Quitting social media

Update (May 2020):  Since this post was published, I have made a return to social media.  Only my Facebook (personal) and LinkedIn (mostly professional) accounts remain, with a strict self-enforced cap of 250 connections on the Facebook side of the house.  In the time that I was off of Facebook, I realized that it does provide several points of unique utility in my life - the videos from outlets such as Vox mentioned below, and also being able to remain connected to long-term friends (a friend from my Carnegie Mellon days, from whom I hadn't heard a word in years, recently reconnected with me via Facebook.)  Besides, I figure that having voices like mine - rational, educated, and fact-based - on that platform helps to provide a counter-narrative to the QAnon crazies, Russian trolls, and other forces of disinformation.  My social media journey continues.
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This weekend ushered in a new phase of my adult life - one largely devoid of social media.  As of Saturday morning June 22, 2019, my Facebook and Instagram accounts are gone.  Only this blog, for my personal musings, and my (still mostly) professional LinkedIn remain.

I created my Facebook account 14 years ago in 2005, just a few hours after returning home from undergraduate freshman orientation at the University of Florida.  One of our orientation counselors actually urged us onto the then nascent platform as a way of starting to build a network of friends at what could be a massive, impersonal institution.  And since then, so much of my life - my development from a borderline adult of 18 years to a 32-year-old professional - has been meticulously chronicled there.

But no more.

The decision to delete Facebook was a rather difficult one; Instagram - of which I've been a member for less than two years - was far easier.  At the end of the day, the decision around both platforms boiled down to a question of what adds meaning and value to my life, and what does the opposite.  From my first day on it, Instagram - which I only joined at the exhortation of a few people who wanted to tag me in photos - was a value-negative proposition in my life.  If the Kardashian family and every single one of their horrible personal attributes could somehow be transformed into a software platform, you would end up with Instagram - a platform which has encouraged jaw-dropping, troglodyte behavior such as taking selfies at concentration camp memorial sites in Europe (my preferred term for those digital miscreants is "Insta-morons.")  Even the most innocuous content on that platform tends to revolve around broke, utterly unaccomplished, self-indulgent Millennials attempting to use highly filtered photos to convince the rest of us that they live glamorous, jet-setting lives.

But why quit Facebook?

There is actually much on that platform which I still value.  I enjoy being able to consume interesting, informative videos from media outlets such as The Economist and Vox.  It's a great way to keep in touch with friends and former colleagues/classmates, and to ensure you're included in events.  And much of the personal commentary written is still of a high quality.  Increasingly, though, those positives have been outweighed by the deterioration and decay of much of the information which is essentially broadcast via Facebook.

One incident is telling.  About a year ago I noticed an account which had made an abhorrently racist comment on a CNN post.  This account's profile photo was a screenshot of a character from The Sims video game franchise and it had a nonsense name almost like something from a random word generator.  Clearly a fake profile, I clicked on the account to see if I could view any other information which might be useful for reporting to Facebook.  What I noticed right away is that this user had over 1,000 friends - all of whom also had different Sims characters as their profile photos.  This was literally an entire army of fake accounts, likely spewing toxic bullshit on a daily basis, existing right out in the open.  I reported about a dozen of the accounts to Facebook for being fake - and around a week later, I got about a dozen emails informing me that no action was being taken on these accounts because there was no violation of Facebook's "community standards."

A platform which enables the live-streaming of murder, which allows Russian trolls to inject venom into an already dysfunctional American political process, which turns a blind eye when the latest suburban Becky posts about how gay teens are going to rot in Hell - this is a platform with a diseased culture.  This is a platform in which the desire to monetize clicks on sensational content takes primacy over basic human decency.

And it is a platform which I found, over time, no longer aligned with the types of things I want in my life.  Or more precisely, the types of things I need in my life, inching ever closer to age 40.

Things may change, so I have opted to merely deactivate my account, giving me the option to resume Facebook usage if I desire in the future.  But for now, I believe this to be the right choice given the direction of that platform.

On the bright side, leaving Facebook should give me more time to write in this blog, and also to engage my professional peers via LinkedIn.  Looking forward to what lies ahead!