Each other over Facebook
Quitting Facebook
I'm quitting Facebook, and I'm really excited about it! But this must seem a strange way to feel about boycotting a service, so let me explain. It didn’t bother me for years knowing that Facebook feasted on the crumbs of my personal information, but now that I'm convinced Facebook is a hazard to our society it's easy to see that we have alternatives.
Facebook's actual value is just letting us find each other and communicate online. There are a host of other ways we can do this without propping up their disinformation machine (more on that later). I'm thrilled at the prospect of using services I actually believe in to connect with you. But before we get to that let me be clear on why I think Facebook should be abandoned.
Facebook's business model depends on keeping us feeling good. They use our secrets to fill our feeds with ads and posts we are predisposed to agree with, while suppressing ideas that would challenge us. They create for each of us a custom lens with which to look at the world. One that keeps us happy, so we keep looking through it. But it’s not a true lens. They even, as a matter of strategy, pass over ads of merit to promote sensational ones. This practice benefits propagandists and extremists and buries content of integrity. If you’ve been wondering why America has become so divided over the last decade, in a word, the answer is Facebook.
Let’s take a hard look at our society. Let's choose each other over Facebook.
