Is logging off the new black?

It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment I fell out of love with social media.

Maybe it was Jesse Eisenberg’s sweaty, neurotic portrayal of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network. That movie, widely considered one of the decade’s best, laid bare Facebook’s origin story as a “hot or not” website for rating young women before it grew into a pervasive tech monolith hoovering up our private data and feeding our addiction through mysterious algorithms.

Perhaps it was in 2021, when whistleblower and former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen leaked internal Facebook documents showing that the company knew its Instagram platform was toxic for teenage girls, while in public consistently downplaying its negative effects.

Or maybe the change was more gradual, a slow and almost imperceptible shift over the past five years, as more and more people in my orbit dropped off social media altogether and felt mentally healthier as a result.

Either way, some 20 years after Mark Zuckerberg and his mates launched Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, I couldn’t help but wonder: have we passed peak social media? The answer, like many a Facebook relationship status, is complicated.

Clues lie at Facebook’s global head offices, situated at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, deep in California’s Silicon Valley. Picture a heady combination of Disneyland and MIT and you’ll get pretty close to where Zuckerberg and co hang out. In fact, the tech giant’s main street was designed by the consultants who helped create Disneyland.

Silicon Valley culture is such that those employees are deeply proud of their outsized influence on the world.

Instead of blokes in Mickey Mouse costumes, however, Hacker Way is populated by whip-smart 20-somethings proudly wearing Facebook T-shirts and chowing down on free lunches. I have good memories of pigging out on “zuckerburgers” – Facebook’s take on a classic cheeseburger – and free burritos in the numerous times I’ve visited in my decade-long career as a tech reporter.

While most Australian workers wouldn’t dream of wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their company logos, Silicon Valley culture is such that those employees are deeply proud of their outsized influence on the world. They are the engineers and architects of a product used every month by roughly three billion people around the globe.

Walking down Facebook’s main street, which I’ve done a handful of times, is weird. The town square is called Hacker Square, where the word HACK is spelled out in paving stones big enough to be seen by satellite.

Famed architect Frank Gehry, known for designing the Dancing House in Prague and LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is responsible for two buildings on Facebook’s campus, MPK 20 and 21. Everywhere you look – the whimsical architecture, the free snacks, the posters bearing company slogans like “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?″⁣, even the on-campus Mexican restaurant – feels somewhat detached from the outside world.

It’s perhaps that disconnect that’s led to a nascent but noticeable shift in how we now use social media –and increasingly, how we don’t. Statistics released in January by creative agency We Are Social highlight declines in both our time spent on social media and the overall number of social media accounts. Australians aged 16 to 64 use social media 10 per cent less than we did a year ago – now averaging an hour and 51 minutes a day – and there are 20.8 million Australian accounts, some 500,000 fewer than a year ago. Of course, those declines should be kept in perspective: according to the research, a whopping 78 per cent of Australians still use social media in one way or another.

That we’re posting less often and spending less time scrolling our social feeds can perhaps be attributed to what’s in our news feeds. What was once a fun, relatively innocent place – a digital town square for sharing photos of your food, your furry friend or your fiancé – has become an often toxic battleground rife with misinformation, invasive advertising and/or abuse. If you wanted to be cute about it, you could say social media has become decidedly less social. And the feeds themselves are quieter and less active. If you want to give your friends and family a job or life update, you’re increasingly likely to do that in a group chat – even an old-fashioned phone call – than through a post to Facebook or Instagram. (Handy for Zuckerberg, then, that Facebook owns not only Instagram but WhatsApp.)

I know if I think of a witty remark about the episode of Survivor I’m watching, I’m sending it to my dedicated Survivor group chat, rather than posting a status to my 1200 or so Facebook friends. I also remain a member of some incredibly niche and irreplaceable Facebook groups dedicated to 1990s emo music and The Simpsons memes respectively.

My own relationship with Facebook is complicated: I deleted the app in 2018 (making a bit of a song and dance about it) as an act of protest for how it was invading my privacy and wasting my time. I lasted all of a week before the lack of dopamine, the raging FOMO, or whatever else it was, led me to reinstall. That rollover conceded, our relationship is still vastly different from when I opened my account nearly 20 years ago.

I’m far from the only one. I’ve known Melbourne-based technology industry veteran Dan Remy for about a decade. Remy, 39, has long been at the vanguard of new technology trends. A nightclub owner when I knew him at uni, Remy was there in the early 2020s for crypto’s explosion, launching an NFT collection that sold out in four minutes, and is now embroiled in the world of fintech.

