In this post, I want to explain why I think it is urgent to leave mainstream social media platforms, from society's perspective, but also for your own personal well being. Social media (here I'm talking about the mainstream platforms: X/twitter, facebook, instagram, whatsapp, snapchat, tiktok, linkedin...) is first and foremost an advertising business. Let's look at why this makes these platforms so dangerous.

Old school ads

Traditional advertisers rent a space to put a poster (or a video on TV, but the result is the same) in a bus stop, a train station, a stadium, basically anywhere many people will see it. The advertiser pays the advertising company for showing their ad for so many days, it's simple. The limit with this system is that it's hard to measure how effective an ad is. If you're the advertiser, you're left with tons of questions. How many people saw our poster in the metro? Who were they? Did they decide to buy our product because they saw it? Should we move the poster to a different bus stop?

Traditional ads can't really answer these questions. But the online world can, to some extent. When you click on an ad and end up buying a product on some online shop, everything is traced, and whoever showed the ad to you gets a bit of money for having tricked you into buying that product. But of course, online ads generate money even if you don't buy anything after seeing them.

Selling you

The modern internet has become one giant advertising playground: every corner of every webpage, app, email, video or song is littered with ads. The goal for the advertising business is to create as much advertising space as possible where people will congregate (space without anyone looking at it is not worth much money to an advertiser). And the best way to create this space cheaply is to let you create it (for free most of the time).

The second crucial element to understand is that the best ad for a product is a recommendation by someone you trust. This is why social media is so central to the internet, so full of ads, friends, likes and influencers, and... so dangerous.

When you open facebook, X, instagram or whatever on your phone or computer, the company runs a series of small auctions to sell advertising space in your feed. The price of that space between your friend's beach selfie and your sister's dinner photo is defined by a variety of elements, but the more specifically you can be described, the more money they can make.

It bears repeating: your "feed" is uniquely tailored to you, and is created (almost) in realtime. And the half second you will stare at some ad on instagram is sold to the highest bidder. If you ever heard the expression "attention economy" this is what it is. Go look at your insta, scroll down to some ad. There, whatever company is behind that ad just paid Zuckerberg and his company Meta some money.

We can put a price on you watching ads on facebook (or instagram), because Meta reports that number to their shareholders every year (more often than that, in fact) Here is the latest slide deck they presented to investors on April 30, 2025. Slide 11 is the one you want to look at, which shows an average revenue per user of $12.36 per quarter. That's just over $4 per month, for each of their active users. They have 3.43 Billion of them (as seen on page 10 of the same slide deck)! (If you want to check these slides by yourself, you can find them from this page).

This number is a global average, but of course, this varies widely from user to user. Advertisers won't pay the same amount to show an ad for a sports car or for a pair of cheap shoes. If you make more money than the average person in the world, then you're probably worth more than those $4 to Meta (the average user in the USA is apparently worth about 4.4 times that, for instance, looking at slide 2: assuming the entire US+Canadian population are active users, so about 350M people, which is just over 10% of the active user base, they account for 44% of advertising revenue ($18B / $44B). The real number might be higher).

To describe you to advertisers, platforms need data about you, so they collect just about anything they can: how long you spent looking at a photo on instagram, where you were while doomscrolling, if you were walking or sitting on a bus, who you interacted with just before and just after that photo, what you googled, what time you went to bed, if you slept at home or elsewhere, if you were late for work, what links you clicked in your favourite newsletter, who was with or near you.

Getting to know you

You might be starting to realise why all these apps on your phone are free. You are not the one paying for them. Somebody else is paying for you to use them.

If you are in the EU or another area with some form of privacy laws (Brazil, California), next time you see that cookie banner, spend a minute reading it. You'll see that your data is about to be shared with several hundred companies (they call them "partners", it's less scary) who will dissect every online move you make to figure out what to advertise to you. If you are really patient, you can also read the privacy policy of your favourite app.

