2019.10.28: I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how long I wavered on this. How many road signs does one person need? I, apparently, needed many red flags before I finally quit Facebook.

What finally put me over the limit, if you must know, were two big announcements in October 2019. One was the early October bombshell that Facebook decided to exempt political advertisements from their fact-checking process. This, I probably would have ignored, if Facebook had never introduced its false-news-reporting process in the first place. Because we’re all accustomed to politicians lying, both in advertising and in every other medium. But Facebook had, after the 2016 election fallout, introduced its “report fake news” feature — ostensibly to clean up the site’s reputation as a purveyor of false or misleading political information. And that feature still exists for all news posts and even for many personal posts — even ones about politics. But this new announcement by Mark Zuckerberg was that if you pay for it (by which he profits), then you can post anything you want. Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proved the point by running an ad on Facebook (falsely) claiming that Zuckerberg had endorsed TAINTUS in the 2020 election. This Facebook policy knowingly and intentionally will further erode what little democracy remains in our nation. I won’t knowingly participate in it.

The second big thing was when Facebook decided to include Brietbart as a “trusted news source” in the new “news tab” in its app. That “news” site is infamous for promoting regressive ideas and has strong ties to the so-called “alt-right” — something that’s well-known to Facebook and Zuckerberg. My wife and I were already boycotting Amazon for two years over their financial support of Brietbart, and now Facebook will be overtly supporting them too. I can’t stand for this.

A third thing — which probably would have, on its own, eventually led me to quitting the site — was the increasing tendency of site moderators to respond to my reports with “the post you reported does not violate our code of conduct” (or something along those lines. I reported posts advocating lynching, outright preaching white supremacy, calling for other types of violence. I reported racist, sexist, and homophobic posts, and more. Facebook said all of those were fine and well within the guidelines. I won’t willingly be a party to advancement of these repugnant ideas.

My readers might pose this obvious question: If these incidents caused me to quit Facebook, will I be willing to rejoin if the corporate giant reverses course? No. The fact that they came to any of these decisions in the first place tells me the culture inside the business is broken; any change of direction on their part would be inspired only by financial concerns — which means that even if they did change to my liking, the site could easily erode back to what it was. Besides, there previously existed a very long list of reasons I should have left Facebook before these recent incidents. These were only the straws that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

 

This Page’s History

Originally, this page (the one you’re reading now, chanfry.com/fb/) was an explanation for why I quit Facebook in 2010. I wrote it circa 2012 because people kept asking me why I wasn’t on Facebook. But I rejoined the social media site in 2014, for reasons that were important to me at the time, so I revamped this page to explain that decision, while keeping the earlier text in place for “historical” reasons. After that, I edited this page several times as I vascillated, grew increasingly frustrated, and considered quitting again, and as I changed the way I used the site in an effort to ease my conscience. Each time, I kept the previous text in place at the bottom or in hidden notes, or by incorporating it into the new text somehow.

 

Reasons To Stay

Believe me, I’m aware of the reasons to be on Facebook; they’re what kept me there for so long. But most, I believe, are illusory. Further, they are simply not enough to override my moral reasons for leaving.

The biggest one, oft-cited by everyone who’s still there, is “keeping in contact” — with family, friends, classmates, business contacts, etc. Those people aren’t leaving (yet), and for many of them it’s the only social media site they use, so it seems like it makes sense to stay on Facebook to maintain that contact. And I admit, I was only able to re-connect with a few good friends from the past due to Facebook. But all of those people exist outside of Facebook, and most of my web presence is outside Facebook; so if they want to contact me, they can easily do it, even if the reverse isn’t true. (And, since I left Facebook for good, many of them have proven they do not want to stay in contact with me, or that their devotion to Facebook is so strong that they will not step outside it to contact me.)

Another reason to be on, or stay on, the site is/was connection to local groups, community news, city government, and so on. I’ve had better luck contacting city officials via Facebook than over the phone or in person. But this is really only an issue once every couple of years at most, and it isn’t always true. It is also a matter of laziness on my part; if I actually needed something from the city or neighborhood, I know of other ways to get in touch with the relevant people, even if it requires more time and effort.

