I THINK THIS IS PROOF THAT TWITTER IS DANGEROUSLY ADDICTIVE AND SHOULD BE BANNED: The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t.

Manjoo wrote about what he learned from his two months away from social media, and dispensed avuncular advice to his readers about the benefits of slowing down one’s news consumption.

But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all. The evidence is right there in his Twitter feed, just below where he tweeted out his column: Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000. In an email interview on Thursday, he stuck to his story, essentially arguing that the gist of what he wrote remains true, despite the tweets throughout his self-imposed hiatus.

It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column. It could be that Manjoo’s column really does serve as a warning about the pernicious effects of social media. Just not in the way he meant it.

The Insta-Wife used to interview people who said they had “quit drinking,” which generally meant that they had cut down to a 12-pack of Busch per day. The thing is, compared to their prior intake, which probably added a fifth of whiskey on top of that, they probably felt like they weren’t drinking.