A first social media account has long been a modern rite of passage on the road to adulthood. But what if this is changing?

Several generations that grew up with social media have reached adulthood, and the long-term impacts have been documented in academics and psychology; we’re starting to see a significant countermovement emerge.

Seven years ago one study found that 56% of children had a social media account, and the average age of first enrollment was 12.6. This is before the legally allowable age of 13 on Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook. Some children are sneaking in – sometimes through the knowing eyes of parents – or creating accounts on more ‘kid-friendly’ place such as Roblox or a semi-public discord server.

Is this new? I’ve seen people on TikTok or Reddit describe a longing for a generation free from the performative nature of life online. A proof point is a post I saw recently on TikTok showing an English field heavy with dew on a rare sunny morning. “It’s 2005 and nothing is happening online,” it says, as birds chirp in the distance. Half-remembered nostalgia for a barely gone-by age.

I regret to inform you that things were very much happening online two decades ago. My university got Facebook during a chaotic (all of the poking!) day in the spring of 2004. Before that there was MySpace, where eight lucky friends were ranked and ordered in a box. And we can go even further back to the America Online and MSN Messenger accounts, with their short profiles and away messages that occupied modems after school in the waning years of the last century.

All of this is to say – being chronically online isn’t anything particularly novel, which makes the recent momentum behind a significant countermovement all the more interesting.

Australia will bar all residents under the age of 16 from creating new accounts and having a presence on social media by the end of next year. There are strict limits on access for school-aged children in China’s one billion-person market – and these recently have been tightened even further. The European Union is also exploring ways to limit access to minors, and a bill impacting children under 14 is winding through the courts in Florida.

Particularly keen teens will find a way around these restrictions. But their effect – combined with a growing movement of people willingly stepping away from documenting and sharing their lives online, presents a genuine challenge for people in our industry. We’ve had access to pipelines of analytics and data, with promises that new technology will allow for even greater targeting and personalization.

I have long assumed that pretty much everyone has a home base online and some kind of a digital paper trail. Most will at least sometimes post somewhere occasionally – whether it’s sharing a link from a friend on Facebook or participating in a promotion on Instagram. They may be reluctant participants, perhaps driven by some sort of need for professional change, but they are there.

But increasingly, that’s not the case as more people actively try to minimize or erase their online footprint. Social networks are starting to worry about this, reacting by filling feeds with content from friends and pushing people towards individual and social selling.

And yet, I suspect next year will be one where “digital ghosts” become more common. We, as marketers, need to understand the challenge.

AI content companies claim we can use someone’s published online history to show them a piece of writing that is precisely tailored to them, pumped out of a large language model in seconds, even if they aren’t actively posting. While I’ve seen some interesting experiments in this area, none are really relevant for corporate communications.

When people are active online, we can communicate with them better. Therefore, if people have less of an online presence, either through choice or government mandate or the deprecation of cookies, it impacts our ability to communicate well with them

I suppose the pat answer is a retreat to quality. If we don’t know anything about our potential target, all we can do is try to rely on our expertise and wisdom. Maybe it’s not exactly aligned, but hopefully, it will be relevant.

Another route is to simply ask people. We know what this form takes – endless surveys every time we use a service. (Here’s a funny post about the perfileration of the Net Promoter Score.) These are mainly an end-run around stricter data protection and marketing laws. But they can provide some context, if they are rare and well people engage with your content to begin with.

Marketers might have to return to relying on other metrics, ones that are tied to an individual reader or social media count. Overall web page views, how long people spend on a site, or download a particular file. It’s not the same as a cookie tied to a profile that follows someone all across the internet, but it might have to do.

While I have no plans to log my terminally online self off anytime soon, I look forward to these new generations of people who aren’t bathed in social media joining the workplace. I hope that extra time is spent on creative projects, building relationships and truly original ideas. And eventually they find a way to share them with me.

Jon Schubin runs Cognito’s internal marketing function and is a director focused on content