If you have quit social media, what was your last straw?

[alexela64]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

Seeing the way that people in my life responded to the uprisings in 2020, followed by the genocide in Palestine, and subsequently Trump's election. Social media is the strongest tool of liberal reformist ideology because by pressing a few buttons, people can feel like they've made an impact; they are instead spreading information that may or may not be true, revealing their political/ideological standpoints to the feds and anyone caring to look, and oftentimes not caring about their immediate communities in favor of boosting international issues (not to say that's a bad thing, but as some people say, you fix your own house first -- especially in the US when your house *is* the problem.)

I already was never big on social media, as someone that was raised with open access to it, but I felt like i was drowning in a wave of carefully formatted canva infographics telling me why racism is not okay, actually.

[caracalled]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

I actually feel similar and it was a big reason for me to leave, but it was a bit of a different situation for me!
I agree about the performative activism 100% and one of the huge changes I've seen since quitting was how much more informed I am in comparison? I have used the time and energy I have since quitting (since I'm not overwhelmed with other peoples hot takes and guilt-tripping anymore) for actually reading newspapers, essays and theory and I feel like the performative nature of online activism was actively keeping me from engaging with the topics in a high-quality manner (aside from the fact that it shifted what I see as activism - now I think of activism as things I do in my community in real life instead of what I post and I can see the tangible results of my efforts).


I think there were two major things I realized halfway down the journey (i had already deleted twitter and instagram) that I would say were the big reasons for my past (and then also future) leaving of social media:

• I could tell when someone (even someone I agree with) was getting all their information/ideas on tiktok and from youtube video essays and started to feel the dread of "oh, is this what I sound like? That's awful". It sounds very mean, and I feel a bit sorry for that, but i much prefer reading the actual texts instead of consuming the ideas derived from them chewed out in video form (realising that video essayists repackage texts that I can just... read myself? was really cool). Hand in hand with that also goes that a lot of the time the same talking points get handed around on social media, and I've been enjoying breaking out of that constraint!
• The realisation that most people on social media are shadowboxing their own algorithm, and losing. A lot of angry posts I (used to) see were just someone reacting to random noise of the algorithm. I like to say that they're fighting nonexistent people, groups so small they only exist in a sub niche of a sub niche of a niche, and therefor there's no reason to worry about the three people who believe whatever OP is arguing against, or about whether whatever OP is saying is true/applies to me/etc.

[Eunice]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

Absolutely this! It's led to bullying. One has to show obvious support for the side that the prevailing opinion says is the "right" one, or else. I don't like it at all. Everyone should be able to express their own opinion in their own site without other people metaphorically yelling at them.