I’m really good at Twitter-ing. I’ve been described as hyper-online, I’ve gathered some 31,000+ followers and I have that magic verified button which apparently makes me a Twitter royalty.
What I tweet can occasionally have some weight, much less so than so many people who don’t deserve the impact they have and much more so than so many people who absolutely deserve it more. This on its own really bothers me, but not as much as what I’ll try and discuss in this blog post. My tweets have been featured in virtually every major publication I can think of, and then some. Many tweets have ‘gone viral’, many videos have been viewed over a million times, and so on. By all accounts, I am ‘succesful’ on Twitter and, for one reason or another, I managed to gain a lot of people’s respect, something for which I am genuinely grateful.
But over the past four years – yes, that long – I have been thinking of deleting that account.
This blog post isn’t to try and convince you to delete yours. I don’t know what your circumstances are and it’s not my place to make that argument. You should evaluate the pros and cons of being on social media and decide based on that.
The main take away I hope you get out of this is that social media are a problem. They’re not a neutral phenomenon. They are having an impact on our world that is getting out of control, and we need to very quickly wake up to that fact.
Why I deleted Facebook
I deleted my private Facebook in 2018, roughly 11 years after creating my account. I initially kept (using a fake account as an administrator) the relatively well-known page of my Hummus For Thought blog with its 14,000 followers, but then I deleted it too. When I did that, traffic to my blog went sharply down, effectively killing it. I found myself actually depressed because I was no longer getting those dopamine hits that kept me on that site, a phenomenon something most of us are still invested in denying. I found myself isolated for some time, and I considered re-activating my private account. Facebook is very aware of that phenomenon – FOMO, fear of missing out – and so it gives you 30 days to change your mind. That worked for me, and I deleted/undeleted Facebook twice until finally forcing myself to make it to day 31.
When I told this to a good friend who is a recovering drug addict, she told me that this is exactly what happened to her when she quit drugs. We’re now understanding the social component of drug-addiction much more so than before, and this is informing healthier societal responses (focusing on recovery rather than punishment) in many places. When she quit, a process which took 3 years, it also meant losing her social networks. One of the reasons it can be so difficult to fight drug addiction is that you can end up only being friends with those who have the same habit as, gradually, you have likely isolated yourself from your other friends. I asked myself then – or later, can’t remember – whether there are people that I could have gotten to know better and that I just did not because I was not ‘interacting’ with them on Facebook. I thought of more than a few. This thought bothered me so much that it ended up being the final strike. I deleted Facebook some weeks after that thought.
I was much more active on Facebook than Twitter, publishing up to a dozen posts a day and getting some 3,000+ followers on my private account. My commentary (mostly on Lebanon and Syria) attracted all sorts of attention, at first good and bad, and then mainly bad. I started seeing attitudes around me change, and my own attitudes being changed with them. This, we now know, is by design. It is a big part of Facebook’s business model, which is centered around selling the product (me) to its actual clients (advertisers). This is not a drill. It is how Facebook operates. As long as that is the reality, I cannot in good conscience have an account on that site, despite all the perks it brought me.
How Facebook impacted Hummus For Thought, which was my main blog between 2011 and whenever it started dying (I am reviving it now), is indicative of this. At some point, between roughly 2014 and 2016, I largely abandoned the actual blog (HummusForThought.com) and focused more on its Facebook page. At first I had told myself that the Facebook page would be a helpful tool. You know, you publish something on the blog and then publish it on Facebook so that more people can read that blog post. It is that simple. The problem really is that that was never Facebook’s intention. It was a side-effect of Facebook’s actual purposes which is, again, to sell me to advertisers. So, some years later, when I ended up deleting my Facebook account and page, I had abandoned the actual blog for so long that I just didn’t know how to restart it. There was a stark difference between the quick responses I’d get on Facebook (sometimes hundreds of comments within an hour) to the odd comment on my blog every now and then. Given that, by then, my measure of ‘success’ had adapted to Facebook and, therefore, shifted from largely personal to largely what other people seemingly thought of me, I simply lost the motivation to maintain the blog.
To this day, I am still in denial as to the sheer amount of time I have spent on that site, and it is something I deeply regret. I can categorically state now that Facebook destroyed aspects of my personality that I have been trying to recover for the past two years, and I know it will take me a bit longer to do so properly. I am also fairly confident that most people reading this have no real awareness of just how much time they have spent on that site over the years. I think it would terrify most people to find out the overall amount, especially if you’re a regular user.
