 Quitting FacebookMarch 23, 2018 |
The ultimate 👎
Over the weekend, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy firm hired by the Trump campaign for the 2016 US election, illicitly acquired data from 50 million Facebook users without their consent—and Facebook knew about it for the last two years. (Later, the revelations around Cambridge Analytica's tactics got substantially seedier, but that's another story.)
Users already had plenty of reasons to feel disillusioned with Facebook: the creepy ads that follow you around the internet, the platform's still-unfolding role in 2016's election, its potential link to genocide in Myanmar, and its negative effects on mental health. Soon a pre-existing ebb in Facebook's active users threatened to become a flood, with a growing #DeleteFacebook movement.
Is this the watershed moment when the world turns against social media? It's way too soon to say (and the answer: probably not). But this week's spiraling events have millions of people questioning whether it's time to leave the social media platform that has become a cornerstone of modern life. Let's walk through this decision together.
4,000: Number of subscribers the early Harvard iteration of Facebook had when Zuckerberg described his users as "dumb fucks"
2 million: Number of people under the age of 25 who will stop using Facebook this year, as predicted by research firm eMarketer
231,000: Google results for "I quit Facebook"
Reasons to leave
🙂 Happiness: Studies suggest that getting off Facebook actually helps us feel more socially connected, not less. Researchers suspect that Facebook often makes us unhappy because we spend a lot of time engaging in social comparison—measuring our achievements and self-worth against our friends' status updates.
💡Simplicity: Many who leave Facebook come to the same liberating realization as those who Kondo their apartments or give away big portions of their incomes: A lot of the things we think we need in life are actually 100% optional. Facebook's big value proposition is that it's a convenient way to communicate with your friends and family. But it's far from the only way to do so.
🚫 Privacy: Facebook has faced repeated scandals over how it handles personal data. By design, the platform is a repository of information, bequeathed by users, that is cross-referenced, analyzed, and synthesized for the benefit of ad targeting, to target people more effectively.
🤔 Manipulation: In the wake of overwhelming evidence that Russia used Facebook to influence the 2016 US presidential election, the company is desperately trying to fight the spread of fake news. None of the attempts have been remotely effective.
💊 Addiction: Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya said that "short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops" define the experience of using Facebook. Like a drug, after that rush, depression can follow. As time spent on the platform has fallen, Facebook has changed its algorithm to focus on content shared by family and friends. But as Paul Smalera pointed out at Quartz, this move echoes a classic drug-dealer tactic: "a cut-down dose of its drug might keep feed junkies hanging around longer, searching for that scrolling high."
📱 Battery life: The Facebook app takes up a ton of energy on our phones. There are ways to adjust settings so that it consumes less, but the easiest is to just delete the app.
Reasons to stay
👫 Keeping up with friends and family: It's a big task to keep in touch with people the old-fashioned way, especially if they're scattered around the world. Without Facebook, you'd still (hopefully) be in touch with those who are the closest to you, but you'd risk losing the ambient awareness of what the people in your life are up to. And, in the unfortunate event you ever need it, there's also Safety Check.
📰 A compelling way to read news: Over the last few years, the Facebook news feed has overtaken old media sources to become the primary source of information for much of the world. The downsides of this phenomenon have become painfully apparent (and recent algorithm changes have deprioritized news), but it remains a vibrant newsreading experience for many.
😢 FOMO: Of course, there are the marriage announcements and party invites, plus baby clips and dog pictures. But more broadly, the platform has become a virtual town square. Leaving would mean fewer updates about your community: What's the most pressing problem to the people in your hometown, or home country? How do your friends and family interpret what's going on in the world these days? How are these communities changing?
🐱 Memory lane: This one might be the hardest for Facebook leavers—the platform has been a repository of memories for more than a decade. You can download your photos, but you'll lose your friends' comments (wise, mystifying, cringeworthy). And these diaries are interconnected, so if you delete your account, your best friend might lose access to thousands of photos that you tagged them in.
✅ An ID card for the internet: For more than a decade, Facebook Connect has served as a digital passport, used by popular services including Spotify, Netflix, Tinder, and Airbnb. Much like a real ID card, if you lose it, you can't get into a lot of interesting spots—and deleting your account may result in some headaches as you figure out alternate ways of logging in.
🍕 Actual connections: Facebook is still the best place, in towns big and small, to share information about toddler playgroups, women's circles, pizza pop-ups, and movie nights—and to connect with other people with interests like Wok Wednesdays, mycology, ultralight backpacking, and machine embroidery.
⏰ It's a big commitment: If you're leaving Facebook for privacy or other ideological reasons, you should really quit the company's other services, which use many of the same data platforms. That includes Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR. (Otherwise, you're basically a vegan who still sprinkles bacon on salad.)
Quitting ain't easy
Even if you manage to jump through all the burning hoops necessary to delete your account, the company can track you across sites it owns and unrelated sites that have a Facebook module. Its infamous "social graph" can track you even if you're logged out or have deleted your account. (Yes, this is crazy.)
Here's an incredibly long list of URLs that are connected in some way with Facebook or its subsidiaries. If you want to completely sever your problematic relationship with the social network, you'll need to block all of them via your computer's own network settings.
If you've done all that, you can finally breathe a sigh of relief… oh nope, you can't: Any apps that you authorized to use Facebook (or, during a period of about four years starting in 2010, that any of your friends authorized) still have your data. (That's basically the problem at the root of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.) Facebook advises you to “contact these apps for details on removing this data." 😆
Destruct-o-meter: $50 billion and counting
Is Facebook spying on you through your phone's microphone? This episode of the Reply All podcast investigates uncanny incidents where the company serves up ads based on something that's just been said.
(Spoiler alert: Facebook almost certainly isn't using the microphone, largely because it has so much data that it doesn't need to.)
So really, how can I take back my data?
✔︎Cambridge Analytica harvested data from third-party apps (remember Farmville?). Here's how to check which apps have access to your Facebook account—and delete them.
✔︎Want to salvage your photos and/or go ahead and delete your account? Here's how to do that.
✔︎If you're going to totally sever your Facebook relationship, you also need to block all the URLs on this long list.
📬 Are you thinking about quitting Facebook?
💌"If I find, if we find, that Facebook is a dangerous resource for being misappropriated by companies and governments, I won't mind losing it." — Christopher
💌"I've reached a compromise: deleting Facebook and Messenger from my phone. I no longer see ads for something I've talked about in conversation (without typing it anywhere), but forget to check for messages and comments for days at a time. So far the trade off is very worth it!" — Scott
💌"For me Facebook a one stop shop for local friends, people I taught English to in Moldova, cousins I met in Poland, U.S. cousins (including those I haven't met yet), high school classmates, and people all over the world who are interested in linguistics." — Constance
💌"I would love to quit Facebook, but I won't. I have family and friends in Tonga, New Zealand, India, Germany, France, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Tanzania who don't have email addresses or messaging apps—they use Facebook and Facebook Messenger as their primary means of communication. If I close my Facebook account, it would be like closing those people out of my life. [Also] I use Facebook groups to get information I can't get elsewhere. For example, my son has anaphylactic food allergies, and joining a local food allergy group's Facebook page is an efficient way for me to get information about locally available safe food brands and local doctors to research before travel or a move." — Anna
"I smashed my cell phone with a dress shoe, melted the pieces with a hair dryer, stowed the pieces away in a military-grade Faraday bag, and then buried it in a shoebox under a floorboard. As I meditated in total darkness above the broken corpse of my former mobile device, I felt my digital self fade into the wind with the vapor of silicon. I took a deep breath. This was freedom."
A crisis-management crisis
Companies like Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, and Pepsi have honed crisis management to a science. The template: Don't delay, apologize, be transparent, and be accountable. It appears no one at Facebook has bothered to study these uncomplicated principles. The company tried to get ahead of the scandal with a hasty blog post, but then went into bunker mode with top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg ghosting for days.
When Zuck finally did emerge, he laid out a systematic, point-by-point (and surely heavily lawyered) response—one that has virtually no chance of calming the outrage or quelling the disgust that many Facebook users are feeling this week.
That's because Facebook's success was never predicated on the rational benefits of its gargantuan social network; it was always about how it makes you feel. The company lives at the intersection of engineering and psychology, ruthlessly designed to hack our brains and tap into our unconscious need to receive affirmation.
But if you live by tapping into the irrational desires of large groups, you die by them too. Facebook thrived because it made billions of people feel good. Increasingly, it makes a lot of them feel bad. That's why it's hard to imagine how Zuckerberg's hyper-rational response could do much to reverse the tide of ill will that has engulfed Facebook this week.
Poll So NOW are you quitting Facebook? |
In yesterday's poll about business cards, 36% of you said you use yours to sell your soul. (Zuck, is that you?)
Today's email features writing from across the Quartz newsroom, including Sarah Todd, Mike Murphy, Hanna Kozlowska, Jason Karaian, Josh Horwitz, Annaliese Griffin, and Oliver Staley. It was edited by Adam Pasick and Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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