WHY I QUIT FACEBOOK 

BY Angelo Fernando 

I’ve had it with Facebook! In March, I decided to quit the first social network I joined in July 2007, and my main reasons revolved around its users and Facebook itself. Over the past three years, I found myself growing weary of what goes on under the guise of being ‘social’ on Facebook since the social media platform seemed to be overrun by weirdness.

Was it becoming a platform for connectivity or ranting? Is FB a platform for better communication or monologues? Have you had similar concerns? Consider this as you continue reading.

Another issue I have is the way Facebook treats customers and its business modus operandi. If we don’t like how a bank does business, we typically close our account and shift to one that’s in sync with our values.

There are many other ways to communicate, collaborate and huddle together with like-minded people – and for me at least, Facebook isn’t the only game in town.

My decision to quit Facebook might seem odd to some of you. Back in 2010, in a series of Sri Lankan webinar styled workshops I conducted for Sri Lankan communicators, one of the modules was how to implement Facebook in business – meaning, ways to connect the dots between offline interactions and online audiences.

We held up the Facebook model as part of an ecosystem alongside professional networking (LinkedIn), microblogging (Twitter), knowledge sharing using video (YouTube and Vimeo) and citizen journalism (blogs using WordPress).

It was a good year for Facebook. Time named Mark Zuckerberg as its 2010 Person of the Year. The ‘Like’ button had been introduced a year earlier and there was very little not to like about it.

OPTIMISM FADES Ten years ago, Facebook fulfilled the yearning that organisations had to engage with stakeholders without cumbersome intermediaries. It served as their de facto website – i.e. a place where customers could directly contact management.

Those promoting social causes found unique ways for citizens to connect and take action. Facebook’s user profile was young and outspoken, and it was adding digital citizens who were hell-bent on changing the world at breakneck speed.

The Arab Springs of 2010 and 2011 were fuelled by the collective intelligence that came together through the ease of social networking in general and Facebook in particular. “There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralising of power and at the same time, perhaps a greater faith in one another,” wrote Richard Stengel in a Time essay, in the same issue that feted Zuckerberg as having started something unstoppable.

However, Stengel ruefully also noted that “what was once considered intimate is now shared among millions with a keystroke.”

My book titled Chat Republic, a primer on social media, was published in 2013 and its subtitle explained my optimism: ‘How social media drives us to be Human 1.0 in a Web 2.0 world.’ But a year later, I felt that much of social media was making us forget what it was to truly connect. And antisocial behaviour was on the rise.

I soon started to notice that the capacity for oversharing was becoming the Achilles’ heel of Facebook. It was being overrun by those who are crass, vain and portray oversized egos.

To put it bluntly, Facebook in 2019 has become a PR and propaganda machine; a way to circulate personal press releases thinly veiled as status updates. This is only one of many forms of Facebook behaviour that has set in; it is one that is often at odds with real life.

Facebook provides users with more than a network; it gives them an instant, large and live audience – something humans have never had and aren’t prepared to handle. The fact that an individual could use a live feed while carrying out a horrific mass murder like in Christchurch tells us something about what humans could do when enticed by a free social network with an audience of billions.

FACEBOOK EFFECT As I transitioned into a career in education, I had a front row view of how social media was impacting the lives of young people.

Students taking to smartphones are growing addicted to them. A 2018 Pew Research study found that 45 percent of teens are online most of the time with 95 percent having smartphones. Three years before that, only 24 percent were online.

As many teachers will tell you, despite the connectivity tools at their disposal, students are losing those vital life skills of being able to communicate. There are many early warning signs of device addiction and the effects of developing brains being saturated with ‘media.’

Social media doesn’t appear to be knitting a fragmented world. Rather, Facebook and Instagram (the student friendly equivalent of Facebook, acquired in 2012 for US$ 1 billion) appear to be priming people to become more self-obsessed, audience obsessed and insular.

Both social platforms didn’t create this problem but their owners are not seriously addressing what’s happening in this powerful ‘social’ space.

The Facebook effect is also one that users subscribe to with a wink and nod. Everyone I discuss this with agrees that people project a fake image but nevertheless continue to consume that hypocrisy. Initially, I stopped reading posts of those who were obnoxious or boastful. Next I would block them; but blocking these posts became too much work.

Opening Facebook was like slowing down for an accident – you never knew what beautifully photographed wreckage you’d see on the road. For anyone who may be shocked that I’m unaware of the certificate their child was awarded, my response is: ‘You know my number – call or text me.’ Spare me the traffic accidents.

SHIFTING GEARS How is Facebook responding to the drop in users? CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg had this to say in early March: “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy focussed communications platform will become even more important than today’s
open platforms.”

He seems to be acutely aware that public facing communication (wishing one’s wife a happy anniversary; and thus informing an entire network when a simple note by the bedside would do) is losing its appeal.

As he envisions the value of an ‘open’ platform, Zuckerberg appears to understand that being social is going to need more one-to-one opportunities. The ‘one-to-many’ model may be up for revision. Or could this be a way to signal that the network is maturing in more ways
than one?

Zuckerberg goes on to acknowledge this (in a sort of apologetic way): “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy focussed platform; because frankly,  we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services and we’ve historically focussed on tools for more open sharing.”

But we have seen this apology tour before. In March last year, he said: “We have a responsibility to protect your data and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

This was in response to the scrutiny that came with the Cambridge Analytica scandal around Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. It transpired that 50 million Facebook users’ data had been used by Cambridge Analytica without their permission.

DATA HARVESTING Data is Facebook’s bread and butter. Most people don’t realise this and many will say they don’t care because there’s nothing more attractive than a free product used by about two billion people.

Did you realise that when you created an account and clicked on the ‘terms of service’ that include paragraphs on how it empowers, connects and helps you discover etc., you also agreed to this?

Facebook declares: “We collect information about the people, pages, accounts, hashtags and groups that you are connected to and how you interact with them across our products, such as people you communicate with the most or groups that you are part of.”

And it gets better: “We also collect contact information if you choose to upload, sync or import it from a device (such as an address book, call log or SMS log history), which we use for things like helping you and others find people you may know and for the other purposes listed below.”

It’s quite an explicit statement of what business you are subscribing to simply for the privilege of sharing your beach photos and grumbling about the poor service at a restaurant. For many years, I too didn’t care. As a technology columnist, I was aware that this is how a network does business. And for a greater part of a decade, my marketing communications function involved advising organisations on how to connect their business with other areas of communication, outreach, content creation and marketing. Facebook fits the bill.

Nevertheless, it became all too embarrassing to have to say that I teach communications and admit to maintaining a Facebook account. It took me two minutes to delete my account… and I haven’t missed a thing!