Today I deleted Facebook. Its taken sometime to come to this conclusion. But I think I will like this decision. It wasn’t a hard one. But I wouldn’t say I didn’t have some hesitations.
There is a fear of missing out or ‘connecting with others’. But in reality, I think its a false fear and misnomer that sells these services as ‘good’ and wholesome Surprisingly I don’t think many were suprised by this announcement and yet some asked why, so I thought I’d share some of those reasons. It’s nothing earth shattering but I thought I’d like to just write out my thoughts about the issue. I hope it doesn’t come across to conspiracy theorist.
A few months ago I was listening to an IT podcast that was talking about psychological operations . The object of Psychological Operations is to be on the ground in a targeted area spreading and sharing information about things you want people to believe so that the outcome and behaviors is what you want. Just like many things, this can be used for good and bad. It got me thinking.
Fast forward a few months and I was listening to another Podcast where the host was interviewing Jaron Lanier. He wrote a book called “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” and he was talking about this book. He shared how social media is manipulative and targets you as a product and tailors your content based on the algorithm choices they make in what they want you to see. I know this sounds tinfoil hat level stuff here but I do believe there is validity in this.
Think about it. In our current realities, the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Google are taking the liberties to censor and dictate what is appropriate or not. They are dictating the message and truths they want known for their own agenda. Most of the time it leans towards the liberal bias. I think we are all subjected to this and yet we choose to ignore it because of the addictiveness of said services and the need to ‘connect’ and yet we are growing more and more disconnected. And distracted.
Facebook was making me angry and frustrated and found myself wanting to respond in that anger and frustration. I was no better than the next person and so I needed to stop. True dialog could not happen without things getting messy. The truth is being undermined and real dialog can’t happen.
Facebook has had a clear track record of having poor security and privacy policies. It’s a habitual problem that they don’t seem to care to resolve. It’s the data you and I post that is their fuel for targeting you with ads, politically charged topics, and manipulate your thoughts for their own agendas. We give to much information away that people are using that for malicious reason and cause. We trust these companies to protect our data, but it’s not possible when they are in the business of selling it and using it for their own gain. They track you beyond their borders by observing what services you use to log into or fingerprint your activity across the web by third-parties embedding facebook tools into their sites.
Facebook was stealing a lot of my time and I see it stealing a lot of other peoples time. It was keeping me from doing more interesting things like starting this blog, or attempting to write a book. It would consume my thoughts even when I wasn’t on it because of the types of things I was reading and the rage that was being displayed.
These are some of the big reasons I’ve chosen to delete my Facebook account. I’ve collected my data and am heading on to a better life. I just hope Facebook honors my deletion request and actually removes all my data. Looking back I realize, it hasn’t been worth it and I wish I had that time back.
-Chris