Today I Deactivated All My Social Media

I remember the first time I went to Las Vegas. It was about fifteen years ago, on a comped trip because I was writing a travel piece for a newspaper. There is no place in the world that comps you like they do in Vegas. Myself and my photographer were given two suites at the Luxor hotel, they were side by side, sixteen rooms between us. We ran between them hardly believing our luck.

But I digress.

Every day, as we walked through the casinos on our way to another comped lunch or dinner, I passed rows and rows of people sitting at slot machines, their eyes glazed staring at bright screens, their fingers reaching for one more press of the button, one more coin in the slot.

Saddos, I thought, as I passed. There are even slot machines at the airport in Vegas. Their business is keeping people in the chair, keeping them pressing those buttons, inserting more and more of their hard-earned cash into the slot, just for a chance of winning that jackpot.

Fast forward fifteen years and I see what we have become, we are all now sitting with those glazed eyes staring at bright screens, though swap the bright lights of Vegas for our own sofas and sitting rooms, and swap the money that we feed into those machines for something much more valuable — our time, our attention, our lives.

Yes, our phones have become those slot machines, one more scroll and we might win big: a dog reel; a baby with a scouse accent; someone making something disgusting looking in an airfryer. Not the jackpot so much as… well, I don’t even know if we know what we’re scrolling for. But one thing is for certain, we are all now addicts, there is no difference between us and those people sitting at those slot machines in Vegas.

We are all saddos now.

Over the last few years I have seen just what a saddo I have become. My daughter can come home from school and I don’t look up because I’m choosing which bad taxidermy fox best depicts my mood today. I get into bed early, tucking myself in with a good book, or perhaps some research I need to read to write my own book, but oh look, there goes two hours looking at the holiday snaps of someone I went to primary school with and haven’t spoken to since. Or how about this – which in my mind is so much worse – I upset myself looking at videos of a genocide taking place in our time, livestreamed to the world for perhaps the first time in our lifetimes and yet serving only to desensitise us to violence. I share it on stories criticising the regime that is inflicting it. There, that should help the cause, I think, and roll over, switching off my light and going to sleep.

I see how social media has disenfranchised me in every area of my life: my parenting, my work, and even my politics.

How much more creative would I be if it wasn’t for social media? How much more money would I earn? How much more attentively would I listen to my kid when she’s telling me about her day? She is 12 now, in a few short years she will fly the nest, and I will long then to know about her day. But I spent our short time together staring at a screen in my hand. What a saddo, indeed.

It’s not just that anyway, we believe that social media keeps speech free, but look how many times it censors us, look at how much trouble people can get into for writing their opinions, women hounded and cancelled, US immigration officials combing through our phones at the border. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter hiding our content or ‘fact checking’ it and attaching a note that it contains misinformation (misinformation that in many cases has since turned out to be true). Say something about the genocide and a message will flash up asking if you’re sure you want to post that because other accounts have been reported for similar. Last night I watched a video of some girl and her grandma and every time she said blood cancer ‘blood’ was bleeped out because apparently some social media sites find the word offensive and might block the content. What have we become?

Social media used to be transactional, I used to be able to post links on Twitter to my work, but then they started hiding posts that included external links. After Musk inciting the Southport riots I stopped using Twitter and started deleting my content on there, years and years and years of my opinions that nobody even asked for. I kept the account because with 9,000 followers, I was pretty well connected, but I also knew that was just ego bullshit. Anyone who I’m really connected with probably has my number.

I haven’t looked at Twitter for perhaps six months, just dropping in once every few weeks for approximately ten seconds, and I noticed something, the algorithm didn’t know what to do with me. If I wasn’t feeding the beast, it was lost. I had escaped the echo chamber of content that would make me sad or angry. Surely this meant that we had more power than we’ve been led to believe?

I joined Facebook about 18 years ago, I wasn’t even one of the early adopters, but what it became was a diary of my life, nights out with friends, colleagues, holidays. Videos of my daughter’s first steps were posted there, likes and hearts and positive comments became the replacement for having her father beside me witnessing them. Yes, there were times when that stupid app made me feel less alone as a single parent. But we know now that Facebook was involved in more malign activities than just spreading likes and hearts, we know it was influencing elections, in some countries inciting violence among citizens. What has been the human cost to all the fun we have been having?

We have placed so much power into the hands of a malign few. As many people rightly ask, with all the billionaires we’ve made, where are the Musk Children’s Cancer Hospitals, the Zuckerberg Dementia Villages? We got conned into community, our empathy was used for no good except to make us apathetic to the ills of the world. And yet the power has been in our hands all along, because these people can only mine our data if we hand it over, they can only influence elections while they have our eyes, our attention, while we spend time sitting on our sofas taking another pull on that metaphorical one-armed bandit, missing out on our real life while we do.

Their control and power over us stops the day we all deactivate our accounts. It’s that simple. The robots that they train to be more human have no more teachers without us giving away all the details of our lives.

And so, all this is to say, I did it. This afternoon, I sat down and I deleted every account I have on social media and removed the apps from my phone. No more Twitter, no more Instagram, no more Facebook.

The question is now, what will my life look like without it? Many people keep their social media because they need it for work. I used to say the same about Twitter, but when I stopped using it, it made not a jot of difference. Some people think that they sell more books by promoting them on social media, but most publishers know that’s not true.

Amie’s Substack

wrote on here about how many books she has actually sold. Amie has half a million followers on Instagram, and so surely it should be easy for someone like her to see her book in the New York Times/Sunday Times bestsellers? But no, she’s sold a couple of thousand copies in each country, so given that, what impact might little old me with my 1,000-odd followers on Instagram have on book sales? The answer is negligible.

The biggest fear I have now is that people will think I’m a rude bitch who has blocked them … if they even think of me at all, because that’s the other thing about social media, it has made narcissists out of the very best of us with our selfies and face to camera blatherings.

The biggest sadness for me are those baby photos and videos, I must have copies somewhere, there’s one in particular of me feeding my daughter steamed strawberries when she was about five months old and her trying so hard to like them for me whilst pulling one of those funny baby faces that might have gone viral on Instagram. Damn, why did I never think of that at the time? Oh well, too late now.

Oh and I’ve just remembered something else I won’t ever see again now, those sixteen rooms of suites me and my snapper had in Vegas. Or me sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair inside the Cabinet Office in 10 Downing Street because I befriended the security guy at a party there once. Or that hilarious photo of me and Simon Cowell with our arms around each other. Oh well. I’ll survive.

And who knows what I might achieve now. Might I be richer? Might I be a better parent? Might I read more? Write more? Might I do more than just post an angry story about a genocide?

But then again, I am just one person.

But what if we all did this? What might our world look like then? What power might those tech bros have to concede? Who might be running The White House if things were different?

It’s all in your hands. But thankfully not in mine any longer.

• Thank you for reading, I’d love your support to help me keep writing here for you — after all, I’m going to have a lot more time on my hands now! This is my first free post in a few weeks, but do consider upgrading to give you access to all of my posts, I’ve got a special offer on this weekend which you might like. Click below: