You should quit social media for good

Platforms optimized for engagement warp our politics, erode attention, and harm our wellbeing. Here’s how I minimize time on the (anti‑)social web.

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…