READING AN OBSCURE Sherlock Holmes pastiche by James Lovegrove to my son recently, I came across this gem: ‘We, mankind, simply cannot be trusted with what you’re offering us… The gift is not the problem; the recipient is.’ When it comes to social media, this sentiment is right on the money. We like to think we consume social media; I think it’s reasonable to say that it’s consuming us. As with necrotising fasciitis, the only thing to do is cut it out.

Social media is now so bad that when parents sue TikTok for the role they believe it played in their children’s deaths, it feels terrifyingly quotidian. These platforms are ruining our health, the planet and our diplomatic processes. So sound on, NSFW, watch ’til the end: we need to call time on this caustic and corrosive ecosystem before we press the repeat button on 1933.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I mostly avoided the frenzy that took off when we all started oversharing, which means I’m not on Instagram, X, Bluesky, Snapchat or TikTok. I do, like my boomer forebears, have Facebook and WhatsApp. I’ve tried to break up with the former (because I’m petty and find Zuckerberg odious), and yet I’ve clung to it because it lets me keep abreast of worthy initiatives in my local community and judge people I never really liked at school. Don’t get me started on the family WhatsApp group.

Not to get all Dunning-Kruger on you, but even in my limited experience I can say with absolute certainty that social media sucks. Potentially informed by my previous career as a survival instructor, I’ve long known in my bones that I don’t have the requisite strength of character for either the love or hate social media could have afforded me; I am ill-suited, like most of us, to influence, power and acclaim.

But what about the cancer support groups and community recycling initiatives and surfers against sewage groups, you ask? Social media can’t be all bad – look at the good works that come out of its sunlit uplands! Regrettably that’s like saying ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’. On balance, it’s better to have late trains. A good deal of social media is (at best) just showing off which, as my mother told me a lot when I was a kid, is not something she wants to see, thank you. These days, much of the rest is rape and/or death threats, hate speech, nastiness and lies, and there are fewer fact-checks and gatekeepers than ever. If I was trying to invent something to trash our collective mental health/democracy, I couldn’t have come up with a better idea.

So who’s to blame? Much like the Californian wildfires and the aeronautical disaster above DC, I’ve got this feeling that it was probably a diversity hire. Seriously though: why did we give so many opportunities to so many nerds and/or billionaires? The tech bros, the broligarchy, super-rich dweebs no one ever says no to – in short, people with deficient personalities and swole bank accounts. Case in point: after someone bought it, Twitter moved into extremist hate-spreading and now all the nice people have left. You might go so far as to call it an X-odus – Musk would love that almost as much as he loves his augmented hairline. (But seriously, who the fuck has a favourite letter of the alphabet? Are you four, Elon?) As Tressie McMillan Cottom has expressed much more eloquently than me, ‘all of Musk’s preening on social media obscures what is actually happening. That is what content is really good at doing… In politics, content can hide the money and power at play.’ Or, in layspeak, I’m so angry with the emperor for resting his sweaty nutsack on my kitchen counter I’m likely to miss him stealing my firstborn.

And don’t get me started on the dystopian crazy bucket that is Truth Social. Trump, done dirty by nominative determinism, is a revanchist manspreader whose online cropdusting is so absurd, my outrage muscles are aching. Most grown-ups agree that opining about the waterfront potential of the ‘riviera of the Middle East’ will give us memes for eternity.

What this means is that politics is now dominated by those who shout the loudest and/or have the most followers (on the platforms they own). In case you’ve been (doing the only sane thing and) hiding under a rock since 2025 began, the social media overlords are very much dominating the group chat and the libertarian boner needs to be shoved back into the tech bros’ pants. The social media power of the broligarchy gives me the chronic ick and radically undermines democracy. I’m not saying that having a gimp ball (what is the collective noun for tech guys with ideas above their stations?) of software engineers – one of whom goes by the online moniker ‘Big Balls’ – as unelected government officials is necessarily wrong, per se, but it speaks to something unflattering writ large across your psyche for the world to snigger at.

Of course social media isn’t the only thing to have given humans justification for marauding behaviour. The Bible was kind of successful: a how-to guide for territory acquisition and sanctimony, especially during the medieval Crusades. But thanks to mercifully low literacy rates and people’s preoccupation with trying not to die from the Black Death/poverty/childbirth, the Crusades remained pretty niche. People had other shit going on, so the God Squad (like The Avengers, but for Jesus) did not have as many willing recruits as they would have if there’d been a compelling TikTok reel on why you should claim vast tracts of land. Living Safe Together would have had a much easier time talking would-be crusaders out of signing up than convincing some fuckstick who spends every night bingeing radicalisation reels in his basement.

IN 2025, TRUTH is moribund if not already decomposing, but you’ll love this quick and easy recipe for better mental health, sleep and political integrity: break up with social media. Even if we’re not absorbing the messages it amplifies, we’re still in the splash zone for the vituperative spittle of the fascists and the fantasists. Like an online Lord of the Flies, it was always going to end up being dominated by bullies (and while I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m Piggy in my family WhatsApp group, at least my mother-in-law isn’t inviting journalists to bear witness).

Forget a digital detox – we need an ejector seat before we end up like Top Gun’s Goose, splattered on a high-altitude windscreen with no chance of being cast in the sequel.

Image by Pixelkult from Pixabay