10 reasons to quit social media — and why I'm glad I did

It’s been nine months since I quit social media, and I don’t miss it.

I’m not condemning anyone for using Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. I used them myself for years. But the longer I’ve been away, the more I’ve realized just how harmful these platforms can be.

Sometimes, when you take a step back, you see things a lot more clearly. Here are 10 toxic things I’ve found that social media sites cause or encourage:

Impatience

Social media have reinforced our “gotta have it now” tendencies by catering to them.

We like things prepackaged and bite-sized, and the internet is more than willing to accommodate. Twitter was among the first — and worst — offenders, actually prohibiting posts longer than 140 characters (since raised to 280). The message? Don’t think too deeply, because we won’t let you explain yourself anyway.

Twitter’s character limit actively discourages complex thought. It empowers people like Donald Trump, who don’t want to take the time to process complicated issues, but prefer to react based on whim and prejudice. Instagram focuses on pictures, not words. Snapchat posts are automatically deleted. TikTok videos are limited to a few seconds.

The more we get used to indulging our impatience, the less tolerance we have for waiting — even when it’s crucial that we do so. (Our impatience in reopening despite the continuing danger posed by COVID-19 is a chilling example).

Social media sites encourage us to clamor for whatever’s next, giving us a rush of dopamine, a chemical released when we’re expecting something good. This natural high is deceptive, because it rewards hope or desire, rather than the experience itself. It’s the same thing that fuels compulsive gambling, shopping, and similar behaviors. The result of indulging this is that you never have enough, and never appreciate what you have.

Oversimplification

Because of our impatience, we dismiss the value of evidence in making decisions.

Social sites encourage us to share opinions, not evaluate facts. Analysis relies on the kind of thinking the internet has no use for: a thoughtful, sometimes difficult process of weighing facts and considering a variety of viewpoints.

We’re encouraged to have only one perspective — ours (or our group’s) — because that’s all we think we have time for. Our counselors aren’t advisors, they’re yes-men and yes-women.

We’re encouraged to make decisions quickly and stick to them, regardless of their merit, for fear of looking weak or hypocritical. In response, we dismiss the value of nuance and perspecitve, instead adopting a black-and-white view of the world that lacks both depth and diversity.

We’re encouraged to adopt a position and stick to it, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. We just don’t have time to deal with it. We’ve got to watch the next short-form video, catch the next “breaking news” bulletin, read the next tweet.

There’s no time, either, to acknowledge our mistakes, much less apologize and learn from them. When we do apologize, it’s not because we’ve internalized a lesson learned, but because we’re doing what our group expects of us — fearing that, if we fail to do so, we’ll be condemned and shunned.

We stop thinking for ourselves because it’s too much trouble and too great a risk, and let others do the thinking for us: politicians, celebrities, “influencers,” and con artists waiting to take advantage of us. Social media empowers these con artists, and in doing so create the sort of learned helplessness that masquerades as know-it-all bravado.

Dehumanization

The less you know about a person, the easier it is to dehumanize them. That’s what governments do in wartime: They depict the enemy as faceless, nameless, and subhuman. They depict them as “all the same” and debase them using racist names. That way, soldiers can ignore the fact that they’re killing and maiming human beings who feel pain and hurt and loss, just as they themselves do.

These days, politicians do the same thing, and social media have shown them the way.

Unless you know the person in real life (or IRL, to use online shorthand), they’re just a name on a screen. And their communication is just words — or maybe just emojis. When you’re talking to someone face-to-face, you can see their facial expressions and their gestures, you can hear their tone of voice. And you don’t want to see the look in their eyes if you hurt them.

The internet depersonalizes our interactions and, in doing so, keeps us from seeing people as human beings. Instead, we see them as targets or obstacles or followers. As in war, this reinforces the “us vs. them” mentality that fuels continued hostility and conflict. Peace and understanding? They’re condemned as compromise and disloyalty.