And, for any of us with business interests or otherwise have things to self-promote, Facebook seems like an ideal place to try to promote that — again, because “everyone’s there”. (For example, I dabble at writing fiction and tried to use Facebook to promote that writing.) For me, personally, it didn’t work. When I posted links to my stories, they went unnoticed or ignored. If it works for you, that’s irrelevant to me leaving the site.

 

Reasons To Leave

In addition to my final reasons listed above, over the years I came across dozens of other valid reasons to avoid, quit, and otherwise get away from Facebook. Here are some of them that easily come to mind.

• A Colossal Waste Of Time

This is the primary reason I initially quit Facebook in 2010, after having joined in 2007 or so. The older I get, the more I’m aware of how little time I have left — whatever my expiration date might be, every day brings it closer. I don’t want to spend my remaining hours scrolling through endless stupid memes, poorly written vague personal posts with emojis in the place of words, pictures of people French-kissing their pets, or unsourced “news” screenshots from other sites. For a while, I convinced myself I could make a difference, however small, by refusing to interact with pointless posts and elevating my own contributions. But now I’m convinced I can make more of a difference by not participating at all.

The site is designed for “prolonged user engagement”, which means it doesn’t care whether your time spent there is worthwhile, just that you spend more time there. This is why it often doesn’t work well, or quickly — it’s actually meant to be that way. This is why it takes so long to find that one post you saw yesterday. The more time you spend on the site, the more time they can tell advertisers that you spent on the site. They don’t have to tell advertisers that “Wil was only here an hour yesterday because we made it difficult for him to find that one Richard R. Barron post he was looking for.”

• The Company’s Consistent History Of Bad Behavior

Unlike typical companies, which we usually expect to be amoral and interested mainly in profits, Facebook is particularly uninterested in the common good. Facebook knew children were amassing huge debts on their parents’ credit cards, and decided this is okay; let’s keep it up (New York Magazine, 2019). When ProPublica introduced an advertising transparency tool — so the public could learn exactly how users are targeted — Facebook shut it down (ProPublica, 2019). Facebook repeatedly broke the rules of the App Store and was punished with a day-long slap on the wrist (Slate, 2019). When the company was finally forced to reckon with its “fake news” problem, Facebook basically did nothing (Vanity Fair, 2017), and then inexplicably partnered with a hard-right-wing funded “fact checker” (Vox, 2019).

There is also the ongoing issue of the company and site mishandling our personal data. Yes, we can assume any free site today uses our data for one thing or another — it’s part of how they make money. But Facebook goes further than the others in the misuse. Remember the Trump campaign’s use of private data of Facebook members (New York Times, 2018)? And remember when that scandal broke, Facebook suspended the account of the man (Christopher Wylie) who blew the whistle on the breach (CBS News, 2018)? Facebook knew about the breach for two years, but only suspended his account when the story went public.

After years of complaints that Facebook’s governing board was entirely white, the company added its first black board member in 2018 (CNN Money). Early in 2019, Facebook added another (USA Today). Facebook is notorious for the extremely low percentages of African-Americans and Hispanics, especially women (USA Today, 2018). Which is horrible for a company with such a highly-public image, used by an estimated 2 billion people worldwide.

