Republican Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced he was “swearing off Instagram and X” in an op-ed piece published on the Wall Street Journal website on January 5 (US time). In his opinion article titled “Social Media Is a Trap for Politicians,” the Indian-origin entrepreneur disclosed that his New Year’s resolution was “to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026.”
Ramaswamy further underlined therein that he deleted social media platforms X and Instagram from his phone on New Year’s Eve. And yet, netizens could still see his official account on X pushing out several tweets days into 2026.
What does this mean? Has the former Republican presidential candidate really quit social media?
Vivek Ramaswamy’s major social media confession
In the WSJ opinion piece, Ramaswamy confessed that he was inspired to make the switch after meeting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during her visit to the US in July 2024. While interacting with the international leader, the Roivant Sciences founder discovered that Meloni doesn’t read or watch the news as she doesn’t want the media to influence her political strategies.
Hailing her decision to travel her country and engage directly with citizens as a “beautiful idea,” Ramaswamy declared that he hoped to do something similar moving forward, especially with his Ohio gubernatorial campaign in swing.
In part, he even admitted that he might end up scrolling X by March. Nonetheless, he didn’t finish the article without asserting that he was fully behind the experiment at the moment. Urging even fellow Republicans to join him on the no-social media journey, he pressed that virtual abstinence may just end up being the “extra X-factor” they need to score victories in 2026.
Who is posting on Vivek Ramaswamy’s social media if he’s quit X and Instagram?
As already established in the op-ed, platforms like X and Instagram are now off Ramaswamy’s phone. However, as you may have already seen, his SNS profiles are still publishing news posts, and that’s because his campaign team is doing the work for him.
“My campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf,” Vivek Ramaswamy shared via the WSJ article. “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.”
With more time on his hand that he would’ve otherwise spent on social media, he plans to listen to more voters in “real-world Ohio developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family.”
His motivation to push through with social media abstinence was spurred by the prediction that he would make a “better leader and a happier man.”
Racial attacks and more flip Vivek Ramaswamy’s once digital-centric approach
As again seen in his recent public outings, including Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in December, the Indian-origin US politician has often used his influential stance to speak out racist attacks. At the December summit itself, he openly spoke out against white nationalist Nick Fuentes for using racial slurs to address Vice President JD Vance’s wife and Second Lady Usha Vance.
Ramaswamy alluded to the same issue of rising bigotry in the US in his January WSJ piece, noting he witnessed a “spate of shocking racial slurs and worse on social media” in 2025. Despite the surging online hate, the Ohio governor hopeful pointed out that he never actually encountered anything of the sort while meeting with Ohio voters in person during his campaign trail.
“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,” he wrote.
Yet again referencing the controversial far-right influencer in connection with a Network Contagion Research Institute study, Ramaswamy wrote, “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.””
He also relied on an NBC News study to argue that social media basically offered a “warped projection of reality.” The report in question indicated that hundreds of bots fuelled the pro-Democrat #BlueCrew hashtag, while mounting up conspiracy theories online that claimed the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania was staged.
Even recollecting his own lived experience at the AmericaFest last month, he said that his speech underscoring that the US is best defined by ideals, not shared bloodlines, fetched his resounding applause in Arizona. Contrarily, he had already expected to be booed on social media, and that’s exactly what happened, presumably pushing others to believe that his remarks were equally ill-received at the live event.
Admitting that while he ran a “digitally centered campaign for president,” Ramaswamy continued to drag social media’s temptations, especially considering it offers free and real-time feedback. However, he repeatedly emphasised in his op-ed that even if such online interactions create the illusion of speaking directly to the people, most reactions are simply revenue-drivers for content creators.
At the same time, he didn’t want citizens to stop using the platform to speak their truth and sway politicians either. Ramaswamy’s most significantly highlighted issue was that he just didn’t want American politicians to be buried under the constant pressure of the “Twitter prison.” He urged “real leaders” to break free of the virtual confinement by practicing what they preach and not just jump on the bandwagon and complain about social media.