Why I have left almost all my social media

British spelling.

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Like. Follow. Subscribe. Repeat.

That’s all everyone obsessively commands on social media. This is the world of social media today.

How did we get there?

I started using social media a long time ago. Back then, it was a useful source for the latest news, a place to stay in touch with friends, a fast way to effectively contact customer service and an almost immediate resolution to a problem.

When taking breaks from work, I used the time to catch up with what was going on in the world’s living room.

Almost a year ago, I noticed I was losing interest in social media. It started to become tedious and boring. And also, there was a witch hunt going on.

Scrolling endlessly on my iPhone’s screen first thing in the morning and last thing before bed started to feel like a major waste of time. It started to give me anxiety when the messages received were too many to reply to.

Social media started to feel so demanding that it was almost like an unpaid second job. I was not getting anything positive out of it. It was consuming my time, my energy, and it all became too overwhelming.

Keeping up with conversations took too much of my productive time. Social media started to feel like a job where I had to show up every single day or I would miss something presumably important.

When I was done with social media, I was too tired to start the real work. I had to take a break, sometimes a nap to clear up my head.

I started to feel the pressure. Some people began to complain because I had not responded to anything.

“Excuse meeee?! Since when social media became a daily obligation?” I asked someone one day.

Little by little, I was slowly taking increasingly longer social media breaks.

First, just for a few days. Then a week, two weeks, a month … One day, I realised I had been social media free for a few months and I was feeling fantastic.

I didn’t miss it at all. I was feeling better than before. The stress and anxiety that social media caused me before had decreased. I had more time in my hands.

I used the time for more productive and rewarding things. Even sitting, slowly sipping a cup of tea whilst looking through the window provided me with a moment of relaxation and time for thinking, something I enjoyed doing.

This was time well invested.

I think my actual problem with social media began much earlier when Twitter (before it became X) suspended me.

That was when I realised freedom of speech is no longer a right and whatever a bot that doesn’t understand human word-play picks up a word out of context, humans with an equally robotic brain will not question anything and will proceed to suspend the account.

The fact is: Twitter falsely accused me but they couldn’t tell me what exactly the problem was. No one could ever give me an answer. The idiotic robotic humans were just following whatever their AI lord flagged without questioning.

In legal terms, Twitter violated my freedom of speech rights and they are guilty of defamation. Why is this allowed?

Defamation is something that the current state of social media loves.

Most people have decided to accept it, lower their head, and carry on liking posts obeying automated decision making made by a piece of AI software.

At this point, most people are like a group of cattle doing anything their preferred social media lords say they should do.

And well, I am not precisely a brainless follower who will quietly agree and obey when commanded to delete my words to have the “privilege” to have my account restored.

Hell will freeze before I give in.

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About the writer: Susan Fourtané is a science and technology journalist, professional writer, dead media archeologist, photography enthusiast, a free-spirited maverick, and sometimes a hermit. She travels capturing the essence of what she thinks it’s interesting.