Why I Deleted Facebook

After 14 years as a user, I’ve deleted my Facebook account. I joined Facebook in November 2004 when I was a junior at UW-Milwaukee. At this time, Facebook was a collegiate social network exclusively. Initially within your school, expanded to other colleges shortly after. It was a wild place in its infancy. Like many, it was merely ramblings of a collegiate student.

My Historical Usage

Gripes about studying, messages to a friend to hang out during the weekend. Photos of friends together out for drinks. It eventually grew into its more current form over the years. Random updates, messages back and forth between friends who had years before moved elsewhere. Reconnecting with friends from high school. Family messages.

By 2008, it became an expansion tool to share my creative works. Blog posts, photography and more. It was around this time it slowly began to become less relevant for daily usage of connecting with people. From the middle of 2008 to the end of the year, I posted a handful of times about random things. I posted over 80 times with links to my blog. 2009 was used to share my 365 photography project and continued posts about my creative work. Again, rarely using it for anything else.

2010 was a return to active use on the network. My wife and I had been living in Chicago for over a year and Facebook had dramatically increased as a focal point for connections with friends. It was probably the most usage of any year for me on the network. In 2011, we moved to Denver and I used Facebook quite a bit to stay connected to friends back in Wisconsin and update them on our life here.

By the end of the year, I had started a website with some friends and we used Facebook extensively to promote our content. This continued into and throughout 2012. It was at this time that my usage shifted to communicating within groups we setup for editorial discussions. It was an easy way at the time to keep content centralized and have conversations. This stayed consistent up until the website stopped production in mid-2013. It would be chaotic at best from this point on, mostly posting photos of my son who was born in 2014.

From January 1, 2016 until shutting it down on November 21, 2018 — I posted a total of 24 times. 24 posts in 1055 days. (For compassion, I tweeted 3446 times during that same period.)

Why I Deleted It

In all honesty, it had been a long time coming to delete Facebook. Besides my decreased use over the past few years, I simply just don’t trust Facebook with my data. You don’t need me to provide examples of coverage of Facebook doing dubious things with data, but here’s one from today about executives considering selling user data from 2012–2014. My concerns about how they either didn’t know about data usage and abuse, didn’t care to address it or ignored it for longer than they should have is disturbing. I posted on Facebook a few weeks ago that I was finally going to delete it and shared my personal contact information with my friends and asked them to stay in touch there.

I followed up the next day and shared these same concerns with them in a comment on my original post.

Not to mention that Facebook’s constant policy changes have made managing business pages increasingly challenging as they alter the algorithm and policies with little to no public information as to how to work with the changes.

Example, they very recently changed a policy that videos on political pages cannot contain the name of official running for office or who has been elected in the video. I work for an elected official and we distribute non-political informational videos about our agency. They had been blocked from boosting a post until last week when my coworker finally was able to talk to a person at Facebook and come up with a workaround.

What Held Me Back

As I mentioned previously, I’ve managed business pages as an admin for various companies and agencies for nearly the last ten years. I always used my personal account — like many — to manage those pages. I just created a dummy account last week, no friends, no other information, and have added that as an admin to the pages I manage. That freed me to finally request a delete of my personal account.

Working in marketing doesn’t allow me to fully abandon Facebook. Too many businesses continue to rely on it, and rightly so. The active userbase is in the billions. By using the dummy account to act as my admin account for pages gave me the flexibility to finally say adios.

What I Don’t Like About Facebook

Frankly, I just don’t trust them. I don’t like the constant shifts to the platform, algorithm and shifting content they think I want to see. I know Twitter does some of the same and faces their own challenges with the platform (privacy, usage, freedom of speech, censorship, etc.), but I haven’t been given a reason not to trust Twitter at this point. It’s my first source for news and a source I use follow reputable journalists.

My Social Media Usage Now and Going Forward

I use Twitter extensively, as well as Instagram. I know Facebook owns Instagram which creates a conundrum. I have a private account on Instagram. I also truly don’t know much about the data concerns and usage from Instagram. I haven’t seen it mentioned much in the news and it’s on my list of things to learn more about. I also am active on LinkedIn and Reddit.

Social media usage is inescapable for me. I’m attached for my job and career. I’m connected for my desire for instant news and analysis. It’s an outlet to share photography with friends and family. It’s a way for me to kill time and find things to laugh at. But we are at a point in the life cycle of social media that we have choice. Choice about what platforms we use and how we use them. But I do have to wonder, do we know what choice we’re truly given as to how our data is used by the platforms? Do we fully comprehend what data is saved and quantified? Is it sold? Stolen? It’s the gamble I and billions of others take to connect. Maybe in the future we’ll all look back in hindsight and marvel at the choices we’ve made.

For me personally, I truly hope that data I’ve requested Facebook to delete (which they said will take 30 days from notice of cancellation to complete) is that — wiped and gone forever. I have no way of knowing other than to trust a company that I don’t trust. The irony is not lost on me.

(This article was originally published here on my personal website on November 29, 2018.)