I’m leaving Facebook at the end of the year. So I’ve got about three weeks left. The time is to allow me to transition away with relationships intact, and I’ll write a little more about how I’m leaving in another post. This is just the why.
It’s NOT because of annoying posts, envy, not curating my friends/feed properly, or addiction. I have dealt with all these things and found workarounds that made the platform “work” for me. I’m not annoyed by too many of the people I connect with, and when I am… I just unfollow for a while. I feel great when I see updates, for the most part, even if you appear happier than me… I know it’s the edited version of life, and also I’m pretty genuinely happy for you. There are some politics I don’t like, but again I can unfollow. There are some comments which are probably unhealthy to be reading, but I skip them sometimes and choose to waste time on them other times. There is an addiction component. Scrolling gives me a bit of anxiety, yet that hit of chemicals that keeps me coming back. I’ve used blockers and other methods to keep myself limited in time wasted on the platform. (StayFocusd on Chrome and the Freedom app on my iPhone have been part of this). And I do think ultimately getting off will have very positive mental health benefits, but that’s not what pushed me over the edge to actually leave. The positive relationships I had on Facebook were overriding all of these factors until now. The reason I finally feel the need to go is Facebook itself, the company and its policies, and the negative effects on the United States and the world.
I know I’m just one user, and my leaving will not change the world, but I can’t support this company as a user anymore.
Facebook may have come from an intention of “connecting people” and it still does a great job of connecting, but the overriding drive to make money at all costs using the data mined from those connections has led to some bad things. Whether you want to call Facebook “evil” or not, some “evil” has been allowed to flourish there.
Personal data being collected on millions of Americans by outside parties in violation of FB’s terms (see Cambridge Analytica); data used by Facebook itself, not in violation of its terms, but to serve ethically questionable ads; the platform being used by other countries to attempt to influence the United States elections; hate speech posts allowed encouraging ethnic and religious violence; fake news and the spread of disinformation; and targeting ad consumers based on categories that are awful awful awful… how can I sum this variety of crap up in one statement? It’s a smorgasbord of things I don’t feel good about.
I think they are using me to make money, I think there are some terrible side effects of which they are aware but will never fix, and I think it is my responsibility to go get the value I get from Facebook elsewhere and remove myself as a participant.
Perhaps the overriding theme, for me, is that we are not the customer - advertisers (this now includes political campaigns and lobbies of all sorts) are the paying customer - so the product evolves to service them and not us. “You are the product,” which has been said by so many people I’m not sure who to attribute the quote to. Maybe I’d be ok with this, if I didn’t see the yucky results. I guess I was, in fact, “ok with it” for a number of years.
My brothers and I started working on a social app a couple of years ago which would combat some of these negatives and be user-centric instead of designed around advertiser needs. We unfortunately (or fortunately) all have young families and careers that we love, so it hasn’t been a quick process. The app is still in the works, but I can no longer wait for it to be done to leave Facebook, as was my secret plan for a while. :)
What do you think? I don’t judge anybody who needs or wants to stay on Facebook. Are there other ways to make change besides leaving? I’d love to hear your thoughts!