Breaking up with Facebook is hard to do
HAVE you tried to erase Facebook from your computer?
It’s like killing an AI that doesn’t want to die.
It starts with the pleading: “You might hate me, but could you do this to them?” And it shows a gallery of photos of friends and family.
Your emotional manipulation won’t work with me, evil robot! I click “Proceed”.
It starts bargaining: “How about a short break, so you can come back later?” The panic is showing. But it is too late for that . You betrayed my trust and now you must pay.
Farewell, corporate surveillance! I consulted five online how-tos on how to delete my account.
The how-tos must have been planted by Facebook to sow maximum confusion so users give up halfway. I got as far as deactivating, but not deleting, my account, because I am weak.
What if I am, as the dying AI suggests, being hasty?
Give the app a life sentence and, given time, it might clear its name.
Capital punishment, however, is forever. Deletion does sound final and, in one sense, it is. (If Facebook is to be believed.)
It implies that all the things one has uploaded will be erased.
And that is why it is so hard to get rid of an account.
The app began life as a way for founder Mark Zuckerberg to rate the attractiveness of women on campus, but now it has pictures of friends and family, and that gives it the status of a handmade quilt, laboured over for years, stitch by stitch.
But that is not true, of course. It just feels that way to us because humans really like giving humanity to objects. We can’t stop ourselves. It’s like we have too much of it and it leaks out.
We grant humanity to Facebook, buildings, old cars and trees.
So if Facebook is a person, then it has been a very bad person who deserves jail for what it has done.
I’m used to all sorts of horrible things being done to my data – the passwords stored in leaky servers that hackers walk right into – or having my data turned into shopping suggestions that follow me everywhere online.
But Facebook went further. The company’s negligence led to the profiles of 50 million users being sold to data-crunching company Cambridge Analytica. As a result, as one whistle-blower puts it, it could conduct “psychological warfare” on the users. If you’re not alarmed by this, perhaps you should be.
We like being around people who agree with us. Targeted ads exploit this preference. With every “like” and “share”, Cambridge Analytica knows more about you and – I believe it rubs its hands and cackles while doing this – fills your timeline with messages that turn lukewarm biases into fullblown beliefs.
This goes beyond the echo chamber effect.
Echo chambers exist because we friend people we agree with and unfriend those we do not.
But you cannot unfriend manipulative advertising.
Unlike that racist uncle you blocked, it never goes away.
That tactic, if applied to what the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria does, would be called radicalisation.
That we are not more afraid of this could be because it exploits another bias of ours – snobbery.
Cambridge Analytica is not taking contracts from wingnuts in robes or sinister guys in military uniforms, but from serious white men in business suits who happen to have certain ideas about how to run a country that happen to fall in line with the political aims of dictators.
Facebook’s privacy issues surfaced a few years ago, which was when I first deactivated it.
I crawled back to it some weeks later because I had to get in touch with someone urgently on Facebook Messenger.
Since then, like a home owner worried that his neighbour might be a serial killer but lacking proof, I kept my interactions brief, reluctant and vague.
I’ve quit and come back a few times, actually. I am a bad breaker-upper. But this time I plan to stay away. I promise.
Next step: WhatsApp.
Can someone tell me how to stop group chats from turning into cesspools of smut or dodgy news?
Let me know? – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
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