I Deleted My Instagram

06 Aug 2026 - William Van Der Laar

It’s a bit of the “boy who cried wolf” situation since I’ve been saying I’d do this for over a year and a half. But it’s done, and you should consider it too.

There are countless reasons to get off of Meta’s platforms. They attack your mental health, they steal your personal data, they meddle with our democracy, they craft increasingly toxic spaces to appease a fascist regime, they contribute to genocide, and profit from CSAM. But sadly none of that was what got me to follow through.

The final straw was Instagram releasing a feature allowing anyone to use your likeness in “AI” generated photos and videos. I can’t think of any other social media feature that is so obviously antagonistic and offensive to every normal user. Over the past couple of years their refusal to moderate has lead to widespread abusive and hateful content across the platform, but this feature is beyond negligence. Meta is explicitly asking for people to become abusers. There is no legitimate use case for generating videos of someone without their consent. Though it is to be expected from the company that’s also pushing the pervert glasses.

I don’t think I will miss Instagram. I’ll miss the friends and acquaintances that I only kept up with through the platform, but even then most of those “mutuals” were effectively para-social relationships. Only a tiny fraction of my 2,000+ followers were people I regularly contacted, and I have other means to keep in touch with the people who are actually part of my life. I also understand that this won’t completely free me from Meta’s drag net, but there’s a difference in principle between signing up to be surveiled and having it done without your consent. Thinking about those choices is what this blog post is really about.

I expect a regular person’s response to this choice to be similar to the refrain I’ve heard while omitting other “normal” things from my lifestyle. I avoid food delivery services, I very rarely get anything off of Amazon, and I have not owned a car in over 5 years. “Why do you bother? Your individual choices won’t solve the problem!”, they say. I have a lot of complaints about this attitude, but most of all I think it’s the apparent lack of self-respect from the one who utters it.

Beyond the power of collective action, I still think doing good things is good, even if you’re the only one doing them. I still think participating in bad systems is bad, even if only for how it affects your mind and soul. But the truth is no one exists in a vacuum, and you are better than “nothing I do matters”.

When you are done using a disposable plastic bottle (maybe you’re out enjoying an evening stroll on the beach far from a trash receptacle) do you just throw it into the ocean? No? It’s not like keeping your bottle out of the ocean will magically clean up the giant trash islands floating at sea. So why do you bother carrying it back with you? Maybe it comes from a respect for nature, or a respect for society and your fellow humans that would have to eventually clean up after you, but mostly I think it is because you respect yourself.

You have a set of principles and a sense of self that includes not being a piece of shit, even if no one is around watching you. This is admirable, and you should seek to nurture this instinct inside of you. No matter how many people complain when you “signal” (act on) them, virtues are virtues. The alternative is to believe that none of your choices will ever have a real positive or negative impact on yourself, your community, or your world. This would require a level of nihilism so egregious that I’d recommend consulting a professional¹.

Throwing trash directly into the ocean is maybe an extreme example, and I’m not saying that using Instagram makes you a bad person who likes to choke sea turtles. Our relationships to these different platforms and infrastructure systems are complex and nuanced. I can think of many legitimate excuses to stay the course on this or many other services². But to stay somewhere solely out of convenience or habit is to lose a part of oneself.

You are important, and your time, attention, data, and money are too. Contributing them to abusive platforms will have an impact on you whether you acknowledge it or not. The acceptance of the existing harms will allow you to justify increasingly larger harms. The light moral weight of small daily choices will start to feel like no weight at all. You will forget that you have agency over your own life. You will rationalize away every choice as just “the way it is”. Or at least if you’re like me you will. So I deleted my Instagram.

A real one, not one of Meta’s scamming chatbots. ↩
but not X, that is ridiculous, get the fuck off of that site. ↩