How to Leave an Internet That’s Always in Crisis

Kate Lindsay on TikTok, the influencer trickle-down, and what social media breaks in our brains

This is one of my favorite conversations that I’ve had about social media in a very long time. I write a lot—in this newsletter and elsewhere—about Twitter. The focus is disproportionate to how many people use it and is very clearly colored by my own tortured experience on the platform. But I also write about it because I think that what happens on Twitter has a very outsize effect on the people who both make and are the subjects of the news. Still, very often when I’m writing about social media, a lot of its subtle, warping dynamics don’t come through as I’d like. Twitter is reduced to some kind of shorthand—we call it a “hellsite” or something like that. What I love about the following interview is that we talk a bit about what it’s like to have to live on some of these platforms professionally and the less obvious ways that social networks (not just Twitter) shape our behavior. What follows is a very honest discussion about a Very Online existence that is intended not to elicit any sympathy, but to show the ways that many people participate in deeply dysfunctional systems.

Kate Lindsay is my colleague at The Atlantic, where she works on the newsletter team. A keen writer and observer of internet culture, she also co-writes the great newsletter Embedded (which I’ve been a fan of from well before we worked together). We were chatting on Slack one day about her decision to stop scrolling on Twitter and Instagram and spending most of her social-media time on TikTok. We decided to talk about her reasons for leaving the platforms for a short newsletter, and it sprawled out into this long discussion about the internet. As soon as we hung up, I knew I wanted to share the whole thing. So here it is.

Warzel: Let’s get right into it. You write about the internet and social media and yet you’ve left all social media but TikTok. Tell me everything.

Lindsay: This has been a years-long journey that I started around when I started going to therapy. One thing I really needed the therapist to understand was Twitter. It’s [a source of] a lot of my social anxiety, and it was, very unfortunately, a huge part of my life and how I feel about my work. I felt like I couldn't leave it because of my job—that leaving it was committing career suicide. But being on it actively made me feel bad.

The way I was able to get off of it was less about social media and more about changing my attitude toward work. And coming to the—it doesn’t sound revolutionary—conclusion that my happiness is more important than my career. And that having a career that feels impressive doesn’t matter if I’m not enjoying myself. I always knew this but never committed. I’d take a month off Twitter or Instagram, but always thinking I’d come back. I always remember how quiet my brain felt. How nice it was. But then somehow convinced myself this wouldn’t work for me.

Warzel: What made Twitter so awful for you, specifically?

Lindsay: I’d describe it as the frog that doesn’t know they’re being boiled. That’s how I felt. When the war in Ukraine started and it was just this clusterfuck of news that all happened at once—that’s when I realized what a bad space Twitter put me in. It’s just this constant stream of disparate thoughts that I’m always trying to streamline. With Twitter especially, like during COVID, it was my attachment to society and community. But Twitter really flattens everything. Like, a tweet from a real, expert doctor about a COVID study would come after a tweet from somebody who doesn’t know anything and was making a glib joke about COVID case rates. Now, I can tell myself rationally that one person is qualified and one isn’t, but my brain is processing all this information together and it interprets it as similar in value. They got equal weight as it pertains to my mental health. Twitter became a really negative place.

Warzel: It’s such a weird phenomenon. It is so hard to convince myself to ignore things from randos online. I remember seeing all these doom posts during 2020 about COVID and realizing they were from just…random anonymous people. And I could rationally tell myself to ignore them, but my brain had a hard time letting go of those signals. This also happens to me with criticism of my work.

Lindsay: I think there’s something also to our plugging into this constant stream of horrific news with commentary attached. It was too much for me to be able to respond to productively. I think Twitter especially is a machine for overwhelming you. It was making me feel hopeless by shining a light on every problem in the world, very few of which I can actually impact. My brain sees this information and tries to go into fixing mode, but I can’t do much. So I feel out of control.

Warzel: Was it hard for you to step away?

Lindsay: I had this battle going on in my head over whether it was a moral failing to step away from the constant stream of bad news. I had convinced myself it was almost righteous to subject myself to this.