Platforms that focus on photos can enhance this “book by its cover” approach by focusing attention on externals — skin color, weight, clothing — rather than anything of real substance.

Studies have shown that people who use Twitter less often are more compassionate than frequent users, and that compassionate people spend less time on social media than narcissists (gotta get those likes and followers!)

Isolation

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. Social media are supposed to connect you with others, and to a degree, they succeed in doing so.

But you never feel so alone as you do at a party where you don’t know anyone. The internet is like that. You may get superficial attention — the little heart emojis that are the small talk of social media. Or you may (almost certainly will) say something that offends someone, in which case you’ll get the kind of attention reserved for party-goers who wear shorts to a black-tie party.

Social sites encourage use to view superficiality as a measure of self-worth. Instead of encouraging meaningful dialogue, they promote mindless “likes” and “shares.” Instead of a forum for discussion, they’ve become a virtual beauty pageant where celebrities and so-called influencers vie for followers.

It occurs to me that, when I started using social media (back in the days when MSN and Yahoo! were the biggest players) there weren’t emoji options to “like” posts. You had to actually talk to each other. Imagine that.

Groupthink

Social media platforms claim to foster a sense of belonging by helping people find their “tribe.” But this is largely an illusion, because acceptance is, by and large, superficial and conditional.

In a virtual world where people are routinely dehumanized, they naturally become disposable. The tribe is important; you aren’t. Creative thought isn’t just devalued, it’s condemned as dangerous. Thinking outside the box isn’t seen as problem-solving, but as a threat to the status quo.

If you deviate from the norm or fail to meet a litmus test, you’re either unreliable or an outright traitor. It’s loyalty over logic, conformity over integrity. And people go along with it because they’re afraid of being shamed and cast out.  

Groupthink is heartless because it treats people as expendable. But it’s worse than that: It’s also self-destructive. If you’re invested in protecting your bias above all else, you’ll ignore any problems that challenge that bias. Even if you do recognize them, you won’t have any experience thinking creatively to find solutions — because you think you already know everything.

Even though you don’t. And you’d rather go to your grave protecting your bias than risk being cast out and scorned by others who know even less than you do. Just look at the response to the coronavirus.

Bullying

Dehumanization is the gateway drug of bullying, and groupthink is the “fix” that keeps abusers coming back for more.

If we don’t see or care how the person on the other end feels, we feel free to attack them mercilessly — especially if we know others will back us up with attaboys.

We can lament cyberbullying all we want, but it won’t stop until we recognize that social media platforms, as currently constructed, enable it by their very existence. They encourage groupthink and allow users to dehumanize each other — all while hiding behind a computer screen that gives them a measure of anonymity.

You can defame someone, post embarrassing pictures, stalk people, purposely try to provoke them... the list goes on.

If anyone complains, it’s easy to cry “censorship!” and use freedom of speech as an excuse to hurt others.

If you doubt that online activity facilitates bullying, check out these statistics: More than one-third of young people have been threatened online (and this is just one form of bullying), and more than 25% have been bulled repeatedly via their cellphones or the internet.

Distraction

Social media sites distract students from their homework, employees from their jobs, people from their families.

And while they’re distracted, student learning fails, productivity falls, and families fall apart.

Since social sites distract people from real life, they can easily become a substitute for real life. Users spend so much time on social media, they come to regard it as real — even more real than their everyday life. It can seem appealing because it’s an escape, but problems arise when they seek to apply virtual fixes to real-world problems.

A two-dimensional fantasyland can’t provide three-dimensional solutions. It’s simply not equipped to do so. Magical thinking doesn’t work, no matter how badly we might wish it. But if you spend enough time on social media, it’s easy to convince yourself — to pretend — that it will. You may start to think the coronavirus will simply “go away” because your group insists it will. Or that you’ll get rich by lighting a green candle.