Whatsapp says your messages are safe because they are "end to end encrypted". This is a lie for at least two reasons:

One: your messages might be encrypted, but Meta has the encryption and decryptions keys, so they can read them whenever they want (if you lose your phone, you can install the app on a new one and get all your message history back, guess where they were stored?). But let's assume they are honest and don't actually read what you write.

It doesn't actually matter, because, Two: what they want is the metadata: who you messaged, when. You were right in front of a baby shop and sent a message to your partner? Any chance you're pregnant? Let's show you some posts about pregnancy on Instagram to find out. If you paused a bit longer on them, bingo! Now you're worth about twice as much as yesterday, because we can sell you overpriced baby stuff. But let's be honest, they probably knew before you that you were pregnant. Do you use one of these period tracking apps? Did you buy a pregnancy test that you paid with your phone or your bank card that's connected to your google account?

These advertisers are able to identify you uniquely. Even if you never type anything in google, just what you look at, where you are and so on is enough to understand a lot about you.

Fight for your(the far) right

So far so good. Maybe you like ads after all. So why did I call them dangerous?

Remember that your feed is uniquely taylored to you: the selection of posts, ads, videos that you are shown is not random. When your friend posts something on their insta, neither you nor her decide if and when you see it. This is what "the algorithm" decides continuously and in real time.

Whoever has control over this algorithm has control over what you see and listen to, and what you see largely conditions how you think and what you think about. Whoever controls the "algorithm" has the remote control for your TV, not you, and they choose what channel you're watching, and what the channel shows.

Politicians were quick to catch up on the advertising story: could they buy ads to convince you to vote for them? To some extent, but there are controls in place in some countries to limit political advertising budgets. But their friends have no such limits. And without showing you ads directly for a candidate, it's possible to push you one way or the other: show you some videos about violent crime in your area, now you start thinking that maybe this candidate's proposal to have more armed police or videosurveillance in the city could be a good idea.

When coups happen, one of the very first things that the army takes control of is media: radio, TV, newspapers. And now of course the internet.

As I write this in early 2025, many people comment on what Elon Musk is doing with his semi-official role in the US government. I think he started his coup a while ago, back in 2022, when he bought Twitter. Immediately, he had his engineers modify the algorithm to favour his own tweets.

He actually tweeted about it in November 2022:

New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

In other words, "you can write what you want on twitter, but I decide who sees it".

He didn't buy Twitter to make money, he bought it as a propaganda machine with over 500 million readers. Whether he was aiming for political power, or was just satisfying his outsized ego, I have no idea. But either way, he got himself a loudspeaker much bigger than any TV channel or newspaper could ever be.

Monopoly

What Elon Musk thinks doesn't really matter, no matter how despicable it is. Zuckerberg (arch boss of Meta, which controls facebook, instagram, whatsapp and threads) is the same problem. The same goes with TikTok. The fact that it's Chinese controlled doesn't make it worse than the US control over the other networks.

In my view (and quite a few others', read Cory Doctorow for instance), the problem is not social media as such, the problem is the centralisation of power in those networks.

Because they have such wide control of people's data and views of the world, they can shape the world view of many of them. How many people do you know who only get their news from X, facebook or even google?

Are you suffering more than you thought?

Looking at some issues closer to you, in case you disagree with my perspective on the above, it's also important to realise that you are also suffering from these networks (or apps, if you prefer to call them so).

I discussed how social networks need advertising space to sell. But they also need people looking at these spaces. For a while, the networks were focused on growing the number of their users, but at some point, when pretty much everyone in the world is on the network, you need other tactics.

To make more money, they need to keep you on the app for more time. And what is better than a little addiction for that? This is not an exageration. All the social network apps have behaviours rooted in psychology to make you want to come back.

You might have heard of this experiment where lab rats were put in front of a machine with a pedal. There were two groups of rats. When the rats in the first group pressed the pedal, they got a little something to eat from the machine. Every time. Of course the rats quickly figured out the trick, kept pushing the pedal and eating the food. But they also grew tired of it quite quickly, and once they were not hungry anymore, they stopped "playing the game".