Warzel: I feel this way, too. There’s a part of me that convinces myself I’m bearing witness and that’s a virtue of some kind. Even though I know that’s probably just bullshit.

Lindsay: I found it was the opposite of a virtue. The general tone of Twitter is snarky, angry. And what I was doing was spending hours every day watching people being rude to each other, either directly or passively. And that was training my brain to respond to things in my personal life with these learned Twitter patterns. I developed this reflex where everything enjoyable was processed initially in my mind as cringe and bad. Like, you come off Twitter and you go into the world, and there’s this imagined Twitter-troll Reply Guy that lives in my head. I’d have some normal, earnest thoughts, and my brain would stop me and counter with the most bad-faith interpretation of whatever I was feeling.

Warzel: This is a great example of what people are talking about when they say that social media is breaking peoples’ brains. It’s not just the arguing and exposure to shitty stuff online, but the way those experiences stick with you when you’re interacting in non-digital social situations.

Lindsay: But it’s not just Twitter. Instagram was really hard for me. Instagram Stories, particularly. With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to complete strangers. Just constantly judging my life from this strange third-person perspective. It infiltrated all these other corners of my life, too. I make pottery and I’d finish it out of the kiln, but it doesn’t feel done until I put it on my Instagram. I’ll make this thing from scratch and have this wonderful, meditative experience doing it, but if I don’t share it with this feed, part of my brain will think, What is the point? It’s so bad and dumb.

Even now, thinking about it, I struggle with what authentic posting looks like for me. So I’ve stepped back from it. I don’t need to have this documentation of every few hours from my day.

Warzel: Another part of this is that if your authentic impulse is not to post, these apps make you feel like this antisocial piece of shit.

Lindsay: I’d get genuine anxiety about capturing a moment in a way that looks good to others. It feels so superficial to say but at any exciting social event, like a big thing like a concert or festival or birthday party, the act of trying to get a good video or photo and failing to document my lived experience would be genuinely frustrating for me. If I didn't end up taking a good picture, I’d upload something, anything. It wouldn’t get attention because it was a shitty photo, and a part of the day would be ruined. I’d let those likes be an evaluation of the time I spent on the experience I just lived. I know this all sounds kind of insane…

Warzel: See, I think it’s just that we don’t talk about this stuff out loud very much. I feel the same way describing the kind of social anxiety I get from performative parts of social media—to detail it out loud feels unhinged. But I think most people are feeling similar stuff. It’s bleeding into everyone’s behaviors. The other day I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and was just taken aback by how many people—like, very normal people with day jobs and like 500 followers—were using all this influencer-like language. It’s really strange to see. I don’t mean it in a judging way. It’s just odd.

Lindsay: I think there’s a trickle-down influencer thing happening. I see it most when tragic news happens. Like, if there’s a mass shooting. Real influencers with big platforms now take these moments to issue a statement and say, “My heart goes out to the people of X” or something. That responsibility has trickled down to everyone else in the feed too. Every time there is bad news I’d feel this pressure. Russia invaded Ukraine—is it insensitive to post normally right now? And if you step back, it’s like clearly ridiculous behavior. Why do I feel the need to post at all about an event if I am not super-qualified to speak on the subjects?

One interesting example I noticed is Mother’s Day. Open your Instagram feed on Mother’s Day, and you’ll see just this stream of people posting pictures with heartfelt comments about their moms. And a few years ago, there was a shift and you’d start to see more people sharing about how this day is hard or fraught for some people who have either lost their moms or have difficult or complicated relationships. And that sentiment kind of picked up. Now, if you scroll on Mother’s Day, you’ll notice an overwhelming amount of sad content about Moms but also a lot of people like preemptively excusing their mom posts because you have more people trying to do their best to be aware. And it’s not a good or bad thing, really, but it’s just demonstrating that everyone is a creator and influencer to their own small communities. And there’s this expectation that’s trickled down to everyone with an account that you need to acknowledge all kinds of potential audiences if you choose to post. Even if you’re just sharing about your own life, you need to take it into account. Posting is much more complex.

