Social media detox in the climate crisis

Sometime last year - I don't remember when, because I didn't expect it to last long - I deleted social media apps. Now, probably six months down the line, I haven't re-downloaded them. Recently I've been reflecting on this.

My life, professional and personal, is mired in the climate and biodiversity crises. Social media is a hub of activity when it comes to climate transition news, information, and activism. I haven't used Twitter (X) for years because it was too needlessly confrontational, and I haven't used Facebook for even longer, but when I was active on Instagram I used to post primarily about the natural world, and, until last year, most of the content I saw was related to nature or climate.

The question I must consider, then, is: am I losing out by not spending time on social media? Could I be better informed, or make more of a difference, if I were active on social media?

The common narrative these days is that social media 'presence' is incredibly important. If you want to be an author, you must have a huge social media following. If you want to be a wildlife photographer, millions of people need to like your photos on Instagram. If you want to act on the climate crisis, you need to do so via social media. If you want to get things done, the answer is social media. We're hooked with stories about people who rose quickly to fame and riches or made real positive change via a few viral posts; maybe that could be us! What we often fail to realise is that such narratives are largely promulgated by tech companies, whose advertising revenue depends on how much time we spend on social media.

The truth is that there are so many people who are not active on social media who are creating art that thousands of people are moved by, making waves in climate policy, and generally succeeding in any given field or area of life. Besides, social media is a fickle beast. Woe betide anyone who pours their time into their social media presence without realising that popularity and algorithms are built on sand - sand controlled by tech companies.

I dropped social media from my life and it didn't leave a hole. There were lots of good things on Instagram - I connected with fantastic people, saw beautiful art, learnt new information, benefitted from the viewpoints of others, and made friends (some of whom are now long-term real life friends). But in the past couple of years, the bad had started to outweigh the good. I was seeing misinformation, deliberately divisive content, and a tsunami of ads for things I didn't want or need. I sometimes spent hours flicking through short videos about nothing. I could feel my attention span shortening. I wasn't being entertained, I was being lured into addiction.

My use of social media, even at its worst, was much lighter than people who are truly addicted to scrolling. My worst stints were a couple of hours in the evening. Even so, I'd get an uncomfortable feeling in my tummy when I was watching reel after reel - I'm not enjoying this. I want to do something else, but I can't.

Social media sucks our time away. You know what they say - if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer - you're the product. Our time viewing social media is the product that tech giants sell to their real customers: organisations that pay to advertise on the platforms. And unlike TV, where ads sit alongside content created by the TV station, streaming provider, or production company, the content on social media is created by users for free. This results in even more ads, because people who dedicate a lot of time to social media understandably expect some return, and they usually find it by adding adverts and sponsorships to their posts.

Then came generative AI, releasing a slew of poor quality, bastardised content onto our feeds. At worst, AI social media content can be convincing misinformation with the potential to worsen public understanding and create division; at best, it's just rubbish images that lack any spirit (except, perhaps, a tiny shadow of the spirit of the creators whose work was fed, usually without their permission, into the AI's model).

Looking at all this stuff - ads, sponsored posts, AI-generated images - wasn't bringing me any benefits. The genuine ad-free posts from my friends were lost in a sea of nonsense. I started to feel like I was living in a not-real world. Social media amplified aspects of the real world that I'm not happy about, like hyper-consumerism. I needed to distance myself from all of that, to have space to think. Deleting the apps felt like a tiny rebellion.

The time I used to spend on Instagram I now spend doing all sorts of things - reading books, writing, walking, seeing friends. I spend a lot of time watching TV, because I enjoy long-form visual content and find it relaxing, and I like watching DVDs with no ads. I still get regular updates about the climate crisis, and they're from more reliable sources and are long-form content, which is vital for understanding the context and nuance of climate issues. I always had other, far more important, more reliable sources of information and inspiration, so my social media detox means I get more time for those: books, the degree I study, documentaries, scientific studies, news articles and, my favourite, New Scientist magazine.

Don't worry. If you delete social media apps, you're not going to immediately become irrelevant. You won't drop off the face of the Earth. You can still create positive change and develop personally without a social media 'presence'.

I don't miss social media - if it feels more bad than good for you, maybe you wouldn't either.