In 2026, this realization has begun to enter policy. Australia enforced the world’s first social media ban in January for under-16s, the UK prohibited smartphone use across schools in England as of last month, and a landmark US legal case recently found Meta and Google liable for the addictive design of algorithms on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. But these aren’t isolated policy moments — they’re symptoms of a structural trust collapse that strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory recently dubbed “the defining tension of this media era”.
A lot of the concern is concentrated around the vulnerability of fashion’s next target consumers, Gen Z and Alpha, who have grown up with these platforms since day one. Two-thirds of people believe that social media is negative for children, per consumer insights platform GW1, and Gen Zs themselves feel like they’re constantly being sold to online.
The consumer backlash against social media from a moral standpoint has been accelerated by AI, which is evidenced by the widespread disapproval of the tech on these platforms, especially in forms such as AI slop. Recent examples of luxury brands — from Prada to Gucci to Valentino — experimenting with AI for creative campaigns have met with fierce criticism online, even when involving prominent contemporary artists, like Jordan Wolfson in Prada’s case. All of this presents brands with a genuine strategic tension for how they market to consumers on social media.
How do you show up on social media to sell products, while distancing yourself from its darker sides?
Redefining media value
Social media platforms are so baked into the infrastructure of advertising that they remain a massive part of the purchase journey. Globally, 42% of people still find the products they buy through social media, per GWI’s research. This means brand consultants, analysts, and even online safety campaigners don’t forecast a total mass exodus from these platforms anytime soon.
“The ‘say-do’ gap is a common pattern in consumer research, where values and behavior don’t always align,” says Chris Beer, senior data journalist at GWI. “For example, consumers have historically expressed fatigue with climate change coverage, while wanting brands to be eco-friendly.” Social media could be the next example of this moral mismatch. Where trust in social platforms is at an all-time low, but they remain the infrastructure of consumer attention, the onus is falling more on brands to build trust through signaling values that transcend them.
“All of this is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with how we define media value,” says Rose Coffey, senior foresight analyst at The Future Laboratory. “We’re not quantifying it by reach anymore, we’re quantifying it by trust,” she says, adding that for brands, the question is no longer how loud they are on social media, but how credibly they show up. “Bottega Veneta’s Instagram-free strategy won’t become universal, but it signals something important: silence can be a positioning tool.”
Digital restraint
In a saturated world of social content, thoughtful restraint now communicates clear brand values, which are becoming the new conduit for trust. This has The Logging Off Club’s Walton anticipating a split information ecosystem where polluted, AI-driven social feeds will coexist with a renewed turn toward trusted institutions, long-form content, and offline archives. Access to this information — from books to photographs to academic texts — beyond the echo chamber of social feeds will become a luxury and therefore socioeconomically defined.
