Why I’m Dumping (Most) Social Media, and How to Decide if You Should Too
The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote . . . in the politics of the everyday our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.
—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
I first signed up for Facebook in 2007. Twitter in 2009. Instagram in 2011. I have been a consumer of social media for nearly twenty years. (Oy, all the drama I’ve seen could fill a daytime soap opera with a thirty-year run.) I found my first clients of Magic Words in Facebook groups. Writers told me how much my Instagram content helped them. Twitter (and then Threads) kept me informed of world events. Checking my socials was often, sadly, the first thing I did in the morning and my last activity at night. To say it was an integral, vital part of my life would be accurate. It was a go-to marketing tool, a forum of ideas, a source of endless joy, connection, frustration, and ultimately, dismay.
No more.
As of December 31, I’m leaving (most) social media platforms for good, at least those owned by Meta/Mark Zuckerberg, and here’s why. You might be at the same place given **waves arms around at the state of things**, so perhaps my whys will help you decide whether or not to do the same.
Social Media is Turning Evil
Social media started off as (mostly) a force for good, but these days it’s starting to look like an evil empire, especially through its embrace of AI training, its invasion of privacy via surveillance, and the increasingly useless and unpredictable ways it uses algorithms to deliver content.
AI Training
It’s no secret that I despise generative AI, especially the way it gobbles up and spits out copyrighted content that normal humans have created and turns it into word barf. This year, Meta announced new terms of service to allow the company to scrape user data and do whatever they want with it. That means, “by using Facebook, posting on Instagram or writing on Threads, you are granting Meta an open license to use any of your content however they want.” (Source: https://www.mcnuttpartners.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-metas-new-terms-of-service/) Meta has already admitted to feeding user content into AI without consent: “Publicly shared posts from Instagram and Facebook — including photos and text — were part of the data used to train the generative AI models.” (Source: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/privacy-matters-metas-generative-ai-features/) The new terms just bring that out into the open and basically say if you or I don’t like this, tough: “These terms therefore constitute an agreement between you and Meta Platforms, Inc. If you do not agree to these terms, then do not access or use Facebook or the other products and services covered by these terms.”
There is no opt out. There is no way to turn it off save for making all of your posts private, not a real option for a business owner.
As long as I’m able, I will not allow the theft of my content, hard work, words, or imagination by AI. That intellectual labor belongs to me and it belongs to my audience: you. No one or no thing else.
Surveillance
You might be with me on this: I’m really tired of seeing ads for a product or event I’ve recently googled (or anyone connected to my WiFi network has googled) pop up on my various social feeds because Big Tech tracks my every move, across all the platforms I use and sites I visit. While relatively harmless at the moment to everything but perhaps my wallet, with Big Tech CEOs leaning more into their supervillain eras these days, what if that purchase/product tracking turns into idea and statement tracking? Given their cozy relationships with authoritarian governments, what if the perfectly innocuous thought I express on Threads today becomes disallowed as free speech in the future?
The internet is forever. Nothing is ever really deleted or erased. Through my nonparticipation in their tracking and surveillance now, while I can’t completely prevent them from violating my privacy, I can at least stymie it somewhat in the future.
Algorithm Chicanery
This year I’ve noticed the algorithms across all Meta properties have been atrocious. Posts that normally would have done well have the reach of a T. rex. My feed is full of ads, groups, and people I’ve never heard of, much less followed, and I rarely see content from individuals I actually am following.
Algorithm changes have certainly happened before, and adapting my content strategy to meet the platform’s priorities has worked in the past.
No longer.
The more I trial-and-error formats, captions, keywords, and images for posts the more it becomes a never-ending time sink without a reciprocal return on the investment of that time. From what I hear, I’m not alone in this. Many other content creators are having the same issues, especially with Instagram. There’s too much advertising, video dancing, pay-to-play boosting for small accounts owned by word-loving creators to break through the noise and reach the people we’re trying to serve.
I am not on this planet to be a content-creating monkey to appease Meta’s capricious algo gods. I’m here to help indie authors publish their books. Full stop. And I will no longer be beholden to Meta’s ultimate goal, which is to keep me (and you) chained to the eternal mill wheel of its feed and trying to get noticed on said feed.
