Leaving Social Media: Facebook Took A Bit Longer
How Facebook made me sad and angry
And when I say “leaving”, I mean “leaving forever, deleting absolutely everything, with definitely no desire of coming back again — ever.”
“Hey, why don’t we become friends on Facebook?” he asked.
Not again, I thought. I had just ended a very long call with a very demanding customer and needed to prepare a report; I didn’t have time for trivialities. “That’s not possible,” I replied, “I don’t have an account there.”
“WHAT?!” Both his face and voice raised that question. “But how can that be?” he added. “Don’t you know Facebook and social networks are the future? Everyone’s joining and you should, too!” He seemed genuinely perplexed.
“Well,” I responded, “have you ever heard that thing about jumping a bridge? Or about lemmings?” He stared at me. I went on: “I’ll never join any social network. I don’t believe in them. At all.”
That’s how everything started.
I’ve never been an early adopter. This conversation took place only a few months before I opened my Facebook account in March 2009, which I did solely for a purpose: all my colleagues at work were playing a video game called Biotronic on lunch breaks, and I wanted to be part of that. I added my first “friend” much later, on June 2010, and I had no other “friends” until December that year.
As with Instagram, I quite enjoyed the platform at first. Facebook allowed me to regain contact with old acquaintances, with whom I still talk nowadays. My parents also joined the platform, albeit much later, and that made things easier for us to keep in contact. I liked to share everyday information with my “friends.”
I’ll admit it: Facebook was fun back then. I felt I had control over what I shared and of who saw what; I was able to more or less remember each of my fifty or so friends I had and publish with them in my mind. I knew and was aware of my public, so to speak.
However, as the number of people I befriended on Facebook increased, it became harder for me to bear in mind all the people who could potentially see and interact with my posts. Therefore, and almost unconsciously, I stopped posting regularly and I didn’t give my opinion anymore. Even so, I continued uploading photos of my travels and so on.
The beginning of the end
Explaining how I started disliking Facebook is complex. There’s a combination of factors involving not only Facebook but also its users and the changes done to the service by the company itself.
For starters, a few annoying trends emerged.
I never joined people taking tests to know which Hogwarts House I would be in, which character from The Lord of the Rings I would be, or which celebrity I looked like. I always felt I was giving far too much of my information for those tests to work, but they kept popping out in my feed from time to time. Who would ever think that the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be far worse than that.
Also, people started posting crappy images with some random picture and a few lines of misspelled text explaining a seeming truth about the political, economical or social topic of the moment without further comment or links to verified sources.
Clickbait headlines by once respectable newspapers was another irritating trend, and let’s not forget this infamous privacy notice text that kept popping out in our feeds now and then:
(…) I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law (UCC 1–308- 1 1 308–103 and the Rome Statute). NOTE: Facebook is now a public entity. (…)
Not to mention the fierce and bitter debates the platform seemed to look for and encourage.
In addition, algorithms started showing me information I couldn’t care less about: likes to publications I didn’t follow and people I knew nothing about; for instance, I got too many disturbing images from animal shelters, and that made me sad, anxious, angry and plainly powerless.
And well, “fake news” are nothing new — pun not (so) intended.
I felt overwhelmed by the amount of unsolicited and needless information I was getting in my now random, messed up feed.
I didn’t even know if my friends were seeing my publications anymore. I was losing control over what I wanted to see and show.
Epiphany
In 2017 this article by Gen Cruz caught my attention right away. By the end of the year, I decided to follow his steps and check the results.
Each time I entered Facebook, I only saw publications from those pages I’d decided to follow. My feed felt clean and honest. If I wanted to know about my friends, I only had to check their profiles, even though some information such as status changes — from “single” to “engaged,” for instance — weren’t visible anymore.
Then I realized a few things. We all had been choosing Facebook over real life to let people know about many things, a few of them irrelevant, a few of them important or even vital, which is not bad per se. The thing is that we ended up expecting people to read our posts without never really caring whether they were receiving them or not.
And then, one day, someone suggested taking a look at a very good friend’s profile. It turned out he got engaged, and I knew absolutely nothing about it.
That hurt.
I then decided to choose coffees over most-probably-hidden-by-an-algorithm posts to know about my friends. I’m still working on that.
What’s the point of being on Facebook any longer?
Deleting my Facebook account was trickier than expected.
Many people know the option to deactivate accounts, which in fact keeps a copy of all your account in case you want to come back later and still have all the friends you made and the stuff you posted, liked and shared.
I didn’t want that. I wanted to completely disappear from Facebook’s servers and from my “friends” lists forever. Once I found the option, and after struggling with its awful user interface, some problems with my password, and a bit of hesitation, I hit the submit button.
On March 8th, 2018, I was finally free.
I requested Facebook to permanently delete my primary account. The following day, I did the same with a secondary account with no friends which I used mainly to check that the privacy settings were working properly.
Facebook then informed me that my account had been deactivated and that it would be deleted 14 days later; I could cancel the deletion by just logging in.
I never did.
By the way, you have to wait one full month now, so I feel pretty lucky in that sense.
Do I regret deleting my account?
There are lots of people and businesses still relying on Facebook to share important news and promotions, so it is quite common to be routed there from time to time. However, I always end up getting that big annoying popup asking me to either sign up or log in. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen too often.
Additionally, and while I’ll admit I sometimes wish I could take a sneak peek at some friend’s profile, I don’t really miss Facebook. In fact, I feel relieved from the pressure of an environment that made me feel depressed and anxious most of the time because of the interactions, or the lack of them, with other people’s profiles through a hellish feed that, again, made me feel powerless.
I suppose I ended up following the #deletefacebook trend almost without noticing. I had been thinking about leaving it for so long that maybe it just triggered me to take the step to leave after so many months willing to do so — who knows?
So, does your relationship with Facebook feel awkward or stressing? Have you ever thought about leaving? Do you worry about your privacy? Then let me tell you: there’s a big, big world outside Facebook. Do not be scared to leave; it will certainly pay off.
At least, it did for me.
By the way, I also left Instagram: here’s the story!
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