Social Media Fragmentation

When social media was first coming to prominence, there was a lot of concern about echo chambers.  After all, the earliest social media paradigms were explicitly designed to create forums for likeminded individuals to gather, unified by some shared interest.  As the technology evolved, with people spending more time on the platforms and using them for more purposes, like general community and a source of news, these echo chambers were blamed for political polarization, although subsequent studies (with some controversy and caveats) have revealed that the effect is minimal, or at least much less than mooted.  Social media echo chambers and political polarization may be correlated, but blaming social media for polarization may be a confusion of causation and correlation.

Somehow, we seem to be entering a second social media era, when some of us (me – this is a post about social media by a person whose only social media is Goodreads (well, I have a LinkedIn profile under my real name which I rarely use beyond occasionally remembering to update my resume or (more rarely) preserve a professional connection)) have yet to enter the first one.  It’s following a by-now familiar trajectory, which I predicted in another context around 2010.  Netflix was gaining prominence as a streaming service, Blockbuster was still around (barely), and commentators were increasingly talking about the phenomenon of “cord-cutting,” with people only paying for a single streaming service subscription instead of an expensive and complicated cable package.  Here we are in 2025, and streaming services have proliferated and fragmented to such an extent that many people are now spending just as much time and money managing and paying for a variety of streaming services as they once spent on cable packages.  Social media is doing the same thing.

Social media used to be fairly sequential.  A new platform would rise to prominence, everyone would jump on the bandwagon, and then it would become the legacy platform when the next new platform came around – not quite gone, but no longer so relevant.  That began to change a few years ago, when none of the short video format platforms really dominated over the others (although TikTok could arguably be said to have won the battle to manipulate minds with short video content), but recent commentary about a migration to BlueSky emphasized the point to me: social media is now fragmented.

I came across the discussion in the commentary sections of a couple scientific journals in the weeks following the 2024 US election, and I have since observed the trend elsewhere.  Twitter, BlueSky, and Truth Social are filling the short message social media format, split largely along political lines.  It resonates with the idea of ideological echo chambers, but an examination of the larger landscape suggests that the political divisions reflected between these platforms is more another facet of the larger trend towards fragmentation in social media.  Where before there were perhaps three major platforms which dominated the landscape, each with slightly different niches, now there are at least half a dozen major platforms to keep track of: Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky, Truth Social (and this list coming from someone who doesn’t follow these matters closely – there are probably more, or different, platforms which the more engaged among us would identify).

There may be interesting implications and insights to be gained from the fragmentation of the social media landscape, and not just that WordPress (through which I host this site) will probably add more “social” buttons to the bottom of my posts and pages soon, and that there will be more social media platforms for me to not use to engage with and widen my audience.  I am more interested, however, by the repetition of the trend: in streaming, in social media, and elsewhere.  A recent report suggests it is beginning to happen in search engines, with Google’s dominance as a search engine diminishing before challenges from multiple sources, especially AI-integrated search capabilities.  We can call this fragmentation, and it is, but it can also be viewed through another lens: specialization.

The applicability of specialization is especially apparent in examining the social media fragmentation trend.  Each of the social media platforms which is now prominent has its own niche, its own specialty, which attracts those who are particularly interested in that contribution or capability, whether it be short video formats or a certain flavor of ideological dialogue.  Though less obvious, it underlies the apparent fragmentation of the streaming landscape, and now the potential diversification of the search landscape.  After the oft-echoed concerns about consolidation and “Big Tech,” this may seem surprising, but it should not be, for specialization has a long history, and for good reason.  Specialization offers significant advantages as capabilities and functionality expand.

This isn’t a post about monopolies or antitrust policy, but it is certainly interesting to observe that this fragmentation process appears to be happening as the natural result of market forces and consumer demand.  The possibilities inherent in specialization leave room for more options, and the market seems to be (finally) taking advantage.

There remains a degree of concern about echo chambers in social media, amplified, if anything, by those echo chambers now comprising entire, distinct platforms instead of different spaces on the same platform.  It is more obvious this time, though, that the polarization preceded the segregation, rather than the latter causing the polarization.  While it may make things more complicated for the marketing people, in the long run, there is reason to suppose that such specialization may provide more benefit than it does harm.  It will be interesting to see if the trend continues.