10 | DECEMBER 7 • 2023 J
N

opinion

Social Media Has Become ‘Unhinged’
I

t was a slow trickle, each 
long press of the finger and 
ensuing quick tap was days 
and sometimes weeks apart (it’s 
hard to comprehend that two 
months have passed since Oct. 
7), but I am here 
to tell you that I 
— a former social 
media manager 
— have removed 
each and every 
social media 
app from my 
phone.
In fact, as I was writing this 
very essay, I realized I still had 
Threads downloaded, opened it 
for a minute, saw a Thread that 
said “Zionism is antisemitism,
” 
and promptly deleted that, too.
I have zero desire to restore a 
single one of them.
What happened to me has 
probably happened to you, too. 
I saw a Tweet, a TikTok, an 
Instagram story that filled me 
with such fury and indignation 
that I spent hours — sometimes 
days — formulating and refor-
mulating an epic, fact-based, 
emotionally charged, imagined 
response. Imagined, of course, 
because I knew I’
d never post 
it. I’ve seen so many celebrities 
and random acquaintances do 
such utterly embarrassing and 
harmful and reputation- 
destroying things in the last 
weeks to even dare to try.
And to be clear: I would try if 
I thought I could change some-
one’s mind and force them to 
see my humanity, but beyond 
the small, intimate, personal 
conversations that I can have 
off the apps, I feel like these 
enraged indignant responses 
only seem to silo people further.
I’ve worked in social media 

since 2014 — in the Jewish 
realm of social media, specif-
ically. That means I’ve seen a 
lot of awfulness, gas chamber 
memes, overt antisemitism 
and Islamophobia. I’ve per-
sonally been told many times 
to go back where I came from 
(which, yes, is Israel, and that 
feels grimly funny now). Yet 
I’ve also believed in its power to 
heal, to make people feel seen, 
to energize activism, to educate.
I still believe that — kind of? 
But I’ve also never seen it this 
awful, this polarizing, this … 
honestly, unhinged. An unsci-
entific poll of people I know 
seems to indicate the same 
thing: Social media is the worst 
it’s ever been, maybe because 
the Israel/Palestine conversa-
tion has always been so impos-
sibly polarizing.
People are so stuck in their 
“side” and binary that they’re 
willing to share anything — 
without fact-checking, with-
out making sure they’re not 
getting in bed with people 
whose worldview is dangerous, 
without asking themselves for 
a small second, wait, is this 
Islamophobic? Antisemitic? 
Completely detached from real-

ity? Without wondering if they 
sound like a conspiracy theorist 
or if they’re just being cruel for 
cruelty’s sake.
And the number of words 
wasted on misinformation and 
meanness doesn’t even com-
pare to the number of words 
some people insist on putting 
into other people’s mouths (or 
keyboards, rather) when their 
statement doesn’t 100% pass 
whatever standards they’ve arbi-
trarily decided it must. Beyond 
Israel and Palestine, we’ve been 
tearing ourselves apart inside 
our Jewish community, and that 
also breaks my heart.
I understand the deep grief 
and rage behind most posts. 
I’ve been enraged and grieving 
myself. I’ve been scared too: Of 
the growing antisemitism. Of 
the people who tell me that I 
and my family, because we were 
born in Israel, can’t be innocent 
civilians, that we all deserve the 
horrors of Oct. 7 to befall on us.
I’ve also been scared for 
the life of every innocent per-
son lost and about to be lost. 
Around 1,200 Israelis killed, 
250 kidnapped, over 10,000 
Palestinian lives believed to 
have been taken, all unfath-

omable numbers. And I’ve 
been scared about the cycle of 
rage and violence and siloed 
indignation that removes the 
humanity of a whole swath of 
people. Because I do believe 
that that’s part of what got 
us here. And I keep seeing it 
evinced, over and over again, 
on social media.
I am — unlike many 
“experts” newly minted by 
numbers of followers or mag-
nitude of chutzpah — not 
an expert of Middle Eastern 
politics, despite being Israeli 
and working in Jewish media 
for almost a decade. I know a 
lot, but I am not a politician or 
historian. And yet, to the extent 
I believe that there is a solution 
to the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict, I believe that it has to be 
one that takes into account the 
inherent humanity of all those 
involved. I believe that it will be 
human and imperfect.
I’m awed by the people who 
are still managing to use social 
media for good right now, the 
little spots of light — people 
who parse through history 
and reality with wisdom and 
empathy, well-educated vet-
eran observers of Israel and 
Palestine, academics, jour-
nalists, fierce activists, who, 
through immense pain, still 
manage to retain their human-
ity.
Yet for me, I’ve realized being 
on social media is doing more 
harm than good. It’s keeping 
me further away from solutions 
and useful action, and closer 
to rage and fear. So, for now, I 
can’t stay there. 

Lior Zaltzman is the deputy managing 

editor of Kveller.

PURELY COMMENTARY

Lior 
Zaltsman
JTA.org

