2025 is a year for shedding extraneous baggage; I deleted my Facebook account. Facebook has been circling around my cancel drain hole from the day I first signed on. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to cancel fact-checking was the straw that broke this old camel’s aching back. Read on for my complicated position on Facebook and justification for my decision.
You might guess from my dithering, I’m still not certain I made the right decision– I invite your comments.
To begin, my software engineer self has never admired Facebook. Their technology has never impressed me like Google’s search engine cleverness or Microsoft’s steady improvement of their operating system and office utilities. I took Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things,” as an insult to the software profession. Any idiot can move fast and break things. Engineers move fast and make things.
Facebook was a bulletin board with a graphic interface. La di dah.
For the next fifteen years, I was tolerant. Facebook provides a simple entrance to computer communications for folks who know little about computers. It gathered up family and friend diasporas, giving them an opportunity to exchange news and photos of babies, kittens, memorable meals, and birthday parties without taking a class on computers. A misguided cousin uses Facebook as a platform to broadcast groan inducing puns and dad jokes. Other friends voice snarky commentary on late-stage capitalism and income inequality. I enjoyed looking in on and occasionally sneaking in my “likes” and comments.
I don’t begrudge the targeted advertising on Facebook pages; everyone, even a billionaire, is entitled to make a buck to survive in this hostile world. With little to hide, I don’t fret much about privacy. On the technical side, I was impressed with the reliability of the service as it scaled to manage peta and zettabytes of data.
Facebook code running on servers in data centers all over the U.S. and the world improves lives without requiring their users to know anything of markup languages or programming logic.
The dark side of Facebook is the feed. If all I ever saw when I open Facebook were posts from me and my friends, I wouldn’t have a quarrel with Facebook. I wouldn’t want fact checking. I already know who among my friends are trustworthy. The ones I don’t trust, I like to keep tabs on their lies.
But my feed is cluttered with posts from people and entities that are not my friends and whom I know nothing about. Facebook has chosen these posts for me with their feed stuffing algorithm. I resent that Facebook chooses stuff that attracts my attention like house wiring diagrams or woodworking demonstrations to post on my feed. These tempting posts waste my time. I’m irritated when I discover I’ve spent ten minutes futzing on Facebook when I could have been in the kitchen refining my recipe for scratch-made bean with bacon soup or deciding which infinitives are worth splitting.
I frequently asked myself if my cousin’s puns and jokes were worth imperfect bean with bacon soup. Up until now, since I have never cared whether an infinitive is split or not, I stuck with my cousin.
When I read that the unasked for crap on my Facebook feed would no longer be fact checked, that Mark Zuckerberg no longer cares if my feed is filled with malicious twists on truth, I realized that my bean with bacon soup needs serious work.
Maybe a touch of cayenne.
Bye bye Facebook.