DIGITAL GENOCIDE: A Letter to Social Media’s Usership

Dearest reader, Congratulations! The fact that you are reading these words means you’ve successfully taken a moment of your life to disconnect from the intravenous drip of social media to point your attention toward something…well…else. And boy, is that easier said than done. Casting your gaze away from the digital Times Square that is Tik Tok, Instragram, Facebook and so on is a small miracle, as is each time these apps are temporarily closed on your device. Only temporarily of course, since it’s only a matter of hours, minutes or seconds before an app’s push notification screams at you to rejoin the party and jump back into the sticky, algorithmic sludge machine. While social media has been around for roughly twenty years, it’s still a brand new feature of the overall human enterprise. For older generations, it’s still fairly new, having spent the vast majority of their lives without it. But for our younger population, it’s all they know. Regardless of one’s age, the unfortunate way that social media works (how we engage with it, how we interact with it, and most importantly how we communicate on it) grinds in complete opposition to how the mind of the genus homo was sculpted via evolution and natural selection. Social media and how we use it is as unnatural and synthetic as the harmful chemical compounds found in our favorite fast food meals... which only accelerate us to our ends. We are apes, and our “phones” (why do we still call them phones?) are the ultimate shiny object, beckoning to us for every second of our attention. And we give them that attention each and every time our dopamine levels drop below what is now the very low threshold created by the digital world, but particularly, these platforms. Let me be direct, clear, and decisive: this letter is meant to exist as a complete indictment of the entire social media enterprise. I sincerely believe that social media is causing what can be best described as a mass genocide being perpetrated at scale. Not of human life, but of human intellect and emotional intelligence. These platforms are the gulags of the 21st century. They are the concentration camps of the mind. Just like fentanyl and heroin, once a user gets their first dose, they are often addicts for life. The very few among us who are able to rehabilitate ourselves out of the addiction can easily find ourselves sucked back in by the tantalizing allure of the outrage, anger, fear, tribalism, and zombification that our algorithms have on offer.

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Oh dear reader, your heart rate has just elevated, your blood pressure is a few points higher and perhaps your palms have even started to sweat. These words, while many of you might agree with in principle, are hitting a little too close to home because it feels as though I’m speaking directly to you. I am. These emotions and physiological responses are all too familiar though, are they not? Are these not the same kinds of sensations brought about by time spent consuming “content” on these platforms? Let’s be honest; social media in the 2020s bears little resemblance to what it was in, say, 2010. While I would argue, it was still dangerous then, it was a far more innocent time compared to the average social media experience now. For example, Instagram used to be an image-forward platform where each user you followed had equal space in vying for your attention as Instagram delivered user content in chronological order. It wasn’t dependent on an algorithm designed to maximize attention and engagement. “Alright, but so what?” you might say. “Like everything, things change.” True enough, but it’s the nature of the change that is so deeply concerning. What is the content that maximizes user engagement and what does the almighty algorithm thrive on? Like a hydra with a thousand heads, its lifeblood is sensationalist, tribalist, and divisive content, particularly of the political variety. Social media brings about some of the absolute worst in non-violent human behavior (although calls and support for violence are commonplace). It’s a giant, synthetic veneer in which users lie to themselves and one another. We’ve become narcissists buried deep within echo chambers of political tribes feeding off the hate of the perceived opposition and finding cheap solidarity with strangers based on short-form text blurbs. We cackle at the real-world murder of the “opposition” and revel in the suffering of strangers who have differences of opinion as we garner a synthetic sense of community with people who share adherence to our strict political orthodoxy that we are forbidden to question. We create cheesy little profiles that are highly curated to mask the truth of our lives while being obsessed with an artificial self-image. We endlessly scroll through our own curated profiles, potentially becoming deranged in thinking that these collections of posts are our lives. In our irrational confirmation biases we believe everything we see so long as it affirms our tribe's orthodoxy while condemning anyone who shows even a glint of difference in opinion. Everyone who is intellectually or politically different has become a perpetrator of hate, and make no mistake, this is equally true for both sides of the American tribal divide. If you don’t believe that, you have already fallen too deep into a well of delusion and self-righteousness to be far enough removed to see it clearly. We broadcast our active participation in being on “the right side of history,” while reveling in our tribal people's barbaric, uncivilized, and anti-social behavior so long as it’s pointed at our perceived ideological enemies. With ease we can pause to think of recent examples of the behavior I’m alluding to.

EROSION OF TRUST Trust of information on social media has been eroded beyond belief, and data suggests this. This is actually a very good thing, as so much (if not the vast majority) of social media content is manipulated in some way to push a particular narrative. If you can’t even trust if your best friend’s teeth are indeed that white, how can you possibly trust an unconfirmed statistic about a recent disaster or world event? Misinformation and disinformation dominate the digital landscape on these platforms. However, the few times we do believe what we see is, again, when the information affirms our preexisting beliefs and biases. 

