What started out as a novel, exciting and largely good idea - connecting with people from your past - has turned sour, nasty and toxic. Social media promised to connect the world, but instead it has fractured our attention, polarised our politics, and weaponised our insecurities. From echo chambers that radicalise users to algorithms that exploit our psychological vulnerabilities, the platforms that were supposed to bring us together have often driven us apart. Yet the solution to these digital ailments may not be in abandoning technology, but rather in embracing its next evolution: artificial intelligence.

The Diagnosis: What's Wrong with Social Media

Before exploring the cure, let’s try to understand the disease. Social media's core problems stem from its fundamental design philosophy—maximising engagement at any cost. This creates a toxic feedback loop where inflammatory content rises to the top, nuanced discussion and truth seeking get buried, and users become products to be manipulated rather than people to be served.

The symptoms are everywhere. Misinformation spreads faster than fact-checkers can respond. Young people report unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. Political discourse has devolved into tribal warfare. Our collective attention span has shattered into fragments, leaving us  overstimulated and ironically more disconnected.

I spoke to a Gen Z woman recently, an Oxford graduate working in the city of London, she said “no matter how great a day I’ve had, when I go on social media in the evening there is always someone else who seems to be living a better life than me”. This is what happens when we engage with a business model that profits from our psychological weaknesses.And when I asked another Gen Z man, if it’s so bad why don’t you just quit it; his response was ‘I try to cut down but then when you get to the office, you’re the only one (from his generation of course) who doesn’t get the latest joke or meme etc.

AI as Digital Medicine

‍Artificial intelligence offers a fundamentally different approach. Rather than optimising for clicks and shares,AI can be designed to optimise for human wellbeing, understanding, and meaningful personal connection. Indeed, ChatGPT recently had individual counseling and therapy as the number one use of AI in 2025 (see graphic below. Source: HBR)

Here's how AI could help us move past toxic Social Media:
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Personalized Content Curation Beyond the Echo Chamber
Current algorithms trap users in filter bubbles by showing them more of what they already believe. AI systems can be trained to deliberately introduce intellectual diversity—exposing users to high-quality content that challenges their views while still respecting their core interests. Instead of amplifying outrage, these systems could promote curiosity and intellectual humility. This is already happening with services like “Monday” from ChatGPT, it’s a little aggressive to begin with but you ( the human) can actually guide it to your sweet spot or its better angel so to speak. And then quite bizarrely it very quickly becomes your trusted confidant.

Real-Time Context and Fact-Checking
AI can provide instant context for claims, automatically surfacing relevant background information and multiple perspectives on controversial topics. Rather than letting misinformation spread unchecked, AI systems can offer real-time corrections and help users develop better information literacy skills through gentle guidance rather than heavy-handed censorship. By the way, this is how I think organisations will tackle the thorny question of AI Governance, they will use AI to deliver the AI they want for their customers and their employees.

Mental Health Safeguards
AI can detect when users are engaging in unhealthy patterns—doom scrolling, comparing themselves to others, or consuming content that triggers anxiety or depression. Instead of exploiting these vulnerabilities, AI can intervene with compassionate suggestions: taking breaks, connecting with friends, or engaging with uplifting content tailored to their specific needs.The company that delivers this antidote to say Instagram or TikTok will win the hearts and minds and support of many parents!

Authentic Connection Over Viral Performance
AI can help users focus on meaningful relationships rather than vanity metrics. By understanding the quality of interactions rather than just their quantity, AI systems can promote deeper conversations and genuine community building over the hollow pursuit of likes and shares.

The Technical Path Forward

The infrastructure for this transformation already exists. Large language models can understand context and nuance in ways that previous algorithms couldn't. Computer vision can detect harmful content more accurately than ever before. Machine learning systems can model complex human psychology and predict the downstream effects of different content choices.

The missing piece isn't technical capability—it's incentive alignment. AI systems are only as good as the goals they're given. If we continue to optimize for engagement and advertising revenue, AI will simply become a more sophisticated tool for manipulation. But if we design AI systems with human flourishing as the primary objective, they can become powerful forces for positive change. Cue fanfare for the new tech startup that brings a form of digital Buddhism to the masses for free!

Transparency and User Control
Unlike the black-box algorithms of current social media platforms,AI systems can be designed for transparency. Users should understand why they're seeing specific content and have granular control over their experience. AI can help users understand their own psychological patterns and make conscious choices about their digital consumption. The current trend where AIs are showing chain of thought reasoning bodes well in this respect.

Community-Driven Moderation
AI can augment rather than replace human judgment in content moderation. By handling obvious cases automatically and escalating nuanced situations to human moderators with relevant context, AI can make moderation both more efficient and more thoughtful. Humans can vote for AI participation in their communities and shape the AI to be a helpful non-human member of the community with its obvious superior skills employed in the service of their needs.

Challenges and Considerations

This vision isn't without risks. AI systems can perpetuate biases, make errors, and be manipulated by bad actors. The concentration of power in the hands of AI developers raises important questions about democratic governance of digital spaces.

But these challenges aren't reasons to abandon the approach—they're reasons to approach it thoughtfully. We need diverse teams building these systems, robust oversight mechanisms, and ongoing research into AI safety and alignment. Most importantly, we need a fundamental shift in how we think about the purpose of social media platforms.

A Different Kind of Social Network

Imagine social media platforms that make you feel better about yourself and the world, not worse. Platforms that help you have meaningful conversations with people who disagree with you. Platforms that gently guide you toward accurate information and away from manipulation.Platforms that understand when you need support and connect you with help, rather than exploiting your vulnerabilities for profit.

This isn't utopian fantasy—it's an achievable goal with the AI tools we have today. The question isn't whether we can build better social media platforms with AI, but whether we have the will to do so.

The antidote to social media's poison isn't to abandon digital connection altogether. It's to build digital spaces that serve human needs rather than exploit human weaknesses. AI, designed with wisdom and deployed with care, can be the medicine our digital society desperately needs.

The choice is ours: we can continue letting algorithms optimize for engagement at the expense of our wellbeing, or we can harness AI's power to create online spaces that make us more connected, more informed, and more human. The technology is ready. The question is whether we are.