Warzel: Totally. It’s like everyone now has a marketing and comms team in their head at all times just stress-testing different messages. And I want to be clear that I’m not talking about self-censorship here. Neither of us are saying “The wokes won’t let us just say what we want!” This is different. It’s this idea that we’re all communicating informally, but at the same time we’ve adopted a lot of the practices of public figures or like, I dunno, brands. And that is a really weird and stressful thing.

Lindsay: Yes. It’s a big reason I had to step back from Twitter. Even when there’s not big news about an election or a war or a pandemic, there’s always something. There will rarely be a day where there is no emergency on Twitter, because there are emergencies everywhere in the world.

Warzel: And it’s tough to live in a place that’s always in a state of emergency.

Lindsay: My realization on this was earlier this year when a big climate report came out, and I was reading all these doomer tweets and thinking apocalyptic thoughts while I was in line to get coffee. I’m in this nice, cute little coffee shop thinking and being surrounded by truly grim thoughts. And then I look up, and the immediate reality around me isn’t reflecting what is on my phone and in my brain. So there’s this struggle in my head. Is the world ending, or is it a nice day and I’m getting coffee? Obviously, it’s not a binary thing, but living this way is sometimes brain-scrambling. It’s not like the constant doom and gloom of Twitter was making me a better climate activist. Instead I’d be paralyzed. Twitter incentivizes you to live in this constant state of emergency, but that’s not necessarily going to make me a better citizen. It made it so the reality of the world and the reality of my life never matched up. So it just felt irresponsible to linger in that world. Better to use that time in a million more constructive ways.

Warzel: So you just quit. Was that hard?

Lindsay: Honestly, no. It took two days. After that I felt okay. It’s almost laughable how easy it was and how little it changed the mechanics of my life, despite being a thing I lived on for years. There were two days I wanted to check it while I was bored. Then the impulse started to fade.

Warzel: You ditched Instagram and Twitter, but you stayed with TikTok. You wrote this great piece about how “TikTok Is the Town Square Now.” Can you say a bit about what you’ve learned? Are you using it for news, or is this pure entertainment?

Lindsay: The main point of the piece is that TikTok is actually really good at surfacing the big popular stuff that’s happening on the other platforms. Before I quit other platforms, I’d see TikToks where people would talk about what was happening on those platforms, but I didn’t really spend as much time thinking about how that’s its own form of content.

Warzel: Has this type of TikTok content become the full scope of your internet experience? One of my huge fears is like, losing grasp on the platforms I know and having an even more shrunken understanding of what people are doing online.

Lindsay: I’ve really leaned into Reddit. I think in general I want to hear what just garden-variety normal online people are saying and doing—as opposed to the influencers. Reddit has become a great place for that type of thing. Writing Embedded, I figured if I’m gonna be putting out a newsletter about the internet, I’m doing it a disservice assuming Twitter and Instagram are the entire internet. I want to write for friends who aren’t super-online. I want to know what regular people are doing on the internet. Because there are a lot of people obviously who are not super-online but are active in their corners. I’m hoping to find those corners.

Warzel: Every social feed now is some version of user decisions (following a person or what you choose to watch or not watch), plus algorithmic curation. TikTok’s “For You” page has some of that user-decision stuff, of course, but it’s also a purer curation experience. I love how it feels different, but I also imagine it to be kind of a chaotic way to experience your information about current events. Does the experience sometimes feel too passive, or am I just being curmudgeonly about that? You could make a good case that, online, we’ve always had less agency than we think.

Lindsay: It’s both, right? Because, at least in the earlier parts of social media, you do make a lot of entry-point decisions—the topics you care about and the initial communities or interests that matter to you. But it is wild when you think about the way we use various platforms, and how they evolve so more and more choices are being made for you. You’re shown a shit ton of stuff, and even those who pay attention still passively consume so much of it. It’s odd how much of that we’ve accepted. I entered the internet very specifically to find Harry Potter fan fiction, and it entered me into all these spaces where I was kind of just fed adjacent stuff. And you head down 10,000 rabbit holes, and now you’re watching doctors and COVID conspiracy theorists arguing with each other. It’s wild. I used to go online in search of things. Now, a huge part of my online experience is based on me waiting for platforms to serve me what they think I will like.

