After months—possibly a year?—of deliberation, I decided to leave social media and deleted all of my accounts. (As of this writing, that was a few weeks ago, on July 3.) The reasons are numerous and complex, but I thought I might outline a few of them for those who are interested. (I plan to revisit these thoughts on occasion to further flesh them out.) ## Privacy The final straw on the proverbial camel’s back was Meta’s [recent decision](https://about.fb.com/news/2026/06/better-personalization-and-changes-to-controls-for-your-activity-from-other-businesses/) to eliminate the ability for users to opt out of having their off-Facebook activity tracked. To be fair, I'm sure we didn't have much privacy to begin with while using their platform, and it’s entirely possible that the new decision doesn’t change much for the average user. However, it was enough for me to finally pull the plug on what I consider a toxic relationship. (Yes, most of my criticisms will be directed toward Facebook since it was really the only platform I used on a regular basis.) ## Ethics I can’t recall exactly when I first considered leaving social media, but I know that I was already contemplating it by the time I encountered the video below by Martin Keary, a composer and visual artist also known by his YouTube handle [Tantacrul](https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul). The video is rather lengthy (roughly three hours), but I found myself completely drawn in because so much of what Martin recounted paralleled my own experience with Facebook. Without going into detail, Martin discusses several of Meta's practices, arguing that some have contributed to political violence in parts of the world. In short, I do not believe Meta to be an ethical company, nor do I believe that they are good for humanity. <iframe style="width:100%; aspect-ratio:16/9; border:0;" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MPyJBJTHyO0?si=hd_KP1FGXLw2hpdz" title="YouTube video player" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen> </iframe> ## Time and Attention Possibly the greatest factor in my decision to leave social media is the desire to reclaim my time and attention—not that I was spending very much of it on social media to begin with. Even with a 15-minute daily limit on my social media use, I still found it constantly demanding my attention and disrupting my day. This is my experience of what some have called “[human fracking](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/opinion/attention-economy-education.html).” In other words, it wasn’t so much the quantity of time I was spending on social media that bothered me as the impulse to check it at any given free moment. As it turns out, 15 minutes is more than enough to accommodate multiple disruptions throughout the day. ## Public Discourse I’d like to flesh this out later. But for now, it’s sufficient to say that I don’t believe social media is good for public discourse. It certainly doesn’t promote critical thinking or reasoning skills. On the contrary, it seems to encourage the opposite: it rewards those who generate zingers rather than those who choose their words more carefully. In the early days of Facebook, discussions where people made at least a good faith effort to understand their interlocutors were more commonplace—at least from my own experience. These days, not so much. In fact, there’s a remarkable quote by the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer that speaks to this: > Reaching an understanding in conversation presupposes that both partners are ready for it and are trying to recognize the full value of what is alien and opposed to them.^[Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method*, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1960; First paperback edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 405.] If you want to fall down the philosophical rabbit-hole, check out Vangelis Giannakakis’s article on [negative hermeneutics](https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537231176460). ## What am I doing instead? To wrap things up (for now), I’m redirecting my time and energy to other forms of online engagement that I find more valuable, namely my [digital garden](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history), which you’ve somehow stumbled into. If you’ve made it this far and have been wondering why I keep writing “flesh this out later” or “for now,” then you’ve noticed one of the differences between a digital garden and a blog. A blog post is typically a complete piece of writing that is not revisited. A digital garden, on the other hand, can really be anything you want it to be. Right now, the bulk of my garden comprises notes I’ve created to help my [[music theory]] students. I’d like to expand and add more notes on other topics, or even more long-form pieces such as essays, in an effort to improve my own writing. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from [Andy Matuschak](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes), [Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com/about), and [Nicole Van der Hoeven](https://nicolevanderhoeven.com/about/), among others.