You should quit social media for good
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Attention economy
13 min read
The article's central argument about algorithmic social media transforming into 'attention media' directly relates to this economic concept. Understanding the theoretical framework of attention as a scarce commodity helps explain why platforms optimize for engagement over social connection.
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Filter bubble
14 min read
The article discusses how algorithmic recommendation systems create individualized content feeds that diverge from chronological, friend-based timelines. This phenomenon was formally theorized by Eli Pariser and provides crucial context for understanding the polarization and radicalization concerns Morris raises.
This essay will be most useful to knowledge workers and young people, but I imagine it will be of interest to anyone generally curious about the impact of social media on politics and our lives today. The piece tells my personal story of how I leveraged social media to build a career as a writer and political analyst, and then why — and how — I left most of these sites in 2025.
My thesis is that sometime around 2017, social media companies began a transformation into what I now call the anti‑social web. This transformation primarily resulted from the emergence of big data and algorithmic recommendation systems, which can individually target posts to users that maximize engagement and time spent on the platform.
If you look at the scientific literature today, the empirical harms of these platforms now clearly exceed the benefits the vast majority of users get from them. Unless you have to use these platforms for work, it’s time to quit them — or minimize the time you spend on them — for good.
Anti-social media
Social media is having a bad year. Usage is declining. Books, including Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, advocate outright bans on most social sites for teenagers. Many states have listened and now prevent students from using cell phones in schools. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in September showed how radicalization can happen in plain sight — something Congress is now investigating. Meanwhile, bot farms and AI-generated content — not to mention faux posts from advertisers — clog our feeds and crowd out truly social interactions.
Most adults today know that social media is bad for them. Still, my feelings toward platforms are complicated. On the one hand, as we’ll see, their harms are demonstrable and affect even the most careful users. There are plenty of very good reasons to stop actively using social media platforms altogether. Yet I acknowledge the utility of an interconnected web, especially for writers (like me) who need to share their work with new people. I personally owe my career in large part, if not entirely, to the discovery effects of social media: In college circa 2015, my future editor at The Economist discovered I existed because I was blogging about election forecasts and polling and publishing links to these articles on Twitter.
But this was Old Twitter. Anyone who has been on ...
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