Hello, devoted reader (or hopefully, readers). Many of you are likely reading this blog because I have announced that I will be leaving Facebook and encouraged you to read this instead of my Facebook posts.
But why am I doing any of this? Won’t it be harder to communicate with people without Facebook? Isn’t it inconvenient for people to have to go to a separate website to look at pictures of Hazel? And now I’m expecting people to read? Why this sudden sadism?
Well, I’ve been thinking. And when I start thinking, I usually think a lot, so get comfy.
I’ve been thinking about accountability, and power, and ethics, and the role I play in the world being what it is. I’ve been thinking about how much of our lives are shaped by choices that we know little to nothing about.
I spend a lot of time wondering about the behind-the-scenes of my choices. How does my diet affect the planet? Is streaming music ethical? What actually happens to what I put in the recycling bin?
How can Facebook be so large, powerful, yet free of charge? How can Facebook constantly be under fire and yet seem to be thriving? What are the ramifications of, to quote an article on Spotify, a private service “feel[ing] so inevitable as to seem almost invisible”?
None of these questions are new. There has been scandal surrounding Facebook for years. Wikipedia even has an entire page dedicated to criticism of Facebook that has a warning that "This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably." We all know at least one person who has declared that they are going on some sort of social media detox (often to return a few weeks or months later). People blame social media in general or Facebook in particular for mental health issues, misinformation, censorship, irresponsible lack of moderation, spying. That’s just a list from off the top of my head.
Generally, I had more or less shrugged off those concerns since I made my Facebook account back in 2008. What are you going to do? The world is the way it is, and social media is a part of that world. I don’t have mental health issues because of social media. Mostly. Except occasionally when I do, but that’s rare and it’s on me, right? I’m the one who scrolled too long until my feed stopped being innocuous life updates and memes. It's not because of the designed addictiveness of the feed, riiight? I haven’t been tricked by misinformation. Probably. A company can’t violate Americans’ First Amendment rights for the Bill of Rights are only protections against the government. Facebook is just as powerful as a government, not actually a government, you know? That's.... different, right? And I had sympathy for Facebook moderators after listening to a Radiolab episode about it. They’re faced with an impossible task, after all. It's not like Facebook's hiring practices and growth strategy has made their moderators' task impossible. ...right? And all that stuff about your information being sold, and that Cambridge Analytica scandal? Weeeellllll, I honestly didn’t follow it too closely, and I figured “eh, who cares who has my information? I’m not hiding anything.”
But I’ve been finding it harder to shrug some things off.
The elections of 2016 got me, and many people around me, more interested in politics. Alex and I started dating again in 2017, and she has a degree in political science. Hard to not get exposed to some smart opinions on politics with a partner like that. That led to me forming more and more opinions about the sort of government I want and the sort of society I want to live in. The more I developed ideas about what mattered to me, the more I watched conservative governments and movements strip those things away. Environmental protections, economic justice, workers' rights, fair taxes, reproductive freedom, accessible healthcare, LGBT protections, police reform, civil rights of all stripes. Everything I cared about, threatened, constantly it feels like.
And I kept hearing social media popping up in conjunction with these distressing current events. The reason Trump was elected. The reason people were constructing alternate realities that threatened the actual reality we all share. One of several reasons violent right wing backlash could foment, be emboldened, be enacted in the way it has. The reason the President was able to establish and continue a powerful cult of personality.
That became hard to ignore. Was a powerful force aiding and abetting my despair and frustration really the same place where people play Words with Friends and laugh with me about Hazel?
After years of thinking and taking in information, I conclude that the answer is yes.
The Trump administration and all who empowered it and allowed it became impossible for me to shrug off. My previous thoughts of “eh, Facebook can’t moderate everything; it’s a giant platform” became “okay, Facebook, can’t moderate everything, but this is some high-profile and extremely destructive shit going on. I think they should be paying attention.”
N.B. Twitter is very much at fault in my mind too, but I never had a Twitter anyway, so no decision to really be made there.
