Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Lanier's polemical intervention is short and intentionally accessible, but its analytical core is substantive. As a pioneer of virtual reality and a long-standing critic of platform capitalism, Lanier's diagnosis carries weight: the business model of social media companies is not advertising but behaviour modification, and the optimisation of user behaviour for engagement is incompatible, structurally, with the maintenance of rational public discourse.

The argument anticipates and complements the academic literature on algorithmic amplification and coordinated inauthentic behaviour: if platforms are already systematically optimising for emotional arousal and tribal identification, influence operations that exploit those dynamics are not introducing a foreign pathogen but exploiting an existing vulnerability. For practitioners who need to explain the information environment to non-specialist audiences, Lanier's accessible framing is a useful resource.