Why I deleted Instagram
I followed that by deleting my Instagram account some time later. I actually recently re-opened Instagram (to ‘connect’ with friends during the pandemic) and I recently deleted that other account. Here it’s important for me to say that I’m a photographer. Well, I used to be. The same thing that happened to Hummus For Thought on Facebook happened to my photography on Instagram. It first started as a tool to advertise my work, and it then became an end in itself. I started unconsciously looking for ways of taking photos that were optimal for instagram, rather than taking photos because I actually enjoyed doing so.
And just as with Hummus For Thought, I’m in the process of rebuilding my photography skills. It’ll take some time, but ever since deleting Instagram I’ve felt much more confident and I know I’ll get there. By the way, the photos will be posted on 500px and on this blog too.
The reasons for deleting both Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, are actually very simple. I view Facebook as having a severely destructive role in modern societies, and I think it is harming our capacity to do anything about anything, including the most urgent crisis of our age: the climate emergency.
At first, it was barely more than a decently-informed hunch, but after the Cambridge Analytica scandal this turned into a well-informed conviction. I was among those who noticed Kremlin-linked activity in 2015 due to their role in pro-Assad disinformation on Facebook, several months before this problem reached a wider audience with Brexit and the US elections (I was also complaining about it on, naturally, Facebook). The horrors that have since followed, especially with Bolsonaro’s elections in Brazil and, even worse, with the Rohingya genocide, has convinced me (and many others) that Mark Zuckerberg should stand trial for complicity in crimes against humanity.
Okay, now let’s talk about Twitter, the addiction of choice for serious people.
In this section I’ll go through my arguments for why Twitter has become a problem, to the extent that I believe it has more cons than pros.
Twitter has been my platform of choice for years. Compared to Facebook, it feels more serious, a place for adults. It’s where so many media professionals and academics are. As I’m both a media worker and an academic, it is in many ways my natural habitat. I am telling you this to make it very clear that I am very familiar with the pros of Twitter. So much of my career has depended on me having a Twitter account and I know for a fact that many editors have reached out to me because I often used Twitter to reflect on some current event. This is the reason why I am not writing this to tell you to delete your Twitter account. I am writing this to make the case that you need to treat Twitter as a problem, even if you believe you have to keep your account. By acknowledging the problem, I hope, you’d be able to better manage your time on that site and keep it to the bare minimum. If you then see that you’re better off building a platform off Twitter, deleting that account will be rather easy.
Quote by John Green: “usage goes up when people feel uncertainty and fear, and so the feeds that they choose to show us will increase our feelings of uncertainty and fear. And we’ll all be left wondering whether the chicken of algorithms wanting us to be scared so as to better capture and monetize our attention came before or after the egg of our political, social and economic instability”
Twitter’s power is not just in allowing me to discover people I may not disover otherwise. I have since found that to be a relatively minor component of why I spent so much time on that site/app. After all, the vast majority of the news-worthy content on that site does get published on TheGuardian.com or nytimes.com or aljazeera.com etc within minutes of the ‘breaking news’ on Twitter. For a long time, those few minutes were worth it as I would get so many different angles to the same story in such a short amount of time as to make the addiction ‘pay off’ eventually. I was hyper-informed about so many things all the time.
So what happens if I got my news from TheGuardian.com (as an example) on Tuesday morning instead of on Monday night on Twitter? Most of the time, nothing. I’d still be as well-informed as I was through Twitter, minus the mental health consequences of having to deal with trolls and bots after any news item that deals with racialised groups and/or refugees/migrants because Twitter considers that free speech.
And on the topic of free speech, one quick thing. The debate over whether Twitter should censor hate speech or not is, in my opinion, misguided. The question is more about why Twitter’s algorithm encourages ‘engagement’ at all costs. Requiring ‘engagement’ at all costs is to guarantee that the worst people are emboldened all the time. It’s to bring the ‘moderates’ to the ‘extremist’ side because the latter is much more likely to stay on the platform longer, which is what the algorithms look for in these giant corporations. The perfect Twitter user is not your local anarchist or feminist or that neighbor who wants to plant a community garden. The perfect Twitter user is Donald Trump, and there is a reason for that. I could no longer convince myself that all I had to do was be a responsible Twitter user. One can be a responsible anything within toxic structures without affecting the overall toxicity of these structures. As long as Twitter chooses to have that algorithm in place, it doesn’t matter whethere I’m a good Twitter user or a bad Twitter user. What matters is that I stay on Twitter for as long as possible.
