Let's Dance: AOC Cuts Back on Social Media Usage, and Her Reason Why Is Rather Ironic

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lets off some steam during her college years. Screen grab via berlin1925,.
AOC Dancing
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lets off some steam during her college years. Screen grab via berlin1925.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY-14) meteoric rise to political fame last year was greatly enabled through her near-constant use of social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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But in a recent interview, she said she had cut out using one of the platforms almost altogether as a way of giving herself a break:

“I personally gave up Facebook, which was kind of a big deal because I started my campaign on Facebook. And Facebook was my primary digital organizing tool for a very long time. I gave up on it,” said Ocasio-Cortez, whose campaign still has an account on the social media platform but who mostly uses Instagram and Twitter to connect with her followers.

“Social media poses a public health risk to everybody,” she continued. “There are amplified impacts for young people, particularly children under the age of 3, with screen time. But I think it has a lot of effects on older people. I think it has effects on everybody. Increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, escapism.”

She mainly uses Facebook to run ads, and she also has her official Congressional Facebook page.

And even though she still spends a lot of time on other platforms, she really does think about what she writes before she posts, y’all – and even has her limits:

Ocasio-Cortez, who said she writes all her tweets and Instagram posts, said she thinks about the effects of social media “both as a person with a larger audience but also as an individual user of these platforms.”

[…]

“I’ve started to kind of impose little rules on myself,” she told Yahoo News. “Like every once in a while, you’ll see me hop on Twitter on the weekends, but for the most part I take consumption of content, when it comes to consumption and reading, I take the weekends off. And so I’m not, like, scrolling through trying to read everything online that journalists are writing on weekends. I try to do that during the workweek.”

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She’s definitely right about one thing: Too much social media can be bad for your health. That goes double for reading or watching anything she tweets or livestreams.

But it’s a bit ironic to see her warn about social media being a form of “escapism” considering the vast majority of the tweets she puts out there to her 4 million followers are a total escape from reality.

To listen to the full interview, click here.

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Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter.–

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