The End of Social Media

“Being happy’s out of style
Feeling sad is all the rage
The story's kinda boring though
Might be time to turn the page
Oh


Maybe life is good
And everything is fine
Maybe take a breath
Maybe do it twice
I know you're in pain
But that's a part of life
And, baby, life is good
And everything is gonna be alright”

​- Em Beihold




About 17 months ago I had a massive uptick in my income of dollars, energy, and positivity/joy. Losing a few clients and connections who drained time and energy was such a force multiplier for good that it made me rethink other areas of life where my ROI was potentially much more negative than I was willing to admit to myself. So I left social media about 10 months ago, and the trend of benefit not only continued but accelerated. Reader, consider the following, because it will change your life for the better if you allow it.


Tech giants know. In a 2011 New York Times interview, Steve Jobs revealed his children had not used the newly released iPad, stating, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bill Gates in a 2017 Mirror interview, said his kids weren’t allowed phones until age 14, and even then, screen time was restricted (e.g., no phones at the dinner table). In a 2015 open letter to his newborn daughter, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized real-world experiences over digital ones, saying, “We want you to stop and smell all the flowers.” In a 2017 Q&A mentioning his daughters (then very young), he said they weren’t yet using tech heavily.


In a 2018 New York Times interview, Sundar Pichai (Google) said he and his wife restricted their son’s screen time, including banning devices during meals. A 2018 Irish Independent article cited Evan Spiegel’s (Snapchat founder) protective stance toward his daughter’s potential social media use.


Leaked Meta documents (2021, via Frances Haugen) showed Instagram’s negative impact on teen girls’ body image. Jonathan Haidt and others note tech elites often send their kids to low-tech schools (e.g., Waldorf), reinforcing a narrative of restricted digital exposure.


Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook vice president for user growth, 2007–2011) is even more outspoken. His most notable early statements came in 2017 during a Stanford Graduate School of Business talk, where he expressed “tremendous guilt” over his role in building tools that he believes are “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” He criticized the “dopamine-driven feedback loops” of likes and shares, arguing they erode civil discourse and foster misinformation globally—not just in the U.S. He also revealed he barely uses Facebook himself (only a handful of posts in seven years at that point) and doesn’t let his kids touch it, famously saying they “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” This bluntness grabbed headlines and sparked debate, especially since it came from someone who’d helped make Facebook a juggernaut.


Since then, Chamath has doubled down. In a 2019 Yahoo Finance interview, he elaborated on his kids’ zero-screen-time policy, linking excessive social media use at a young age to poor mental health. He wants his children to build resilience through real-world experiences—playing, failing, winning—rather than digital validation. By 2021, on CNBC, he called out Facebook again, saying it could’ve fixed its misinformation issues years ago but prioritized short-term profits over ethics.


More recently, in 2024, Chamath endorsed Florida’s social media ban for kids under 14, calling it “obvious and sensible” on X. He framed it as a parent’s relief. He’s not just critiquing from the sidelines but advocating for systemic change, informed by both his Silicon Valley past and his current role as a father.


It’s not just kids. There’s a solid and long-growing body of evidence that social media harms adults.


Studies consistently show a link between heavy social media use and increased symptoms of anxiety and depression in adults. A 2018 University of Pennsylvania study found that limiting social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) to 30 minutes daily reduced loneliness and depression significantly compared to unrestricted use. A 2022 MIT Sloan study tied the rollout of Facebook on college campuses to a 7% rise in severe depression and 20% in anxiety disorders among young adults. A 2018 York University study showed young women felt worse about their bodies after engaging with posts from peers they deemed more attractive. This effect isn’t age-specific—adults of all ages report lower self-esteem from similar comparisons. The American Psychological Association notes that constant exposure to “highlight reels” can distort reality perception, increasing dissatisfaction across age groups.


HelpGuide.org (2025) highlights how engagement with social media platforms leads to compulsive use, and is linked to anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments in adults. PHYSICAL AILMENTS. Think about that. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine tied this to perceived social isolation—ironic for a “connection” tool. Social media use, especially before bed, disrupts sleep, a key mental health pillar. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory noted this as a harm across ages, with adults also affected. A 2019 JAMA Psychiatry study found that three-plus hours daily on social media doubled poor mental health outcomes.