I used to write off complaints of “censorship.” It was right-wing people complaining about their freedom of speech, and they were the ones whose misinformation and hate speech I don’t think even count as free speech anyway. I want Facebook to be moderating that sort of content.
But what about all the legitimate examples of free speech on accounts getting deleted by Facebook? What about this anti-left bias I started hearing about? The left were the ones speaking more reason, using more facts, or at least expressing opinions that generally do not, directly or indirectly, encourage or endorse racism, misogyny, homophobia, wealth inequality, or fascism. I am a leftist. Many of my friends and my closest sibling are on the left. We weren’t the ones gutting clean water protections, jeopardizing basic healthcare for trans people, and discouraging democracy. (see previous linked articles). Yet we were being silenced while Trump and people who agree with him continued to encourage people to ignore science, believe conspiracies, and hate immigrants?
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when a friend’s Facebook account was deleted without warning, without reason, and without appeal. This was a leftist friend who wasn’t suggesting violence, posting hate speech, or planning illegal activities. I will admit, I do not know this particular friend especially well, but my impression is that he is a gentle and intelligent person more dedicated to environmental sustainability and making meaningful connections to other people than spreading extremist views that could potentially warrant deletion. I also saw his closer friends discussing that he barely used Facebook for political reasons. Those friends started to wonder… did Facebook track what he did on other places online? How else would they have known he was a leftist? And if it weren’t his political views getting him banned, what was it? I started to wonder what information Facebook had on me and what they might decide to do with it. In the wake of that account deletion, I read an article about a mass deletion of accounts associated with activism for workers’ rights. And suddenly I was thinking that Facebook’s lack of moderation for the right didn’t seem like innocuous negligence anymore. They clearly were willing to moderate some people. My people.
This was all in the wake of the insurrection at the US Capitol, an event planned on unmoderated right-wing social media accounts. I was outraged that the far right attack a democratic institution and the most vehement champions for true democracy are the ones getting accounts deleted?
Now, full disclosure, Facebook ended up opening said friend’s account again. But the arbitrariness (or maybe not-so-arbitrariness) had me on edge. It had me thinking, “Why do things like this keep happening? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything anyone can do? Can we hold Facebook accountable? What are the limits to what Facebook can do with our data, our photos, our writing, our social interactions? ”
Facebook is a company. How does one hold companies accountable? Since we are supposedly in a free market, the power to hold companies accountable is in our wallets, in our consumer choices. Since we are (in some ways, thankfully) not really in a free market, the other option is to enlist the help of our government to improve the lives of the many (the consumers) over the lives of the few (the company). We tried the government thing, but that doesn't feel like it yielded much, considering my concerns sharpened just a week ago. So, how can I, as a consumer, hold Facebook accountable?
Well, normally, I would say “stop buying from them.” But what do I buy from Facebook? How does Facebook make its money anyway? I concluded it was from advertising, and the reading I did for this essay support that. So it would be a small act, but small acts are sometimes the only option for an individual and are certainly better than no act. If I was no longer swelling Facebook’s number of users and number of views, then surely I would no longer be supporting their ad-driven income.
Therefore, I figure the only way I can hold Facebook accountable is to stop using it. As long as they are rendered invisible through their ubiquity, as long as we consider them to be an essential facet of our lives, they will continue to be able to do whatever they like, with relative impunity. And this concerned me.
So that had me thinking, what do I even get from Facebook anyway? What am I getting in exchange for my contributions to their advertisement prices? What am I getting by participating in a social force that is, at best, floundering to keep up with its own massive explosion in popularity, and, at worst, prioritizing profit over truth and democracy?
I concluded the following:
I have an easy way to stay in contact with a huge number of people, some of whom I would likely never stay in contact with otherwise
I have an easy platform for any content I want to publish. I can post a witty caption with a Hazel photo and have it effortlessly appear in up to 579 feeds (though “any content I want to publish” is a bit generous considering I have purposefully kept my mouth shut about current events because of wanting to avoid the infamous brutality of social media conflict in my comments)
I have joined a variety of groups tailored to my interests, so on any given scroll sesh, I may see funny pictures of cats, ecological memes, and photos from the local wildlife refuge (along with stressful opinions from acquaintances and friends of friends and lots of ads).
