Delete Your Accounts

This post is about an immediate action you can take by selecting social media sites that are in alignment with your values.

I’m old enough to remember what life was like before social media existed. I was alive when the internet was first trickling into mainstream usage. My first email address beautifulloser@h******.com was given away to someone else when I got grounded and wasn’t allowed to login during the time-frame needed to keep my handle. (Things were very different then.) Because cell phones weren’t commonplace yet and instant messaging hadn’t started, I would sit at the computer and use my email as a way to message back and forth with my friends. The excitement from getting a little notification when an email arrived was an unparalleled burst of joy.

The home I grew up in was not a healthy environment for any of the members of my family. We only had one desktop computer, and we would all fight to get our time on it. I was literally trapped on top of a mountain, on a dirt road, in a log cabin, in the middle of nowhere, in a toxic family dynamic during the very part of my life where I wanted nothing more than to be around my peers, trying to find someone who would show love to me. Instead of being forced to spend time with each other where the most imperceptible slight would escalate into screaming and fighting regularly, each of us would try to have our “alone time” at the computer where we could engage in conversations with people that we weren’t forced to be around but actually chose to have in our lives.

My entire goal in life was to get away from the home I grew up in, and ten days after I graduated high school, I moved across the country to another state. I don’t think any of my friends actually thought I was going to go through with it, but when I decide to seriously commit to something, there’s very little that can stop me. When I started college, I used phone cards to call home because that’s how long-distance telephone communication worked then. One time, some girls in my dorm found a cell phone dropped nearby, and we all took turns using it to call our families. It was the first time I ever used one, and I went for a few more years without acquiring one myself.

I was still in college (at a different university) when I got my own. It had the smallest screen because all the buttons of the keypad took up the space instead. I took to texting like a fish in water. I was so good at multi-tap texting that I could do it without looking at the numbers, just from the feel of the location of the numbers and knowing which letters were under each number. As soon as unlimited texting was an option, I used it as my primary way to communicate with anyone who would text back. I used to text and drive. I used to text at work. I would fall asleep texting and wake up with my phone in my hand, reviewing my messages to see if I was texting in my sleep.

On the laptop I had on lease from the university, I would instant message (IM) people. Instead of having to wait for someone to reply to my emails, we could chat in real time while we were both online. I could be in constant communication with anyone as long as we both had a stable internet connection. It was magical. Even if I was physically trapped in a room with my abusive family, I could reach out to others for (in theory) a better connection.

I was still in college when social media started. I remember only being able to share text posts at first, and the prompt was something like “What’s on your mind?” I felt like I could be open and share my life with multiple people at the same time. It was fun to be in an online space with my peers, except when it wasn’t. I’m grateful that social media wasn’t really a thing when I was in high school (or earlier) as I was bullied enough in person and would not have survived online harassment on top of it. I feel for the younger generations who have never known life without the internet.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with social media. Back before the algorithm controlled everything, in the times of the beloved chronological feed, I would scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll until I hit the posts I had already seen, ensuring that I saw each and every thing my friends were sharing. I took it very seriously. I felt it was my personal responsibility to see all the things my online connections thought were important enough to document on the internet. I would rotate through my various social media sites for hours each day on my laptop while I was also texting with many, many people on my cell. My “social” life was a high priority.

As cell phones evolved to have apps, larger screens, and online capabilities, my usage grew in tandem. Some of the people in my life (including my partner) would complain about how I always had my face in my phone. Part of me never thought it was an issue because I wasn’t doing anything nefarious, I was just connecting with people. But another part of me knew that I was prioritizing social media sites in a way that negatively impacted the rest of my life.

Over the years, I spent most of my social media time on Facebook. Every so often, I would delete my account, for just a month or an entire year. But whenever I would again have that urge to share myself with others, I would start up again. The last time I deleted my Facebook was sometime in 2020, just before the US election in November. I have zero regrets about it, and my life has definitely improved without Facebook in it. I had many reasons for removing that site from my life including that I no longer wanted it to have control over how I spend my limited time while I’m alive. (This is the same reason I quit smoking cigarettes too.)

I’m one of the many people who recognize how scary it is that we are currently in the age of technofeudalism. “Feudalism refers to the medieval-era social system that dominated Europe. Its basic idea is that peasants (also known as serfs) served their lords through farming and labour and in return, got to live within their kingdom. Technofeudalism is the notion that we serve our big tech overlords (Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta) by handing over data to access their cloud space.

Technofeudalism suggests our preferences are no longer our own, they’re manufactured by machine networks — commonly known as the cloud. It’s underpinned by the theory that the cloud has created a feedback loop that removes our agency. We train the algorithm to find what we like and then the algorithm trains us to like what it offers.”