Because I know from experience that just when I’ve finally learned what Meta wants and how to give it to them, the rug will be pulled out from under me, either through another algorithm change, or terms of service update, or even the removal of a platform altogether. See: TikTok and its upcoming ban. (Source: https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-trump-sale-bytedance-504a7b4a13184ab171415d3800017fa7)
Social Media Is Ruining People’s Mental Health
I don’t know about you, but for the last several years, and increasingly over the past six months, social media is a dreadful place for my mental health. I log on and that soulless, mercurial algorithm serves me up its noise flavored with fear, outrage, anxiety, and a bunch of petty complaining. I leave a visit to my socials despairing over the state of humanity and wanting desperately to leave the world behind.
Why? Why do I waste my precious time and destroy my peace and happiness this way? I’m forty-nine years old; I’m quickly coming to realize don’t have all the time in the world to waste on this downward spiral if I want to have any kind of meaningful life for its remainder.
I no longer want to perpetuate what I’ve come to realize is an addiction—to screens, negativity, fear. And if I’m unwilling to continue this addiction, I also don’t want to be a part of any problem my authors might be having with social media addiction. I don’t want my posts to fall into that “fear and anxiety” trap the algorithm uses to keep us locked in and doomscrolling. It’s so tempting to respond to the state of the world with a quick post to discharge negative feelings. But that energy then gets transmitted to who knows how many other suffering people, fostering negative feelings in them, and so on and so on and so on . . .
My care and concern for you as a writer goes beyond just your writing life, I don’t want you to suffer as a person, either. Anger, anxiety, depression, fear, and all other painful emotions stifle creativity. Time spent doomscrolling is time not spent writing, or with family, or serving a community, or bettering oneself.
So I can’t in good conscience continue to feed into the fear-machine of social media—for your mental health and mine.
Social Media Violates My Values
In the next four years, I’ve vowed to be more intentional, conscious, and deliberative about where I put my attention, time, and money to make sure those precious resources are going to people and companies that have my best interests at heart, or at least don’t want to actively harm people like me and the clients I love helping. I am a left-leaning, woman-supporting, abortion-rights-upholding, LGBTQ+-affirming, nature-loving, inclusive, nonracist, neurodivergent, Indigenous (yes, I’ll be happy to share my bona fides if you ask), alternative-religion-practicing female who grew up believing in the power of facts and democracy and journalism’s/media’s crucial role in preserving human rights. The recent news of Mark Zuckerberg’s trip to a certain President-elect’s evil lair tells me all I need to know about where his values lie. And given Meta’s role in shaping the world’s turn toward fascism and its support of misinformation, division, cruelty, racism, discrimination, misogyny, and basically everything I stand against—how the ever-loving hell can I continue to support it?
I can’t. Not with any integrity.
***
So, I’m out. What does this mean going forward? What are my plans for reaching authors, connecting with my community, marketing my business? And what are my thoughts about how you can do the same for your books and author platform if you’re thinking of leaving social media as well?
I’m Returning to Basics
So, I think I already mentioned that I’m **gulp** nearly half a century old. (Yikes, but also, hell yeah! I made it!) This means I knew a world before social media existed, before smartphones and the stinkin’ internet itself. And lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that world I grew up in, the one that didn’t feel so dire, so frantic, so . . . unstable, and why and how it was the way it was. I know that world didn’t suffer from a lot of the situations we now find ourselves in on a macro level—climate change, school shootings, fascism in America, crippling wealth inequality, to name a few—which made it somewhat safer, easier, and more peaceful on a base level. And there’s really nothing I personally can do on a large scale to affect the overall state of our current reality
I can do something about my own little world. I can implement the practices and form the priorities that were commonplace before the creation of Facebook, or Instagram, or Threads/Twitter. I can build my business and reach the people I want to help in ways that still exist, that don’t rely on a fear-and-negativity-based, volatile algorithm to execute.
So that’s what I’m going to do: I’m returning to the basics.
To me, this means building community. This means fostering personal relationships, even online, based on collaboration, support, kindness, built on one-on-one and small-group interactions that feel more like I remember friendships being. Deep. Responsive. Trusting. This means coming out from behind a cold, impersonal algorithm and meeting actual people behind the avatars and screens. Yes, my social anxiety, a part of my neurodivergence, gibbers in fear over this, but I think there’s a way to honor my natural tendencies while still forming these kinds of relationships.
Here’s how I’m going to shift my focus going forward:
- Prioritize my newsletter: My entire newsletter audience is something that, unless someone on the list unsubscribes, I always have access to. There’s no middleman arbitrating who gets to see the content I send out in a newsletter and who doesn’t. It’s direct and immediate, and I can go deep with the messages I deliver and invite responses from my community. It’s an online ecosphere that I can shape in any way I choose to and in ways that are most helpful to my subscribers.