He’s also probably the most fashionable person I know – at least in the top five. Today he’s donning a mint-coloured Lululemon T-shirt and black sports shorts. I would not be able to pull it off, but Remy does so effortlessly.

“Phone calls are back in fashion,” he says defiantly. The past decade, Remy says, has highlighted the “empty calories” of social media engagement. He
deleted all social media apps from his phone in 2020, deep in the middle of Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns. Tellingly, he says he’s not treated like the
pariah he might have been a few years prior because of it. Even more notably, many of his close friends and colleagues in tech circles have done the same.

‘I often delete social media altogether and have a digital detox of between seven and 30 days.’

Dan Remy

“I thought I was going to miss out on a lot but it was the opposite,” he says of his big delete. “I’m a phone call person, so I’ll easily make 30 phone calls a day, speaking to friends in the UK early in the morning and to friends commuting home from work in Australia in the evening. I’m always on the phone … And being a relationship-driven person, making a phone call is much more personable than sending a DM.”

These days, Remy runs a consultancy with the highly analogue name of Rolodex 2.0, which specialises in making introductions and referrals for people and businesses. For a former nightclub owner, it’s a great fit. He’s a fast talker, so it makes sense he’d want to stick with phone calls over typing. He describes his relationship with social media as love-hate. “I often delete social media altogether and have a digital detox of between seven and 30 days. Thirty days has been the longest. My current arrangement is that I only use social media on my desktop and I have no social media apps on my phone at all.”

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The shift hasn’t just swept through those working in technology. High-profile journalists Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar have abandoned Twitter, now known as X: Sales deleted her account a week after interviewing then-prime minister Scott Morrison in 2022, and Millar quit after enduring what she said was relentless abuse on the platform. “It is non-stop, personal, often vile, frequently unhinged and regularly based on fabrications,” Sales has said of X. “It has the effect of an angry phone call from a politician magnified thousands of times over.” Millar, meanwhile, said that while the platform was enormously useful for her job, the toxicity proved too much.

The Elon Musk-owned X, like other social media platforms, rewards conflict: the more controversial or inflammatory a post, in many cases the more likely it is to be reshared, liked or quoted. It’s notable, then, that according to Edison Research, the number of X users in the US has fallen by nearly a third over the past year.

Those who remain can find themselves in a vexed position. Take the Israel-Hamas war, which has seen rampant misinformation spread across every social media platform. It’s not much of a stretch to say nuance is dead or, at least, dying fast. Those who publicly air their views – on any side of a highly contested subject – can find themselves cancelled from writers’ festivals and other events or, as sacked ABC host Antoinette Lattouf found, from presenting the news. For many sensible folk, including journalists for whom objectivity is a core tenet of their craft, opting out of social media altogether is an increasingly safer option.

Twenty-eight-year-old barista and university student Jenny Peacock has also pretty much hit delete on social media, spending the past two years off it to avoid so-called “doomscrolling” – and thus protect her mental health. Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2020, doomscrolling is the “practice of continuing to read news feeds online or on social media, despite the fact that the news is predominantly negative and often upsetting”.

“I found that if I had a stressful or particularly mentally challenging day, I would want to escape and scroll for hours on my phone as a way to ‘relax’,” Peacock says. “Honestly, I found that I was neglecting processing my thoughts and feelings from that day and rather than addressing them … I was bottling them up and opting for a hit of dopamine instead to make me feel better.“

Peacock migrated to Melbourne from the UK and says being far from home has made staying connected to friends and family difficult. Not having Instagram has made it even harder. “But I’m glad I don’t have Instagram,” she says. “The friends and family who I do want to keep in touch with all stay active with me on WhatsApp and through FaceTime, and I feel that’s honestly all I need. Plus I think the catch-ups of ‘Hey, how are you? How are things?’ are much more realistic and genuine as opposed to seeing a choreographed life snap.”

Peacock is not the only young person attempting to wrest back control of their social media use. According to national youth mental health foundation Headspace, just over half of Australians aged between 12 and 25 said they wanted to disconnect from social media but worried about missing out on things – FOMO, fear of missing out, is a very real thing.

And the platforms have found ways to foster that FOMO. Instagram is no longer the cool app on the block for teenagers: that title now belongs to short-form video app TikTok. Its runaway success has forced others to rethink their approach or, in some cases, to entirely ape TikTok’s features and functionality.

