Does Your Social Media Account Ever Actually Go Away?

We all know the saying “what you put on the internet stays there forever.” It is common to think about this saying before posting something on any social media because you may be able to delete a post but if someone else saves it then it is not actually gone. “On a site like Facebook it is far easier to to share with all friends than to manipulate the privacy settings to limit the visibility of a particular piece of content to a narrower audience.” This quote from It’s Complicated by Danah Boyd explains how most of the time even if someone is posting something that may be appropriate to only a handful of their Facebook friends they will post it publicly for all their Facebook friends to see because they do not want to waste time changing the privacy settings. By not changing the privacy settings then what you post is there for even more people to see and potentially screenshot or save the post.

After thinking about: “what you put on the internet stays there forever” I began to question whether or not our social media profiles ever really go away. I am specifically talking about Facebook because I know that it lets you deactivate your account however it never actually deletes it. By deactivating your account other people cannot search your profile but once you activate your account again everything will be back to normal.

So why doesn’t Facebook just delete your account once you decide you do not want to be active on Facebook? It may just be a way to not loose as much profit. This is because if a person knows that their account is not actually deleted and it is just there waiting for them they might feel tempted to return to Facebook. Even if that is their reason for not fully deleting profiles I believe that there should be maybe two options one to delete your account and one to deactivate it.