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Images lack context. Videos lack context. Text blurbs from users lack context. This lack of context (sometimes intentionally) not only is in part due to the stifling way the platform allows users to communicate and share information, but also the attention span the average person now has due to the nature of the digital age. Social media is all about quick hits. Content has become shorter and shorter allowing for zero nuance or subtlety. Memes (in the technical sense coined originally in 1976 by Richard Dawkins) have become the core beliefs and values, not something that points to or references a belief. A commonplace example of this is when a five or six word blurb written on a cardboard protest sign no longer references a more complicated and nuanced position, but is the position. My favorite examples (and there are many of these) are footage of people, typically political activists, being asked about what exactly it is that they stand for and what it is they are fighting for. The response when asked? They simply point to the cardboard sign and regurgitate the cryptic slogan written with black Sharpie. The depth of their position goes no deeper than the surface-level slogan itself. As long as the words are deemed rightthink, then the person repeating them is exercising rightspeak (an adherence to the current strict and approved orthodoxy of their tribe), their ignorance is not only acceptable, but righteous. While the videos themselves may often take place in the streets, this kind of behavior and lack of contextual analysis takes place on social media, but on a scale several orders of magnitude greater.

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Artificial intelligence is another major player in our continued disbelief in what we see. User accounts, images, and videos can no longer be trusted. There have even been full-blown music groups on Spotify that have been outed as completely AI-generated. Even the images of the band! AI and its impacts can be an entirely separate and very lengthy essay, so I won’t exhaust it here. It is, however, an important point to mention given how much AI is now aiding in the proliferation of disinformation within the digital landscape.

IT’S NOT ME THOUGH “That’s not my experience!” you might be thinking, as you simply use social media to keep up with family and connect with friends without getting caught up in all the muck. My answer to that is you’re still in the muck. Imagine how many more direct lines of contact you would have with meaningful people if picking up the phone or seeing someone in-person was the only way to keep in touch. And imagine how many of the superfluous characters you follow who eat up your time as you doomscrool through your feed would get filtered out, creating more space for the people who matter in the actual world. And imagine how liberated you would feel and how much more content with your life you would be if you weren’t constantly comparing yourself to the artificial curation of other profiles, so many of which look glamorous and pristine compared to what you know your day-to-day life is like. Intellectually, you know you can’t compare the entire gestalt of your being to a few curated images of someone else’s life. But you do. And you torture yourself over it. Everyone else’s life seems perfect, or at least, better than yours. And the surge of “FOMO” (fear of missing out” you feel when you see a post of someone atop a mountain as you lay rotting on the couch in a doomscrolling binge is part and parcel of the social media experience. “FOMO is a social comparison phenomenon fueled by the carefully curated feeds of social media. We see the highlight reels of others’ lives – the vacations, accomplishments, and happy moments – and it’s easy to feel like our own lives pale in comparison. This constant barrage can trigger feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and even depression.” (Blaise Conway. "How Social Media Affects Our Mental Health" (https://greaterbostonbehavioralhealth.com/rehab-blog/how-social-media-affects-mental-health/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21507464607&gbraid=0AAAAApVCf1hObY0Mg-wxGbGad58WzoB5b&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3aLHBhDTARIsAIRij59K0pn4no86xV-BYWjjiUN5nXclBNSaZ3ZgCMOtLSu6UaZVvLtvKUAaAsPcEALw_wcB) Here’s a little observation based on my personal experience: the people who have the most to fix in their life often have the best looking lives on social media. I know many people who have struggled deeply in life for a variety of reasons, but their Instagram would show not just otherwise, but the opposite. Our beautiful profiles and images allow us to mask our true selves and build ever-thickening shells around who we truly are in a desperate attempt to climb the social dominance hierarchy as we seek peer acceptance and admiration through a false digital presentation. This is not to say that we, as social creatures, don’t already do this in real life. Surely we do. When I walk by my neighbor in the morning I’m not going to start vomiting at him about all the things going wrong in my life and all my latest blunders and mistakes. We keep it pleasant, surface-level and light. It’s important, however, to remember that withholding negative information about yourself based on the nature, significance and substance of your relationship with someone is not at all equitable to presenting a catch-all false reality of yourself and your life in the form of a public-facing digital profile that always remains active. It’s also important to recognize that the images we post are in a sense a representation of our lives, but the hyper-curated aspect which filters out anything except what is deemed “Instagram worthy” makes the presentation so woefully and pathetically incomplete that it might as well be a lie.

If you’re still convinced social media doesn’t negatively affect your health, one must at least acknowledge that our children are the single most negatively affected population who are also largely unaware or in denial about its effects on themselves personally: “Social media is the top reason parents give when asked about what most negatively impacts teens. Among parents who are at least somewhat concerned about teen mental health, 44% say social media has the biggest negative impact on teens today,” according to a recent Pew Research Center study. According to the same study, young people are starting to wake up to the negative health effects of social media, but many still believe it affects their peers more so than themselves. “More teens think social media has a negative effect on people their age than on them personally. About half of teens (48%) say social media platforms have a mostly negative effect on people their age. Meanwhile, 14% see a mostly negative impact for themselves” (Michelle Faverio, Monica Anderson and Eugenie Park. "Teens, Social Media and Mental Health" (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social-media-and-mental-health/)

The “it’s not me” view of negative social media impact clearly transcends age and I would argue is a sentiment born, at least in part, out of the addiction to the platforms. 