While a lot of what is currently happening in US politics feel overwhelming, I refuse to give into despair. Even though I may be just one person, there are things I can do to change my life, change myself, change my immediate environment, and hopefully those changes will ripple out further. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I should be doing right now with my life. I decided to take stock of how I’m spending my time, energy, and money and then take action to spend those precious commodities on things that are in alignment with my values.

One of the immediate actions I took was to delete a bunch of my social media accounts. I deleted (both of) my X (Twitter) accounts, my TikTok, and all (three) of my Instagram accounts. I already knew that getting rid of my Facebook account was a blessing, as it forced me to communicate directly with the people I wanted to be in my life and to release those who were not making any effort (beyond spectating), so it effectively strengthened my existing relationships. I know how scary it can be to think that you might lose what tentative connections you have, but please hear me when I say that those superficial connections are taking up your time, space, and energy that could be better spent elsewhere creating actual community.

Once the TikTok “ban” was enforced and the ensuing communications posted praising our glorious leader Trump upon its return, I realized that the beloved community there had been infiltrated by the federal government. All of the reports of censorship of specific topics and the confirmation that the government made a deal to control what is and isn’t allowed makes TikTok no better than OneAmerica. If you wouldn’t subscribe to literal state propaganda, why would you continue to be on TikTok? Even if you claim you are on there because of the other people creating content that isn’t directly approved by the government before being posted, only government approved posts will get into your feed. That’s how it works now. Anything deemed too controversial or damaging to the country’s interests will be suppressed. Stop wasting your time and energy scrolling to try to find the nuggets of truth within the stream of propaganda you are consuming alongside.

Regarding X/Twitter, I stayed for a long time after Elon Musk took over because I wanted to believe that people who weren’t openly spouting white supremacist messages should try to maintain the space. It used to be the best place to get real-time, on the ground updates about what was happening. At a certain point, I realized that all the changes Musk has made to the site have just continually made it worse, but the censorship and algorithm manipulation made most of the reasons for staying null and void.

I also feel as though there is a big difference between staying on a platform that allows Nazis to spew their intolerance and one that is run by someone espousing the same messages. It is not possible for me to remove myself from every part of the internet that houses Nazis/fascists/intolerant bigots because I would need to remove myself from the entire planet to achieve that goal. But it is possible to remove myself from the spaces where the person/people in charge are directly funding them as every moment I spend on their sites supports them financially through advertising and just being able to show how many users their site has as a selling point. So even if I was not clicking links and purchasing things through that site, my presence, the time I spend scrolling, is still putting money in their pocket which is then funneled into causes that do not align with my own.

A lot of people finally decided to quit Facebook but then leaned into Instagram (IG) as their substitute not realizing that Mark Zuckerberg owns them both (also Threads and WhatsApp through the Meta portfolio). If one of the reasons I am not on Facebook is because I do not want to support Mark Zuckerberg, then it only makes logical sense that I remove myself from Instagram as well. In one of my other creative outlets, I was sharing photos on an IG account daily. I literally shared at least one photo for every day last year, but because I do not create/share video content, my posts were never seen in most people’s feeds, and my follower count actually went down. Only 1/3 of the people that follow me even saw my pictures, and that isn’t enough to warrant all the time and energy I put into sharing them on that platform. On my personal account, I don’t get the stats like that, but I know that a lot of the people I know offline were not seeing my posts either.

If the entire point of being on social media is to be connected to others, but in reality, the things we’re sharing aren’t being seen by those we’re trying to connect with, what is even the point? The point for these companies is to keep your attention on what they want to promote. They manipulate the algorithm to prioritize posts from their advertisers. They want you to spend money on these products. They want you to be distracted from the issues that are impacting all of us. They want you to consume. They want you to be inundated with their messages to control the narrative.

It may seem like this is just a “self-righteous rant” like when I stopped being a football fanatic and disavowed the NFL after I realized that all the time, money, and energy I spent on supporting my team was just being funneled into supporting abusers, but if you’re not choosing to spend your time, money, and energy on things that mirror your values, then it seems like you’re OK with that support going to the people fighting against what you claim are your personal priorities. I’ve always been the kind of person that adapts when I realize that my current understanding is different than my lived reality. I’m always trying to be the best version of myself and taking action to alter my path forward.

After a lot of self-reflection, I am choosing to remove myself from specific social media sites to force a transformation on how I spend my time, money, and energy. I am still participating in other places online, so I still have space to share myself with others. I am not completely isolated on the internet. But there may come a time when I continue to remove myself from those places as well. I’m always reviewing, revising, and evolving as I grow. I look forward to seeing what will take the place of these social media sites in my life as I have a lot of ideas on how I want to spend my time and energy going forward that isn’t supporting these “big tech overlords,” and I hope you’ll join me.

~The Overstimulated

Image from Visual Capitalist