Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account

I recently deactivated my Facebook account. When Facebook asked me why I was deactivating, I put in the text box: "I don't want to aid in Facebook's quest to take over the entire universe."

I know social media platforms all share the same kinds of problems. I know that "if you're not paying, you're the product." I know that their ultimate goal is to make money off us, often by tracking our info and selling it to advertisers or whatever. I know that they're all engaged in various shenanigans.

But Facebook is in a class by itself. I've always felt pushed around and creeped out by Facebook, what with its perverse privacy settings and options and with Mark Zuckerberg basically acting like if you're not willing to make something public you must be some kind of criminal. Every time I went on Facebook -- and often by email when I didn't log in -- Facebook would remind me that I didn't really have a lot of friends, and I might be able to connect with more friends, and the things I posted weren't really getting any traction, and there might be ways to make traction happen.

Just last week, I wanted to message something to an old friend, and --oops! -- You can't message people any more unless you've properly opted into the chat feature and signed on to all the extra crap Facebook wants to you to sign on for. Good god.

But beyond the manipulation, to me the deeper threat is the depth to which Facebook is embedding itself in everyone's lives, becoming something you can't live without, becoming essential to what you thought were entirely non-Facebook related things. I'm sure you heard about the old news that lenders were going to use Facebook to judge your credit worthiness. Recently I was using a book reading app and there was an option to share notes. How do you share notes? You have to authenticate through Facebook. Want to use a dating app? Oh -- you can authenticate through Facebook.

What's it going to be like when you have to authenticate through Facebook to vote, to apply for a job, or to satisfy a customs official?

It also freaks me out that people are increasingly getting their news -- and their everything -- from Facebook. People often tell me they won't see anything unless a link pops up on their Facebook feed. It is disturbing. Plus, as we've written about before, do you really want Facebook determining what is and isn't a genuine news source?

The way Facebook deploys its real name policy is frightening. The brilliant sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about her experience being kicked off Facebook for using "TressieMcPhd" -- the name she uses in her online writing and with her 20,000+ Twitter following -- as her name. Someone reported her -- and bam! As Dr. Cottom explains, for all kinds of reasons, the enforcement of these kinds of policies have particularly negative effects for people who are already oppressed:

"It is more common that Facebook will ban non-white, non-male, non-Western users for violating ethical codes when they write against racism or sexism or inequality than they will ban those who post actual racist or sexist content."

In my academic field of philosophy, it is amazing how much discussion relevant to issues in the profession happens on Facebook. Often, before I learn about something from a blog post, there has already been extensive discussion of it on Facebook. But one problem with this is that Facebook actually reinforces some of the problems we're already having. For example, philosophy has an in-group out-group problem: some people are, or are perceived to be, the in-crowd, while others are, or feel, marginalized; overlaid on that there is a sense of people in factions or cliques. Because Facebook encourages and facilitates sharing with your friends, more than with strangers, opinions are shared in ways that track, rather than challenging, the sense of factions, groups, subgroups, who's in, and who's out.

I know my deactivation will go zero distance toward challenging Facebook's success at global domination. It is a tiny symbolic gesture in a cold and uncaring universe. But maybe some day some event or something will be organized and there will be this tiny resistance of people who aren't on Facebook, and the whole business will have to be conducted in some other way, like a blog, or on the non-walled garden parts of the internet, or -- god forbid -- email.

As I was writing this post, I was reminded of the 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman. Hirschman argues that when an organization of any kind is being a pain in the ass, its members can "exit" but they also have the alternative of "voice" -- of sticking around and trying to change things. Maybe the current members of Facebook can change the way Facebook operates, as they did when drag queens won the right to use their preferred names. God knows, when it comes to members of Facebook, there certainly are enough of them.

It's a testament to the power of Facebook that I didn't delete my account but merely deactivated it. Which is temporary. We'll see how things go. In the meantime, why not connect with me on Twitter? It's far from perfect, but there's no real name bullshit. Plus, isn't it weirdly comforting that Twitter is so far from world domination that they still haven't even managed to make any money?