It’s no surprise that, “The earlier teens start using social media, the greater impact the platforms have on mental health. This is especially true for young women. While young men tend to express aggression physically, women tend to do so relationally by excluding others and sharing hurtful comments. Social media increases the opportunity for such harmful interactions. In addition to providing young people with a window through which they can view missed experiences, social media puts a distorted lens on appearances and reality. Apps that provide the user with airbrushing, teeth whitening, and more filters are easy to find and easier to use. It’s not only celebrities who look perfect—it’s everyone.” (Jacqueline Sperling, PhD.. "Scrolling and Stress: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health" (https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/social-media) 

It has also been suggested in studies that people who already have depression are likely to use social media more often than individuals who are not clinically depressed. This creates a vicious cycle of one problem feeding into the other; a downward spiral that screams for intervention, particularly among the young and vulnerable demographics who use social media.

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There is also much to be said about how people who are or have been closest to social media’s backend mechanics view the platforms and their effects on people. Many tech employees and ex-employees of these platforms do not allow their children to be on them, much like how Steve Jobs famously did not allow his young children to use the iPad. This is because they know, better than anyone, how social media is designed to be as addictive and manipulative as possible. Here are just a few quotes from people interviewed in a film centered around the harmful effects of social media use, titled “The Social Dilemma”: “We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary. Especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, anytime two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So we’ve created an entire global generation of people who were raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation.” — Jaron Lainer, computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer “We’re training and conditioning a whole new generation of people that, when we are uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid, we have a digital pacifier for ourselves that is kind of atrophying our own ability to deal with that…. How do you wake up from the Matrix when you don't know you're in the Matrix?" — Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of Centre for Humane Technologies

“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product” — Daniel Hövermann

“There are only two industries that call their customers “users”: illegal drugs and software.” — Edward Tufte

SOCIAL MEDIA AS MARKETING

Social media platforms are, of course, not just a place for individuals to falsely broadcast their lives, but a marketing tool for many people such as artists, musicians and business owners. Some people’s entire career success can be attributed to cracking the code of social media’s algorithms which allow them to garner interest in their product and ultimately generate income. Is there anything wrong with this? Still, yes. I have spoken to countless artists and musicians about their use of social media and through all of the first-hand anecdotal data I’ve gathered, even business success on the platforms has a clear tendency to warp and dilute the creative process and spirit. We can too easily start seeing our work through the lens of the algorithm. We start thinking of our work and ways to present it in terms of how our audience will receive it and if it will be favored by the algorithm. We judge our own work not based on effort, merit, or meaning, but if it has met our ever-increasing standard of user engagement… the eternal dangling carrot which even if captured, subdues your hunger only momentarily. Most egregious of all, our creative works in which we pour our hearts and souls into, once put into the hands of the algorithms, necessarily compete with the rest of the profiles and content on the platforms. And it’s not an apples-to-apples competitive landscape: creative works are not only reduced to one inch, low-resolution thumbnails (a pathetic amount of digital real estate), but they now compete for user attention against low-quality “content” which bears absolutely nothing in common or connection to what you create. The artifact you’ve spent months of your life creating is now vying for the attention of users against decontextualized political clips, AI-generated slop and other meaningless content such as some old, ten-second bullshit clip from the Depp v Heard trial. Unfortunately, those are the clips that win the most attention. In my opinion, putting your creations in such a contaminated and radioactive landscape belittles the work, the creator and the very spirit of creation. No matter where you may be in your journey of creativity or business, your work deserves more dignity than placing it in front of the driverless high-speed bus that is social media. Here’s the good news that the world seems to be in utter denial about: a fulfilling and successful career can be achieved without social media. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never actually tried. It may make the journey more difficult for some creators, but the benefits are well worth it. A digital post can never replace a handshake with a real person in the real world.

CONCLUSION

In retrospect, social media was clearly just a bad invention; users and tech operators can’t use it or control it well enough to meet the ethical standard that the civilized world should be held accountable to in the 21st century. While yes, there are indeed some benefits, the terror it has wreaked on our culture and society make the benefits so negligible, they might as well not exist. 

The internet abounds with a galaxy worth of reputable data on the effects of this harmful, digital drug. However, just like a hard drug, no amount of data in the world is enough to pull someone out of the throws of a deep, pathological addiction. The desire to remove oneself from a harmful, insidious and pernicious situation must come from a sincere and authentic desire to heal and lead a meaningful, growth-oriented, and purpose-driven life.

Get off social media. Get your kids off it. Trust me when I say life becomes far better once you do. Protect your mental health and know your worth without having to measure it against the false veneer of others.

Best of luck,

Steve