In 2020, Facebook launched its TikTok knockoff, Reels, which allows Facebook and Instagram users to make 15-second edited videos overlaid with music. YouTube followed suit shortly after with YouTube Shorts. Snapchat, meanwhile, has its own take, Spotlight, and for a while Twitter had a version called Fleets. Even the positively uncool uncle of the social media landscape, LinkedIn, flirted with the idea, implementing a short-lived LinkedIn Stories feature before removing it after 18 months. (It found its older, more business-
oriented clientele didn’t really use it.)

All this means that 15- to 30-second video clips are the reigning format of social media. This has led to a spark in creativity and participation, particularly among younger people, but also to new challenges for both the platforms and their billions of users. Short-form videos are ephemeral, typically only lasting 24 hours, leading to a strong sense of FOMO for users, thus urging them to check their feeds almost constantly. Academics point to the degradation of attention spans attributed to watching an endless stream of such clips. The phenomenon even has a name: TikTok Brain.

I ring Sydney-based neuroscientist Professor Mark Williams, who’s happy to interrupt his own lunch to chat about all this. Williams, who has spent two-and-a-half decades researching how the brain works, says social media platforms use the same methods as gambling companies to get you addicted to their products as quickly as they can. “They use what are called intermittent reinforcement schedules, which is basically when you hold off from giving someone a reward for long enough that they really want the reward, but not too long that they get bored and don’t want it any more,” he says. “Then when you get the reward, you get the maximum dopamine.”

Aside from being a great name for a grimy punk band, maximum dopamine is social media’s way of keeping us chemically addicted. “If you turn off all your notifications from social media, you get an improvement in your mental health within just two weeks,” he says. “I think it’s really sad that in Australia, our kids are using devices in schools at one of the highest rates in the world. We can see that having huge problems with behavioural issues and educational outcomes.”

Williams is citing figures from an OECD study that found digital distractions have lowered Australian student outcomes across maths, reading and science, with results stagnating at their lowest level for two decades. Another report shows a continued decline in core academic performance.

He largely blames social media for this and wants the federal government to consider a raft of measures to reverse its negative impact on wellbeing. His wish list includes forcing companies to remove “likes” and other reinforcements from their platforms, and legislating to ban the use of machine-learning algorithms to bias social media feeds. He’s sent multiple emails to the offices of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Education Minister Jason Clare but says he’s received only boilerplate responses to date. “I would love to speak with anyone who is willing to listen,” he says.

Around the world, the European Union has probably come closest to grappling with social media’s knotty issues, albeit only to a limited extent. Its sweeping Digital Markets Act, designed to clamp down on anti-competitive practices from the tech giants, came into effect in March, with Facebook and Instagram users in Europe able to withdraw or deny consent for data being collected and used from their posts, likes and so on.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a bi-partisan coalition of 42 US attorneys general (AGs) is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging features on its platforms are addictive and harming kids and teens. Those lawsuits stem from documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

I meet Frances Haugen inside her loft-style Airbnb, down a typical Melbourne CBD laneway, while she’s in town to speak at an AI conference. Three years after she quit Facebook and sensationally leaked thousands of company documents to US Congress, Haugen is still fired up. “Ironically, social media was always intended to be open and democratic. But there is no accountability and no transparency,” she says.

Haugen runs me through unredacted filings from the US AGs’ claims against Meta, including a damning 233-page document filled with internal company emails and allegations that executives knew its products were exploiting impulsive behaviour in children under 13. “The young ones are the best ones,” a Meta product designer wrote in an internal email, according to the filings. “You want to bring people to your service young and early.”

Another email shows Meta characterising its youngest users in terms of their Lifetime Value (LTV) to the company, with the LTV of a 13-year-old user estimated at roughly $US270. “Senior executives are documenting the level of negligence inside the company,” Haugen says. “And it becomes clear that the only opinion that matters is Mark’s.”

Stephen Scheeler knows the inner workings of Facebook better than most. He was the tech giant’s oldest employee when, in 2015, he became its CEO for Australia and New Zealand. Nearly two decades older than Zuckerberg, and nicknamed OMS around the office – Old Man Scheeler – he spent four years inside the belly of the beast, resigning in 2017 after becoming uncomfortable with the negative ways such technology was impacting the world. (These days he runs a start-up, Omniscient Neurotechnology, which is using AI to “decode” brain networks.)

If “maximum dopamine” is a great name for a band, so is “Millennial nirvana”, which is how Scheeler describes the local Facebook office at the time. Think free lunches at a canteen called Sundays and meeting rooms with names such as Tim Tam, Paddlepop and Bananas in Pyjamas. Scheeler says it was a hot tub of earnest, well-meaning people with a deep faith in
humankind and technology – in which he felt “glaringly out of place”. In a TedX talk in 2018, he explained that he seemed “jaded in comparison, beaten down by my experience of how the real world really works, full of death, taxes, divorces and stuff you actually have to pay for. There was this tension between this utopian, Millennial idealism and the stark reminder
in my bald head that I was not a true member of this club.”

