When I met Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during her visit to the U.S. in July 2024, she told me she never reads or watches the news because she doesn’t want the media to influence her approach to governing. Instead, she travels her country and hears directly from citizens. What a beautiful idea.
My New Year’s resolution is to do something similar: I plan to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026.
On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone. I’ll spend my newfound time listening to more voters in real-world Ohio, developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family. I predict that ending my consumption of social media will make me a better leader and a happier man.
My campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf. But I won’t browse any of it myself. 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.
As someone who ran a digitally centered campaign for president, I’ve seen this effect firsthand—on myself and my competitors. Politicians want to respond to voters, and rightly so. But polls are expensive and infrequent. Social media offers a tempting alternative: free, abundant real-time feedback. It creates the impression that you’re hearing directly from “the people” and responding in kind. Modern social media is increasingly disconnected from the electorate. The messages you’re most likely to see 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.
If you click on one post about a topic, suddenly that viewpoint appears everywhere you look, skewing your view of reality. That’s harmless if you’re a knitting hobbyist who might overestimate how many fellow citizens know the difference between a knit and a purl stitch. On its own, random people saying outrageous things on the internet, and even making money from it, isn’t a major problem. But when those in power mistake online commentary for real-world consensus, they make decisions based on a distorted picture of what those citizens really want.
Worse, the online “pulse” that politicians glean from social media is increasingly manufactured by foreign actors and nonhuman bots. 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. Politicians who think they’re taking social media cues from U.S. citizens are often mistaken.
My experience at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in December was a case in point. I delivered a speech arguing that the U.S. is a nation defined above all by ideals, not shared bloodlines. Based on social-media comments beforehand, I expected to be booed. If you scrolled through them after, you’d believe that’s what happened. But in reality, I
received a standing ovation from a politically engaged audience of well over 20,000 attendees.
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.
Social media’s warped projection of reality is reinforced inside modern government. Political staffers on both sides of the aisle skew young and hyper-attuned to social media. Twitter was built to imitate real-life conversations, but in modern younger political circles, real-life conversations are imitating Twitter.
As political commentator Richard Hanania
observed last year, young political aides now compete to be the most “based,” one-upping each other with increasingly unhinged positions on race, sex and who the good guys were in World War II. If you’ve ever winced at a social-media post by an official government account, remember that the person who wrote it is often a young employee who takes most of his cues from the internet. Over time, the state itself begins to sound like X.
None of this is to say citizens shouldn’t use social media to sway politicians. It’s their constitutional right to do so. But it’s up to elected leaders to know what they’re responding to. Most Ohioans I’ve met want higher take-home pay, lower electric bills, and a great education that prepares their kids to join the workforce. Yet it’s precisely because these issues are so universal that they are among the least likely to register on social media. Leaders who depend on social media to gauge public opinion are looking through a broken mirror.
Thomas Jefferson famously observed: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth.” Yes, traditional media is flawed. Broadcasters push narratives, and sensationalism sells on TV and in print. But social media presents a new problem: coordinated influence that hides behind armies of avatars, creating a false impression of grassroots support. Its organic feel, combined with real-time feedback loops, makes its effects on elected leaders even more pernicious than other forms of media.
The result is that some of the most powerful politicians in America live under constant pressure to please social media—an unenviable confinement that we might call Twitter prison. Real leaders must break free. It’s fashionable these days for leaders to complain about the influence of social media on politics, but do nothing to fix it. Yet the first step doesn’t even require new laws. We just need to practice what we preach.
That’s easier said than done. If my current New Year’s resolution resembles past ones, I might be back to scrolling X by March. But for now I’m running the experiment, and I invite my fellow Republicans to join me. Who knows, it might be the extra X-factor that helps us secure victories in 2026.
