Why I left Facebook and Twitter

'Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect to the people around me? Why should my human relationships be mediated through the banal language and feeble imaginations of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What’s wrong with the pub? Why do we need an alternative to real life? And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable like talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk.’ 

Tom Hodgkinson - author of How to be Idle and founding editor of The Idler magazine wrote those words in 2008 when Facebook had just 66 million active users. 

At this moment Facebook has just under three billion active users – nearly 40% of all the human beings on the planet. And that’s just one platform. So was Hodgkinson right? Does Facebook really connect people? And has social media made the world a better place? 

It's been a question I've been asking myself recently. The result was that I left Twitter and Facebook (and I never really got started with TikTok).

Social media, per se, isn't a bad thing. I've certainly used it to make new friends and to reconnect with some old ones. Like all technology, it's how it is used that matters. 

But that's where I start to see an issue. While Facebook and Twitter are promoted as a way to have global conversations, in reality it's a business. It's all about data mining and finding ways to make money from us. Meanwhile, for the unscrupulous user, the anonymity and distance afforded by social media has empowered bullying and extremism. People’s online behaviour has become appalling. 

We’ve always had bullies but at least they once had the guts to do it to your face. Now they spit their vitriol from behind the shield of a faceless avatar. Kids are cyber-bullied for not wearing on-trend brands or owning the latest tech. Larger people – especially celebs - are body shamed. Women generally receive the brunt of online trolling with hundreds of unwanted 'dick pics' and solicitations for sex. And people (okay, 99% men) who have been dumped circulate nudes and videos of their ex-partners as ‘revenge porn’ (it became such a regular occurrence that the authorities had to legislate against it). Meanwhile, anyone who dares to express an unpopular opinion can expect to receive abuse at best and death or rape threats at worst. 

Social media isn’t a global conversation. It’s become the 21st century’s pillory or stocks. It provides the virtual equivalent of lobbing a rotting cabbage – and much worse - at someone who can’t always retaliate. Would the trolls do it to their victim’s faces? Of course they wouldn’t. With the exception of those with genuine psychological issues who can’t stop themselves, trolls are simply contemptible cowards. Keyboard warriors? They couldn’t be further from it. Spewing their hate from behind closed doors means that they don’t get to see the effect their actions have on their victims. As the result, they lack empathy. And that means that the bullying can reach terrifying levels and even destroy lives. 

I’ve also come to hate the way that social media makes people feel about themselves. The first platform I ever joined was Friends Reunited in 2000 which allowed me to get back in touch with people I went to school with. It was all quite harmless and cosy. However, the arrival of MySpace in 2005, and then others like Bebo, Facebook and Twitter, changed the game. Social media was no longer just a tool for communication - it had now become a popularity contest. MySpace introduced a function where you had to list your ‘Top Eight Friends’ – there was no opt-out. So now you could measure your personal popularity by how often you were included in other people’s lists. Or how often you weren’t. Imagine how people felt when they discovered that they weren’t on a list they expected to appear on. Or when they were bumped lower down (or off) the list of someone they regarded as a close friend. 

‘Any ranking or hierarchical system like this promotes a comparing, judgemental, critical and unhealthy environment,’ explains therapist David James Lees. ‘It’s OK momentarily if you’re in the top eight and rising … but what happens when you’re not? Without the correct emotional education and guidance, being liked or part of the ‘in crowd’ is of vital importance and becomes like an unhealthy drug.’ 

But that was just the start. 

Soon we had ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘friend’ buttons. And with them came the power to also ‘unfollow, ‘unfriend’ and ‘block’ people. The number of followers you could boast – whether or not you knew any of them, or even interacted with them – became a measure of your popularity. Social media had suddenly stopped being a communication platform and had become a competition that you could never win. 

‘Think you’re good at something? There’s someone on the Internet who is better, works less, and is happier. They have nice teeth too,’ writes journalist Eric Barker in his book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. ‘For most of human existence when we looked around us there were one or two hundred people in our tribe and we could be the best at something. We could stand out and be special and valuable. Now our context is a global tribe of seven-plus billion. There’s always someone better to compare yourself to, and the media is always reporting on these people, which raises the standards just when you think you may be close to reaching them.’ 

