20 Reasons To Quit Social Media For Your Mental Health

I’ve written a few times about why I think you should quit social media or at least ease off of it. Now I want to put together a list of reasons to quit social media after I’ve had the time to give it some real thought. I’ve often gone back and forth in my mind about quitting my social media, especially as I find myself seeing them less and less valuable to me as the years go by. These days I spend most of my time with my family or I’m doing some kind of writing. The odd occasion when I actually do go on social media is when I’m feeling incredibly bored. However, I never really get the sense of satisfaction I’m looking for. Instead, I find myself scrolling mindlessly looking for a golden nugget piece of content that will give me some kind of pleasure.

I’ve learnt that social media is incredibly addictive, I know this from experience because I’ve often picked up my phone without even thinking about it as if it’s muscle memory. Quitting social media can be hard for several reasons and if you’ve been using social media for 5+ years, there’s a good chance you’re addicted to it, in my opinion (and without even knowing it).

Here’s how to tell if you’re addicted to social media, from my experience;

• You pick up your phone and open your apps without thinking about it.
• You get aggerated if you can’t log on regularly.
• You avoid social occasions if it means you can’t look at your phone frequently.

Quitting social media isn’t just difficult due to its addictive nature, you may find it hard to quit because you use it for work or you use it to keep in touch with friends and family that live far away from you. I get it. You may also think you’re going to feel left out of the conversation if you quit social media. I experienced this when I experimented with quitting social media a couple of years ago. I did it as an experiment to see how I would feel.

After spending over 10+ on social media, I decided I’d try and live the life I had before social media was invented. The truth was, I felt nostalgic about those days. I missed the challenge of having to email someone and not receive a reply straight away due to the fact that you had to be near your computer and most people back then only logged on to their computers once a day. I liked the idea that there was still some kind of mystery or that talking online was still novel. Fast forward to today and you can be speaking to people on various apps instantly and at the same time. I like the convenience but it can also feel numbing at times.

The experiment ended and after 30 days I found out that I’d missed a bunch of (not so important) messages and posts I’d be tagged in. I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t really missed anything. I felt better for it too. However, it did make me think that a teenager doing the same thing would find it a lot harder. As adults, we have important things like jobs and families to keep up occupied. Teenagers on the other hand live their lives through their social apps and if you’re not on them, you’re seen as the odd one out. This is why it may be better for teenagers to cut back on their social media use instead of quitting altogether.

I did want to preface this list of reasons to quit social media by first giving a few reasons I think social media can be good because I have had some good times on social media in the past. It does have its uses as a tool in the hands of those who are not addicted.

• You can keep up with distant family members – social media can be a great tool for keeping up with family members or friends that live far away from you.
• Social media has provided employment opportunities – social media has opened up new job positions which is a great thing in the current climate.

Still, I’ve put together a list of reasons to quit social media. All of these things are from my own personal experience. I’ve been on social media since the days of Myspace so I’ve seen how things have changed over the years as I’ve experimented with different platforms. So, if you’re interested in freeing yourself from the online hamster wheel that is social media here’s 20 reasons to quit social media.

1. It’s a huge waste of time

The first reason I think you should think about quitting social media is because it’s a huge waste of time. If you use social media exclusively for work this may not apply. However, for the majority of us, we use it throughout the day to pass the time.

Do you ever find yourself opening your social apps to only wonder why you’re scrolling mindlessly through posts you don’t really care about? Social media can be fun when it’s every now and again, the problem is, apps like Facebook are designed to be addictive and so it’s no surprise that a lot of people check their social apps constantly. How long do you spend looking at Facebook and Instagram in the evening?

I used to spend at least two hours an evening (not to mention my lunch breaks at work) and then find myself feeling empty. As more time passed I couldn’t help but feel as if I could have been doing something more productive. Instead of mindless scrolling, I decided to work on this blog and other projects to feel as if I was doing something worthwhile.

I used to tell myself that I was just relaxing after a busy day but the truth was, I was wasting my time away and making excuses, giving in to the gadget that I was a slave to. When I first did the math I cringed as I realised I easily spent 21 hours a week on social media. Half the time I wasn’t even interacting with anyone I was just browsing like a zombie.

It can be a rude awakening to count how many hours a week you spend on social media, never really doing anything. Once you do this, it gives you a good reason and motivation to quit social media altogether.

