My Divorce from Facebook
It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally done with Facebook. I joined back in the early days when you needed a .edu email address to sign up. At the time, I was still in high school and had to use a fake .edu email just to get in, but it was worth it. In those days, Facebook was addicting—I could connect with people from my past, from all the places I’d lived. I also found friends from other corners of my digital life—MMOs, IRC, various forums, and websites.
As the site grew, so did its user base. It wasn’t just young adults anymore; I started seeing more parents, and eventually, even grandparents. At first, this was fine. Most new users were relatively tech-savvy and understood how things worked. But then Facebook exploded in popularity, and with that came changes—changes that slowly turned it into something I no longer recognized.
Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more conspiracy theories spread unchecked. I remember when that kind of nonsense wouldn’t fly—content would get removed regularly, and people would face temporary bans for posting misinformation. That’s not the case anymore. Now, Facebook is doing what platforms like YouTube and Twitter have been criticized for: pushing content you never subscribed to, have no interest in, and that’s completely out of line with your views.
For example, it’s no secret that I lean left politically and that I’m trans. Yet, Facebook constantly pushes far-right and anti-trans content to the top of my feed, while burying posts from people I actually follow. It reminds me of what YouTube and Elon’s Twitter have been doing—prioritizing outrage over relevance.
To make things worse, Facebook’s reporting system is broken. Recently, I reported a disturbing video of a woman being sexually assaulted in broad daylight at a bus stop. Facebook responded by saying the video “doesn’t violate our policy.” I appealed the decision, but the result was the same—no action taken, with the option to send it to a vague “review board” that might look at it, possibly within a year.
Facebook has transformed from a place to connect with friends and family to a platform where dangerous conspiracy theories are spread as fact, with zero accountability. I can’t support a platform that operates this way anymore. I’m going to download my pictures and videos, share my contact info with the people I care about, and then I’m out. Zuckerberg can eat the entirety of my ass.