Facebook, we have to talk…

My relationship with Facebook, to use their own terminology, is complicated. Really complicated.

I can remember when I first started using Facebook. It was such a breathe of fresh air, after the clutter and noise and garbage of MySpace. I’d discovered social networking when trying to reconnect with some of my college friends in my early 30s, and found more of them in the area than I expected. That had led me to MySpace and reconnecting with even more friends.

Which had been great. Until it wasn’t. With MySpace, it became not great when everyone’s profile began to be customized. Most people, it turns out, aren’t very good designers. Friends of mine had yellow text on pink backgrounds, spinning flame graphics, and fireworks, animated backgrounds, and music, jesus the music… blaring through your speakers when you least expected it.

In contrast to MySpace, Facebook was a quiet haven. Because FB limited what you could do, everyone’s profile was more “content-driven”. In other words, people had to say what they were doing, or they had to post just a picture, and the overall setup of the site drove a lot of good interaction.

Which was great. Until it wasn’t. With Facebook, the not great came in much more gradually than it did with MySpace. More and more privacy concerns came up with regards to Facebook the company and just what they were doing with all of the data that they were gathering on us. That was troubling… as was their constant pushing for everyone to share more. Then came the ads, and officially licensed content. Brands. Pages. The noise level began to go up. Never in an obvious way, like MySpace, but it became less about interacting and more about Facebook themselves.

But what really sealed the deal for me as far as Facebook goes is actually extremely personal. And not something I like talking about a lot. And something I’ve been avoiding. Which makes it all the more powerful of a reason to say enough is enough, and finally make the leap to leaving. Early in 2012, Facebook, in partnership with Stanford, ran what’s been termed their CONTAGION experiment. That’s where they actively tried to manipulate their users’ moods, without the knowledge of those users. Well, it turns out that at that exact time, I was going through a very deep depression. My relationship had failed (miserably), I’d quit my hated job at AT&T to try my hand at starting a company (which failed miserably), and overall my life was a mess. At that exact moment, is when Facebook ran their experiment.

At the time this experiment wasn’t public knowledge. It hit the news in 2014 actually. And just to be clear, I’m not saying in any way that I’m sure I was directly and negatively impacted by this experiment. But that timeframe is the absolute worst period I ever went through in my life… and to find out, in 2014, that they were running an experiment on users, without their knowledge or consent, felt like a violation. It still creeps me out to know about this now… to wonder if it did have an impact.

Which leads me to this past week. As I’ve been studying information security, and gotten more and more interested in privacy and security, Facebook has become more and more troubling to me. And that conflict, between my own values, and how the Facebook company does business, became more pronounced the more I learned. This week, amid concerns over the pushing of branded content and ads, the increasing invasiveness of Facebook all over the Internet, it just hit me. I’m not living up to my own values. I’m submitting to the Facebook network, because that network has some value, but at the cost of my soul, basically.

Now, that’s definitely a bit melodramatic. And probably a little pretentious too. Certainly there are some who think the way that Facebook does things is just NO BIG DEAL. Except that it is. It’s a MAJOR deal. And by going along, we’re complicit in that. Well, I can no longer stomach that. I. Am. Done.

Done with Facebook. I’m setting my relationship status happily to SINGLE, and moving on. Because it’s time.