Caitlin Moran: social media went from utopia to hellhole in a decade – if you want to feel hopeful again, get offline

Fourteen years ago, Twitter was the fastest, funniest game on the web. Now I’ve been driven out by so-called ‘online activists’. The only answer is to unplug and try this instead

Let me take you back to December 2012 …

God, I love social media! I cannot believe my exquisite luck – to exist in a time when it was invented! Bliss it is in this dawn to be @live! If you’ve not been on Twitter yet – please join! It’s kind of like a cross between your best ever pub, and the bit on Live & Kicking where celebrities like Duran Duran were doing the phone-in, and you could ring in and talk to them. Literally! Because Duran Duran are on Twitter! Well, Simon Le Bon is. And Spandau Ballet, too! Well, Gary Kemp. And they’re really funny. During the royal wedding with Kate and William, when all the lesser royals were herded on to some shitty coaches, Kemp was horrified.

“Spandau would never have got into a coach!” he posted sniffily.

“Yeah – limos all the way for Duran,” Simon replied, with palpable distaste.

For a certain kind of person – by which I mean someone raised on Smash Hits magazine – the idea of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran doing live, bitchy commentary on a royal wedding, on a new communication device in your pocket? This is all our dreams come true.

But it’s not just Camp Old New Romantics Tweeting During a Royal Wedding, though. It’s also a community. Everyone’s so nice on there. Everyone is their best selves. Last year, there was a mother in Welwyn Garden City whose child had lost its teddy bear. She was, understandably, desperate to get it back – begging everyone to keep an eye out for it on the streets.

Obviously, everyone reposted her tweet, and it went super-viral. Then the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, got involved. He wrote a little poem about the bear! And then that went viral! Because everyone really wanted to find that bear! And, by the end of the day, the bear was found – and it was like a breaking news event, but with actual good news. Everyone went bananas!

For a certain kind of person – by which I mean someone who wishes our newspapers and news bulletins contained more good news – it’s like a dream come true. Online, every day has a moment where it feels like It’s a Wonderful Life.

But the thing is – the fun and the community of Twitter aren’t even the best bit. No! Because the killer thing is: it’s kind of like the revolution on there. Seriously. For the first time ever, people can communicate with each other, across the world – unmediated by newspapers or TV. We all have the power to broadcast, and be heard, now. And do you know who’s basically taken over Twitter in the UK? The women. They’re on there, every night, reviewing the state of feminism through the day’s media – and being Chris Morris-level amusing about how ridiculously male-dominated everything is. And, gradually, they’ve got so pissed off about it, it’s turned into action.

For instance, this year, after the Today programme had two days in a row with, madly, all-male panels talking about female issues – first teenage girls and contraception, then breast cancer tests – Caroline Criado-Perez, who wasn’t a journalist, or a media person, but just someone with a job in the pharmaceutical industry, complained to the BBC – and was told it was because the Today programme could not find a female expert in time. She then spent the next month on Twitter, asking for female experts to volunteer to be on a list, titled it The Women’s Room, and sent it to the BBC.

And now – they use it! She has been the change she wants to see! She saw a problem, crowdsourced a solution – and fixed it! She has altered female representation, overnight, on the biggest broadcasting platform in the world – just by being able to coordinate a campaign on this new-fangled social media thing!

And this will, clearly, be the first of many campaigns like this. This is how everything will change now. We all have our hands on the levers of power, now that Twitter is here. This is the future! This is true equality! We can all be activists now! And at the same time as hanging out with Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet!

We are, clearly, about to enter the most equal, humane, progressive, amusing and adorable era of humanity the world has ever known. Twitter is going to solve everything. Huzzah!

September 2026

Well. It’s been quite the 14 years. Like they say on social media – or what’s left of it, now it’s mutated beyond all recognition from what it was in 2012 – that escalated quickly.

In 2012, I truly believed social media – and particularly Twitter: back then, the fastest, funniest game on the internet – was the greatest force for progressive change the world had seen. I spent hours every day on it – keeping up with the news, signing petitions, mucking around, making a whole new bunch of friends who are still my primary social circle, and, quite frequently, laughing more than I had before or since.

Obviously, part of my love for it was that I was, to use the parlance of the time, totally winning the internet: I had 800k followers and, in 2014, my Twitter feed was added to the list of English A-level set texts, as an example of “modern digital communication and contemporary rhetoric”. Let’s gloss over the fact that this was alongside the Twitter feed of Russell Brand. After all, back then, the worst thing we knew about him was that he had chosen to write something called My Booky Wook.

