I Did A Thing: Deleting Facebook to Buy Back Time for Writing

If there’s just one single thing I could do in my life to free up massive amounts of writing time, it would be deleting Facebook. So I just did. And it felt great.

I’ve never been what you’d call a trend-follower, so I was a late adopter to the platform. But even I got addicted to the platform in a way I didn’t see coming: I cultivated my feed and made it the go-to hub for all my hobbies. As a result, I’ve lost countless thousands of hours in meaningless interactions, trapped within this glorified friendship simulator.

I’d spoken earlier about how I’d been minimizing the number of groups and people I follow on social media platforms, but there were a few driving factors that led me to deleting my Facebook account altogether last night:

1. Facebook forces too many pieces of unwanted news and information I cannot hide, such as recommended groups, recommended friends, biased news, and ads I definitely don’t want to be seeing. It got so annoying, it started making the platform borderline unusable, and this is coming from someone who was running a plugin that blocked most of that stuff called “Fluff Buster Purity“.
   
2. Even after I unfollowed a bunch of groups, had F.B. Purity configured, and got my feed curated to exactly how I wanted it, the social media giant started forcing a bunch of posts into people’s feed that are impossible to remove. This change was recent, and it’s hair-tearingly annoying.
   
   For example, if a “friend” of yours posts in a public group, it’ll show up in your feed as if it’s something you follow. The only way to avoid this type of post is by unfriending everyone you know that’s active in any capacity. But you can only do that one friend at a time, and it’s not exactly an ideal solution in the first place.
   
   They also force posts into your feed if their algorithm thinks you might like a group. This is something Facebook never did before, and there is absolutely no way to block it. And boy, some of the recommendations are a stretch to say the least. Too many times, I ended up reading a post thinking it was from a group I follow, only to find out after I’d already wasted time that no, it’s actually from some group I don’t care about and never want to see again! For awhile I kept blocking these groups, but it’s a losing battle. It’s a never-ending cascade of garbage and a massive waste of time because new groups are created far faster than a single person can ever hope to block them.
   
3. Facebook has been lobbying and shaking hands with government officials far too much, agreeing on censorship policies and gaining too much political power. They’ve chosen to take a decidedly anti-free speech stance, which means they are no longer a public forum where users can have debates that are in any way meaningful. (A good book has tension. So does a good public forum.)
   
4. Facebook is about to launch a bitcoin called Diem, but no one’s going to trust a “decentralized currency” that’s run by the Facebook oligarchs, even if it’s built on blockchain technology. Trust is earned, and Facebook certainly hasn’t earned people’s trust with their Orwellian privacy policies and other data-invasive scandals. The only way Diem is going to gain any traction with the public is by forcing it upon them though the aid of the government, and what’s scary is that’s looking like a real possibility. There’s too much conflict-of-interest going on here for my comfort. So at this point, I’d rather wash my hands of them entirely.

Like I said in the post Getting It Out Of Your System, bringing myself to delete Facebook was a combination of steeling myself and getting jaded. Facebook is a dopamine feedback trap that attacks your brain with tiny dopamine hits. If you allow it to gain traction, social media can grow a neurological network in your lower brain so monstrous, it can rival a drug addiction. If there were ever any hope of burning myself out on it, I’m sure it would’ve happened by now. And like I said in Neural Circuitry: Brain vs. Writing, sometimes the best way to deal with such an unstoppable beast is to quit “cold turkey”.

Of course, the option to delete your account is buried in a sub-sub-submenu (not surprised), and even then, they give you the option to just “deactivate” your account for a month and “take a break”, vs. actual deletion. And even when you do finally go through with the deletion, you have to re-confirm twice, and even after all that, they still give you 30 additional days to cancel the deletion.

This process alone makes it evident they don’t want to see you leaving their honeypot, and frankly I think it angers them when someone is able to break free of their matrix. Facebook was never as important to me as writing, so onto the digital trash heap it goes.