Why I am deleting my Facebook account
Trying to come up with one single reason for deleting my Facebook account is like trying to decide which drop is responsible for the flood. Individually, each thing seems so small that it’s all but trivial, yet at the end of the day, there’s a flood.
Did it start already in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg called those who trusted him, and implicitly Facebook, “dumb fucks”?
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That by itself can easily be defended; it was a private chat, he was young and everyone deserves the chance to evolve and change. Five years later, in 2009, he seemed to have changed his mind when he told BBC News:
Reporter: Just to be clear, you’re not going to sell, or share, any of the information on Facebook?
Zuckerberg: We’re not going to share people’s information except for with the people that they’ve asked for it to be shared.
I believed him. So did many, many other users. That’s one of the reasons we weren’t too uncomfortable with the privacy slippery slope mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook pushed us out on. Here is how the default privacy settings on Facebook changed between 2005 and 2010
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Facebook didn’t stop there. In 2013, we learned that they collected the things we started typing into the update box, but decided not to post.
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On Android phones, where privacy settings allowed Facebook to ask for far-reaching permissions like access to your text messages and phone call logs — so if you called your parents on your Android phone, Facebook knew who you called and when. Facebook’s defense when this was unearthed? Trust us (their exact phrasing was: “We never sell this data, and this feature does not collect the content of your text messages or calls”).
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iPhone users were protected by Apple’s rather aggressive stance on user privacy, where your data is protected from third party apps like Facebook. But Facebook found a way around this. They bought a VPN app and marketed it to users as “protection” (which VPN is, if offered in good faith). In reality it was a tool of extensive spying on iPhone users’ actions. This gave Facebook access to data like which apps you use and for how long, which sites you visit and, if the connection wasn’t encrypted, the contents of the communication (e.g. e-mails you sent). Facebook took advantage of it: thanks to this data they knew that Snapchat’s growth had slowed months before it was made public. Facebook’s defense? Their collection of data stated in the terms and conditions for the VPN app. I would argue that marketing a VPN app as “protection” and hiding the fact that your data is monitored and collected in the fine print, is akin to marketing a condom that you believe protects you from STDs, but that in reality collects data on your sexual activity.
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Facebook saved videos you recorded through their app, but decided not to post. It’s reasonable for a user to believe the video was never saved, yet the truth is that Facebook kept that data. Why? Because more data is better than less, and anything is fair game as long as they outline in in their terms and conditions.
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If you get a new phone number that you want to keep secret except to a select few people, who owns that data? According to Facebook it’s not you, it’s the person who you’ve given the number to. If they choose to upload their contacts to Facebook when they install Messenger, Facebook uses that data to build a shadow profile of you even if you don’t have a Facebook account. Installing Facebook Messenger requires that you say no to uploading your contacts twice. Don’t want to? There’s no option to say no on the first screen, you have to click “Learn More” to get to the second screen. Both times, Facebook uses design to make the choice to upload your contacts seem like the correct one.
This may seem harmless, but the results are Facebook knowing things you don’t, like that you go to the same psychiatrist as the random person you don’t know, but got suggested as a friend by Facebook.
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Then we have the growth and harvesting of our attention. It’s such a priority to Facebook that they intentionally take advantage of our cognitive vulnerabilities. The choice not to have a dislike button is an example of that. Facebook denied this until Sean Parker, the founding President of Facebook, confirmed it recently. To me, (temporarily) giving up Facebook has similarities to quitting smoking and recently, Dean Burnett, doctor of neuroscience, published an op-ed arguing that quitting Facebook is as hard as quitting sugar.
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Growth is so important that the ends justify the means, according to Facebook’s Vice President Andrew Bozworth. In a memo in 2016, he wrote that they will connect people even if “it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies” or “someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools”. Confronted with it in the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Bozworth says that he doesn’t agree with the memo today, nor did he believe in it when he wrote it. I, for one, don’t believe him. Neither did Alec Muffett, an engineer working at Facebook at the time:
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Then we have stories like Sandy Parakilas’, platform operations manager at Facebook and responsible for policing third-party data breaches between 2011 and 2012. When mr. Parakilas warned senior executives that Facebook’s lax approach to data protection risked a major breach, and that the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach. One Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”. This was a year before Cambridge Analytica.
