The end of social media
As a member of Gen Z, I used to scoff at older generations who claimed the internet was turning us into zombies. Now I get it.
I am nearing a breaking point with social media. I joined Instagram when I was nine, less than two years after its inception. I made Facebook and Twitter accounts not too long after. Even though I was way too young to be on these platforms, there were things I liked about each of them. I found communities, followed relatives and friends, and got to share the exciting things happening in my life.
Now, I get little to no enjoyment. I scroll and feel angry, annoyed, and helpless. I have felt these ways about social media in the past, but never to the extent I have in the past few months. Here are some things I’m experiencing that make me want to throw my phone (and then my head) against a wall.
My issues with Instagram stem not from the cardinal purpose of the platform of following friends and sharing/viewing photos. Rather, it comes from literally everything else. I am an ashamed Instagram reel viewer. When I scroll through the short-form videos, I consume one daunting theme: money, money, money.
This manifests in a few different ways. First: rampant consumerism. Buy these Skims dupes from Amazon! They’re half the price, and I have them in all 20 colors! Come with me to Erewhon to buy the MUST TRY $20 smoothie! You NEED this accessory for your Stanley Cup! It sits on the top, and you can fill it with snacks! Perfect for a movie night! (I wish I was joking).
A second type of video I encounter is get-money-quick scheme tutorials. They tend to be shady. I’ve seen many that involve ripping product images from Amazon and posting them as a promotion on various platforms, the poster earning a few cents per click. Another includes going to a discount store, buying items in bulk for a low price, and then reselling them on Amazon for five times the price they were bought for.
What happened to using Instagram for fun? For me, it has become a source of anger. It makes me long for the fun days of the platform with casual pictures and silly filters. I try my best now just to look at my friends’ posts and close the app as quickly as possible to prevent it from ruining my day.
We all know that Twitter has been going down the drain since Elon Musk’s takeover. But I didn’t notice a difference until recently.
I used to love Twitter for the communities you can find on there. I’m a big music lover and concertgoer, so the platform was a good place to find like-minded people. I used the app to learn about new music, see videos from concerts, buy and sell tickets, and meet people who liked the same things as me.
My feed has been infested with AI bot accounts. All they post is recycled content. I can’t count how often I’ve seen “Crazy footage showing the second plane hitting the World Trade Center.” It’s just garbage content.
I luckily don’t come across much of the awful hate speech on the platform, but this does not make it any less unpleasant to be on. Scrolling through my feed, I’ll see a ‘shocking video’ post, a meme, a video of a Palestinian child being pulled out of the rubble of their bombed home, and then a video of cats sleeping. I have to stop and think: it’s not normal to experience such whiplash every few minutes. This can’t be good for me.
Twitter is not suitable for much anymore, but none of the replacements (like Instagram Threads) have captured the essence of what the app used to be.
As a young person, Facebook has little appeal to me. I use it purely to connect with family who I don’t get to see often. Now, I no longer have that privilege.
My entire Facebook feed is ads and suggested content. Around 1 in 10 posts are from people I’m actually friends with. I get suggested articles from newspaper companies from Australia, viral videos similar to the ones I see on Twitter, AI-generated pictures that all the Boomers think are real, and sponsored posts from a town I don’t live in. Again, it’s all garbage content.
Posts from my friends are buried under these junk posts. Worst of all, there’s no way to eliminate the posts. You can ‘snooze’ content from a particular page or hide a specific post, but there is no way to get rid of all suggested posts. I’m using Facebook even less than when I first signed up.
TikTok
As the most popular social media platform right now, you would think I’d have much to say about TikTok. Fortunately, I’ve had the pleasure of not being on the app since last summer (hence the Instagram reels watching).
I deleted the app because of the ‘TikTok Shop’ addition last year. My entire feed was filled with people trying to sell products. Most were drop-shipped products from unethical companies, such as AliExpress and Temu.
I really enjoyed TikTok for a while because of its addictively accurate algorithm. But my perfectly catered algorithm went out the window once the shop was introduced. No matter how often I pressed ‘not interested,’ the promotions kept coming.
Luckily, I had previously deleted the app multiple times and didn’t have a strong connection, so this was an easy change for me. I’m unsure how irritating TikTok is to scroll through today, but I imagine it’s no better.
I’ve been feeling the ‘brain rot’ sensation worse than I ever have before. I get angry at my phone, at myself, and the world while scrolling through social media. I knew it started getting really bad when I started having dreams that were a screen playing Instagram reels.
Although I’d love to delete all these platforms and switch to a flip phone, I haven’t yet reached that point. I’ve used ‘healthier’ social media sites like Pinterest and YouTube to combat this brain rot. Pinterest is just image curation with no numbers and few advertisements. I enjoy the long-form, more educational content on YouTube. Stepping away from the screen, I’ve spent more time reading and reflecting on how these problems affect me.
I sense that the downfall of social media is imminent. What to do next? Perhaps I’ll join the MetaVerse. Maybe I’ll go off the grid and move to the middle of the woods. Until the Instagram renaissance, I think I’ll stick to books.
