The 46-year-old social media virgin: how people ditch Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and survive

Matt* should’ve joined Twitter years ago. He fits the user profile perfectly: highly educated, a politics junkie, across the news, loves a debate, and he’s a climate scientist.But unlike many users publicly grappling with Elon Musk’s new universe, threatening to jump ship (but then lingering on the deck), or trying to muster the energy to migrate to another platform and, ahem, “toot”, Matt is a social media virgin. Unblemished, unsullied – the 46-year-old has never joined a single social media platform.“I’m not very quick to pick up and run with new technologies,” says Matt from the Victorian town of Geelong, “but that lag time meant that I began to see things I didn’t like about their adoption.” Along with privacy and data concerns, he figured most algorithms encouraged outrage and constant use. Like a true scientist, brevity (and committing casual comments to the public record) also put him off: “I didn’t know what could be usefully said in 140 characters.”Twitter might be a social media minnow (29.5% of Australian internet users use it at least once a month, compared to Facebook at 76.8%) but watching people tweeting about whether to stay or go in real time is instructive. It’s a
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