Warzel: I wrote a piece right after the 2020 election, where I had a few Baby Boomers give me access to their Facebook accounts during the election season, and I spent time in their feeds and then interviewed them about it after. And a big thing I came away with was that so many of them had joined the platform for this very mundane and innocent reason—to reconnect with old friends. Like, actual people they had not seen or heard from in decades. It was like going to a big high-school reunion. But then Facebook became more news-oriented and those same people became the users’ primary vector of news. But like, those old acquaintances often weren’t good news sources or even politically aligned with those folks. And it was this super-traumatic, polarizing experience for so many people. They came into this world for one purpose, and it evolved. And the result was that people were getting exposed to stuff they never really asked or chose to see.

Lindsay: Yeah; it reminds me of that meme that says, “Ten to 15 years ago you joined Facebook to see what your classmates did, then: SMASH CUT, you’re at the Capitol for January 6th.” Obviously it’s a meme and it’s not that simple, but it’s a similar feeling.

Warzel: Since you rely on TikTok much more now than you did, is your For You page super dialed-in?

Lindsay: I think it has taken some time, but now TikTok knows me well enough to know that I will watch people standing in front of a green screen with a cut-out screenshot of an article with people talking about it. It’s definitely figured out what I like. And so I’ll get lots of analysis videos, or videos of somebody green-screening in front of a tweet or a thread. A lot of what it’s feeding me is bringing Twitter to TikTok.

Warzel: So it’s kind of your perfect, curated workaround?

Lindsay: Analysis and commentary TikTok is a big part of the app. And a lot of it is based around discussing things that people do or say on Twitter.

Warzel: I noticed this a lot with Instagram—how Twitter is the niche app with fewer users, but it ends up being the content grist for the mills of way-larger platforms. Everyone’s always screenshotting tweets to put into whatever other social network.

Lindsay: In the piece I wrote, I mentioned though that even though there’s a lot of taking replies from Twitter and discussing that stuff, TikTok is not insular—it wants to be a big melting pot of what’s happening on all other platforms, in a way that’s not really native to other platforms except for earlier versions of Twitter. It’s really the town square people claim that Twitter is.

Warzel: I think people made this argument about YouTube as well. Given that it’s a video app, how are the mechanics of TikTok different from YouTube?

Lindsay: This is an obvious difference, but on YouTube it’s easy to get hooked on a title, and on TikTok there’s very little of getting hooked by the title—it’s so much more visual. It’s about having a creator who can compose the shot and hook people in the first few seconds. There’s a sneaky element to this. If I see a video on YouTube with a title like, “Top 10 Craziest Moments in the Depp-Heard Trial,” I won’t click on it. But I found myself unknowingly and then knowingly watching content about that trial because the algorithm served this to me, and I didn’t really know exactly what I was seeing at first.

Warzel: Part of me wonders though if TikTok is helpful in understanding recommendation algorithms and curation, because it’s so blatant. I notice that, especially with younger users, there’s a total understanding that what they’re seeing is not occurring naturally, but is the result of computational choices being made for them. They might not know how they’re being manipulated, and maybe they even assign too much agency to algorithms. But younger generations also seem more aware that the algorithm is kind of like the ghost in the room. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse.

Lindsay: It could go in the other direction—where people think they’re being manipulated more than they are.

Warzel: Definitely. There are so many people who believe that TikTok’s For You page algorithm is essentially magical. But it’s not! Part of the reason it feels so spot-on is because the clips are short, and you’re essentially voting on every piece of content you see! I’ve actually found the algorithm isn’t always that savvy for me. TikTok does this terrible thing where it keeps feeding me people posting about their dogs' last days before being put down. It’s like 15 good videos of dogs, and then always like the 16th is about “going over the rainbow bridge,” and no matter how quickly I veer away from it and tell it, “Please no!,” it still pops in.