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2. Half the people there aren’t actually your friends (most likely)

They say you can count the number of real friends you have on one hand. So, why do so many people on social media have 1k+ ‘friends’? I can’t tell you that half of your friends online aren’t really your friends but from my experience, I know I’ve accumulated friends online that have come and gone from my life, there are many people that I don’t even know or talk to on there. Most of my Facebook friends are people I added when I was a teenager and we’re still hanging around on each other’s friends lists, even though we have nothing in common and don’t speak to one another anymore.

I’ve often thought about deleting people off my friend’s list but then I hesitate when I think how awkward it will be when I bump into them in real life. It makes me angry that something like a social app can make me feel so conflicted and that it can interfere with my physical life. The better option seems to be to just walk away from it after realising that I don’t have any kind of meaningful relationship with most of the people on there.

I took the opportunity to scan through the people I actually have on Facebook recently and I saw names on there that I hadn’t seen for years.

3. What benefit are you getting from it?

Another reason why I think you should consider quitting social media is that it lacks any tangible value, at least it does not for me anymore. As a teenager, social media held a lot of value because it was how I stayed connected with my friends. Maybe it’s because I’m older now but I don’t see social media as very valuable to me anymore. I’ve come to learn that there are only so many things you can give value to before you get burnt out.

The problem with giving too much value to social media is that you can end up in a place where you base your whole sense of self-worth on your online image. Online, you live and die by your reputation. It doesn’t matter what you’re really like in real life. On social media, you can project a fake image of yourself in a very clinical way. When you base your value on how you’re perceived on social media, you become a slave to the feedback from your friends and strangers alike.

I got to a point where I stopped myself before posting on social media and asked myself the question “why am I posting this?” It’s a very simple question but an important one. Most of the time I couldn’t give myself a convincing answer. It was usually to try and seem like something I wasn’t or to try and be funny so others would ‘like’ what I’d said.

Social media is often used to air people’s every thought. A good example of this is Twitter. I don’t think it’s healthy to live this way in front of thousands of people, at least, that’s my own opinion. What purpose does this behaviour really have? What are you trying to get out of doing that? It seems to me like a way of telling people you’re important or your opinion on something is important even if no one is asking for it. It’s a self-serving activity that comes from the often out-of-control ego in all of us.

From what I can tell, this only inflates topics into things they were never meant to be, increase the likelihood of unnecessary arguments and leave you feeling bad when you didn’t have to get to that point in the first place.

4. Social media leaves you feeling rubbish

This leads us on to another reason to quit social media – it often leaves you feeling worse off. I have recently written about doomscrolling and my thoughts on it. Essentially, doomscrolling is where you continuously scroll through bad news. Scrolling through social media can be like this too. Negative news gets pushed by the algorithms on social media because it encourages more interaction amongst users. Any positive or inspiring stories are less likely to be visible because they get little interaction. That says a lot about human nature.

Interaction on social media is very reactionary with a lot of alarmism. It’s easy to think that social platforms like Facebook are just fun places to hang out with friends and family and forget that the people who own them are manipulating how they work and what they show you. This means that what you see on social media is being carefully fed to you, it’s based on thousands of variables to keep you coming back.

It’s why news companies do so well on social media. Any alarming news gets thousands of interactions within minutes with people from across the world chipping in with their outraged opinions. It’s a catalyst of things all compounding to make things seem more outrageous, making you want to chime in too. It’s one of the ways social media has become so toxic. The outrage is often artificial to begin with.

It’s easy to see why you’d feel bad when you come off social media, not only does it become addicting to scroll through outrage posts, you start to get a very warped view of what you think the world looks like.

5. Social media makes you anxious

Even if you don’t see yourself as ‘an anxious person’, social media can interfere with your stress levels. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into an argument with someone from across the planet without feeling like I’d said anything offensive. People just enjoy shutting other people down on social media. Social media can give you waves of anxiety when you wait for a stranger to type back and give you their thoughts. It’s a level of stress that doesn’t need to exist in the first place. It’s hard enough keeping healthy relationships in the real world without inviting artificial stress into your life. There’s also the anxiety that comes from feeling like you’re missing out. Social media is a place where you can make other people see you in any light you want. Studies have shown that many people get anxious and down on themselves when they see others posting about their ‘perfect lives’ all the time. In these instances, you have to again ask why people post certain things like this in the first place.

