Social media titans Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk got prime seats at Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, among Cabinet nominees and the president’s own family. The seating arrangement seemed to signal a clear alliance between the tech world and America’s new, right-wing government.
The warning signs had come through loud and clear in the recent past. Since purchasing Twitter and rebranding it as X in 2022, Musk has transformed the platform into what NPR called a “conservative megaphone.” During the 2024 election, Musk repeatedly campaigned for the president, and he has since jumped into a new role with the Trump administration in which he’s primarily been tasked with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” as per a White House executive order.
This has led to efforts to drastically cut spending, eliminate programs, and reduce the federal workforce, laying off staff from across the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the General Services Administration (GSA).
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta (which donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund), the parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, would be parting ways with third-party fact checkers. This has stoked fears that more disinformation will be allowed to proliferate on platforms millions of people use to consume news. In Zuckerberg's video explaining his decision, the social media czar donned a gold chain — part of a newly debuted rebrand that has him attempting to shed his tech-dweeb image — as he told the camera, without a hint of irony, “There’s a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.”
Some social media users say they’ve had enough. Twenty-two-year-old Quinn, from Minnesota, (who, like other sources interviewed for this piece, asked to withhold his last name to protect his anonymity) says he shut down his X account in January. The inciting incident: Musk joking about all of the “Nazi accusations” against him after he made a straight-arm salute at a Trump inauguration event.
“I have been disgusted with X for a while, but stayed on to keep a pulse on the content circulating,” Quinn tells Teen Vogue. “When Elon got away with a fascist salute without even a slap on the wrist, that's when I knew I needed to make a real effort to get people off his platform. It makes me sick to think of him profiting from such vile hate.”
Quinn is not alone: The Guardian reported that between October and December 2024, some 2.7 million active US users left X. Similarly, a weeklong “Lights Out Meta” boycott gained traction after Zuckerberg announced the new fact-checking policy, with people like 24-year-old Rae deciding to log off Facebook and Instagram for good. “I was holding onto my [Facebook] account to keep up with local news,” she says. “But the complete lack of moderation and their history of misusing and selling our data has put me off forever.”
Even TikTok has come under fire. The app was supposed to be banned in the US on January 19, but it then released a statement praising Trump for allowing it to continue service after it went dark for a mere few hours. TikTok also sponsored an inauguration party for conservative content creators.
Twenty-two-year-old Emma from Rhode Island (who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her anonymity) says she used to be “a big TikTok consumer.” But the company’s adulation toward the new president prompted her to quit the app for good. “After that clear example of the TikTok executives sucking up to the Trump administration," she explains, "and most likely using that message as a way to make it seem like Trump saved the app, I didn’t trust it anymore.”
This isn’t the first time users have fled social media as a form of political protest. “People have been resisting these big tech platforms, in part to show their identity,” points out Dr. Minh Hao Nguyen, assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. “In the past, big scandals have also been reasons for people to leave platforms,” she says, highlighting 2018’s Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, when digital consultants for the Trump campaign were found to have misused Facebook user data. “I think this is another important moment in time, but it's not necessarily something new.”
What has changed, though, is our relationship to social media in general. John H. Parmelee, professor and director of the University of North Florida’s School of Communication, says there’s been a shift in how we interact with political content. Back in 2012, Twitter users he interviewed for his research said that “a political tweet wasn’t influential if it contained claims that seem outrageous or incorrect. Today, however,” he adds, “outrageous social media posts have become more widespread, accepted, and normalized.”
Our new chaotic social landscape may have us eager to take an extended digital detox, but is it even possible anymore? “I've spoken with young adults, and with older adults above the age of 50," says Dr. Nguyen, "and I think one thing that distinguishes these groups is that the older generations feel less social peer pressure to be constantly online and connected.”
With Trump’s presidency impacting the entire world, the dilemma also extends to young people outside the US, like David, 24, from Ireland, who deleted his Instagram due to the company’s new fact-checking policy. “It is a pain to lose that contact with my friends and potentially isolate myself a bit because of it,” he says.
Quinn says he also has a “complicated” relationship with Instagram for this reason. “I want to know what's going on in my friends' lives, even if I don't live near them anymore,” he says. “In an ideal world, we all get off social media, but until then I have this underlying fear of missing critical updates.”
It’s not only the social aspect that causes people to linger on these platforms, though; it can also be a practical nightmare to go off them cold turkey. Meta, with its monopoly on the social media market, has entangled us in its web. People furnish college apartments using Facebook Marketplace; communicate with colleagues on WhatsApp; and find out when their favorite artist is going on tour from Instagram posts. To withdraw from these platforms completely can severely alter the way we live our lives.
Mollie, 23, is an independent artist from Northern England who says, though she’s keen to limit her association with Meta, she feels she has no choice but to stay on Instagram to grow her fanbase. “It’s scary, because I personally don’t want to support or engage in a platform that is owned by someone who uses their power in the wrong ways,” she explains. “As an artist, I don’t want to be censored, and we need to be able to speak out and say things and be political, especially as a queer neurodivergent person.”
Alternatives to the more “traditional” social media apps are trying to address this need. Bluesky, positioned as an alternative to Musk’s X, has had 14 million new users sign up since the election, according to CNET, while Signal, an encrypted messaging app that competes with WhatsApp, reportedly reached highs of 70 million active users in 2024. “People continue to feel the need to connect, to gather information, to feel informed," Dr. Nguyen says, "but they're then just seeking it elsewhere.”
But with young leftists migrating to new corners of the internet — or saying goodbye to socials altogether — there’s a danger that “selective avoidance,” by which people intentionally avoid information that goes against their existing opinions, will become the norm. This trend could intensify an already sharp political divide among young people. Bluesky and X have both been criticized for serving as echo chambers for the left and right, respectively.
“You begin to think that your way is the only way and anybody who thinks differently must be a threat,” Parmelee explains. “Users can always be selective, but the problem is when they are too selective and actively avoid hearing voices that provide a counterpoint.”
Platforms like Instagram and X are, for now, so ingrained in our social lives, politics, and the cultural landscape that it’s hard to imagine them fading from relevance. But, Parmelee cautions, platforms can die if enough people ditch them, “drift[ing] into obscurity and hav[ing] little or no influence.” He adds, “Just ask MySpace.”
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