How Gen Z Organized an Anti-Social Media Day

Famed for its 1960s anti-war protests, New York’s Tompkins Square Park hosted another countercultural movement on Friday: rejecting social media.

“Delete Day,” organized by several Gen Z-led groups, called on young people to excise an addictive app from their lives, starting, for now, with their phones.

The event was not promoted on social media, unsurprisingly, and only minimally online. Instead, attendees relied on more old-school methods, like word-of-mouth.

As their peers passed by, dressed in going-out fits begging to be documented, organizers tried to entice them to join the event.

They decorated the park’s entrance with chalk signs like “Delete your apps on the grass” and gave out hand-drawn stickers and pamphlets detailing how to save their data before nixing apps like Instagram. When they were ready, they could take a seat on the lawn, on picnic blankets, with candles, glow lights, and a living room lamp.

The event, which drew about 80 participants, featured a few short speeches from the organizers, the deletion ritual, and a no-phones party. Nick Plante, 25, one of the speakers who organizes events around “attention activism” in the city, told Business Insider that the night’s tone was meant to be positive.

“This event is a celebration that society has kind of reached this inflection point,” he said. “We realized how weary we are, how screen-addled we are, and we’re taking stronger steps together to do something more lasting about it.”

Tabling over TikTok

In the post-pandemic years, Gen Zers who spent high school and college behind screens have started to push back.

Delete Day brought together groups like the Appstinence movement, originally started at Harvard by then-grad student Gabriela Nguyen, and the Reconnect Movement, led by Seán Killingsworth, which helps launch phone-free clubs on high school and college campuses.

Other groups, like the modern Luddite movement and the Lamp Club, a student group at Eugene Lang College that fosters more in-person socializing “for funky people who hate overhead lighting,” were also in attendance. They brought their friends and roommates, as well as new people they met through their organizing efforts.

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Some spread the word by sitting at picnic tables around the city. “We had friends of ours who just tabled on the streets and said, ‘I don’t have a smartphone. Ask me a question,'” Killingsworth, 22, told Business Insider. “They had some awesome conversations and passed out a bunch of flyers.”

The idea was to bring people together organically. “We wanted to really, really get in on a couple of people and change their lives very deeply,” Nguyen, 24, told Business Insider. Speakers shared their own struggles of growing up with social media, from being distracted at school to living with looming self-consciousness.

“If you’re like me, you’ve canceled on a friend because the pull to just stay at home and chill with all your devices is just too strong,” Nguyen said in her speech. “It’s the kiss of death to the social fabric.”

The ‘anxious generation’ fights back

Delete Day was organized by Time to Refuse, a global movement that encourages app deletion and smartphone abstention.

While it’s officially led by Gen Zers, Time to Refuse is supported and promoted by Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation,” a 2024 book about the ties between adolescent smartphone use and rising rates of mental illness among young people. Since its publication, the book has inspired full and partial school-wide phone bans in most US states. Tech companies, meanwhile, have become the center of lawsuits accusing them of creating a “mental health crisis.”

Haidt shared the Delete Day event on his Substack, After Babel, and his team also helped design the official Time to Refuse website, a representative told Business Insider. After Babel also features writers like Freya India, whose popular Substack, GIRLS, focuses on the damage done to young women by social media apps like TikTok.

India, who recently became a staff writer for After Babel, told Business Insider that she used to feel a lot of cognitive dissonance when she was younger and more plugged into the online world. “I would post pictures of myself and feel really anxious and on display,” India, 26, said. Since creating rules for herself, like not posting photos of herself online, she said she’s felt more liberated.

“You go to an event and you don’t have to take pictures for Instagram,” she said. “You don’t have to think about how you’re going to market it.”

Others shared similar sentiments of wishing they hadn’t grown up with this technology.

“I want you to just look at your phone, and I want you to put it on top of your head,” one attendee said in a speech. “Think of all the poison seeping into your brain…since you were 13 and got Instagram like me, or since you were like 20 and it became introduced as a normal thing. But enough is enough.”

After a countdown, attendees deleted their poison of choice: Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, or others. Some volunteered to share their experience with the group.

“I deleted Hinge!!!” one attendee shouted, to vigorous applause.

An alternative to loneliness

One of the biggest challenges of quitting social media — or smartphones entirely — is the immediate loss of connection, however thin those bonds might actually be.

It’s why the organizers were adamant about emphasizing positive alternatives, such as in-person hangouts. After the mass deletion event, attendees were given cardboard pouches for their phones and name tags. If they wanted, they could write down a few words referencing a story they wanted to share with strangers as they mingled.

At one point, a representative from Light, a Brooklyn-based tech company, stepped on the soapbox. He gave out a free Light Phone (retailing at $299-$699, depending on the model), a device that offers basic features like texting, calling, and maps, but no social media or internet.

While the Light Phone and Time to Refuse aren’t exactly mainstream, organizers of the Delete Day event said the goal isn’t to try to scale. It’s to build a strong sense of community. Their plan is to keep hosting Delete Days around the world as people volunteer to host them. As of now, events are planned in Philadelphia, the UK, and even in Nairobi, Kenya.

Several attendees stressed that finding compelling in-person activities helped them distance themselves from their phones. “Now, I’m taking Mandarin classes and doing other hobbies,” event volunteer Judy Liu, 25, told Business Insider.

Attendee Kanika Mehra, 24, runs a program called Airplane Mode in DC designed to bring young people back into third spaces. “The way out of it isn’t just like ‘I’m deleting Instagram,’ but doing it through community,” she told Business Insider. “Ultimately, when you experience real life and real connection, social media is not a compelling alternative.”