For me, it’s not enough to simply say; ‘They just like sharing every aspect of their lives.’

There’s something deeper going on. Is it to make others jealous? Is it to tell the other kids from school they are doing well in their adult life? It seems to be something to do with insecurity. I take this opinion from my own experience. The happiest people I know post the least.

6. A lot of people are depressed themselves

I’m always shocked to discover that the people who seem the happiest on social media are often the most depressed. Many times I’ve been told by others that certain people have told them they are in a hole of depression and yet they post the happiest posts on social media. It got me thinking why this might be. Could it be to inflate an artificial sense of themselves, to create a world where they are happy? Is it to show they are not weak? Even though if they were honest, most people would reach out and help them.

I find this very sad because it means that people are suffering in silence whilst pretending to be something they are not. In my experience, pretending to be something you are not only leads to more inner turmoil. Projecting a false sense of yourself on others keeps you further away from the help you might need whilst lying to yourself keeps you buried in misery. If you are depressed, I think it’s best to be authentic and be depressed. Let others know you’re depressed, preferably those that truly care about you and do it in person, not on social media.

Trying to hold up a fake image of yourself and how you conduct yourself is like carefully stepping over thin ice. Eventually, the ice breaks and you are forced to face the freezing water below. If many of the people on social media are suffering, the environment itself is not only fake but it encourages others to only keep the wheel spinning. Only when you are authentic and honest with yourself and others can you be free or at least freer from inner pain that comes with depression and pretending.

Being who you really are is scary. You may feel like you’re not good enough when you strip back all the bullshit personas you’ve created for yourself. It takes more courage than projecting a false image of yourself.

I once worked with a woman who was a compulsive liar. I couldn’t tell at first because she was new so I just believed everything she told me. However, as time went on her lies and comments became more and more over the top. She was a very anxious and depressed person that took a lot of medication to keep her afloat. I couldn’t help but feel like she was trying to project a better version of herself on me, just for some kind of acceptance. The truth was, I didn’t care what she’d done or was aspiring to do, I just liked her for her. I can’t help but feel as if this behaviour is used to a higher degree on social media where we tell lies to impress other people.

I put this point as a reason to quit social media because instead of fuelling this culture, I think it’s better to have more face to face conversations about how we really feel. That way, everyone feels better.

7. It damages your self-esteem

To have strong self-esteem, you have to believe in yourself and your capabilities. You have to back yourself. I think self-esteem is a thing that fluctuates based on experiences but going on social media can lower your self-esteem. I’ve found comparison to be something that has a huge impact on your sense of self-worth and self-esteem. So, if you’re comparing your life with others on social media (and what you’re comparing yourself to is likely false or inflated to begin with) how are you going to feel after you’ve put down your phone?

In my opinion, social media is obviously used to connect with others but too often to validate yourself and your life in front of others.

Have you noticed people who have come out of relationships on social media? I’ve seen many happy couples avoid social media for the most part, only of the individuals becoming increasingly active on social media once they have split up. This seems to be a natural reaction, after all, you want to become more social again with your friends.

However, can this type of situation become toxic and unhealthy when you find yourself sharing more and more with the world to get back some kind of validation that you think will increase your sense of self-worth? I think it can become unhealthy when you find yourself posting selfies with the hopes of getting validation that you’re doing fine on your own. On the flip side, everyone has different ways of doing things in these situations, I just think it’s more helpful in the long run to work inwards than outwards online.

Sometimes I can’t help but feel like the sudden sharing could be a cry for help. Talking to loved ones and friends in person may be more helpful in the healing process.

Self-esteem is a funny thing. You can get it from others which tends to be short term or you can build it yourself through your own authentic achievements.

8. Avoid Tribalism

Tribalism is rife on social media. It’s the perfect environment for finding like-minded people which isn’t always a bad thing. However, there’s no denying that tribalism can easily become toxic. If you read the same narratives and stories over and over again, you can soon find yourself part of a very narrow-minded tribe. From my experience, having an open mind is one of the components of having good mental health. If you can allow yourself to be more ‘fluid’ in the way you think, you increase your chances of accepting things and avoiding inner turmoil. Having a very closed mind to other ideas cuts you off from discovering things that you may find useful in life or things you might be good at.

