With age comes social media mania.
Older generations are driving political polarization and conspiracy theories on top internet platforms, while Zoomers tend to be more issue-focused rather than on partisan warfare, a sweeping new study found.
Socialprofiler, an artificial intelligence platform, combed through the top social media sites and analyzed some 756 million profiles to conclude that older generations are more outspoken about partisan politics online than younger ones.
“I would say a lot of the findings are very unconventional,” Socialprofiler CEO Tony Noskov admitted to The Post. “Political discussion is not really popular among younger generations. It’s mostly about activism, nonpolitical activism.”
The study assessed posts that users of different age groups interact with the most on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to help reach its conclusions.
While Gen. Z frequently engages with left-leaning political content and progressive social issues, it was the Millennials and Gen. Xers who were more slanted toward traditional partisan content, the study found.
“This suggests that the loudest political debates occur not among the youth themselves, but among their parents and older siblings, who use social media platforms as spaces for ideological expression and partisan discourse,” the study explained.
The findings from Socialprofiler’s first-of-its-kind social media study track with other anecdotal findings that older Americans can be too online and go down rabbit holes of social media conspiracies.
A Talker Research survey of 2,000 American adults age 50 and older, commissioned by Centrum Silver in September, found that the average older American spent a collective 22 hours per week in front of some type of screen, including scrolling through social media.
Another study out University of Colorado Boulder found adults aged 55 and older are significantly more likely to share political misinformation than younger social media users. As Americans age, they become more partisan and those beliefs can muddy their online judgment, the November 2025 study found.
With age came an increase in political polarization and conspiracy theories about UFOs, aliens, the Illuminati, the earth being flat, alternative knowledge and more, the new Socialprofiler study found.
Meanwhile, Zoomers tend to be more issue-focused and dabble in esoteric content like tarot reading, witchcraft, hypnosis and spiritism.
“This suggests that different forms of escapism and alternative worldviews appeal to different age cohorts, rather than representing a simple replacement of traditional faith with scientific rationalism,” the study said.
When asked why the gap between younger and older generations on conspiracy theories exists, Noskov admitted that “We don’t exactly know,” but teased that his company is planning to conduct additional research on that in the future.
Republicans generally drew much more robust engagement on the top social media platforms overall, but Democrats unsurprisingly fared better among younger cohorts.
Zoomers appeared specifically focused on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and climate change.
One specific example examined was the Black Lives Matter movement, which the study found lost engagement with its younger audience to non-political content.
“Even among movements that initially attracted younger, politically engaged users, there may be a natural lifecycle or shift toward depoliticization,” the study noted.
Although polls have generally shown a decline in religion among younger Americans, Socialprofiler found that some religious movements, such as Islam, are making inroads with the youth.
Socialprofiler theorized that religion is slowly being replaced “by other forms of metaphysical explanation of the world.”
The study also concluded that X is the top platform for politics, news, and science, while Instagram dominated in lifestyle and aspirational culture content, and TikTok was home to the youth and identity expression.
Socialprofiler’s “2025 State of U.S. Social Media” study is its inaugural report, based on two years of building up its analytic database of social media platforms.
Accounts that are private were not assessed, though Socialprofiler was able to learn from people’s interactions with content on other social media platforms.
“We look across platforms, everything from LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook to Instagram, and we looked across all the platforms,” Socialprofiler COO David Marohnic explained. “So usually most people will have at least one of those public.”
The company estimates that roughly 65% of social media profiles are public, while 35% are private, though that varies by platform.