Of course, it was all exciting and new, then. No one knew what it would turn into. But it was, we can see now, a gigantic, unprecedented experiment: not just one in “digital communication and rhetoric” but also in the behaviour of crowds; in exercises of power; in what “the democratisation of communication” really means – especially when it’s incredibly easy for hostile foreign governments to covertly infiltrate, and sabotage, it.

It was also an experiment in witch-hunts, and shitposting. In bullying, purity-spirals, public shaming, cancellations and algorithmic radicalisation. In what happens when there’s a form of mass communication in which the majority of the context has been stripped out; escalating rhetoric is financially rewarded; bad faith becomes rampant; and no one has made eye contact with the majority of people they have been talking to.

And some of the findings of this experiment are, finally, in: public health services and governments now have so much evidence of its deleterious effects on both mental health and social cohesion, they are banning our children from using it. There are whole subjects – trans rights, DEI, vaccines, Gaza – once seemingly settled, or marginal, but on which social media has now all but obliterated a calm centre-ground. And families, and whole social groups, have imploded – after online skirmishes became unsolvable, and each side slowly migrated to utterly different, algorithm-dictated “realities.”

As I look through the list of the people I was chatting to on Twitter in 2012 – people who went to early Twitter meetups; people who were part of my everyday conversation in this imaginary pub/club in the ether – the attrition rate is startlingly high. I would say that fully one-third of them have been fundamentally changed by social media. Like some modern-day version of the rhyme about Henry VIII’s wives – “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” – the tally reads: “Cancelled, radicalised, now offline; cancelled, radicalised, survived.”

Caroline Criado-Perez? Who, in 2012, looked as if she was changing the face of feminism with a brilliant, amateur, smart, one-woman online campaign? Six months after her success with The Women’s Room, she had received so many rape and death threats online – more than 50 per hour – that she could not eat or sleep, lost a stone in weight and felt utterly driven to despair.

When MP Stella Creasy tried to highlight Criado-Perez’s problem she, too, received a bombardment of rape and death threats – as did any other woman trying to help. Including me: 2013 was the first time on social media I was told someone wanted to kill me, or rape my children, or find my house and burn it down. And it was not, by a very long chalk, the last.

But as anyone who has been subject to mass abuse on social media will tell you, the rape and death threats are, genuinely, not the worst thing that can happen to you online. No – the worst part of being engaged in “activism” online, even in its most mild, polite and humorous form, is what you might term “your own side” turning against you.

A mild skirmish with someone you thought like-minded – a classic case of the vanity of small differences – gradually snowballing, thanks to the algorithm, into a pile-on of thousands, until you don’t know whose “side” you’re on any more.

Until – seemingly now ostracised by your own community – you’re faced with a stark choice. Carry on batting for “your” side, even though they have denounced you as wrong, toxic and problematic? Or – rejected – go over to “the other side”, who welcome outcasts, and potential new converts, with open arms?

If you want to see the most famous instance of this, look at the man who eventually bought Twitter – Elon Musk. In 2012, he was the goofy, Democrat-funding stoner guy – a real life Tony Stark – who was going to save the world with his electric cars. A couple of leftwing backlashes later, and Musk – stung and rejected – had begun a classic journey to “the other side” that saw him first radicalised by his own algorithm, and then overseeing a darkly re-badged X being flooded with child pornography, “libtard tears” and actual Nazis. It all feels a long way away from John Prescott writing poems about teddy bears.

This is why, in 2026, my primary piece of advice to someone who wants to make the world a better place is: don’t become an online activist. In fact – seriously – don’t be online at all.

Three years ago, and while in the midst of my menopause, my lifelong, well-concealed anxiety disorder became so out of control I attempted to buy a remote farmhouse in Wales. In many ways, I still think this was a sensible decision: after all, the billionaire tech-bros are buying apocalypse bunkers in Hawaii, New Zealand and remote parts of Argentina. They obviously know something we don’t know. They clearly believe that civilisation will fall, and soon. Follow the money!

Unfortunately, six weeks after putting in my offer, and while tits-deep in planning a life of total self-sufficiency – Goats! Wells! An iron-making forge, so I could be in control of my own supply of eg: rakes! – I realised just how much money you actually have to have to follow the money. The surveyor’s estimated renovations bills prompted my mortgage company to withdraw their offer, and the whole deal collapsed.