A 2020 Pew Research stat showed 44% of U.S. internet users faced harassment, often on social media, which UC Davis Health (2024) links to severe self-esteem and mental health damage. This isn’t just a youth issue—workplace or personal conflicts spill online, amplifying stress.


Fear of missing out (FOMO) drives compulsive checking, worsening loneliness. A 2013 PLOS ONE study on Facebook use found declines in subjective well-being among young adults, a trend echoed in broader adult populations per NAMI (2024). The paradox: more “connection,” yet more isolation.


The 2018 Pennsylvania experiment showed cutting social media time directly improved mental health. Similarly, a 2024 analysis by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch (from X posts) reexamined data and found reducing use for over a week improved mental health.


The CDC reported a 57% suicide rate increase among 10-24-year-olds from 2007-2017, overlapping with social media’s rise. While not adult-specific, MIT Sloan’s college study extends this to young adults, showing mental health declines post-Facebook access.


It’s evident that people should spend as little time on phones and screens and social media as possible. I knew that long before last year, having been an extreme late adopter, never even creating a social media presence until 2015; and at that point I begrudgingly joined because I thought it was a necessity for my business. Over the next 5 years I began to realize it was not only no benefit to me, but it came at a time and focus cost. The less time I’m online, the more money my business makes, and the more I can really connect with real people in my real life. That’s compounded benefit on top of the time I get back. That’s on top of the long-studied and aforementioned mental health benefits of avoiding social media.


The foundational three problems are sensationalism, active propaganda, and algorithmic suppression. The sensationalism of news and the nonstop nature of social media generates unending grudges, real and imagined. If you always have enemies and can never let a newfound slight go, you can never free yourself from anxiety. Harvard has covered this: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-power-of-forgiveness#:~:text=Practicing%20forgiveness%20can%20have%20powerful,esteem%3B%20and%20greater%20life%20satisfaction.


And so has Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/forgiveness-your-health-depends-on-it


But it goes beyond the sensational. Social media companies actively involve themselves in misinforming users, which adds to the mental health crisis they’ve already generated. Documents released starting December 2022 by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss provide internal evidence of content moderation decisions to propagandize the public.


Documents showed U.S. officials, including from the Biden administration and FBI, requested removal of specific accounts and posts, many containing factual critiques of policy (e.g., COVID vaccine efficacy debates). A notable case involved the suppression of a tweet by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist, questioning mask efficacy for children—later a topic of legitimate scientific debate.


The files revealed a "visibility filtering" system that reduced reach of certain tweets without notifying users, those from moderate/conservative voices or skeptics of mainstream narratives, even when not false. Stanford’s Dr. Bhattacharya was shadowbanned for lockdown critiques later validated by studies (e.g., a 2022 Johns Hopkins meta-analysis on lockdown inefficacy).


The Missouri v. Biden (2023–ongoing) lawsuit explicitly shows federal officials coerced social media companies to censor content, including true information. Court filings cite emails where White House officials pressed Twitter to remove posts questioning vaccine mandates, some from credible sources. A July 2023 injunction limited government-platform coordination, proving credible evidence of overreach.


Before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged mistakes in content moderation, including temporary removal of posts later deemed accurate.


A 2018 Meta statement confirmed that posts rated false by fact-checkers lose about 80% of future views. Sadly, fact-checking is incredibly biased —e.g., a 2021 study by the Media Research Center showed PolitiFact disproportionately targeted moderate or conservative claims, often mislabeling factual statements. If true content is misjudged, it’s deamplified.


During the pandemic, social media platforms aggressively moderated content to “combat misinformation,” although it exclusively targeted factual and scientifically-grounded perspectives if they happened to favor centrist or simply NOT extreme-far-left views.


Early in 2020–2021, Meta, Google, Twitter and major news outlets labeled posts suggesting COVID-19 originated from a lab leak as misinformation and removed or deamplified them. Facebook reversed this policy in May 2021 after growing scientific debate and a Biden administration call for investigation made it the only credible hypothesis remaining. Internal emails from the "Twitter Files" revealed pressure from U.S. government officials, including the White House, to censor content questioning official narratives, even when rooted in expert opinion.


