Easy to hate Facebook, but tough to quit
FIRST, you have to know where the deactivation page lies in your account settings. To even see the page, you have to re-enter your password.
Then, Facebook makes its final plea: “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” The deactivation page displays a mosaic of your friends’ photos, each one accompanied by a message. “Susanne will miss you. Gene will miss you. Jessica will miss you.”
Instead of deactivating, Facebook suggests, would you like to send them a message?
Jessica Stapf visited this page a week ago, her cursor hovering over the deactivation button. She was tired of watching her friends fight each other over gun control, and felt overwhelmed and disheartened by the ugly arguments that dominated her news feed. Facebook has brought her close to leaving before: Once, in college, Stapf even managed to quit Facebook for a day or two, before bringing her account back online.
She wished she could commit, press the button, and disappear from Facebook for good. This time, she couldn’t. Maybe some day. She felt close to ready.
Work is what keeps Stapf, a 25-year-old communications professional in Washington, D.C., on Facebook. “While it pains me each day to look through my feed (and particularly use Facebook’s horrid search function), I’m a captive audience,” Stapf said. “I”m disappointed that a platform that I used to really like became something I can’t stand. I was able to see what my friends posted, what my family was doing, all the things I wanted. And now it’s everything I don’t - everything is an advertisement, the algorithm feeds me everything it thinks I want and nothing I actually do.”
According to a recent Pew poll, 68 per cent of US adults use Facebook, three quarters of whom check the platform daily. When Facebook reaches a moment of crisis - and it’s had a lot of them recently - there’s a wave of those users who wonder why they are on the platform in the first place. With the news late last week that Facebook had suspended the data firm Cambridge Analytica for improperly collecting data from Facebook users, this viral discussion about quitting for good has started once again.
#DeleteFacebook is still trending on Twitter.
“The closest I got to deleting was maybe a year or so ago,” said Laurel Brooks, a 27-year-old program assistant in D.C. She wanted to focus on grad school, and the political content on her feed was becoming draining. “I was on the deactivation page and then remembered I had all my family pictures on there.”
Brooks’ mother was killed six years ago. Some of those photos were on her mother’s Facebook page, which she memorialised after her mother’s death. “I know I could still technically view it as a non-user, I just couldn’t do it,” Brooks said. Facebook, for Brooks, is also how she keeps in touch with family abroad, some of whom are otherwise hard to reach. She’s made real friends through communities and groups on the platform. But that reach is a double edged sword, in Brooks’ experience. Over the years since she joined Facebook in junior high school, her perception has shifted, and Facebook now feels more like a place that tries to “exploit” her personal information, even as it fails to, in her view, adequately address the harassment and hate speech she and her friends see on the platform.
“Quitting is a fine option. I just don’t think it’s a realistic option for so many people,” said Ben Grosser, an artist and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has developed several tools you can install on Facebook to help you realise its psychological impact - like one that hides the number of likes on all posts. “I’m intensely critical of the way Facebook is designed, but the fact is, there’s a reason 2 billion people are on Facebook and it’s not simply advertising.”
For some, Grosser said, quitting Facebook would be “devastating,” professionally or personally. But for others, quitting is a relief.
Steve Muscal quit Facebook in July. And once he made that decision, he just went for it. “I deactivated the account entirely without prior announcement or saving anything. If I’d spent time going through my page for things to save, I’d never have quit, and I knew it,” he said. — Washington Post.
Quitting is a fine option. I just don’t think it’s a realistic option for so many people. — Ben Grosser, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign