#DeleteFacebook

This is a draft I wrote on my phone to announce me quitting Facebook. I started to write it on 2018-03-21 after a lot of deliberation about writing this post at all. So many people were writing about leaving Facebook at the time. Here it goes:

I’m going to quit Facebook.

When on 25th of May the GDPR is becoming law and Facebook has to provide tools to ask for permission to use my data and for telling me all the info they stored about me, I will either delete my account to automatically delete all the data they stored about me or keep the account dormant, if I have no means to know what they stored and how it gets deleted.

I didn’t use Facebook in more than a year and the months before that only occasionally and mostly passively. I kept it mainly to stay in touch via Messenger and to not miss any invitations to real-life events.

Thoughts on My Personal Relationship with Facebook

I definitely will lose touch with or access to some people if I delete my Facebook account. Having deleted my WhatsApp account years ago doesn’t help either. In the last 11 years since I signed onto Twitter as my first major social media platform, so many of my offline-relations moved online.

Still I’ve been very tempted to delete Facebook for a very long time. Judging from my wall it goes back to 2010. And I’m still tempted, even more so than before.

I wonder how many friends already quit Facebook without me noticing it, because when they’re gone, there’s no way of seeing they’ve been gone, afaik.

Before taking a year-long break from Facebook, I pruned my newsfeed and removed any external source of information friends posted (using “hide all from xyz” in the respective post’s settings) to only see personal posts from friends. My Facebook newsfeed was much more personal again. Which is exactly what Facebook decided to do a couple of month ago when changing the algorithmic newsfeed again.

But fear of missing out is still real, and downloading email addresses and emailing friends and acquaintances directly feels rather quaint. Those contact details may change anytime without me noticing it. Facebook doesn’t even have this kind of information in your archive download. You have to use third-party tools and services and give them access to your account. Which is worse than keeping Facebook around.

I think I don’t have to educate anyone about the user-hostile behavior of Facebook over the years. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is no news; it has always been this way. It’s Facebook’s reaction which bothers me the most.

Fake news doesn’t bother me as well. These are network effects and not necessarily Facebook’s fault.

I grew tired of social media. So much noise, so little signal. It drowns my energy. I did a month without news and social media two years ago and it was awesome. Without the constant influx of information the urge to create comes back and creativity blossoms. Seriously.

30 Day Challenge: No Social Media, No Online Video

I thought long and hard about deleting Facebook the last couple of weeks and one conclusion always came up:

Usage is implied consent. Just being on Facebook is passive support. And I don’t consent to Facebook’s way of treating people and their data anymore.

Facebook could have been a nice place, but it isn’t.