I have easy access to a web-based messaging app that I and anyone I’m messaging can easily access from any device, anywhere in the world
So, I thought to myself, can I get these from some other source or do without them entirely?
Yes, I decided.
Now, this is an extremely personal choice. Your answers to the questions of what you get out of Facebook and whether you can accomplish that in other ways may be different. I do not judge anyone who decides to stay on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or any large corporate service for that matter. It would be hypocritical if I did because this very blog is hosted by Google, another huge and absolutely powerful tech powerhouse, whose services I also enlist for email, video streaming, Internet browsing, cloud storage, and probably stuff I don’t even know about. Plus, I work for Starbucks, listen to Spotify (with caveats that I think I’ll discuss in another post), had breakfast from Dunkin’, and one of my favorite date spots is the Burger King drive thru. I am no saint; I am a modern American. I am hardly opting out of corporate consumerism.
But I am trying to cut back where I can. And Facebook is an area where I can. I am in contact with a decent number of people through email, text, GroupMe, Snapchat, and Discord. Will everyone reach out to me to give me alternate forms of contact? Hell no. But maybe I don’t need to be in contact with all 579 of my Facebook friends.
Will as many people look at my blog as my Facebook posts? Maybe. My latest blog post had 15 views last I checked. The average number of views from everything I posted in January is 12 (and the median is 13. That’s for you, Alex.). My first blog post had 47 views (though, granted, it is unclear how many of those was me checking back a bunch of times to see that it was real). So clearly an audience doesn’t seem to be something that I need Facebook for, at this point.
What about cat pictures? Well, I have stumbled across a little secret about the Internet… there are cat pictures everywhere. I have been using Reddit more often to get tailored visual content which basically means it’s accomplishing a very similar purpose to my infrequently-used Instagram and my Facebook feed. Reddit is also cited a couple times in articles I have linked to as being part of the right-wing organizing platform problem, so maybe I will end up moving away from that too. We'll see.
As for web-based messaging? Discord, GroupMe, Snapchat, and email have been serving me perfectly well so far.
Now, I will be honest. There are challenges associated with my decision. Social anxiety plays a bigger role in my interactions now that my social life has to be intentional. (Does this person actually want to have this in-depth of a conversation? Does this person actually want to be hearing from me so much/right now/at all? Do people really care about what I have to say if it’s longer than a couple sentences and not accompanied by a picture? Will the novelty of following my blog wear off and I’ll be publishing into a void? Are my friends reading this out of obligation?)
Things can be a little more complicated. I had to email a link for a Netflix party which felt kinda weird and archaic (and there’s that social anxiety again: Am I being too weird? Is this burdening my friends?) I had to figure out how to have a blog. (Do I seem pretentious?) Now that I have a blog, I’m actually publishing opinions and longform thoughts (Do I seem pretentious? Am I seeking too much attention?).
But on the bright side, now my social life is intentional. Now I have more opportunities to notice (and noticing is the first step to changing) my social anxiety. Now I get to have a blog. Now I get to publish opinions and longform thoughts. Now I stand in solidarity with Alex (check out her blog). Now I’ve inspired Paul to make a blog (check out the construction site for their blog). I don't have to get stressed about something I stumbled across on my news feed. Now I’m doing my tiny bit to make the world and my life a little bit more how I like it.
Thanks for reading everyone! As always, feel free to reach out! I’d love to chat, especially if something in this essay spoke to you or makes you curious. Share your thoughts on the matter with me! What countercultural stuff are you doing? What does social anxiety make you wonder about yourself? What role do corporations and tech giants play in your life? When will you start your blog? (jk but if you do let me know so I can follow it!) See you Friday!
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