The established, institutionalized set of beliefs and practices that define mainstream social media use—the often-unexamined assumptions about how platforms should be used, what counts as successful engagement, how identity should be performed, and what role social media plays in life. Social media orthodoxy includes commitments: that visibility is good, that sharing is connection, that metrics (likes, followers, shares) measure value, that personal branding is essential, that algorithms know what we want, that social media is simply how people communicate now, that criticism of platforms is Luddite. Like all orthodoxies, it shapes behavior and expectation, but it functions as ideology—making platform-mediated life seem natural and inevitable, obscuring how platforms shape us (attention, emotion, relationship), and delegitimizing alternatives (offline connection, platform cooperatives, non-commercial spaces). Social media orthodoxy determines what online behavior is "normal," what engagement is "successful," and who counts as "digitally literate" versus "out of touch."
Example: "She felt anxious about her low engagement numbers—not because she needed validation, but because social media orthodoxy had made metrics feel like measures of worth. The orthodoxy's power is making platform metrics feel like personal value."
by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026
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