And a whole book could be written on algorithmic suppression and media/social media propaganda. There are boundless numbers of compilation videos showing popular news personalities parroting the precisely identical talking points and lies for years on end.


When Dick Cheney last year endorsed a democrat candidate, that was a jump-the-shark moment. But with the amount of propaganda already in action, people just sort of ignored the implications of an earnest endorsement by one of the dirtiest bloodthirsty warmongers in contemporary history. The propaganda fever pitch kept rolling in 2024 when social media outlets and conventional media outlets used precisely the same wording on multiple occasions to describe a delusional reality which viewers could see was false with their own eyes:


https://youtu.be/1kKUye23KBQ?si=7EO7TR5asMc7xAfa


https://youtu.be/3P5bz8dC7-k?si=zlRLwqm8gPvVZu_R


It’s not even remotely isolated. There are numerous examples of talking points verbatim regurgitated by multiple news outlets: https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI?si=a5PpwqBev7Gih6jC


And we all witnessed an incessant stream of lies for two years straight from widely-believed news sources:


https://youtu.be/qWLc8dHW0T4?si=DoogPL5bvM8NR6pn


https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cllpjp9jqdo/


https://www.instagram.com/reel/CllpmbxoTde/


https://youtu.be/zI3yU5Z2adI?si=hSo_WSIj3xf7QE29


https://youtu.be/zI3yU5Z2adI?si=sp1DN52NeKx3GHo5




One of the wilder examples involves the suppression of the news about Hunter Biden’s illegal foreign dealings (specifically in Ukraine in 2014 while the US overthrew its democratically-elected government: https://www.cato.org/commentary/washington-helped-trigger-ukraine-war) during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The news was initially flagged as potential misinformation by Twitter and Facebook. They blocked users from sharing related articles’ URLs, citing its "hacked materials" policy, and locked the New York Post’s account for weeks. Internal documents later released via the "Twitter Files" showed that Twitter staff debated the decision, with some acknowledging the lack of clear evidence of hacking. Subsequent reporting by outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2022 confirmed the authenticity of Biden laptop data, including emails verified through cryptographic signatures.


Facebook reduced the story’s visibility pending fact-checking, a move announced by Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, on October 14, 2020. Of course, last year President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for Hunter Biden extending back to the non-coincidental year of 2014, even after President Biden repeatedly promised not to: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-broke-a-promise-pardoning-his-son-hunter-raising-questions-about-his-legacy


Hoaxes abounded, which I need not get into. I am no fan of any famous person, any wealthy tycoon, or any politician, particularly a blowhard who is all three; but the ridiculous hyperbolic vilification of one contemporary man as the worst boogeyman in history went beyond the unbelievable and absurd:


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VOkrxuZRUnk


https://youtu.be/VMuDsjRs8Ns?si=Q5DDjaXKLQG0Hp3N




Being on social media is an established detriment to mental health, with mainstream news outlets pulling up a close second. The very sources we thought we could rely upon for being informed are actually embroiled in misinforming us and amplifying our anxiety and negative emotions. Even its creators agree. Even social media founders agree. Even news outlets who were/are involved in propagandizing the public agree (on occasion). And I think, if you really reflect on your own state of mind, you too will know it to be true.


More recently, Mark Zuckerberg added that social media is over anyway (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zuckerberg-says-social-media-is-over ). Algorithms have long pushed people to see advertisements and not friends, large companies and not small businesses, narratives and not discourse. People can feel it in their bones that real world interaction is orders of magnitude superior to online time. Virtual reality isn’t reality. Internet is not reality. Social media is fake. News is fake. TV is fake. But people in real life can be authentic.


Take a break or at least limit your time, for your own sake, for humanity’s sake. You may not need to step away completely for 10-17 months like I did. But if you do, I guarantee you’ll feel better. Frankly, the world will heal. The benefits of social media reached their end between 2014 and 2024. And if you end social media for a day, a week, a month, a year, or forever, you can end its detrimental impact on you, on your community, and society.