- Do a lot more personal outreach: Networking, group support for writers, one-on-one relationship building. I have a lot of plans for building writer communities that are self-sustaining and mutually beneficial to allow writers to get the editing help they need regardless of budget or where they are on their author career path.
- Provide offline resources: I’m not sure what form these will take, but I’m planning to offer a suite of resources to help authors DIY their editing. (Some subject or format you’d like to see? Let me know!)
And the two tools that will allow this focus shift, where you’ll be able to find me going forward, are:
My website, and Substack.
Substack is a powerhouse for publishing long-form, in-depth information pieces, but did you know it also offers community-building features like private chats and groups (a la Discord)? And image- or text-based posts (similar to Threads) for dropping bite-sized content? I’m still discovering all the ways I can utilize the platform, and I’ll be revealing more about my plans to start a thriving support-based community of writers and editors there in the future.
My website allows me to provide downloads, ebooks, courses, and other information products direct to you—I aim to take full advantage of this feature in the next year. Tip sheets, checklists, courses on self-editing—all on the possibility list. Tell me what you need, and I’ll offer it there.
When and Where
When will all this happen? And where can you find me going forward?
Substack: Soon. Sorry, that’s the best I can do right now. I’m moving my current newsletter audience over to the platform on December 31. All that means is if you’re a current Monthly Magic subscriber, you’ll receive newsletters from Substack instead of Mailchimp. The rest of the community features will launch sometime in 2025.
I am currently publishing posts there. Find them and follow my Notes (short posts, like Threads) at magicwordsediting.substack.com
Website: I don’t have a timeframe for downloadable resources, but I will keep you informed as they develop. I’m currently in the research phase to determine what might benefit you the most.
As for my social channels, I will be deleting all of my old posts from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads by December 31. I will still have a profile on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/magicwordsediting.bsky.social)—for now, until I determine whether or not that platform is on a fast track to being like the rest.
After December 31, I’ll maintain bare profiles on Meta channels to make sure no one can use my previous handles, but there will be no new content there.
***
Those are my plans, but are you also feeling the strain of social media? Are you wondering whether you should ditch it, and what effect that might have on your book marketing or author following? If so, I want to share a couple of practices that helped me come to this conclusion, to make the decision that this was the right thing to do. It might not be the best thing for you or your business! That’s fine. But here a couple of methods for figuring that out:
Ask Questions
I’m a big advocate of journaling. When things started to feel awful around social media, I asked myself these questions and journaled the answers. I did this for each platform, but you can adapt them for making a decision about social media as a whole:
Does this platform amplify my voice?
Am I reaching who I want to reach?
Is the community here worth staying for, or does it feel toxic?
Do I feel happy when I visit?
Is my content being used in ways that don’t match my values?
Is my privacy protected? Do I feel safe here? Will I feel safe in the future?
Are there other ways I can market my work/generate sales/get the word out? If so, how much of a piece of the strategy should social media remain?
If I decide to stay, how can I make social work for me? (i.e., leave groups, block freely, implement time restrictions, make my account private, remove followers/following, set up content filters)
Five-Minute Practice
This practice comes from Amelia Hruby, who produces the podcast Off the Grid: Leaving Social Media Without Losing All Your Clients. https://open.spotify.com/show/7I9DMIA9UqfzxOo5KSBu8j?si=7392c4b7d7344238
- Visit the social media platform you’re concerned about and do your thing as you normally would.
- Set a timer for five minutes and as you scroll notice how you feel. Write down your feelings.
- Review what you wrote. What did you see as you scrolled and how did it make you feel?
- Connect the dots between what posts made you feel bad, and what posts made you feel good. Ask yourself if there’s a way to amplify the good feelings and minimize the bad on this platform. No way to do that? Bad feelings far outweigh the good? It might be time to ditch that platform.
Other Resources
Here are a few more resources you might check out as you make your decision. They were helpful to me as I wrestled with staying or leaving social media.
The Social Dilemma, Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224)
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250196682/tenargumentsfordeletingyoursocialmediaaccountsrightnow/)
Off the Grid podcast by Amelia Hruby, the episode “How I Left Instagram & My 5-Step Plan So You Can Too” (https://open.spotify.com/episode/7sMKfVwLaGxmpMWkSDRGC0?si=ef3cc1175933458e)
