I finally deleted my Facebook account. There are things I’m going to miss, but really, all that comes down to being able to go wide instead of deep with my social connections. It’s been really great for the past 12 years or so, being able to passively hear about what my cohort are up to. It’s nice to know when someone’s doing well, or have the option to provide some level of moral support when it looks like they’re not. And it’s been great to reconnect with so many people whom I otherwise wouldn’t be hearing much about.
But I’m not going to miss the privacy violations, the cynical abuse of data, the better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission business plan, the facile manner in which misinformation is promoted, and the culture of smacking down people who call out misinformation.
I’d already decided to back out of that system with Zucc’s policy announcement regarding fact checking political ads. My decision was reinforced by his absolute disregard for providing authentic, reasonable answers at the congressional hearing. But in the intervening days, while I was steeling myself to hit that button, things continued to happen to continue to strengthen my resolve.
One example is the attempted take-down of Greta Thunberg. Over five days, I saw five meme posts decrying her movement for varying reasons, none of which have much at all to do with the substance of her message, and all of which imply that the only way to pursue a movement is to sit quietly and do nothing, especially if you’re a girl.
I decided to start calling out the idiocy of blindly reposting these memes, and the pushback I got was significant. Because these interactions were with friends, I was able to navigate it all and the outcome was basically that all the folks who posted the memes admitted that the memes weren’t helpful and that they didn’t agree with the content, but that their intent in re-posting was to voice some level of frustration with the whole conversation.
But even those discussions led to scattershot from friends of the people who posted the memes. One guy in one of the threads told me, “Chill out, Ben. What, is Greta your daughter?” I wanted to point out that he’d just proven my point about these memes, but since I had no real relationship with him, I just chose to block him.
But there are real challenges with maintaining a culture of honesty–and just as importantly, intellectual honesty and thus trust–in a low-friction social network. I know that part of the reason that Facebook hasn’t solved those problems is that they are hard. But I’m pretty sure that the main reason is that there’s no way to solve them without slowing down the money-printing press that is their business.
So, as of today, I am not actively contributing to Facebook’s bottom line. If at all possible, hope to find ways to block any trackers or ad data that they place on any site I visit as well. We’ll see how that goes.
And last, but not least, I have thoughts on how to solve the truth/trust problem Maybe I’ll start posting them here.