Lindsay: Oh yes. Jeez, I’ve seen those. The biggest flaw of TikTok—which Twitter actually does well—is you can’t preemptively tell TikTok “I don’t wanna see any of this” until you’ve seen it. And even then, signaling disinterest doesn’t seem to really work.

But going back to that idea of awareness of algorithms, I think one thing that really separates people online generationally is the divide between who has really tried to create stuff online. The savviest older-generation users are usually people who work in media, and they are exposed to how online content is made and travels. It’s not that they can’t be manipulated by it, but they have an understanding of how these systems work. It goes back to the influencer/creator trickle-down. My parents have never written an online article…so when one blows up on Facebook, there’s less of an understanding about how easy it is for crap to go viral or how easy it is to trick somebody.

Warzel: The creator divide is really interesting to think about. Of course, there’s lots of creators who are way out of touch, because they’ve gone so far in the other direction and are just way too online and seem to have lost a big sense of proportion of any event—a bit like what you were describing earlier.

Lindsay: I just don’t think people have adapted to being in touch with so many humans at every moment and getting this much information. Now, I imagine people will adapt. But we are in this generation where it wasn’t like this fully when we were growing up.

Warzel: I always feel very curmudgeonly saying this, but I think that mid-to-late Millennials and very young Gen Xers are this weird straddle generation. Like, one of my earliest memories is playing with a working rotary phone my parents had in the kitchen of our house. But, also, I was online for the first time at like 7 or 8 and very much was raised online. But I walk around with this strange tortured awareness of like, It wasn’t always this way, and I’m often nostalgic for a thing that I don’t really actually remember but also sort of do. And I think there’s a reason that a lot of people in this age range are both keen observers of technology and also extremely negative about its effects. It makes me feel ancient to say this, but I see a lot of much younger people engage with some of my writing about technology, and they’re like, “Stop overthinking it, man. We’re all just online. That’s life!” And they are right, and I am overthinking it. But our experiences are different!

Lindsay: They’re coming to all this connection like it’s perfectly normal and what life is supposed to be. And they are also right that it is normal now. But like, the internet used to be a place! Or at least it was for me. I love how the internet exposes the weird and funny things about being a person alive in the world. TikTok is especially good at that. But I do think the internet used to be a lot weirder. Certainly more specific. It used to be a place you’d go for a specific interest. Now it is just the context of life and the way you communicate.

Warzel: Parts of TikTok remind me of Vinepeek, which was this real-time feed of people uploading Vine videos. It was just so captivating. Mostly because the app was heavily used by young kids in school, and going on Vinepeek was this live look at the life of an anonymous American schoolkid. Totally entrancing, often very funny, almost always very weird. If you go back and look at writing about Vinepeek, it sounds so much like describing early TikTok.

Lindsay: What makes that special is that, at that time, what those kids were creating and putting on Vine, there wasn’t much of an expectation that anyone would see it besides their friends. They weren’t performing to be discovered. It was so real. Today, everyone is so primed for posting and preemptively ready to be seen by big audiences.

Warzel: Do you get any of that anonymous, weird, delightful stuff on your TikTok For You page?

Lindsay: The closest thing I’ve seen is: Six months ago this random high-school class clearly had an assignment, which was to make a TikTok video about a historical event. Some teacher was probably trying to be cool. But the kids made them, and the idea was to do it for class—not to have it go viral. Of course, it went viral. And I think the reason why it did was that everyone was excited that they were glimpsing something totally authentic that was not made for mass consumption. Occasionally, TikTok will show me a video with one like and zero comments, and you’ll see somebody doing something that’s not particularly interesting. I cherish it. It’s not interesting at all, and I don’t mean that in a mean way. Whoever was making it thought they were doing something fun, but it’s really just unremarkable. But because there’s no wide audience, it feels special. Like it was made for me. These days, everything is made for us, so the things that feel really and truly ours are the things that actually weren’t.