If civilisation was to fall, it became clear, I would have to do it in my old house, in my old life. And if I was to ever get a handle on my rampaging anxiety, I would have to work out just what it was about modern life that was causing it in the first place.

* * *

This is a peerlessly anxious age, we are constantly informed. The last 15 years or so have seemed so fast, chaotic, polarised and without precedent, we are all frazzled and reeling. The cry of gen X and boomers is: “When will things calm down? When will things be normal again?”

On hearing this, I have noticed – with no little sorrow – that millennials and gen Z and alpha will reply, curiously, “What do you mean – ‘normal’? What would we get back to?” For they, obviously, have no memory of a time before … all this. Before all conversations were about how things are getting worse; before the news of things getting worse pinged, 24/7, in your pocket. Before “responding” to the news, online, became some kind of social duty, but one that could, very easily, if you said the wrong thing, ruin your life.

Trying to remember what “before” was like – and why it definitely felt better than what we have now – I drew up a list of ways to improve my life. Some seemed quite random, and all of them were either cheap, or free, but they all made it on to the list because they were things that, I hoped, would help me do two things.

The first – fall back in love with humanity again. To truly believe – as I once had – that most people are, by and large, good. And then second? To be hopeful again. Hopeful about making the future better.

Of the things I tried, I can tell you which ones were a roaring success. Getting a dog. Buying a litter-picker, and regularly acting like a middle-aged Pac-Man, gobbling up the empty vape and vodka bottles of the neighbourhood and depositing them in a big bin bag. Donating blood. Rewilding the garden: “eco grief” is real, but so is “eco relief” when a new pond, and a stretch of unmown grass, sees your previously lifeless garden explode with dragonflies, goldfinches, frogs, and – on what was one of the best days of my life – a peregrine falcon, washing its wings in my homemade waterfall.

I was also unexpectedly affected by accidentally losing my headphones, and starting to “rawdog” on public transport. It’s far easier to believe the doom-laden pronouncements of Donald Trump and JD Vance – that London is a seething cauldron of hatred, on the verge of sharia law – if you never leave the house without pumping an “emergency” news podcast through your Bose. It’s far harder when you sit on the bus with what I began to call “naked ears”, actually listening to what people are saying in London in 2026. Turns out, they’re not seething with plans to begin vigilante mobs at all. They’re just on their phones, talking to their mums (“Press the button at the bottom. The bottom! You’ve got the camera on reverse!”), or planning whether to have chicken, or sausages, for tea. They’re singing to the baby across the aisle, or giggling about some boy they fancy. If you are feeling paranoid, or dolorous, about your fellow man, I can heartily recommend going sans headphones for a spell. It really drops your anxiety rates.

However. Without doubt, the biggest change in my life has been changing my attitude to social media. As a middle-aged, feminist lefty on Twitter, I had genuinely bought into the idea that social media was the water-cooler/town square of our times, and that we all had something bordering on duty to be on it. In this, I was helped by a common online trope – being peevishly reminded, by others, to do so.

“Your silence on this topic has been notable.” “I am disappointed you have not used your platform to centre this subject.” Or – the big trebuchet of prompts – “Your silence is violence.” Each person saying this was utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, of course – but possibly unaware of just how many other people were also convinced by the righteousness of their cause – and how, ultimately, impossible and mad it would be for everyone to speak out about everyone’s causes, every day.

Additionally, I had started to notice a definite, recurring event: people whose conversation had previously roamed over multiple subjects, and in multiple tones, gradually becoming fixated on just one, single cause. Usually, this was defined by the cause – or, more specifically, the Tweet – which had gone mega-viral. Suddenly faced with a deluge of new followers, Tweeting “My hero!” or “You speak for all of us!” the poster would start posting more and more on this subject – until, one day, it finally became the only thing they posted about. I started referring to this phenomenon as “The Omnicause”: the moment where someone’s online life becomes defined by a single subject.

One acquaintance – “A” – took on the Omnicause of homelessness. What happened next was the classic Omnicause domino-effect: viral Tweet; new followers; “You’re my hero!”; escalation; until, finally, febrile, manic obsession. By Christmas Day – just six months after their big, viral Tweet – A was posting videos at 4am, sobbing about how terrible they felt about all the “hate” they were getting from “traitors” whose “silence is violence”, and screaming about government inaction – “These politicians are vermin! They should hang from lamp-posts!” – while their children slept, upstairs, in their parent’s lovely house.