The reason was more this feeling of Twitter being the place where stuff ‘really’ happened. If a news headline didn’t appear on Twitter quick enough, I pretty much assumed it was not worth digging into. This was no conscious decision, it’s just part of Twitter’s success over our lives, a phenomenon I think is particularly disastrous for media professionals as so much of our ‘content’ has to be ‘Twitter-friendly’. The format, the quick pace, the short attention span, the absolute need for any ‘content’ to be sensational or dramatic, with some occasional slot allocated for ‘feel good’ pieces.
The reasons for doing that is simply time consumption, but not in the way it’s usually discussed. While it is true that there were days in which I spend quite a lot of hours on Twitter, most days were relatively moderate in the sense that it would simply be what I check to ‘kill time’.
The way it affects me is through ruining my perception of time, my attention span, and my mood.
Perception of time.
I have been studying temporality for the past three years as part of my PhD. I look at how Lebanese ‘postwar’ (post-1990) cinema deals with the notion of time. The past, the future, the present. How does the past affect the present? How is the future affected by both past and present? And so on. This has accidentally also made me very aware of my own experience of time while being on social media. That feeling of just wanting to check Twitter briefly and then finding yourself still on it for hours on end is something I ended up being very aware of. It didn’t just cause anxiety in itself, it also made me anxious about the anxiety it was causing. Meta-anxiety!
The feeling of not knowing what is real and not real anymore is a function of social media’s algorithms. This is something I am now convinced of. I think the more we depend on social media and the more time we allocate to them, the more the line between what is real and isn’t is blurred. This in turn has consequences to our societies that are barely starting to understand, and I think the window we have of undoing the damages done in the past decade or so is quickly closing. This is what is making me anxious.
Attention span.
I enjoy reading books. I think there are very few things in life that compares with the joy I feel when reading and finishing a really good book. I also know that when my mind is on something that I just read or saw on social media, I cannot read that book. If my phone is near me, I can struggle to read that book. I don’t even have social media apps on it anymore, but the lingering effects of years of Twittering and Facebooking on that phone are still with me. That need to ‘just check’ has, I can very safely conclude, negatively affected my life and that of everyone I know (including those still in denial about it).
Mood.
As for my mood, I have become more frustrated and more anxious. Part of that is simply the line of work I’m in. I regularly deal with horror stories around human rights abuses, disinformation and authoritarianism, among others. I have gone through periods of intense online activity during periods of intense violence. The Israeli war on Gaza in 2014 and the fall of Aleppo in 2016 are two notable examples, and it is since the latter that I’ve been seriously questioning the ethics of social media.
But part of why I get anxious and depressed is the very algorithms on which the social media giants depend on. Add to that the fact that I try and be very aware of the social media’s giants on
I have seen well-meaning activists in difficult places spend their entire energy on social media debunking fake news and disinformation campaigns to the point where it risked their very survival. I’ve seen activists disappear from social media because they couldn’t handle
I have strict rules that I do my best to respect which I’ll list below in case this might help you.
Like so many people, the way I interact with and on social media changes a lot depending on my current mood.
It’s quite telling that almost no one I know who uses Twitter actually like Twitter.
The problem with Twitter is that I have very little control over what I see and why I see it. People who don’t tweet for a while get punished for not tweeting for a while by disappearing from my feed. Those who tweet the most end up dominating people’s timelines, to the extent that out of the 8,000+ people I follow, most of whom (best guess) tweet frequently enough to be considered ‘active’, I only end up seeing a few dozen people. As it is impossible to keep track of that many people, I end up just not doing it.
But can’t I just remember to, for example, message the person I choose to follow and see if we can interact outside of the timeline (via DM for example)? Sure, but I don’t want to have to do that. It takes too much time, and is not worth it taking that much time. Also, even if I do that, it still doesn’t change that the people I don’t publicly interact with are being effectively punished by bein
If I happen to interact with one person a lot for a period of time, that person is more likely to pop up on my feed tomorrow. It creates a loop, and not necessarily a good one.
Cost
Being on Twitter at the right time has had the tendency of boosting my tweets. It’s one of those days you pick up on after years on the site (I have been on Twitter since November 2008)
Rules for responsible social media use:
1- Have a time and/or place where you check your social media accounts. I only always have my phone and laptop and desktop computer in the small guest bedroom/work space. This helps me physically separate the ‘internet area’ from the rest of the house.
There are exceptions to the rule. For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts while cooking so I’d have my phone in the kitchen with me. If I’m skyping with friends and I need to move to the living room, I just do that. When I walk my dog I sometimes have my phone on me and sometimes not.
The key is to have strict rules but also be reasonable towards myself, and that took me years to do.
2- Unless you have something to add to the post you want to share, just retweet it. We are often tempted to quote tweet