I’ve been considering boycotting social media ever since a social media site prioritized free speech over my safety back in 2013. As we often do, I shrugged off the incident as an isolated event and personal failing, but since reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I can no longer shake my misgivings about social media.
Thus, I’ll be boycotting all social media sites until any dedicates itself to the following…
- Increasing physical safety of users and non-users alike by taking increased action against the use of their site to organize crime and terrorism.
- Increasing mental health safety of users of their site by limiting their algorithm’s proliferation of content proven to increase anxiety, depression, and body-image distress.
- Increasing mental health safety of children by taking greater steps to ensure those under 16 do not have access to their site.
Here are some recent articles that have inspired this boycott:
- Remove videos seen by Southport killer, Cooper says
- Fentanyl Distributer Tied to 13-Year-Old’s Overdose Death Pleads Guilty (they sold her drugs via Instagram)
- Catching the catfish killer: Phone calls and 64 seized devices snared child sex abuser (he’s been charged with 185 counts related to harassment, abuse, and manslaughter of minors via social media)
- Camping with the far-right: What I learned from a year inside Patriotic Alternative (they’re using Facebook to organize)
- The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents: A systematized review of literature
- Parents suing TikTok over children’s deaths say it ‘has no compassion’
- Harry and Meghan call for stronger social media protections for children
- Bereaved parents demand tech firms ‘protect children’
- Neo-Nazi Groups are Using Instagram to Recruit Young Teenagers, Experts Warn