Whilst it’s obvious that we all need to feel part of something, leaning one way more than another seems counterproductive. You open yourself up to more stress and arguments to say the least. The problem with social media tribalism is that it snowballs very quickly. Ideas become gospel and the more confirmation bias that gets thrown on, the more the flames burn out of control.

Social media closed groups like Facebook groups are essentially online forums. If you spend enough time in topical forums, you sooner or later form very strong opinions of opposing ways of thinking. It’s easy to then become militant with your views. It’s why many vegans hate meat eaters or why the left hates the right and vice versa. If you don’t moderate your own core beliefs, you can fall victim to toxic tribalism.

Social media is a tool that allows us to air our strongest views from the safety of being behind a screen. In real life, people are much more tolerable of each other and their opposing views. In this sense, we can see that social media only amplifies hatred into levels that don’t need to exist.

9. It’s All About Reactions

Another reason to quit social media is that it’s all about reactions. It’s no secret that the more interaction a post gets, the more the algorithm loves it and pushes it out. Unfortunately, negative things get the most interaction on social media. Every time you open a social media app, its only goal is to get a reaction out of you. If you give it a reflex reaction, it’ll serve you more of the same so you keep coming back. How many times have you seen a crazy news article post and seen the thousands of angry face emojis underneath it?

Sure, people are allowed to get angry at horrible news stories but why has the post been posted in the first place? Why do we feel the need to inject more sadness and hatred into the world than there needs to be? It’s all for a reaction out of you. Newspapers have been doing it for hundreds of years. They stick the most absurd story on the front page to rope you into buying it.

The problem with social media and reactions is that it’s written in black and white text. Often, what you read has no context. In fact, there have been many times where I’ve seen an absurd post only to click on it and find out the title has nothing to do with the content of the article. However, many people do not read the full story and only base their opinion on the title the editor has given the social media post.

This is a very good way of inviting stress into your life that doesn’t even need to exist in the first place. You have to question why these types of news pages exist in the first place because it’s not to serve you with breaking news, it’s to get a reaction out of you so you keep coming back.

10. ‘Influencers’ just want your money, money, money

The term ‘influencer’ didn’t exist when I first started using social media. However, they did exist in their own right offline. Z-list celebrities would try and shill you useless products in magazines all the time. Fast forward a few years and now everyone and their dog is an influencer. If you don’t know what an influencer is, here’s what Wikipedia defines it as;

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field.

Wikipedia

However, I define it as something slightly different;

An individual that shills useless products to unsuspecting social media users.

I do believe there are many people who have large followings that only share products that they think will benefit them. However, this appears to be the minority of cases. All too often you see Z-list celebrities who have had five minutes of fame shilling products they are paid to advertise. For example, there are many Love Island contestants who gain a large following in a short span of time who then take up any offers from advertisers to maximise their wealth by selling whatever they can to their followers.

I don’t condone the abuse these individuals get but it is down to their own poor judgement and greed in the first place when people are unhappy with what they are trying to sell. There’s no better example than Georgia Harrison from Love Island 2019 who promoted ‘weight loss gummies’ to her nearly 1 million followers on Instagram. Needless to say, she was hurled with abuse for doing this after hinting her weight loss was because of a product she got paid to advertise.

The main issue here is that she of course did not lose weight by eating sweets. She was asked to promote something for a few thousand pounds and she happily agreed, not even questioning what it might do to her reputation. Some people get sponsored by advertisers but if you know they don’t use those products themselves, do not buy into it. I can’t say this for sure but I would say most sponsored posts endorse products the influencers aren’t even using themselves. Most influencers are morally void.

The worst part is that people like Georgia advertise these types of useless products to unsuspecting teenage girls who don’t know any better, causing them to waste their money and of course, not lose weight. Unfortunately, you have to question the motives of even your most beloved social media personality every time they suggest a product to you because the reality is, there’s likely money changing hands in the background.

11. Focus on your goals

If you quit social media today, how much free time would you have? We’ve already discussed quitting social media because it’s a waste of time but have you thought about how much closer to your goals you would be? There are only so many hours in the day you can dedicate to your goals and social media might be sucking away that your time. Doing anything meaningful takes hard work and dedication. You may think browsing social media is a form of relaxing but it gets in the way of you achieving your goals in the real world.