A 2016 review of the literature on selfie-taking and mental health concluded that excessive posting of selfies online was most associated with low self-esteem, narcissism, loneliness and depression. It’s easy to see why someone with existing psychological issues might use social media as a way to temporarily assuage negative feelings about themselves. There is something euphoric in getting likes, follows, retweets and positive comments -even from complete strangers. But prolonged or continual exposure can lead to dependency to maintain the good feeling. And getting no likes or negative comments is deflating at best and life-destroying at worst. A recent study found that nearly half of young people who spend five or more hours per day on social media had experienced suicidal thoughts, compared with only 28% of those who spend just an hour. That’s because every time we check in, we get a spike in levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. We all need to feel that we have worth. Social media feeds the niggling worry that we don't matter.

We also live in a culture that popularises and reinforces the lie that the better looking you are, the better your life will be. Therefore, in many instances, people will try to project a ‘better’ version of themselves, spending hours learning to use contouring make-up effects or filters to ensure that each selfie is perfect. It can become obsessive - even leading to making physical changes. 

There’s a young man on Instagram called Junaid Ahmed (photo above) who has over 60,000 followers and posts hundreds of photos of himself online every month. He admitted to the BBC that he had undergone cosmetic surgery as a result. ‘I used to be quite natural,’ he says. ‘But I want to upgrade myself now. I’ve had my teeth veneered, chin filler, cheek filler, jawline filler, lip filler, Botox under the eyes and on the head, tattooed eyebrows and fat freezing.’ All to impress 60,000+ people he’ll never meet. And the irony is that he was a good-looking lad to begin with – that’s why his Instagram account attracted people in the first place. He's now landed himself a place on the TV show The Only Way is Essex. On his Instagram page he describes himself as a 'public figure'.

But it’s not just how good you look - it’s also how good your life is. People take selfies on holiday, at rock concerts, even at the cinema or theatre (to the annoyance of those around them). For many, proving the fact that ‘I was there’ has become more important than the actual experience. It’s a form of self-validation because we’re all in competition with each other now, whether we like to admit it or not. 

What must that be doing to our collective mental health? 

It’s not often I agree with a holy man but Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster said something back in 2009 that really rang true for me. He expressed the opinion that social networking websites lured teenagers into 'transient' relationships that could leave them suicidal. In an interview with the Telegraph newspaper he said, 'Among young people often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate. It's an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast. But friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right.' 

He's right. Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. It started with 724 participants: boys from disadvantaged and troubled families and Harvard undergraduates. It has included thousands of descendants of the initial group. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done. Conclusion? Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.

But most worrying of all for me is social media's power to influence. We've even seen the rise of a whole new profession - the 'Influencer' - who may have uninformed or even dangerously wrong views but they also have charisma, which is a trait they share with many of the worst people in history. 

Tech pioneer (and one of the people who helped create social media) Jaron Larnier now believes that he made a terrible mistake. In his 2018 book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now he provides some compelling evidence that social media is making people lose free will and their capacity for empathy. It’s also modifying behaviour, empowering unhealthy interactions, is undermining truth, promoting some terrible politics, and makes people less happy. He also points out that having tailored content supplied to us by our devices means that we don’t necessarily see the same world as other people are seeing e.g. politically right-leaning people are nudged towards different content than left-leaning people. 

‘Not only is your worldview distorted, but you have less awareness of other people’s worldviews,’ he explains. ‘You are banished from the experiences of the other groups being manipulated separately. Their experiences are as opaque to you as the algorithms that are driving your experiences.’ 

He believes that this is at the dark heart of the growing tribalism and polarisation of society. ‘Empathy is the fuel that runs a decent society,’ he says. ‘Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.’  

