Here's Why I'm Deleting My Facebook and Instagram Accounts

On January 7, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Facebook and Meta social media platforms, announced his companies would end fact-checking and let the platforms return to a space of free information in which third-party fact-checkers could not censor what others say. 

Until Tuesday, I had developed a complicated relationship with Facebook and Instagram.  Like most people in the mid-to-late 2000s, I joined Facebook to connect with old friends and share information with current friends and family. I enjoyed seeing family photos of my friends from around the world, and when I had my daughter, I enjoyed sharing tidbits from our journey as parent/child. But, the positives came with many negatives: extreme posts about social and political issues whose only purpose was to agitate and not offer community-based solutions, bullying, and body shaming. The filters that became available for images on Instagram offered convoluted ideas on how people should look, to the point that people got plastic surgery to look like they are forever in a photo filter. As a woman who has grown up with patriarchal ideas of how women should look thrust upon her since I can remember, these new ideas of beauty hurt my soul. 

Facebook and Instagram have gone from shiny playgrounds with all the toys I want to share with friends and family to a dilapidated pit where the bad guys mix with the good to sway curious minds towards illicit ways of being– whether it’s hating themselves or hating others. 

I have spent more time on the apps searching for the good through the mess of mixed messaging.  Even worse, I have noticed myself becoming a voyeur on others' lives and judging them for how they behave for the app (and, let’s not even open the can of worms that question how truthful these representations of their lives are). I don’t like feeling like a voyeur, and I don’t like being judgemental.  

Since creating a life of yoga starting in the mid-2000s, I have worked to live the tenets of the yamas and niyamas (the observances and practices for living a life of integrity from yoga). In short, they are to practice kindness, be honest, be giving, release clutter of all things in all ways, protect my energy so I can direct it to GOOD, stay clean in mind-body-spirit, be content, study myself to better myself, devote myself to personal discipline for my greater GOOD with harm to none, and to go with the flow of life through surrender. These practices are easier said than done, but have saved my life a million times. My heart is free. I am a genuinely kind person. I shall not regret how I have shown up in the world when I die.  As I say on my website as I introduce myself, I’m always keeping it real while also noticing the now.  

But, I don’t like who I am when I am on the apps. My mind is dull, and my heart craves connection more than ever.  It all made sense to me when I heard Dr. Laurie Santos say on the Huberman Lab Podcast that the connection we think we feel on apps is like Nutrasweet– it feels like it will sustain us, but it leaves us craving more. Moreover, I find myself circulating between Facebook and Instagram, back and forth, back and forth, refreshing the feed time and again, thinking it will bring me something new.  To use Dr. Santos's analogy, I’m craving wholesome wheat bread with jam (a snack that would truly satisfy me), but I keep getting candy. I feel like I’m getting my sustenance needs met, yet I am not. As biochemist Katy Bowman said in a podcast once (apologies for not recalling which podcast), the dopamine triggers in my brain are circling the cage like a bored lion in the zoo. This cage’s perimeter is manmade, and I have forgotten the freedoms I have. I have been staying within my social media perimeter for connection. I had forgotten that an actual connection could happen then and there with a phone call or a knock on a door across the way.

Now, the cage I encircle is about to become an even worse free-for-all cage fight. The lack of fact-checking will lead to an all-out war of ideologies, bullying people into how to think, eat, and look. Just when I fear it couldn’t get worse, the referee in this game of blacktop tetherball has now given guns to everyone on the playground and said, “Do what you will.”

I’m leaving. I will not participate. I will delete my accounts.

I will not give my energy to a space that corrodes me. It’s too much work to decipher the useful from the harmful. Instead, I’ll give that energy to my personal development, family connections, and meeting up with true friends. 

We forget that we have so much agency.  We don’t have to participate in activities that go against our values. 

I will be sharing my personal growth content on my website and YouTube.  Please subscribe to my newsletter to learn about impactful practices that may change the quality of your life from surviving to thriving. 

If you have been a supportive and kind follower of my content on Facebook and Instagram, thank you. I hope to keep connected with you.