Blog 20th May 2019 – Ditching Facebook I've been pondering the relative merits of social media for quite a while now. When the Snowden NSA releases first came out, I think everyone was surprised by the almost comic lack of privacy we enjoy on social media. Facebook looked particularly bad because their own API's seemed to permit unrestricted access to posts and PM's on the site (in the film, an NSA tech' gleefully boasts that facebook is his "bitch"). Nonexistent security was again confirmed by the huge Cambridge Analytica data leak, where millions of personal profiles were exposed, without consent. Unsurprisingly, in February this year facebook US market share dropped from 80 to 47% in just two months. Folks were voting with their feet and these days, there are some quite good alternatives such as MeWe, Minds, and Pinterest. I always understood that being on facebook was a trade of my own personal privacy balanced against the advantage of ease of communications with like minded folks, or folks who have some shared interest or just plain ordinary family... all the time knowing that I have absolutely nothing to hide. But what I hadn't realised was that while users of facebook (think of them as Bob and Alice) might be busy putting the world to rights in a private conversation, someone in government would be recording their every word, permanently, to be used in searches or lord knows what years down the line. That, I hadn't realised. You might argue that if you have nothing to hide, surely you have nothing to fear. Snowden captured the problem with this argument rather well when he wrote: saying you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. The problem being that one day, you might have something very important to say. If government can eavesdrop on your every word then there are other more subtle risks, because interpretation, often bereft of context, may lead to inacurate conclusion(s) - a problem nicely captured in the historic quotation from Cardinal Richelieu, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged".
Ditch Facebook
The last straw for me was the censorship announced by facebook in May 2019... under the guise of "removing dangerous people" which banned some legitimate nasties, but also grabbed the opportunity to throw a bunch of conservatives under the same bus. I don't even vaguely like Alex Jones, but I do enjoy listening to the arguments made by Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson, who provide articulate and valuable conservative views.
The fact that I might like or not like Alex Jones is not the issue, for if you believe in free speech you are obliged to listen to those with opposing views, just so that you can have a say. I may dislike every word Jones has to say, but I would defend his right to speak. Unfortunately, these days folks have a nasty habit of shutting down any kind of opposing view often by screaming a one word accusation at the speaker, blinkers down, spittle flying. Those folks may applaud facebook censorship... but in time, that same censorship will be knocking on their door. What goes around comes around...
I'd been in facebook since 2006 and so was a member of a great many groups... but increasingly the content of group posts were subject to censorship, often by autonomous AI bots... which seem to have perfected the art of getting the wrong end of the stick. A perfectly innocent post results in a ban. The poster then finds themselves in a position of having to try to appeal after the event, without any clear understanding of the offence and without any knowledge of who they are meant to appeal too. Most times the appeal, such as it was, would either be ignored or dismissed.
Ditch Facebook
Group admin members might spend years setting up a group with tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of members only to find one morning the group had vanished... all because facebook deemed something that any one of those members had posted was inappropriate. You'd think it would be easy to find out what the problem was and rectify it, but that was never the case with facebook. Don't get me wrong, I fully applaud the idea of taking down a group doing something wrong... but I would equally expect the process to be in some way accountable... which it isn't and probably never will be with facebook where a blank look and the automated response computer says no seems to be the order of the day. Who makes the rules in facebook, what are the aims and who or what enforce these rules... beyond bots (with the intellect of a worm), or third party companies incentivised by cuts rather than the ability to detect and encourage reasoned argument. All of that is unknown, but what is known is that if you choose to login to facebook, you are in their playroom and so their rules apply. It's a binary decision, you either suck it up, or you leave. Before initiating the leave process, I ordered a full archive of all my facebook data - which is easy to do. For desktop users, click on the right hand down arrow located on the top horizontal nav bar and select settings. Look down the left hand options and select "Your facebook information". Finally click the "download your information" link to start the process. The file takes a while to generate depending on how busy you've been on facebook and so the server will email you when the file is ready. Once that data file was safely downloaded, I instructed facebook to delete my account (using the same page but just selecting the "delete your account and information" link). Facebook build in a 30 day cooling off period to the process before they actually start deleting data - and during that time your account will be unusable. So if you want to say goodbye, do it a week or so before you initiate the process. I've been a member of facebook for such a long time and I know that I will miss chatting with friends and family in that forum... ...but I don't think I'm going to miss facebook itself. Not at all... Comment | Back to Quick Links...