In the second group on the other hand, the rats only received food randomly. Sometimes there would be food, sometimes not. And these rats kept playing the game for a lot longer. To the point that they seemed very much addicted to it.

You can read more about B. F. Skinner's "schedules of reinforcement" in wikipedia to understand more about this.

This is exactly the principle at play on one armed bandits in casinos. And on social media. The notification is that trigger. It's always the same notification. You can choose a vibration, a sound of your choice, but you can filter to only get notified about one type of event or the other. Sometimes it's a message from your lover, sometimes it's a like on your post. Most of the time it is nothing actually interesting. But you end up checking, no matter what.

Statistics say that on average, we unlock our phone every 12 minutes while we're awake (probably because of some notification). For comparison, if you smoked a cigarette every time you unlocked your phone, you would smoke 3 to 4 packs a day.

Put another way, every notification generates a little shot of dopamine in your brain, the hormone of pleasure. It is extremely difficult to fight your own biology.

A side effect is also that it becomes impossible to focus. Our brains need time to get back to what they were focused on (say your work, or your studies), apparently 25 minutes. If you get interrupted every 12 minutes, it becomes challenging to actually do any real work.

One more toxic aspect of social media is about what is shared and shown to you. Facebook used to have a "like" button, but later they added a variety of reactions, heart, angry, sad, etc... Research has shown that content that made people "angry" was shared 5 times more than other content. The obvious incentive is then to show you more "angry" content to keep you on the app. And guess how you are going to feel if you're only being shown content that makes you angry, and how you will interact with other people in that context?

Does this sound like your experience on social media? It's not a coincidence, it is very much by design. Social media companies have built a world of angry users because this is what makes them more money.

Now, what?

You are not in control of what you're being fed on these networks. And as long as you use them, you are feeding the system.

If you feel powerless in the face of all the mayhem, you actually have some power: leave their circles of influence. Leave monopolistic social media. Stop using Google, whatsapp, facebook, instagram and X. It might seem futile if you do it alone, but take your friends, family and colleagues with you. And tell them to do the same.

You've probably thought to yourself that a lot of what you see on social media is disturbing. If you want to escape the flow of brainwashing that comes from them: congratulations! Let's look at what you can do. It will require a bit of work on your part, and you will need to make a few (easy) decisions.

I think there are two main sorts of uses of social networks:

• you want to message people, essentially what you do on whatsapp. Install signal. You will feel right at home, the app works in the same way. It is blue instead of green. But it does not track you, it sends a message to who you want to send a message to, that is it. It uses end to end encryption, but unlike whatsapp, the keys are on your phone, so nobody else can read your messages, and signal does not store any information about you besides when you joined, and when your last message was sent. Nothing else. If you lose your phone, your signal messages disappear with it. Signal is not perfect, but it is incomparably better than whatsapp. Signal is a non profit, their only income is donations. Try signal, and if you decide to keep using it (you should), give them a little bit of money. There are other options, but they are most likely harder to use.

• you want something like twitter or instagram to post and share content (whether it's text, photos or videos):

  • you have probably heard of bluesky at this point. While it is much less toxic than twitter right now, it is essentially built the same way: some of the twitter people rebuilt a similar service. The founder of Twitter (Jack Dorsey) was even on the board of BlueSky (he is not anymore). It is a for profit company, funded by venture capitalists, they have no clear business model yet (subscriptions, ads?), which means that sooner or later, they will need to generate revenue and profit. Or they will sell the network to a very rich person who doesn't care about losing a few hundred million dollars. Does that sounds familiar? Ironically, they say it themselves on their front page:

    Social media is too important to be controlled by a few corporations.

  • I list other options below.

Alternative decentralised, opensource, federated networks

There are alternative networks that are fundamentally different from what you are used to.

"Opensource" means that the source code, which decides how those apps work, is publicly available. So you (or a friend of yours who knows how to read code) can verify how the app works. It also means that you could change how it works if you don't like it. In particular, if you don't like the "algorithm" and how it decides what to show you, you can write a new one. Compare this to the usual networks, which disclose nothing about how they function.