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Stories like Chamath Palihapitiya’s, former vice president of user growth at Facebook, who feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
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Stories like when Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost” and how the company can monitor posts and photos in real time to determine when young people feel “stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless” and a “failure”. Facebook claimed that the report was misleading. Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who helped build Facebook Ads platform doesn’t believe Facebook’s PR team, and he has the stories to back his stance.
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Some people — including me until some six months ago — would argue that “Facebook users know what they get in to, they have agreed to the terms”. But even before putting this list together, my gut feeling told me that the whole picture is so much worse than the individual parts. Does the average user see even a fraction of this picture? Perhaps they just feel like I did, powerless to make any impact, and therefore they might as well keep using Facebook. Another thing I often hear is “Facebook is only doing what’s right for business and it’s not illegal”, implying that ethics are optional in business. To me, just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right, but I see how comforting it must be to see money, growth and stock price as justification for sacrificing ethics and values. Then we have the argument that “what Facebook does isn’t worse than what, say, Google or Twitter do, why don’t you complain about them”. Disregarding the whataboutism fallacy, is a race to the bottom really the standard by which we want to judge commercial actors? In any case, ToS;DR, a service that helps regular users navigate the complicated terms of service of different digital actors, gives Google a “C” rating and Twitter gets a “D”. Facebook? They get an “F”.
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Should I judge Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook by what they say, or what they do? In 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg said that privacy is no longer a social norm. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said, a change that has ben spearheaded by his creation and in the process made him a billionaire. He even used his own daughter in an example, implying that it applies to his family too. In 2013, Mr. Zuckerberg spent $40 million to buy up the houses surrounding his own $10 million home in Palo Alto. His words say he’s one of us, his actions tell another story.
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With great power comes great responsibility. To me, Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook sound an awful lot like they want the power and the money but not the responsibility. Here’s a transcript from Recode’s interview with Mr. Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (emphasis is mine):
Zuckerberg: You know, what I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in the way that reflects the values of the community so I’m not the one making those decisions. Right? I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world. So there are going to be things that we never allow, right, like terrorist recruitment and … We do, I think, in terms of the different issues that come up, a relatively very good job on making sure that terrorist content is off the platform. But things like where is the line on hate speech? I mean, who chose me to be the person that …
Reporter: Well. Okay …
Zuckerberg: I have to, because [I lead Facebook], but I’d rather not.
This is not new. When minorities are abused on Facebook, whether it’s photographers getting suspended for posting photos of two men kissing, ads for gay conversion therapy being targeted at gay people, or enabling ad targeting to “people who hate jews”, the responsibility inevitably falls on “the algorithm”. Each time it happens, Facebook wows to fix it, but the problem is that they always fix the symptoms and rarely the problems. Yes, responsibility is hard, but I’d argue that Mr. Zuckerberg’s pay grade should include that responsibility. $50 billion is, in my book, worth quite a lot of responsibility. Imagine an employee with the same attitude towards their job: I want the salary and the perks, but I’d rather not have the responsibilities …
Add to this that Zuckerberg’s mantra is “companies over countries” and that he used to close all-staff meetings with a closed fist and the phrase “Domination!” … I just can’t be hopeful with these facts in hand.
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Facebook, if unchecked by regulations, is a threat to democracy. Bloomberg’s excellent long-read on what happened in the Philippines is an excellent example of why. (If you’re going to read only one of my sources, I would recommend this one.) Facebook now offers white-glove service to Duterte and his regime. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem if Duterte’s regime didn’t use Facebook as a weapon against media, journalists and the 4th estate. Facebook claims they’re doing their part, but the their actions say otherwise. Maria Ressa, a Facebook-savvy journalist who was on good terms with Duterte during his election campaign, started questioning the actions of him and his administration once Duterte was elected (which is the job of journalists). At that point she felt the full force of Duterte’s digital army on Facebook. Ms. Ressa has asked Facebook for help multiple times, but it has done her little good. This is a quote from her speech at an award ceremony in November:
“[Facebook] haven’t done anything to deal with the fundamental problem, which is they’re allowing lies to be treated the same way as truth and spreading it. Either they’re negligent or they’re complicit in state-sponsored hate.”
