Five reasons why I am not on social media

If you are on this website, you might wonder why there are no social media links. The answer is simple: I do not have any. I am not on Instagram (Deleted), Facebook (Deactivated), TikTok (Deleted after trying for three days), or Twitter (Deleted). The only social media platforms I use are YouTube and LinkedIn. I mainly like YouTube (not including YouTube Shorts), and LinkedIn seems like recruiters have forced it on every working-class white-collar person.

The reason I left all these social media platforms is as follows:

1. Designed to addict users rather than having a nuanced debate: For a very long time, I convinced myself that I was using social media incorrectly and that I needed more discipline to regulate my time on social media to have the best of both worlds. However, I realised that effort was futile when I heard the following analogy:

   I can use a fork as a knife if I tried hard enough, but its form makes it much more possible to use it for picking stuff up, not cutting things(drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction).

   Even though social media might have nuanced discussions from time to time, its design makes it much more likely to make users mindless consumers of content.

2. Promotes a soft form of fascism: More and more companies have recently introduced short-form content to their platform, similar to TikTok. Instagram has reels, YouTube has shorts, and the same can be said for other platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat etc. I think this is a problem, and Noam Chomsky explained it the best in his masterclass. I don’t have masterclass anymore, so I am paraphrasing from memory here: It (short form video content) is a soft form of fascism where things are understood at a high level, and critical thinking is reduced. If you are doom-scrolling, you do not have enough time to think critically about the content being fed to your mind (Noam Chomsky Independent Thinking and Media’s Invisible Powers).

3. Some of them have blood on their hands: Social media has been used as a tool to spread hate speech and misinformation. One case that comes to mind is how hate speech affected Myanmar. I recommend checking out the following article: Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable.

   When we call people to thrash, vermin, or monsters, we edge towards the great abyss. The abyss where we treat people as thrash or vermin or monsters. Uncertain and Afraid

4. Surveillance on users and stealing their data: It has been well documented that social media has been used to spy on their users, conduct psychological experiments (Facebook apologises for psychological experiments on users) and steal their data to train their AI models. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that creators and publishers are overestimating their impact (Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI). Hey Mark, If their data is not valuable, then why are you stealing it?

5. Promotes consumer culture and creates unnecessary wants: It is quite common for social media platform creators to promote stuff that users don’t need. This is evident in the popularity of platforms like Temu, where people buy unnecessary stuff. If you want to find out more about how social media promotes consumer culture, then I can recommend the following video: TEMU and commodity fetishism

Now, the above points are not the only things that are wrong with social media, but these points bother me the most.

Please let me know if you want me to provide further clarification in any of these points or if you think I am wrong.