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Simon Lester, “Is US Big Tech’s Dominance of Social Media Waning?,” Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, October 27, 2025, https://doi.org/10.25613/BPNH-1Z93.
It may seem counterintuitive at the moment, as American tech giants spend billions of dollars on AI infrastructure to cement their dominance, but the foundations of their control may be shakier than it seems, particularly in the social media sector. The effort by the U.S. government and American moguls to wrest control of video app TikTok from its Chinese owner, Bytedance, may prove to be one of the final battles of the current social media era. When they finally get their hands on TikTok, they may discover they own an outdated product and business model that will decline along with other Big Tech social media platforms. The future of social media, it may turn out, is smaller and more global.
Why might American Big Tech social media be in trouble? To a great extent, online platforms rely on trust and good feelings to attract and retain users. However, both of those are currently in short supply.
One reason is that the Big Tech companies have shifted away from their initial consumer-friendly product offerings and focused on short-term profits rather than providing a good user experience. Users now face more ads, a greater use of personal data to serve those ads, and less control over what they see. That approach can work for a while, as people are locked in through network effects and cannot easily leave. But many users are growing increasingly irritated by the experience.
U.S. government actions may also be playing a role here. An aggressive stance toward other countries on tech regulation, as well as in other areas, has alienated people around the world, and American social media offerings could feel the impact.
A recent comment by French President Emmanuel Macron illustrates the concern with American (as well as Chinese) Big Tech products: “We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”
The good news is that there are small companies working on better products that could transform social media in positive ways. In particular, people are developing various versions of decentralized social networks, in which apps can communicate with each other, similar to how email works.
Decentralized social networks allow for varied cultures, approaches to algorithms, moderation practices, and business models to emerge, while at the same time providing for greater connectivity between products. In this new environment, people will be able to use a service where they feel comfortable, but still be able to communicate with others on different networks. If a young person chooses app A and their parents are on app B, both can still see what the other is posting.
It is not clear which of the versions of a decentralized network will achieve widespread success first. At least one company, Bluesky, is seeing some positive results already though. Some people have focused on the perceived political views of Bluesky users, but that misses the point. Bluesky is an app that is based on a protocol rather than built as a platform, and other apps using that same protocol can connect to it. Connected apps are already emerging for images and videos. Bluesky and its protocol may or may not be the product to unseat the current dominant players, but there is a good chance that one or more eventually will.
As things stand now, most of social media operates in “walled gardens.” In a decentralized world, however, everyone can build their own garden space but still visit the gardens of others. People in America can build a garden (or gardens), Europe can build, Canada can build, people everywhere can build, and the result will be more small gardens that will all be open for others to visit. Some of these gardens may be specifically designed to meet the demands of local users — for example in terms of a preference for limited data gathering and more privacy — but if done well any of them could appeal to people around the world with similar preferences.
The transition may be slow because people were first introduced to internet conversations through specific platforms, and it can be hard to imagine the online world as anything other than the app where they initially made connections or developed a following. However, as the user experience on these centralized platforms continues to degrade, and the decentralized experience continues to improve with more products and users, many of the holdouts are likely to come around.
Some people have called for government intervention to address concerns about Big Tech’s version of social media. Although regulation could help in theory, in practice it has sometimes led to annoying features such as the constant clicking of cookie preferences on websites, rather than improved user experiences. Antitrust is another avenue, but simply preventing company mergers, or breaking large companies up, is not enough to give them better business models or products.
A big part of the problem is that many company founders and leaders have decided their only path forward is to shoot for a valuation of a trillion dollars (give or take). But there is no way to get to this figure without degrading the user experience. Better products can exist at valuations of merely a $100 million or even a paltry (for the tech world) $10 million, and those figures are enough to create incentives for people to keep up the push into this sector. What is needed here is not necessarily government intervention, but rather a different type of company vision, one that thinks longer term and takes into account the preferences and needs of users and society more broadly. Fortunately, a number of entrepreneurs have been taking the plunge recently.
That’s not to say everyone should just sit back and wait for benevolent CEOs to save the day. Rather, individual internet users have an important role to play in the future of this sector, and can and should make the effort to understand how these products and services work, and to demand better ones.
Big Tech had a good run with social media. Innovations took place and fortunes were made. But a series of business and government decisions has contributed to increasing dissatisfaction. Consumers have no reason for concern, though, as a new crop of small tech companies — some in the U.S., others elsewhere — are launching products that promise a better experience for sharing thoughts, images, and, as always, funny cat videos online.
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