I Quit Facebook

After about a decade of using Facebook, I finally decided to delete my account. After the 2016 elections and a lot of other revelations from the last couple of years, I'm not convinced Facebook is the force for good in the world it thinks it is. They turned a blind eye to misinformation campaigns during important elections. They sold information to companies that were trying to win campaigns for scumbags. There are a couple of places that Facebook has contributed to rises in violence against minorities. They dragged their feet on banning Alex Jones and his companies. Facebook needs my attention to make money. The best way to prevent them from capitalizing on spreading garbage is by depriving them of my time.

My less self righteous and socially conscious reasons for quitting are the site isn't that great to use anymore. Facebook has become a complete garbage dump of shitty minion memes, inflammatory political rhetoric, advertisements, and notifications from people trying to promote themselves while pretending that they aren't promoting themselves. The people I actually want to interact with aren't using it at all or are barely using it. Nobody is paying attention to what I post. I pretty much just log in to get fed ads for things that are identical to what I was just searching for on Google.

Facebook isn't a natural way to communicate or keep in touch with people. I shouldn't know everything that is happening with my high school classmates that I haven't actually spoken to in person in almost 20 years. I shouldn't be seeing everyone's ugly political posts. Unless you are just a giant asshole that likes to provoke people, you generally don't share your ugly political views. From my experience, even people that seem really nice and don't say much about politics in person let there true colors show on Facebook. I can't believe some of the ugly stuff I've seen people post, like, and share since 2016.

I will miss using it to share photos. I'll miss those rare productive conversations. I'll also miss keeping up with the latest news from the national parks. I just can't justify wasting my time there anymore. I hope to spend the time I was wasting trying to sort through bullshit on Facebook doing something productive or at least not being stressed out by things I can't actually change.