Caitlin Moran Urges 20-Minute Social Media Limit After 14-Year Slide Into a 'Hellhole'
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Sep 20
Caitlin Moran Urges 20-Minute Social Media Limit After 14-Year Slide Into a 'Hellhole'
1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 20
Summary
Caitlin Moran says people who want to improve the world should largely get offline, capping any online activism at 20 minutes a day and shifting effort into local, real-world action.
Fourteen years after celebrating Twitter as a democratic force, she argues social platforms have instead damaged mental health and social cohesion through abuse, pile-ons, algorithmic radicalisation and bot-driven manipulation.
More than 50 rape and death threats an hour hit campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez after her 2012 success, Moran writes, citing that case and her own abuse as evidence that online activism can quickly turn punitive.
One-third of the people she knew from early Twitter were fundamentally changed by social media, she says, with many burning out, radicalising or leaving altogether as single-issue obsession consumed their online lives.
Moran says hope returned through offline habits such as volunteering, donating blood, rewilding her garden and simply listening to people in public, arguing the bigger modern crisis is how the world is mediated online.