I have not put any updates on Facebook for more than three months, and these days I often get text messages complaining I am not replying on some “Messenger thing”.
Reason: I have abandoned Facebook!
Bullshit limit reached
Basically, I reached my bullshit limit and realized Facebook did not give me anything useful and all I was doing was wasting my time - Do not get me wrong, I really like stuff from e.g. How It’s Made , but I found I was watching some dude casting a miniature knife from an old tractor, fascinating but not exactly energizing.
Then, the news about Cambridge Analytica story broke, the whole Trump’s 2016 campaign, Brexit and what have we. On top of that, rumors started that Facebook was silently monitoring phone activities on Android phones gaining access to private data through the social network app and then the Russians got a hold of it…
I had been thinking about leaving Facebook for some time, but despite it is hard to really know what is up and down, I made the decision to abandon Facebook. When it finally came out that Russians had been using Facebook to manipulate people, I was happy I got out’ish and I changed my Facebook habit.
To all my friends on Facebook, you should not, and I repeat, you should not expect to get any respond from me via Facebook
In an academic study on Facebook from August 2013 , researchers claimed that the more people used Facebook in their test group, the more unsatisfied they felt with their lives - regardless of how many friends they had amassed. Please accept my apology for acting like and hypocrite, but despite near-constant data misuse scandals emerging from Facebook, the hashtag #DeleteFacebook appeared everywhere, there’s little evidence people are choosing to switch off their accounts entirely and I am one of them.
Facebook have some useful stuff, not that I particularly like seeing pictures of people on vacation, shared recipes, or just random thoughts on daily life. It is a great way to keep in touch with old friends and family across the globe. Facebook must do much better and ensure to secure user data from misuse by individuals and/or corporations - then, and only then, I might consider start using Facebook again.
If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer. You are the product being sold.
However, there seems to be a social cost for being out of the Facebook loop, and opting out of the “phone book of our age”. I know I miss out on casual, but sometime important invitations and lots of fake news. More important, by opting out of Facebook I misses status from friends, holiday photos, baby photos, and the casual status update, it is not essential, but it keeps a trickle of communication open between people I might otherwise not hear from.
Conclusion
By sharing you personally stuff on platforms as Facebook, you must accept that data can be reused, whatever you like it or not, however I want my communications to belong to me. I want more control with “my data” and I am not seeing this happening on Facebook, confirmed by the waste number of Facebook misuse data stories that keep surfacing.
For this reason, I have abandoned Facebook, and has become the occasional user sharing a minimum - if you se me online, feel free to reach out, but please do not expect me to respond.
Update Stumbled across this tweet today: According to new research quitting Facebook makes people happier and less informed about politics, but less partisan, too!
“People learned that they enjoy life without Facebook more than they had anticipated." https://t.co/B9hjYmxMPO
— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) February 5, 2019
-Jesper
Header image credit: Noureddine Belfethi