Taking a break from social media is progressing as I permanently deactivated my Facebook account today. I know I’m not going to miss it, although I was in a couple of useful groups.

Facebook often gets criticised for the lack of privacy. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product being sold”, and that is very much true. Facebook gets revenue from advertising. To be able to target ads, they need your data. Whatever you have in your Facebook profile, your friends, everything you have ever posted there or all the websites you ever visited that had a Facebook like button, they will all count. Even if you don’t have a Facebook profile, they will still probably keep a shadow profile of you, based on your phone number, email address or other identifiers they may get from you or people you interact with.

It’s really not much different to what Google does. They also depend on advertising. So does Twitter and most of the internet. That’s why ad and tracking blockers will improve your privacy and I recommend everyone to use them.

Don’t get me wrong though. Facebook will not give your address or phone number to 3rd party advertisers. It doesn’t work like that. The advertisers on their platform will want to target their ads to certain demographics and that’s how Facebook will show you the cat food ad. You liked so many cat pictures on your feed that they will think you probably have a cat.

Another more serious issue with Facebook is that they haven’t really bothered cleaning up their platform from hate speech. There are tools that allow you to report posts but you are most likely to receive the usual “This post does not violate our community standards” response.

Many groups are badly moderated and popular public posts will often get tons of hateful comments on them. This is really sad and depressing and the main reason why I wanted to leave the whole platform.

I also think that many friend connections on Facebook are superficial and you don’t really know them. Why do you connect with old school friends or workmates you haven’t seen or spoken with in 15-25 years? Do you actually care about them? Do they care about you? Well, some of them are still quite close friends but there are other means to communicate with them. I do have several chat groups with friends and people I used to work with, b~ut I bet there are a lot of Facebook friends who will not even notice I left.

Anyway, if Facebook makes you feel a bit depressed, take a little break and see how it improves your life.