• Other Reasons

• The site itself, in design and functionality, is mediocre at best.
• Photos look notoriously bad on Facebook (low-res, random unsolicited cropping)
• Advertising and “suggested page” algorithms are horrible (as I complained in an earlier blog entry [not currently online]).
• Newsfeed in nonsensical order, often showing posts I’ve already seen instead of new ones. Some posts show up repeatedly.
• Strongly pushing the opposite of what you like. (Example: If I follow a likeable progressive politician like Elizabeth Warren, Facebook will repeatedly suggest I follow the opposite: offensive, regressive ones like Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott. If I like a post or page about atheism, Facebook will strongly suggest religious pages.)
• Many features don’t work well or at all.
• The notification system is broken.
• Queries to the Help Desk always go unanswered.
• Technical issues abound.
• Many of my comments were randomly (and immediately) marked as “spam”.
• Superficial interaction (as opposed to meaningful interaction) is encouraged by the site design . This results in intellectual laziness and a general dumbing-down of discourse. I tested this often with experiments, often making two posts within minutes of each other — one deeply meaningful and well-thought-out and the other pointless like changing my “cover photo” — and the meaningless, superficial one always got more interaction. Significantly more.
• No other social media site (except maybe Tumblr) has such a high proportion of useless memes. 99.99% of memes have spelling, grammar, capitalization, or punctuation errors (sometimes all four). More than half use copyrighted images without permission. Most contain misinformation. Most include critical errors in logic/reasoning.
• Reporting posts for sexism or racism (or other hate speech) result in no action. At the same time, multiple people I know and pages I follow have been banned or suspended for advocating against racism and sexism.
• Instances of fake news increased after Facebook’s 2016 announcement that they would combat fake news. (It probably didn’t help that Facebook contracted with actual purveyors of fake news to “fact check”.)
• About the same time CEO Mark Zuckerberg removed “atheist” from his own profile, Facebook began strongly pushing religion (previously, the site had seemed relatively neutral on this front). Several atheist groups I followed were shut down by Facebook for alleged breaches of the Community Guidelines. Facebook’s algorithm began downgrading scientific or atheistic posts while pushing upward any posts about religion.
• Anything you can do on Facebook can invariably be done better somewhere else.
• Ratio of ads-to-posts steadily increasing.
• No part of the site is user-customizable.
• Repeated refusal to implement a “dark mode”.
• Can’t schedule posts.
• Facebook functions as a “mini-internet”. All of my content is available on the actual internet.
• Facebook is like a mega-store that sells everything, but none of it very well, as opposed to speciality stores that sell one kind of product each, and do it very well.
• I prefer small amounts of meaningful interaction to large amounts of meaningless interaction.
• Other people used (and still use) Facebook as an excuse to not visit my blog, my website, or my photo site.
• It is easy enough to find me and keep up with my life without using Facebook. In fact, it’s easier to remember chanfry.com, which has fewer letters than Facebook.com.
• Page URLs (web addresses) are too long and nonsensical, making it difficult to link to a page.

 

I Did Try

Over the years, I tried several self-imposed rules and quite a few tactics to help things or improve the site in some tiny ways. None of it helped. I tried things like (1) clicking “hide this” on every meme, promotion of religion, or MLM scheme; (2) using the report feature for false news and hate speech; (3) forcing myself to read a number of full-length news stories on other sites before visiting Facebook; (4) ignoring (scrolling past) posts that I wish I didn’t see; (5) when the post is a link is to a blog site, make sure to comment on that site instead of on Facebook; (6) limiting my interactions to reciprocal interactions; (7) unfollowing or unfriending users who filled my newsfeed with pointless posts; and more. All of it was time-wasting and pointless on my part, part of my erroneous self-justification for continuing to use the site.

 

What I Will Miss

To be clear, I don’t mean “miss” in the emotional sense, but in the practical sense of there are things I won’t have access to.

Our neighborhood has a Facebook page for residents and property owners to discuss local issues; it’s the only place many of these issues are discussed, and the only place certain local events are announced. My family will likely miss upcoming community events or changes to neighborhood rules regarding the pool, spash pad, walking trails, playgrounds, and basketball courts. We’ll miss future neighborhood notices about the Neighborhood Watch, Easter egg hunts, Christmas get-togethers, and the Spooky Trail. In the future, I’ll depend on neighbors or mailings from the HOA — which are not very dependable, but will have to do.

I’ll miss being able to comment on certain news sites or blog sites that require a Facebook log-in for their comment modules.

I’ll miss notifications from the city and police department, both of which I followed on Facebook and both of which post regularly about road closures, boil water notices, etc. (And both seem to infrequently post to their Twitter accounts, so following them there isn’t as helpful.) The same is true for the school district, which often posts important school-related announcements to Facebook instead of their own website.

 

Conclusion

Despite what I will miss, this will result in a better overall quality of life for me. The time saved from not being on Facebook will be better spent doing other things, whether writing, reading, making photographs, or otherwise not looking at stupid memes.

If you are someone who misses me on Facebook and miraculously found this webpage on the internet outside Facebook... Yay! You’ve done it! You’re using the actual internet.

 

Related: Why I Quit Twitter. For The Last Time. (2022)

 

Note: Comment section closed in 2023, after 11 years of inactivity.

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