Spending too much time on social media often indicates you have a void you need to fill, not just a time void, but an activity void or a purpose. When I think about my goals, I think about this blog and the writing goals I want to accomplish. There have been too many times where I feel as if I ‘need a break’ and so I open up Facebook to waste a bit of time. If you won’t go into your social media settings you can end up getting very random notifications throughout the day that distract you from what you’re doing.

I see it all the time in different areas of life. People stop what they’re doing to post updates for seemingly no reason other than to tell other people what they are doing in the hopes the others on their friend’s list will care. Social media and all of its flashing lights are but mere distractions from what you could be achieving in reality.

12. It’s the complete opposite of mindfulness

Yes, mindfulness has become a buzzword that everyone uses these days but it’s more important than ever. The western world didn’t have a vital need for mindfulness until we became slaves to technology. I love gadgets as much as the next guy or girl but I’m aware of how distracting they are. Social media is the opposite of being mindful. What do I mean by ‘being mindful?’

I’ll give you some examples of how social media stops you from being mindful and then explain why this is, I believe, is bad for your mental health.

The classic example is when you go somewhere for a nice meal. Instead of taking a bite with your loved ones, a lot of people will first whip out their phones and take a picture before sharing a post online. It seems as if without doing this first, they were never there in the first place to enjoy the meal. Being mindful is being totally present and enjoying the present moment for what it is. Having to share your experiences online first means you’re more concerned about projecting an image of your experience rather than actually enjoying it. You’re always living in the next moment of your life rather than the present one.

It’s the same at sporting events. How often do you see people filming an activity on their phones rather than being in the moment and sharing the experience with the people around them? People are more concerned with showing others what they’re doing than doing what they’re doing without expectations.

I feel this is bad for your mental wellbeing because living in the present moment is all you have and it is something to be grateful for. A feeling attached to a memory has more substance than a photo you need to post on your timeline.

13. You get more social

Another reason to quit social media is you become more social. I know that sounds silly because social media is supposed to be ‘social’ but hear me out. How much time do you spend talking to your friends on social media compared to the time you spend with your friends together in the real world? It’s understandable that many teenagers and young adults don’t have the social skills their parents did at their age.

When you interact on social media, you’re not honing your social skills like you do when you have real-world conversations. Talking to other people is a skill, not just something you do. Understanding the tone of someone voice or their facial expressions helps you to learn how others are feeling.

When you interact on social media, it’s easy to view your friends as a cold set of fingers typing a response. It’s no wonder many teenagers are socially awkward when meeting new people, they haven’t had the experience they need to make meaningful relationships. It can affect their romantic and friendship relationships. People start to treat each other as disposable and shallow.

I think this is an important point because it can affect your ability to hold a conversation that has substance like when you go for a job interview. If you can hone your social skills in real life, you get better at knowing people below the surface. The more meaningful relationships you have, the better your mental health.

14. You treat people more equally

I think you should treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect. Only after someone does or says something to you that is hurtful should you form an opinion about them. Unfortunately, social media has created a culture and generation that judges people based on their looks or the number of followers they have. Social media is literally a numbers game. The more followers you have, the more importance you portray on the platform that you’re using. However, if someone has 10x more followers than you, they are still a human being like you are, suffering the same pain all human beings do. When adversity comes, no one cares about how many followers you have, they just need some human help, a shoulder to cry on or someone to listen.

Everything in life has perceived value. For example, houses are priced based on how much people think they should be priced. Social media users are also priced in a similar way. People think they often have more value, the more numbers they gain.

The amount of followers someone has just means they have been manipulating the social game for longer than you. I have met several big internet names and they have all come across as normal, sometimes introverted individuals like most of the population. The flashing lights and editing on social media has the ability to portray them as super stars when the reality is very different.

People are the same – everyone just wants to have a steady income so they can get by, be happy and have a family around them.

15. Regain some mental clarity

Another reason to quit social media is to regain some mental clarity. It might just be because I’m older now but I can’t help but think I had more mental clarity before social media came into my life. After all, social media is just a lot of noise being shouted at you, sometimes constantly. If it’s not people arguing, it’s adverts shoving themselves down your throat.