Facebook’s power in the Philippines is enormous. Smartphones outnumber the number of people in the Philippines, and 97% of Filipinos who are online have a Facebook account. The power Facebook has in the Philippines is partly due to their program internet.org, which they claim is to bring Internet to people who couldn’t afford it, but this gift comes with a heavy cost for democracy: people who have access to internet.org don’t understand that Facebook is a part of the internet, not the other way around. More Filipinos say that they’re using Facebook, than those that say that they’re using the Internet.
Now, do I want Facebook to choose which governments they help or not? No, that would be a horrible thing. In fact, I don’t see any way of fixing this apart from regulators breaking Facebook apart. Until that happens, all I can do is stop being complicit in helping Facebook become even more powerful.
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Facebook’s motto was “move fast and break things” until 2014, when they changed it to “move fast with stable infra”. But moving fast means means a risk of becoming blinded by the speed, and if that is fuelled by a hunger for data it can lead to questionable decisions. Like when Facebook’s R’n’D division sent a doctor on a secret mission to get hospitals to share patient data. Facebook claims the data would be anonymized, but even if they don’t have the patient’s name or personal details it’s easy to match a Facebook user profile to that of a patient. With Facebook’s current track record of user integrity vs profit, I would not trust Facebook with anything as sensitive as health data. This attempt will probably not succeed, but their aspirations frighten me.
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I could add many more examples, but I’m going to let this be my last — and perhaps most important one on an individual level: the unintentional, but very real effects on our wellbeing. At this point, I’ve seen more studies like this one: The more we use Facebook, the worse we feel, than I have seen studies proving that Facebook makes us happier. Here is another similar result, from a natural experiment. The benign effects of quitting Facebook can even be seen in our hormone levels: a recent study shows that just five days without Facebook lowers the stress hormone cortisol.
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Once the flood is a fact, it no longer matters which of the drops that created it. I wrote this post in part to try to explain to my friends on Facebook why I’m not only disabling my account, but deleting it. I wrote it in part to show more of the whole picture to those who are interested.
I can’t give a single reason, because each reason I come up with sounds almost trivial. But it’s a little like being in a relationship with an ego-centric asshole, that sometimes realizes they’re treating you like an afterthought, and buys you chocolate and flowers, or takes you out to dinner to “make up for it”. But they never change.
On a personal level, I’m not very worried about my own data. It’s the very fair price I paid for the value I’ve gotten out of Facebook over the ten years I’ve had my account. I would not be where I am today without it, neither professionally nor in my private life. But during the hiatus I took in November last year, I came to the conclusion that the costs of using Facebook now by far outweigh the benefits, both for myself and the world. Once Pandora’s box is opened, you cannot close it, and fostering the cognitive dissonance necessary to stay on Facebook is not worth anything the platform can provide.
What I am worried about is my — our — attention being harvested. I’m worried about the questionable ethics of the monster I’ve helped create, feed and even market in my lectures and courses. A monster that pretends to be a cuddly bear, but is full of razorblades laced with heroin.
Deleting my Facebook account is somewhat terrifying. As a freelance who in large part works with digital strategy, this decision will affect my livelihood. But I firmly believe that my values are worthless if choose to give them up as soon as it costs me. During a trip over Easter, I saw a sticker marketing an environmental group saying “If not you — who? If not now — when?”. It reminded me that even if my action doesn’t affect Facebook’s bottom line even the tiniest bit, I have a responsibility to myself and to the world to act in a way that I believe benefits the world. Even if it costs me on a personal level. I used to believe I can change Facebook as a user, but the flood washed away that illusion. If you feel the same way, here is a guide to how to permanently delete your account.
I respect if you reach a different conclusion after reading this. Should you wish to discuss your conclusions, whatever they are, you can find me on Twitter (for the time being).
You can follow me here on Medium or on Twitter. This post is also available in Swedish: Därför bestämde jag mig för att radera mitt Facebook-konto. If you liked this post, please consider sharing it. I’m also looking for gigs as a freelance writer, both in English and Swedish. Any tips here are much appreciated.