As I knew a bit about A, I had a deeper contextual understanding of their Omnicause: a bad childhood, a failing marriage, ongoing mental health problems. To me, it seemed obvious what was fuelling the greater part of this – and, to be honest, so many other – Omnicauses: it was a proxy fury/sorrow about their own life. But of course, not one that could ever be admitted, on modern-day social media – where there is always someone, no matter how bitter your own sorrows, ready to shout “Check your privilege!”, “Stop whining!” or “Think how lucky you are, compared with those in Sudan!”

Over the years, I’ve observed just how many of those ostensibly passionate about a cause are, in fact, subtweeting just a single person – a wife; a friend who has turned against them; an alienated social group. And they are often so distressed by their online experience that they don’t realise how, if we are being honest, there is a terrible form of narcissism, which they are blind to, in their posts.

I have lost count of people who say they are having a “genuine mental health crisis” about, say, Gaza, or Ukraine. I wonder how distasteful someone actually in Gaza, or Ukraine, would find these posts: someone in Leytonstone or Brighton claiming to be “broken” by a foreign war in which people are actually being bombed.

Or – worse – people allowing their “passion” for a subject to become so intense they are willing to watch whole friendship groups and families divide over the issue and implode. Even to the point – at the most extreme end – of violent marches, and bricks through shop windows.

Surely, the first response to any brutal conflict, thousands of miles away, is to do whatever it takes not to import that conflict back into your own, fortunately peaceful country? You don’t spread the kind of ideological contamination that has set another country on fire. You just offer up your most profound and humble thanks you were born in a country currently experiencing far better luck – and then?

And then. For what do you do if you really do want to make the world a better place? How does a 21st-century person make conversations about the 22nd-century flip to the presumption it will be better than this one – and not, as we currently presume, so much worse?

Well, first of all – as I said before – get off the internet. Or at least ration it way down. If you want to do online activism – if you are on a platform you still, perhaps bafflingly, believe can be used to spread news, information and ideas for a better world – then, 20 minutes a day, tops, seems optimal. Enough to put something useful, and good, out there – but not long enough to get caught up in snark, and fights, or get co-opted into factional wars in which at least a third of the participants will – and we can now observe this to be true – eventually burn out, radicalise, or go, to use the technical term, “completely crackers”.

And secondly? Well, the old Al-Anon saying is popular for a reason: you can only keep your side of the road clean. No one can actually change the world – like Zara’s infamous “death trousers”, it’s both controversial, and far too long. But we can change our days. We can change our lives – just enough to change those of others.

Pick litter. Donate blood. Volunteer. Fund a local community centre. Mentor. Flower-bomb wastelands. Clear a river. Raise funds for overseas aid. Talk to someone lonely. Babysit for an exhausted friend. Join an organisation you believe in. Turn up and show solidarity with a local mosque, synagogue or abortion clinic. Read a proper history book on a subject you’ve only read tweets about. Then read another one – as there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who’s only read one book on a subject. Seriously – if I have to explain what “from the river to the sea” actually means to another ardent 21-year-old, I will genuinely lose my mind.

Stop listening to emergency podcasts; stop doomscrolling; go for a walk and talk to people; buy your local newspaper – and, finally, stop believing that we are living “through one of the most difficult, anxious and chaotic times in human history”. Sure, it’s not a golden age – housing, the NHS, the climate crisis, inequality and the rise of intolerance nix that – but, if you’re British, you must keep hold of a solid historical perspective: there are no bombs in our skies. There is no plague stalking our streets. We are not living through a Depression so bleak children are abandoned outside churches.

For the truth is, the world is, still, largely, as it was, “back then”, when things were “normal”: a big old mixed-grill of awful things and wonderful things; steps back and steps forward. In reality, there are only two big things that have changed. The first is climate change – something which, as every expert will wearily explain, we already have the solutions to tackle - but still lack enough bracing top-level panic to implement. And this leads to the second, and arguably biggest, change in our times: how we are being told about the world. Who is telling us about the world – and why. You only need to see footage of well-funded bot-farms – thousands of phones and laptops, blankly using AI to argue with real, angry, despairing, crying people – to realise something deeply disruptive is happening here.

And if you take your headphones off, put your phone down, and turn all those newly freed-up hours into actually doing something – however small – then maybe you, like me, will realise that you’ve now passed through Peak Despair. And have, yes, started to become, well, hopeful again.

• The writer’s fee has been donated to charity.

How to Be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran is published by Ebury at £22. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.