriers. Images, videos, voices, music, articles, advertisements, memes, fake personalities, virtual influencers, and entire social media accounts can now be generated quickly and cheaply at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. As these technologies improve, the amount of synthetic content circulating through social media feeds will likely continue to increase.

Internet culture has already developed a somewhat blunt term for the lowest quality version of this phenomenon known as “AI slop.” The phrase generally refers to repetitive, low-quality, misleading, bizarre, sensational, or mass-produced AI generated material created primarily to attract attention, clicks, shares, or advertising revenue rather than to contribute meaningful human creativity or communication. For young people scrolling through recommendation driven feeds, this creates an interesting contradiction. We are entering an era in which there may be more digital content available than at any point in human history, while at the same time knowing whether something was created by an actual person may become increasingly important. When almost anyone can manufacture a convincing image, video, voice, personality, story, or online persona within seconds, authenticity itself may become something people actively seek.

We believe this is particularly important when thinking about the next evolution of youth online culture. If algorithmically curated public feeds become increasingly saturated with advertising, influencers, commercial content, engagement bait, and AI generated material, it should not surprise us if some young people begin placing greater value on digital spaces where they know who they are communicating with and why they are there. In a digital environment where content becomes virtually unlimited, trusted human connection may become increasingly valuable precisely because it cannot be manufactured as easily.

From Broadcasting to Belonging

This brings us to what we believe may be one of the more interesting shifts occurring in youth digital culture that we are currently seeing and hearing from youth and teens, a movement away from broadcasting everything publicly and toward communicating within smaller, more intentional digital communities. This does not mean youth and teens are suddenly abandoning major social media platforms. Nor should we suggest that every young person is following the same pattern. Digital culture is far too diverse for that kind of sweeping conclusion. However, we are seeing reasons to pay attention to the growing importance of private group chats, messaging apps, smaller Discord communities, multiplayer gaming spaces, invitation-only groups, and other digital environments where the emphasis is less on accumulating followers and more on interacting with a recognizable group of people.

One way of thinking about this difference is to imagine two physical environments. The first is a massive shopping centre filled with thousands of people, advertisements, stores, performers, signs, screens, and businesses all competing for your attention. The second is sitting around a table with six friends talking about something you all care about. Both spaces contain people, and both can be enjoyable, but they produce fundamentally different social experiences. Increasingly, large commercial social media feeds resemble the first environment. They are extraordinarily sophisticated entertainment and discovery systems where advertisers, influencers, creators, algorithms, businesses, and users compete for attention. Smaller digital communities can feel more like the second, where the value of the experience comes not from how many people are present, but from who is present.

For parents and caregivers, this is an important distinction. We have spent years worrying about follower counts, likes, public profiles, viral posts, and young people broadcasting themselves to large audiences. Those concerns have not disappeared, but the next stage of youth online interaction may require us to pay greater attention to smaller spaces that are less visible from the outside. A teenager with a relatively quiet public social media profile may still have an extremely active digital social life taking place within private messages, gaming communities, group chats, or invitation-only online spaces.

Different Digital Spaces May Serve Different Purposes

Rather than imagining that one new platform will simply replace another, we believe the more likely evolution is fragmentation. Young people may increasingly use different digital spaces for very different purposes, kind of like a Swiss Army knife for those old enough to remember that tool. One platform may be where they discover trends and entertainment, another where they watch long-form videos, another where they play games, another where they communicate with classmates, and another where they maintain a small group of close friendships. Their public social media presence may become less important to them than the private digital spaces where their actual relationships are taking place.

This is why simply asking a young person, “What social media do you use?” may increasingly provide parents and caregivers with an incomplete picture of their child’s online life. A better conversation might explore what purpose each digital environment serves. Where do they discover new things?, Where do they go when they are bored? Where do they communicate with classmates? Where do they talk with their closest friends? Where do they feel most comfortable being themselves? Where do they go when they need advice, support, humour, entertainment, or belonging? These questions move the conversation away from simply identifying apps and toward understanding the social and emotional functions those apps and communities are serving.

Smaller and More Private Does Not Automatically Mean Safer

There is also an important caution that parents and caregivers need to understand. A migration toward smaller, more private online communities should not automatically be interpreted as a migration toward safer communities. Private group chats, gaming spaces, Discord servers, messaging apps, and invitation only communities can still experience cyberbullying, harassment, exclusion, sexualized conversations, inappropriate content, scams, misinformation, grooming, coercion, and peer pressure. In some circumstances, the sense of intimacy created within a smaller community can actually cause young people to lower their guard because the environment feels more trustworthy.