Social media provides a great deal of stimulation especially platforms like Tik Tok that plays videos one after the other. The mental clarity you get from ignoring all of that noise is blissful. Because social media has become entrenched in our daily lives, it’s hard to remember a time before it, or how you used to spend your free time. I think that trying to reclaim some of that pre-social media existence is important for your own mental clarity. It also allows you to free yourself up for some positive real-world experiences with people.

It reminds you that you were fine without social media and you still can be.

16. You start to use social media as the tool it was meant to be

This whole post is about reasons to quit social media but really, when you step away from social media, you can start using it again as the tool it was designed to be. When social media platforms like Facebook were first widely available to the general public, the idea was that you could use it to connect with friends and family. However, social media has taken more and more of our attention and now people use it constantly throughout the day to talk to others or just to simply check what their friends are doing.

When you step away from social, you take away its power over you. A lot of the draw to social media use is the fear of missing out on the conversation. However, I think you can still use social media if you’re not addicted to it. For example, you can delete the people you don’t talk to and use it to connect with those you really care about, when you need to. Some people are very active users and some others are simply ‘lurkers’. If you’re a lurker, there’s a good chance you waste a lot of time scrolling over posts you don’t even react with, just to waste a little time.

I don’t use Facebook anymore but I do use Facebook Messenger to talk to family members. I use Facebook instead of it using me. At least, that’s what I like to think. I’m aware that it’s still collecting data on me, for example.

17. It’s an expectation

In the space of 14 or so years, we’ve gone from thinking that people who have an online presence are geeky to thinking anyone who doesn’t have an online presence is weird. So how did this happen? When I think back to the early days of social media, I think about how it was a place for teenagers to roam and joked around on. Over time, older generations adopted the online space too and places like Facebook suddenly got a more serious tone. Before we knew it, Facebook was an expectation. If you don’t own a Facebook account, people assume there’s something wrong with you or you’re trying to hide something.

I find it amazing how quickly the landscape changed.

This expectation to have an online profile where you have to act a certain way can’t be healthy for your mental wellbeing. It goes back to my point about the societal value we’ve given social media. We’re expected to uphold a great image at all times and this makes us more likely to only share our best sides, skewing what reality is really like. You can visit someones social media profile, look at hundreds of their posts and still know nothing about what they’re really like.

To have a bunch of virtual expectations on top of real-life expectations can’t be a good thing.

18. You get patient again

When you come off the social media hamster wheel you get to live your life again. Personally, I want to live a life where going somewhere is more important than the picture I take of the place. There’s enough to think about. Maybe I’m too nostalgic but I love that I was one of the last generations to buy comics as a form of real entertainment, not as something to pass the time when my phone battery runs out. I love that I used to have pen pals and I’d sometimes have to wait for 10 days to get a reply through the post.

Having a tangible letter in your hands that someone you love has also touched and put love into is underrated, in my opinion. It’s a form of excitement you don’t get with social media messaging. Social media messaging is cold and bleak. When I send an online message I find myself checking my phone over and over to see if I’ve had a reply, as if anything other than an instant reply isn’t good enough.

I’ve learnt to turn off notifications from social media so I’m not enslaved to the cycle of constant messaging. I removed myself from group chats because the expectation was too great. I do not enjoy the expectation of having to reply when someone demands it. We’ve forgotten what urgent really means, in my opinion.

It sometimes feels like no one can wait for anything anymore. This is terrible for your mental well-being because anything meaningful takes time.

19. You find the beauty in finite resources

Another reason to quit social media for your mental wellbeing is so you can find the beauty of infinite resources. I think that’s why I liked the idea of getting a letter from my pen pal. Once you’ve read the letter, it’s over. The issue with social media is it’s infinite. You could literally spend a whole week locked in your room, scrolling over millions of posts. With no end in sight, it’s hard to feel any sense of satisfaction or meaningfulness.

20. You stop being a consumer sucker

Whilst platforms were not built for the ones with the money to begin with, they have since evolved to be. There’s more money put into social media advertising than TV commercials these days because all advertisers know that people spend all day on social media. You can make a tonne more money online on platforms like Facebook because the users can’t escape the adverts.

No matter how much you tinker with your settings, the ads will still find you in one form. Now, you may think that this is a small price to pay for using a free platform like Facebook but social media apps are constantly collecting more and more data about you on and off their platforms to serve up relevant adverts to you so they and their advertisers can make more money. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.