‘Now, social media can really be viewed in the same category as cigarettes.’

Stephen Scheeler, former Facebook CEO for Australia and New Zealand

Scheeler tells me today, with not a hint of hyperbole, that Google and Facebook are the most prolific money-making machines in the history of the world. “Facebook was lucky in that it basically had a regulatory-free
environment where they could just grab people’s data and make use of that data to make money. And now all of that is kind of going away,” he says, referring to the EU legislation, the US lawsuits and everything else coming down the pipeline. “The other thing that’s impeding it is user behaviour and awareness. People understand now that ‘you are the product’, and they know that there are alternatives, whether that’s group chats or other options.”

He remains optimistic that we’re on our way to coming to terms with our use of social media. Young people are much more aware of the dangers than prior generations, he says, and parents are far more attuned to its pitfalls. “Fifteen years ago, there were no warnings and no control. And now, social media can really be viewed in the same category as cigarettes,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that teens won’t want to go on social media, but I think there’s a lot more sand in the wheels.”

Cigarettes are one metaphor. Futurist Mark Pesce prefers a more provocative one: cocaine. Pesce, whose booming American accent persists despite having spent 20 years in Australia, thinks new regulations for social media are inevitable, even if 20 years too late. “A hundred and twenty years ago, anyone could go to their chemists and buy morphine or cocaine or, well, pretty much anything else they wanted. Then we got a whole series of laws to regulate addictive substances,” he says. “As there are trillions of dollars on the table, the businesses making that money aren’t of a mind to change their business models. That means it will inevitably end with regulation.“

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Pesce agrees the litany of issues around algorithmically driven social media platforms are causing mass migration to what he calls “group” media such as WhatsApp. And what about the metaverse? In what can be basically thought of as the internet in 3D, tech execs like Mark Zuckerberg are desperate for the metaverse to be where we all hang out … if we can collectively get over how lame and clunky virtual reality (VR) headsets are.

“I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Zuckerberg said in 2021 when announcing that Facebook was changing its parent company name from Facebook to Meta. “In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine – get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create – as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”

Frances Haugen was at Facebook when the metaverse was being dreamed up. She picks up on the scepticism in my voice when I ask her about it.

“I think we need to be really careful to not laugh about the metaverse,” she says. “I’m concerned. Are we going to use it as a place where we just dump people who are vulnerable? Do we put senior citizens in virtual reality, is that where we put a special-needs student who keeps acting out, in a corner with a VR headset? If you don’t have these conversations, this is the future we’re going to have.”

For Haugen, fixing Facebook looks a lot like removing Zuckerberg. Right now, of course, that’s pie in the sky: Zuckerberg controls more than 57 per cent of its voting rights, meaning the only way he can be removed as chief executive is if he votes himself out. Despite that, Haugen remains an optimist.

“Facebook is good at hiring kind, empathetic people. In general, people who work on social software are social people,” she says. “The problem 100 per cent flows from the top down. There are a lot of very competent people trying to help Mark make responsible decisions … Microsoft didn’t start getting better until Bill Gates stopped being the chairman and CEO.”

I reach futurist Cory Doctorow over the distinctly Web 1.0 communication method that is email. The US-based Doctorow gained notoriety last year after coining the term “enshittification”: another word-of-the-year candidate used to describe the decay of online platforms such as TikTok and Facebook. As Doctorow put it: first, the platforms “are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

‘Facebook is going to burn someday: our priority must be on evacuating users before that happens.’

Futurist Cory Doctorow

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Doctorow has been on this beat for a long time, and is adamant social media can’t go on forever. “Facebook is irredeemable,” he tells me from Burbank, California, where he works as an author and technology activist. “The problem isn’t merely that Mark Zuckerberg is manifestly unsuited to the job of unelected social media tsar for life of four billion people. The problem is that no one should have that job. We don’t need to
replace Zuck, we need to abolish him. There is no configuration of Facebook that safeguards its users from the harms that Facebook itself generates.“

Doctorow says for policymakers and regulators, the emphasis needs to move beyond disciplining Facebook to minimising the harm experienced by its
billions of users. “Facebook is going to burn someday: our priority must be on evacuating users before that happens, so that the relationships, support and connections that keep those users on the platform aren’t lost in its inevitable conflagration,” he says. “Abolish Zuck. Evacuate Facebook.”

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