According to The Wall Street Journal, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced on New Year’s Eve that he deleted X and Instagram from his phone, vowing to be a “social-media teetotaler” for 2026. He cited a July 2024 meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who said she avoids news media to stay grounded, as inspiration. Ramaswamy, who ran a digitally-focused presidential campaign, stated his team will still post on his behalf, but he will no longer browse the platforms himself. He argues the real-time feedback loop is increasingly manipulated by foreign actors and bots, pointing to reports on coordinated activity around white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the pro-Democrat #BlueCrew hashtag. His immediate goal is to spend more time with Ohio voters across all 88 counties and his family.
The Twitter Prison
Here’s the thing: Ramaswamy is diagnosing a disease that’s infected modern politics, and he’s not wrong. He calls it the “Twitter prison.” The idea is simple. Polls are slow and expensive. Social media is free, fast, and gives you that addictive hit of feeling “connected.” But it’s a trap. The algorithm rewards outrage and negativity because that’s what drives engagement. So a politician’s feed becomes a horror show of the angriest, loudest voices, which they then mistake for the public pulse.
He gives a perfect example from the Turning Point USA conference in December. Based on social media chatter, he expected to be booed for his speech. The online commentary afterward claimed he was. In reality? A standing ovation from 20,000 people. That disconnect is terrifying if you’re making policy decisions. You’re basically governing based on a funhouse mirror version of your constituents.
Bots, Avatars, and “Based” Aides
And it gets worse. That “public opinion” isn’t even real. As Ramaswamy notes, it’s often manufactured. He links to a Network Contagion Research Institute report showing Nick Fuentes’s engagement looks artificially inflated and foreign, and an NBC News investigation on bot-driven hashtags. So you have politicians potentially being guided by puppet accounts.
But the feedback loop doesn’t stop at the politician’s phone. It gets baked into the staff. Ramaswamy points to commentator Richard Hanania’s essay on young aides competing to be “based” with extreme takes. The state itself starts to sound like X. Ever see a cringe-worthy post from an official government account? That’s likely a 24-year-old for whom Twitter *is* the real world. So now the distortion is institutional.
The Real Issues Don’t Trend
This creates a massive policy blind spot. Ramaswamy says most Ohioans he meets want higher pay, lower electric bills, and good schools for their kids. Universal, kitchen-table stuff. But guess what? Those topics are boring. They don’t generate the rage-clicks that make a post go viral. So they become invisible on the leader’s social media radar. A leader glued to their feed starts prioritizing niche, inflammatory cultural battles over the actual, widespread economic concerns shaping daily life.
It’s a perverse incentive. The very tools sold as a direct line to “the people” systematically filter out the most common people’s concerns. Jefferson warned about newspapers, but this is different. Traditional media has bias and narrative. Social media has the illusion of organic, grassroots consensus, which is way more seductive and dangerous for a politician seeking validation.
Will Anyone Else Log Off?
So, is Ramaswamy’s experiment the solution? He admits he might be back on X by March. The pull is that strong. And let’s be real, his campaign will still use the platforms—he’s just outsourcing the browsing. But the core argument is powerful: if you don’t want social media to use you, you can’t let it be your lens on the world.
The real question is: will any other powerful figures have the discipline to try? He’s inviting fellow Republicans to join him. I’m skeptical. The addiction to the instant feedback, the fear of missing out on a trending narrative, the entire political-media ecosystem is built around this now. Breaking free means trusting old-fashioned, slow, in-person connection over the digital dopamine drip. In 2025, that almost seems like a radical act. But maybe it’s the only way to actually hear what people are saying, instead of what the algorithm and bot farms are screaming.