"Decentralised" means that there is no single "server" for them. When you install the instagram app, you are on the instagram network, there is nothing else to decide. And nobody can create an instagram server with their different set of rules. On a decentralised network, there are many servers, and you can choose which one you want to use. It is very similar to when you use a phone. You can choose which phone company you prefer (based on your own criteria), but you can still talk to your friends who have a different phone company.

"Federated" is even more amazing. Imagine that you could read twitter from instagram, like the tweet and reshare it so your friends on facebook could see it. This is essentially what federated networks are. It is because they speak a common language, that geeks call a "protocol". The biggest federated network is collectively referred to as the "Fediverse". BlueSky claims their protocol (called AT) is federated, but some key components of the network are not (LINK).

So, which app?

Mastodon is the most famous one right now. It is similar to twitter in its functions. But the most important difference is that it is run by multiple people and non-profit organisations. There is nothing for sale. Most people who use mastodon talk about how much more peaceful it is compared to twitter, and how they can actually have fruitful conversations.

PixelFed is built as an equivalent to instagram, with a focus on sharing photos and videos.

These networks look the same as X or instagram: they have mobile apps, you create an account, you follow people, you post whatever you want. But there are no ads (maybe they will come, probably in the shape of influencers, once enough people move to them).

It doesn't really matter which of the two networks you join, because you can communicate across them. You can follow your friend who's on PixelFed even if you're on Mastodon.

On both networks, you can choose which "server" you join. This is like choosing a phone company or an email provider. Whichever you choose, you can still talk to everyone else. Choosing a server means you will have "neighbours" that you will hear from more than people on other servers. And you might have different sets of rules on different servers. But the key point is that it doesn't really matter. If you don't know which one to join, pick the first one in the list, or better yet, pick one based in the EU, because you will benefit from the stronger EU data protection laws.

If you were on X/twitter and want to bring your friend over to mastodon, there is even a tool to help you reconnect over on mastodon or BlueSky. For instagram and facebook, I am not aware of an equivalent tool available yet, but the people behind pixelfed are working on one.

Coming down...

Because these social networks are not designed to show ads, they don't need to manipulate your attention. So chances are that you will actually find yourself missing the old ones. Maybe you will even find the new ones boring at first.

I titled this post "leave while it's still possible". I mean it. It is very possible to imagine a situation where joining social media and having an account is required. After all, a lot of diplomacy has been taking place on X over the last years, with heads of states publishing their official positions on the network. In France, to obtain a digital ID, you need a phone with Google software on it (no law mandates this, but it is effectively impossible to follow the process without Google software). The list goes on. It is very possible that having an X or facebook or instagram account becomes de facto required to function in society very soon.

I'm only using whatsapp, why is it a problem?

In the USA, there are stories of women being arrested after aborting. The police apparently used social media messages obtained from Meta to charge the women in question. Whether you believe women have a right to dispose of their own bodies or not (they should, just like any human being) is beyond the point. The point is that in the current state of affairs, anything you write or share on Whatsapp (remember we established that the "end to end encryption" is a farce further up) is basically accessible to a fascist government (if not proactively shared with them), who has very little patience with people who disagree with them.

A note on activists using social media to spread the word about their work and causes

If you try to use social media to spread the word about your activity (assuming you don't pay for ads, which is really what you should do if you really want people to see your content), your followers will only see your posts if the "algorithm" prioritises them. And guess how someone like Elon Musk will prioritise progressive campaigns over hate speech. Maybe your posts will be shown to your followers, but they will be drowned in dozens of posts arguing the exact opposite of what you try to say.

As the head of a French newspaper put it (this is not an exact quote, I heard her say it in a public presentation in January 2025 in Paris):

when you post on X, you are asking your readers to stay on X and be bombarded by horrible content. Chances are that most of that content goes against the values that you stand for.

If freewill, democracy are important to you, then I hope the above has convinced you of how strongly they relate to the use of social media.