This is particularly important when it comes to the concept of transferred trust. A young person may be understandably suspicious when a complete stranger suddenly contacts them on a public social media platform. However, if that same person appears inside a gaming community or group chat containing several of their friends, the young person may subconsciously assign that person some of the trust they already have in the group. “My friends know them” can easily become “therefore they must be safe,” even when that assumption has never actually been verified. Smaller communities therefore require digital literacy just as much as public social media does, although the skills may look somewhat different. Privacy, consent, healthy boundaries, screenshots, manipulation, misinformation, conflict resolution, digital permanence, and recognizing inappropriate behaviour remain critically important.

Parents Need to Understand Communities, Not Just Platforms

For years, much of the conversation around online parenting has focused on individual apps. Parents and caregivers have been encouraged to learn about Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, gaming platforms, messaging applications, and whatever new service happens to be attracting young people at the time. There is value in understanding the technologies our children use, but this approach becomes increasingly difficult as digital life fragments across dozens of platforms, services, communities, and communication tools. No parent can realistically become an expert on every application their child will encounter, and we should not expect that parental controls or monitoring software will anticipate every new digital environment that will emerge.

This is why we believe relationship based digital parenting becomes even more important as technology becomes more complicated. Instead of attempting to monitor every platform, parents and caregivers can work toward creating the kind of relationship where young people are willing to talk about what they are experiencing online. Questions such as, “Where do you actually hang out with your friends online?”, “What online communities do you enjoy being part of?”, “Where do you discover new things?”, “Are there places online where you feel like you can actually be yourself?”, and “Have you ever been part of an online group where something started to feel uncomfortable?” can tell us considerably more about a young person’s digital life than simply checking their screen time statistics.

The goal should not be surveillance for the sake of surveillance. The goal should be understanding. When parents and caregivers understand why a particular digital space matters to their child, they are in a much better position to help them navigate that environment safely, ethically, critically, and confidently.

Maybe Youth Aren’t Rejecting Social Media, They Are Redefining What “Social” Means

It would be premature to declare the end of traditional social media. Major commercial platforms remain enormously popular, and they will continue evolving to compete for young people’s attention. However, we believe parents, caregivers, and educators should begin distinguishing between media consumption and meaningful social connection when discussing youth technology use. A young person spending an hour scrolling through an algorithmically generated feed is having a very different experience from a young person spending an hour laughing, creating, gaming, or talking with a small group of friends online, even though both experiences may take place on a screen.

This distinction also challenges some of the simplistic ways adults discuss “screen time.” Two hours online tells us almost nothing about what actually happened during those two hours. Was the young person passively consuming hundreds of algorithmically recommended videos? Were they collaborating with friends to build something in a game? Were they talking with a close friend who was having a difficult day? Were they learning guitar, creating digital art, participating in a community based around an interest, or being fed an endless stream of commercially optimized content? The screen may be the same, but the social, emotional, developmental, and educational experiences can be completely different.

From an Attention Economy Toward a Trust Economy

For years, much of the commercial internet has been built around the economics of attention. The longer someone watches, scrolls, clicks, comments, or remains engaged, the more opportunities there are to advertise, collect behavioural information, recommend content, sell products, and generate revenue. Generative artificial intelligence may significantly intensify this competition because the amount of content available to fill those feeds is becoming virtually unlimited. Humans, however, still have only twenty four hours in a day and a finite amount of attention to give.

This creates an interesting possibility. As content becomes abundant, trust may become scarce. Young people may increasingly ask, consciously or unconsciously, “Who created this?”, “Is this person real?”, “Why am I seeing this?”, “Is this an advertisement?”, “Was this generated by AI?”, “Do I actually know these people?”, “Do these people know me?”, “Can I trust this community?”, and “Does being here make me feel connected, or am I simply being entertained?”

If that happens, the next major evolution of youth digital culture may not be defined by another massive social media platform replacing the one that came before it. Instead, it may involve young people increasingly dividing their online lives between large commercial platforms used for entertainment and discovery and smaller personalized spaces used for actual human connection.

Perhaps after nearly two decades of encouraging us to accumulate hundreds, thousands, or even millions of followers, the pendulum is beginning to move in another direction.

Perhaps the next generation is beginning to recognize something humans understood long before social media existed, having access to everyone is not the same thing as having meaningful relationships with someone.

For parents and caregivers, this is not something we should necessarily fear. In many respects, a movement toward smaller, more intentional communities could be a healthy correction to the era of public broadcasting, follower counts, likes, virality, and algorithmically engineered attention. However, it will require us to evolve our digital parenting as well. We need to move beyond simply asking which platforms our children use and begin understanding the communities they belong to, the people they trust, the purpose those spaces serve, and how those experiences make them feel.

The future of being social online may not be about connecting with more people. It may be about young people becoming far more intentional about who deserves their time, attention, trust, and connection.

Digital Food For Thought

The White Hatter

Facts Not Fear, Facts Not Emotions, Enlighten Not Frighten, Know Tech Not No Tech

References:

1/ https://www.thewhitehatter.ca/post/from-social-media-to-social-ai-to-trusted-digital-communities-the-next-digital-migration-is-happe