I Deleted Social Media Because There Were Too Many Vegans

I'm not the first person to quit social media, and it's not even my first time. Six months ago, I ran back to Instagram and Facebook, hopeful and optimistic. This morning, I deleted everything—again. This is my quitting manifesto. 

Links

📝 Substack (get episode alerts): veganfireside.substack.com 

🌐 Website: krimdom.com/veganfireside

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📚 Krimsey's Books: dabblerouser.com/books

💌 Contact: krimdom.com/contact

Vegan Fireside: A podcast by Krimsey Lilleth — honest conversations about the inner life of being vegan in a world that mostly isn't. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] I am not the first person to quit social media. Heck, it's not even my first time in 2021. I deleted my accounts. Then mid 2025, about six months ago, I gave it another try. I was excited about it, optimistic. I even wrote a piece about my decision called I logged off for four years. Here's why I came running back.

Good God, I was so wrong.

But I'm actually still optimistic because I believe we're witnessing the death rattle of social media as we know it. In the six months I spent back on Instagram and Facebook, I watched them spiral into something straight out of Idiocracy. Have you seen it? It's creepily accurate.

I rejoined social media to meet people with shared interest, join mom groups, and use Facebook marketplace. This morning I gave up on all of that. 

And now I'm writing it all down to help myself remember what grossed me out enough to jump [00:01:00] ship.

Here's what finally sent me over the edge last year, Meta quietly scraped every piece of data from Facebook and Instagram 

And fed it into their AI models. Every post you've ever made, every comment, every like, every photo, every thought you decided to share with friends, all of it, training data.

In my world, this wasn't news. There were no headlines. No one was talking about it at dinner parties or texting their friends in alarm. it just happened. Even my partner who works in AI.

Hadn't heard about it. I only found out today and shared the news with him

when they scraped all the data. I only had a couple months worth of data for them to harvest. but that was enough. There is no universe where I'm handing over my future thoughts and experiences for free 

To train a machine designed to manipulate me. Think [00:02:00] about what this means for each individual user. Meta now has the ability to decode exactly what makes you stay, what makes you engage, what makes you comment, what makes you share.

They can now use photos of your kids to create content that will catch your eye because the children in the photo remind you of your own, but they'll make sure they're subtle enough that you'll never figure out what they're doing to you

they've reverse engineered your psychological buttons and built a custom interface designed specifically to keep pressing them. And when I caught it happening on my own feed, It gave me the chills.

We're living in a new kind of reality now. When you look at your feeds, you're not seeing the internet, obviously, you're seeing whatever has been personally curated for you by the world's most sophisticated manipulation engine. And I think most of us already know this, but we believe we're immune to it. We're smart, we're media literate. We can see through the bullshit. [00:03:00] It's annoying, but I have to be on there for work or whatever, so I just ignore it. I don't give myself that much credit anymore. I have a human brain, same as everyone else, and my human brain is vulnerable to psychological manipulation, especially when the technology behind it has studied billions of human brains and learned exactly how to control them.

This is just the beginning. What scares me most isn't what's happening now. It's what comes next.

The manipulation tactics currently in development will be completely undetectable to us. Right now it's kind of clunky, but we're looking at a future of corporate PSYOPs that infiltrate government infiltrate daily life and make us believe the ideas planted in our heads are our own, make us turn against each other while congratulating ourselves on our independent thinking.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Recently, the new food pyramid was announced. I came across an article [00:04:00] discussing how heavily cow based the pyramid is, 

Hello Cattle Lobby.

And how obsessed American wellness culture has become with tallow and colostrum and 

Beef liver supplements. The headline irritated me enough that I did what we all do.

I dove into the comments to see what people were saying, and the comments were almost entirely anti beef. People saying, gross, and I'm so glad I gave a meat 20 years ago.

I scrolled and scrolled. Where was the pushback? Where were the carnivore diet people?

Where was the internet? I knew

the one that attacks vegans at every opportunity I sorted the comments by newest.

Still overwhelmingly vegan with just a handful of pro beef comments scattered through like seasoning. Unless millions of people went vegan last night, something was deeply off.

Here's what I think happened. Either those [00:05:00] are bot comments designed to show me exactly what I want to see, or more likely, META'S algorithm is serving this article exclusively to people identified as vegan or vegan sympathetic,

which means we've all been funneled into the same ideological tunnel and we're seeing only the comments from people like us. It's nothing new.

Meanwhile, the cow eaters are in their own vortex, probably reading articles about regenerative beef and patting themselves on the back for buying local tallow.

We're having parallel monologues. Each of us convinced we're witnessing a groundswell of support for our position.

This is the Facebook playbook. Nothing new, but it's pretty intense now. That's when it knocked me in the head. This is the end, not the end of social media. As a business that's thriving. But the end of social media as a place where you might encounter an idea that challenges you, a perspective that makes you uncomfortable, a conversation that changes your mind.

You're stuck in your [00:06:00] personal funnel unless something viral creeps in or out. But even then, worthwhile things don't really go viral. It's just puppies and rage bait.

Like what even is this place? And it's already so difficult to tell who is a real person and who is a bot or AI generated influencer.

 I don't have time for this.

Mark Zuckerberg is using AI to be sleazier than ever, and I hate what he's built.

So this morning I gave him the finger and took my little drop out of his ocean.