Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2025-11-27
Very quick and digestable read. I already believed social media was bad, but for different reasons. This book focuses on behavior manipulation of users. I was more concerned about addiction, and displacement of more high quality social interaction. A couple of the chapters get weird and less relatable. Also, this all came out before TikTok.
Introduction - introduces “be a cat” metaphor, because cats are not easily controlled. Social media controls you. 1 - You are losing your free will - Social media modifies your behavior and sells that ability to advertisers, political agents, etc. Addiction of any kind lowers your agency / free will. 2 - Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times - There are benefits to computers and smartphones. Social media is the most harmful part. Quitting reduces massive harm while losing minimal benefit. 3 - Social media is making you into an asshole - Social media rewards outrage with likes. 4 - Social media is undermining truth - You can’t tell if you are interacting with a real person or a bot. With real video or AI-generated. 5 - Social media is making what you say meaningless - Posts are taken out of context and mixed into a feed with unrelated content. Compare with podcasts or books, which are long form from a single author. 6 - Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy - You don’t get to see other peoples’ feeds, so you don’t know what information their views are based on, or what they’re feeling. 7 - Social media is making you unhappy - Apps maximize engagement, and negative emotions are efficient ways to do that. Also, constant stimulation lowers your baseline contentedness when you’re not using social media. 8 - Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity. Social media is free, so you pay in other ways. By letting your behavior be modified, or by producing data that trains AI models. 9 - Social media is making politics impossible - Social media favors irritable, authoritarian, paranoid, tribal behavior. Echo chambers make compromise less likely. 10 - Social media hates your soul - Lots of aspects of social media can be thought of in religious terms, and the metaphor is not flattering for social media.