Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

Now everyone who is on social media is getting individualized, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones. What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.

it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.1

When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, “engagement,” we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics.

Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.”

One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.

The problem isn’t the smartphone, as suggested by a flood of articles with titles like “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?”1 The problem isn’t the internet, which is also routinely accused of ruining the world.2

If you have good experiences with social media, nothing in this book invalidates those experiences. In fact, my hope is that we—meaning both the industry and all of us—will find a way to keep and improve on what we love precisely by being precise about what must be rejected. Deleting your accounts now will improve the chances that you’ll have access to better experiences in the future.

The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.6 Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.

“Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”? BUMMER.

Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main—or often the only—reward that’s available is attention.

With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention.

The effect is subtle, but cumulative.

When Facebook emphasized “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to BUMMER standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasized clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become BUMMER in order to not be annihilated by BUMMER.

The most curious feature of the addict’s personality is that the addict eventually seems to seek out suffering, since suffering is part of the cycle of scratching the itch. A gambler is addicted not to winning, exactly, but to the process in which losing is more likely. A junkie is addicted not just to the high, but to the vertiginous difference between the lows and the highs. Similarly, a BUMMER addict eventually becomes preternaturally quick to take offense, as if hoping to get into a spat. Addicts also become aggressive, though they feel they are acting out of necessity. The choice is to victimize or be a victim.

Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.

Look into yourself. Seriously, are you being as kind as you want to be? At what times are you more like the person you want to be, and when do you get irritable or dismissive?

you might think that you’ve never interacted with a fake person online, but you have, and with loads of them. You decided to buy something because it had a lot of good reviews, but many of those reviews were from artificial people. You found a doctor by using a search engine, but the reason that doctor showed up high in the search results was that a load of fake people linked to her office. You looked at a video or read a story because so many other people had, but most of them were fake. You became aware of tweets because they were retweeted first by armies of bots.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate, lawyers for social media companies stated that they couldn’t detect the fake people.10 They have no means. This is dark comedy. The BUMMER algorithms are presumably trying to manipulate the fake people, just as they manipulate you; but unlike you, bots are immune.

Online, we often have little or no ability to know or influence the context in which our expression will be understood.

Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit.

When context is surrendered to the platform, communication and culture become petty, shallow, and predictable. You have to become crazy extreme if you want to say something that will survive even briefly in an unpredictable context. Only asshole communication can achieve that.

This means that we notice one another’s reactions in order to help us each get our own bearings. If everyone around you is nervous about something, you will get nervous, too, because something must be going on. When everyone is relaxed, you’ll tend to relax.

The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore.

But when everyone is on their phone, you have less of a feeling for what’s going on with them. Their experiences are curated by faraway algorithms. You and they can’t build unmolested commonality unless the phones are put away.

I fear the subtle algorithmic tuning of feeds more than I fear blatant dark ads.

What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.

Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation.

Yes, of course it’s great that people can be connected,12 but why must they accept manipulation by a third party as the price of that connection? What if the manipulation, not the connection, is the real problem?

This constant dosing of social anxiety only gets people more glued in.

I suspect that even though you might say it doesn’t bother you, on some level you know it does, and there’s no point in being angry because you can’t see any way to do anything about it. But there is. Delete your accounts.

I worry about young people growing up in our mess and believing this is how things always are.

To review: Your understanding of others has been disrupted because you don’t know what they’ve experienced in their feeds, while the reverse is also true; the empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can’t know the context in which you’ll be understood. You’re probably becoming more of an asshole, but you’re also probably sadder; another pair of BUMMER disruptions that are mirror images. Your ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted. Politics has become unreal and terrifying, while economics has become unreal and unsustainable: two sides of the same coin.

Usually Google has had a way of coming up with the creepier statements, but Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that “every single person has a sense of purpose and community.”5 A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.

The best way you can help is not to attack those who would manipulate you from afar, but simply to free yourself. That will redirect them—us—and make us find a better way to do what we do.

You don’t need to give up friends: Email your friends instead of using social media, but use accounts that aren’t read by the provider—so no Gmail, for instance. No need for a sneaky company between you and your friends.

The effects that networks have on people are statistical; for every individual who self-radicalizes there are many more who are merely made more irritable and paranoid (the diffuse forms of “fight or flight”) than they would otherwise be. Researchers have detected an unprecedented level of “negative partisanship,”8 meaning that people no longer vote for anything, but against other groups of people; indeed when ideas or plans are at stake, there’s an emerging new norm of “no to everything.”

We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.