❓WHAT HAPPENED: Vivek Ramaswamy announced his decision to delete social media apps X and Instagram as part of his New Year’s resolutions.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio Governor candidate, and his campaign team.
📍WHEN & WHERE: The announcement was made in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, early January 2026.
💬KEY QUOTE: “I plan to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026. On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone.” – Vivek Ramaswamy
🎯IMPACT: Ramaswamy’s move is intended to connect directly with voters and avoid the distortions of social media feedback.
Republican candidate for Ohio governor Vivek Ramaswamy has deleted his X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram accounts, framing the move as a personal New Year’s resolution for 2026. Ramaswamy stated that although his campaign staff will continue to post on those platforms, he personally plans to prioritize face-to-face conversations with voters.
“I plan to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026. On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, arguing: “There’s a fine line between using the internet to distribute your message and inadvertently allowing constant internet feedback to alter your message. That isn’t using social media; it’s letting social media use you.”
The 2024 Republican primary contender complained that the posts you are most likely to see on social media “are the most negative and bombastic, because they’re most likely to receive rapid ‘likes’ and ‘reposts’– and that drives revenue for social media content creators.”
Ramaswamy alluded to some of the criticism he has received on social media in recent months, for instance, after arguing that American tech firms hire foreigners over locals because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” that school should be year-round, and that “your lineage and your genetics tied to the blood and soil of the country” are irrelevant to what it means to be an American.
“In 2025 I saw a spate of shocking racial slurs and worse on social media. Yet that same year I visited tens of thousands of voters across all of Ohio’s 88 counties–from inner cities to farms, union halls to factories, Republican rallies to one-on-one discussions with protesters–and I didn’t hear a single bigoted remark from an Ohio voter the entire year,” Ramaswamy stressed.
He also cited a “recent report revealed that engagement with the X account of the now-notorious white nationalist Nick Fuentes shows signs of being ‘unusually fast, unusually concentrated and unusually foreign in origin.’ Another investigation showed that hundreds of bots drove the pro-Democrat #BlueCrew hashtag, amplifying false claims that the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pa., was staged.”
Ramawamy suggested that there is an echo chamber effect on social media, where users are repeatedly shown content that aligns with their existing views, thereby developing a distorted picture of public sentiment. While he said that he is not advising others to quit social media, h encouraged fellow politicians to be cautious about relying on it as a measure of public opinion.
In a lighter moment, he acknowledged that if this resolution follows the pattern of previous ones, he “might be back to scrolling X by March.”
Join Pulse+ to comment below, and receive exclusive e-mail analyses.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
