After nine days of deliberation, the Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive products that harmed a young woman’s mental health, despite initial difficulties in reaching a decision. This bellwether ruling stands to set legal precedent for how courts rule either in favor or against Big Tech companies building platforms to capture our attention.
But this article isn’t about the ruling, though it matters. I’m writing to share that the social media era we’ve experienced over the last two decades is fading. Too often, social media companies like Twitter/X, Facebook, and YouTube rely on enshitification (also known as platform decay) to attract audiences, hook them with highly attractive features, and then slowly and intentionally degrade the platform to maximize profits.
We’ve observed this pattern recur with a disturbing regularity: A platform emerges and feels like a revelation. It’s social, creative, and genuinely useful. Then the investors arrive, the quarterly targets get set, and the rot begins. Algorithms that once surfaced content from people you actually knew are replaced by content engineered to provoke. Feeds fill with strangers, bots, and brand content optimized for engagement. To this point, more than half of social media traffic has been found to be driven by bots, often posting politically or financially motivated disinformation.
Lawyers argued that features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, autoplaying videos, and beauty filters made apps like Instagram and YouTube equivalent to engineered addiction mechanisms. Many experts are already calling the judgment Big Tech’s “big tobacco moment,” the moment at which the tobacco industry had to accept not only that their product was harmful, but also that they had known this and tried to cover it up.
So what comes next? Users have been signaling their answer for years. Brands and organizations would be wise to pay attention and use this moment as an opportunity for direct engagement with their supporters, donors, and key stakeholders.
I don’t believe people are abandoning the digital community or social media writ large. They are, however, abandoning the factory floor version of it. In the latest wave of migration, primarily to Bluesky, users are seeking an ideological alternative to increasingly corporate and algorithmically hostile platforms, stepping into a world fundamentally different in ways many are only beginning to grasp. Bluesky, Mastodon, and their federated counterparts are built on a different promise: that communities can govern themselves, set their own rules, and exist without a billionaire’s thumb on the scale. Meanwhile, platforms like Discord have built loyal, purpose-driven communities around shared interests rather than mass broadcast.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshitification, advocates two remedies: upholding the end-to-end principle, which asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions, and guaranteeing the right of exit, enabling users to leave a platform without losing their community and connections.
That second point is where the real opportunity lives for brands and organizations thinking about where to show up next. The future of the digital community is not a single, massive platform with a single set of rules and a single advertising stack extracting value from every interaction. It is smaller, more intentional, more autonomous. It looks like a Discord server where your most engaged supporters gather, ask questions, co-create, and feel genuinely seen. It looks like a Bluesky community organized around a cause, not a content algorithm. It looks like a newsletter with a reply button that actually gets answered. These are not retreats from digital life.
For organizations and those focused on social impact, this is an invitation. The digital spaces and communities that flourish in this next era will be those built on autonomous design, trust, and accountability.
The Los Angeles jury delivered a verdict about the past. But the users who are quietly moving to smaller, more intentional corners of the internet are already building the future. The question every brand, nonprofit, and communicator will grapple with is whether they will meet audiences there, on their terms, or keep pouring budget into platforms designed to harvest their attention. The era of enshitification is ending. What replaces it will be defined by true innovators who show up with something real to offer.