By Delaney Newhouse | Focus Editor
Aaron Rivera spends 35 hours a week on social media.
The San Antonio senior uses various platforms for hours on end, advertising for his clothing business, watching video tutorials and meeting new people.
“I use TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube — Facebook for ads,” Rivera said. “I’d say about 70% of it is business.”
In the limited personal time he spends on the internet, Rivera said he prefers Instagram to its many competitors. He feels it’s the best way to experience personal connection online.
“I love Instagram,” he said. “You can see people; you can post, put stuff in your own thoughts. I love pictures. Even though I use TikTok most … on TikTok, you can’t really interact with your friends as much. You just brain rot and watch videos.”
Rivera isn’t alone. The Pew Research Center found that 70% of US adults reported using Facebook in 2024, and around half used Instagram. The American Customer Satisfaction Index, a company which “uses customer interviews as input to a multi-equation econometric model developed at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business,” published data showing that general U.S. satisfaction with social media in 2024 had grown to 74%, with TikTok leading the pack at 77% satisfaction.
Others, however, do not share this rosy outlook. A randomized experiment by the University of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute found that the experiences of social platform X users were negatively impacted by the algorithm it used to show users content. The findings “suggesting that the engagement-based algorithm underperforms in satisfying users’ stated preferences” are not perfectly reflective of the ACSI’s score of 69% consumer satisfaction with the platform.
Kellen Mrkva is an assistant professor of marketing at the Hankamer School of Business. He researches consumer behavior and has seen the myriad ways tech companies are “getting you to spend a little more time on these websites by any means necessary,” for better or for worse. Tech companies offering free options often sell advertisements guaranteed to reach a certain number of users, necessitating that these users spend time on the sites to maintain content balance.
“It’s almost like a small addiction; it’s just automatic,” Mrkva said. “I used to like Twitter before things changed in the last year or so, but I still find myself going there even though I’m not enjoying it as much.”
Furthermore, medical studies have consistently shown the negative impacts of social media on quality of life. A UC San Francisco study suggests that even young adolescents show signs of addiction to these platforms.
“Policymakers need to look at TikTok as a systemic social media issue and create effective measures that protect children online,” said Dr. Jason Nagata in a January UCSF article covering the study. “TikTok is the most popular social media platform for children, yet kids reported having more than three different social media accounts, including Instagram and Snapchat.”
Conflicting information about overall trends has even led to outright conspiracy theories. In 2021, dead internet theory left chat rooms and blasted onto the mainstream media scene, and it’s only been bolstered since then by the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. The idea of robots posting and responding to each other all over the internet to generate revenue no longer seems so implausible.
Despite fears, social media companies have joined with other tech giants in promoting and funding AI programs. Snapchat lets users create selfie-based AI images, Facebook is training a chatbot and even LinkedIn is wielding user data to train an AI model.
“I don’t quite know exactly how it’s going to change social media websites,” Mrkva said. “It seems like they have pretty advanced algorithms already, so it’s not necessarily going to be any better than that in terms of targeting our feeds.”
Critics, though, are less concerned about the companies themselves and more about the possibility of malevolent content mills. A Stanford study investigating the use of Facebook pages in scams found pages attempting to divert users to off-platform content farms, sell fake items or steal information — often using AI content.
Despite all this, Rivera laughs off AI scammers.
“Those usually get banned really quickly — you can really tell — but for me, I barely get any of those,” he said. “Everything is so real, people talking, telling you about something … It’s not dead. If anything, it’s the most alive it’s been.”
