Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., listens during a House Financial Services Committee hearing with leaders of major banks on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who likely owes her seat in Congress to her sophisticated use of social media, now says she’s giving up Facebook and cutting back on Instagram and Twitter — for her health.
Too much screentime can be bad for your physical and emotional health, she said during the Yahoo podcast “Skulldudgery.”
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Social media poses a public health risk to everybody,” she said.
“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,” AOC said.
“I’ve started to kind of impose little rules on myself,” she said.
“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.”
The freshman congresswoman also took a swipe at President Trump’s use of social media, claiming that the video he posted on Twitter about Rep. Ilhan Omar was “trying to incite a stereotype of all Muslims being terrorists.”
Ocasio-Cortez still has an account on Facebook, but she now mostly uses Instagram and Twitter to connect with her fervent followers.
This story originally appeared in the New York Post.
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