Distracted driving can be deadly, and the kind of distraction created by social media can be severely damaging. It’s a vehicle for others to tell us what we want to hear, and a device to help us believe it, even if it isn’t true.

Addiction

It’s easy to spend a lot of time on social media based on a “fear of missing out.”

Social media sites aren’t alone in this. The 24-hour news cycle, propelled by “breaking news” feeds a need by users to know about something the minute it happens. Internet sites are coerced by their own addiction — an addiction to clicks, which produce revenue — to keep us addicted, in much the same way casinos keep gamblers addicted.

In a casino, there are no clocks and no windows to the outside world. This is by design, so you lose track of time. Casinos want all your attention focused on the one-armed bandit or the roulette wheel in front of you. Internet sites want your attention focused on your computer screen. That’s how they earn their money.

How often have you been so transfixed by social media that you haven’t realized hours have passed? You may justify it by saying it doesn’t cost you anything, but is that really true? Is your time really worth nothing?

Distortion

Advocates of social media claim that it cuts out the middleman and allows people to communicate directly with one another, rather than through an expert or media gatekeeper.

There are two problems with this.

First, experts are experts for a reason. They shouldn’t be trusted blindly, but their opinions should carry more weight than the average joe you’ve never met from Timbuktu whose reason for doing (or not doing) something is no more complicated than “I wanna.”

Second, media gatekeepers perform an important function. The knock against them is they’re biased. This is true. But it’s true because EVERYONE’S biased, so removing media gatekeepers doesn’t remove bias.

In most cases, it makes it worse, because the traditional media had guidelines in place designed to minimize bias. They adopted these guidelines precisely because they knew any reporter or editor they employed would be biased. Newsroom protocols didn’t eliminate bias completely, because that’s impossible, but they did reduce it significantly.

The provided a filter. Modern fringe media like to pretend they’ve removed bias by eliminating that filter, but they’ve done the opposite: They’ve replaced the filter with their own unfettered bias, and presented it as fair. It’s not. It’s a snowjob.

Anarchy

Facebook has been around for a couple of decades now, and social media sites as a whole longer than that. Still, in all this time, they’ve been unable (or unwilling) to act like adults when it comes to moderating content. Ordinary users get 30-day bans for perceived slights based on a single complaint, yet there’s a hands-off policy toward the rich and powerful.

There’s no noble reason for this. It’s pure self-interest. Social media platforms know that if they crack down on the rich, they’ll lose money. And if they crack down on politicians, the mindless drones who follow those politicians will jump ship to another platform where they can preach, complain, and blame to the choir about the evils of everyone who doesn’t agree with them or their puppeteer of choice.

All the puppeteers have to do is keep pulling their strings.

There are upsides to social media. You can connect with friends easily, and you can make new ones. You can share personal news and access news of the day.

But we could do all that before social media came along, and we can still do it now if we decide to. Instead of staying in contact with old friends who are miles away through social media, why not do so via email, FaceTime, or even old-fashioned letters and phone calls? Why not make new friends through a local club or activity?

When it comes to news, there’s something to be said for old-fashioned magazines and newspapers, most of which are available online if you prefer the digital route. News aggregators can put a wealth of resources at your fingertips without any need for social media, and you can even tailor them to your interests.

As for me, I ditched Twitter (which I never liked anyway) and Instagram and everything else for three years. (I retained a token presence on LinkedIn for business purposes.)

Now, after that three-year hiatus, I’m back on Facebook, but in a limited capacity: My friends list only includes real-life friends and former colleagues, not strangers who feed off drama and conflict.

The fact is, for better or for worse, Facebook is a cheap and occasionally effective means of getting the word out on my work.

You may even be reading this on a link from Facebook, and yes, I recognize the irony in that. But I’m doing it on my own terms. If you, the reader, never hear about one of my books because you decide to quit Facebook as a result of this essay, I won’t complain. In fact, I’ll give you one last virtual thumbs-up for the road and wish you well in the land of the living.