I was quite a late adopter of the major platforms because I didn’t really see the point of them. I have lots of friends and I was perfectly happy with the way we interacted – usually by phone or text or email but most often by physically meeting up. I was eventually persuaded to sign up by my publisher who told me that it was essential for an author because you need to have an online presence to sell books these days. That might have been true in the early days, but now I’m not so sure. You see, here in 2023 it’s never been easier to publish a book. But it’s never been harder to get noticed. I can see how social media would be useful if you’re already famous (or infamous) and have an established fan base. It then functions as an extra channel through which you can advertise your wares to a pre-existing and hungry audience. But it’s a very different story for the rest of us. You’re just one voice shouting, ‘Buy my book!’ among billions of ephemeral messages. Author Chuck Wendig describes it as being akin to throwing a load of your books out of a plane in the hope that someone finds one and bothers to read it. 

So what do I actually need social media for? I don't need validation. I'm happy with who I am. And let's be honest, checking my phone for updates uses up a lot of time that I could be spending doing things I really value like writing, reading, eating, or socialising. 

And so, as an experiment, I left Twitter six months ago but retained the option to re-open my account if I missed it. 

I haven't missed it for a second. So now Facebook has gone too. And I don't feel 'disconnected' or 'separated' or 'isolated' at all. Such negative terms! 

In sharp contrast, I feel liberated. 

I feel free.

The straws that, for me, finally broke the camel's back were three conversations I had online a few days ago. 

In the first one I had expressed sadness that three horses had been put down during the Grand National. I ventured the opinion that horses love to run on the flat but the jumps at Aintree are now far too difficult and dangerous (62 horses have died at the Aintree Festival since 2000 - with 16 killed in the Grand National). I also stated that, rather than fix a horse's broken leg as we would with a beloved pet, a race horse will be put down as it would cost too much and because its competition days are over. The horses are simply expensive assets and no more. I was immediately piled upon by people defending 'the sport of kings' and telling me that this level of fatality was acceptable. It just reminded me that if you have the right to express an opinion, so does everyone else. But it bugged me that instead of creating a Facebook post to espouse their opinions they chose to trash mine.

The second conversation was with a woman who genuinely believes that gravity is man-made. She called me 'stupid' because (her words) 'Everyone knows that it was invented by Isaac Newton and it's under government control'. She insisted that world leaders could 'turn the gravity down' if they wanted to, which would mean that overweight people have less heart attacks. But they won't because they're all 'in the pay of big pharmaceutical companies and the diet industry'. No, really. 

The third conversation grew out of me posting a photo of my renewed passport and saying, 'I may not be pleased with the fact that this new passport entitles me to less than the old one but I can't fault the service offered by the Passport Office.' And I can't. It was quick, efficient and easy, which was the point of my post. But, within minutes, a couple of people turned it into an argument about Brexit. And then  pro-Europeans and Brexit fans chose to battle it out on MY post and it all got bitchy and nasty.

At that point I suspended my Facebook account.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Social media is an addiction. And, like all addictions, it isn't natural or healthy. 

Social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager. Nor did mobile phones. Which goes to prove that you can live quite happily without them. It hasn't been a wrench for me to leave Twitter or Facebook. But younger people live online these days and it would be a huge challenge for them to ditch their 'socials'. 

But not impossible. Comedian James Acaster did so recently and wrote a whole book about how much better his life got as the result. 

I'm not trying to persuade you to do the same - it's a personal choice - but everyone I've talked to who has deleted their social media accounts, are as smug as ex-smokers and as happy as vegans. 

And I've now joined them.

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Footnote:

I haven't quite left Facebook it seems.

I had completely forgotten to remove the link between it and my Instagram account. So when I posted to Insta, it automatically posted to Facebook and reinstated my account. And then I realised that a number of events I'm due to attend were pending and I would keep getting reminders. Which, to be fair, is useful.

So my Facebook account is once again active although I'm not going to actively use it. I've also made my profile private so only friends can see it or get notifications. Consequently, it's there as a passive account rather than the active account it used to be.

That will have to do for now.