The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of “fake news” and disinformation, mounting crises have raised the question: Is Facebook more harmful than helpful? This major, two-night event investigates a series of warnings to Facebook as the company grew from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room to a global empire. With dozens of original interviews and rare footage, The Facebook Dilemma examines the powerful social media platform’s impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

Overall, it was a pretty good documentary. They weren't lying about the original interviews and rare footage. It reveals insights into company culture — why Facebook is the way it is now and how they got there.

Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

The bits on privacy was eye opening, even when I already expected it to be. I was still surprised at what I saw in the documentary. One thing I learned, is that Facebook doesn't actually care about the data that I thought they would care about. They don't care about the personal details in your life. They don't care about your embarrassing photos. Or the personal drama that spills into your wall. They don't care about all that, unless that data can be used to target specific ads. It is all about revenue and growth for them. These were the main considerations for determining what Facebook would do next as a business.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that played out on Facebook was alarming. That was the first time I saw how a country could weaponize Facebook to further their agenda. It is on Facebook to be smart enough to stop this from happening again in the future.

Back when I was looking into ways to lower my social media consumption, I kept running into the same comment online — that something horrible happened in Myanmar and the Philippines because of Facebook. After watching the documentary, I now understand what happened in those two countries. Facebook could have had a hand in stopping what was happening, but didn't.

An interesting revelation in the documentary was how people in Macedon were making money off Facebook. They did it by writing and posting about Trump. These people had no hidden political agenda. They didn't care about politics. They were just trying to make money. And they were making money because Facebook's algorithm favors controversial articles and posts.

I think one of the most important lines in the documentary was from Alexis Madrigal, who writes for The Atlantic. He said something like, “Facebook took on the role of a news editor, but did not want to take on the responsibility of being an editor.” The result is the proliferation of fake news on their news feeds.

This PBS documentary and The Great Hack from Netflix, are must-watch documentaries if you want to educate yourself on the dangers of social media. Anyone who uses social media, or has family or friends who use social media, or anyone who cares about a working democracy needs to educate themselves on the dangers of social media.

Lastly, and this is more of a rant than it is commentary on the documentary — it frustrates me that people don't take the threat of behavior manipulation on social media seriously. It has happened before, it will happen again. Unless Facebook takes responsibility for content on their site, this will happen again. I probably sound like a middle-aged paranoid netizen to my friends. But I believe that there is a danger to social media, especially in the way that most people use them today.

And before I sound like a hypocrite, yes I do have a new Facebook account. No, I'm not using it the same way I did years ago. Here are the guidelines for the use of my Facebook account. I'm only on Facebook because 100% of the people I want to stay connected with are on Facebook.

Anyway, I have my Facebook news feed locked down tight. The result is that there are no controversial posts that show up on my news feed. I could scroll to the bottom of my news feed in less than 30 seconds. There are even days when my Facebook news feed comes up empty. What a glorious sight that is. And that is important because it cuts down on behavior manipulation from my news feed. For folks in the US, this is more important than ever because 2020 is another election year.

I'll end this post with a quote on what I said after watching the The Great Hack on Netflix:

Watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. If you need any more reasons to quit Facebook, then watch this documentary. At the very least, if you live in a democratic country, you should watch it to see how Facebook could be a threat to democracy. I'm not saying they are actively trying to undermine democracy. I'm saying you should inform yourself about their capabilities and what they have done with it in the past.

My biggest takeaway from it is, people need to be mindful of the possibility of their behavior being influenced by the feed on Facebook. If there is an election coming for instance, you should quit Facebook, or at the least, avoid it until the election is done. This is so that your judgement will not be influenced by what you see on your feed.

This post is Day 5 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

Tags: #Bookmarks #SocialMedia #Facebook #100DaysToOffload

Rules for Logging In

No installation of the Facebook app on my phone. I'll only login to Facebook using a browser. Ideally, only via a browser on a laptop or PC.

Right now I'm allowing myself to use the browser on my phone to add friends and to reply to comments. That is only temporary, until such time that my friends list stabilizes. I'm giving myself a week at most. After that, I'll only access Facebook via a browser on a laptop or PC.

If need be, to avoid distractions and preserve my attention, I will disable the browser on my phone, or I can block the Facebook website on my phone via the iOS Screen Time settings. – I'm hoping I won't have to do that.

I'm going to be using a modified version of the 3/60 rule to determine how often to login to Facebook. I'm thinking mine will be the 5/60 rule, where I can only login to Facebook at most 5 times in a week, for no more than 60 minutes total. So that would give at most 12 minutes per login. I think that should be enough to reply to comments, share new posts and visit a few profiles.

Rules for Managing the Newsfeed

No following of any accounts/profiles or pages except for my wife’s account. This should cause the newsfeed to be pretty much empty, except for the posts that my wife makes.

An exception to this rule is if I find a profile that has consistently interesting posts. Similar to following a good blog or website, in such a case, I will allow their posts to show up on my newsfeed.

If for any reason my newsfeed starts causing me pain, I will unfollow everyone, including my wife. – Don't worry, I already told her about this and she said she will still make me sandwiches for work.

Rules for Posting Content

No posting of Facebook only content. By this I mean content that can only be found on Facebook, or content that is only shared on Facebook, or content that only Facebook users can see or any variation of that. I'll only post content that links to this site. The point is to get people out of Facebook and into my website(s).

No posting of photos of material things. No posting of any photos that fall under the “my life is better than yours” category. No posting of any “highlight reels” photos or any photo that can be considered “fake lives online”.

If you are a friend on Facebook and you see me violating this rule, please feel free to call me out on it.

Rules for Facebook Groups

No joining of any Facebook groups, except groups whose members I know personally.

Rules for Notifications

No notifications for Likes or any other superficial activity that Facebook wants to notify me about. – Right now I have it setup to where I only get notifications for comments, tags that need to be reviewed and accepted friend requests.

Rules for Interacting with Friends

No clicking of the Like button or any of the available emoji reactions unless I already made a comment. If I can't be bothered to make a comment, then I cannot click the Like button.

Ideally, I just write comments and leave it at that. The point here is to try and initiate a conversation with my friends.

Rules for Managing Friends List

How to decide who I can add to my Friends list? I can only add family and friends who I know personally, who I have talked to personally in the past and who add value to my life. If you do not fall into these categories, feel free to make an appeal by sending me a message. Otherwise, those rules are set for my own sanity, not yours.

An exception to this rule are good friends I made online back when I was still playing MMORPGs.

Can I add co-workers? Co-workers from a previous job, sure why not, as long as they fall into the criteria I listed above for adding friends. Other co-workers are better off adding me on LinkedIn instead.

Lastly, I'm going to limit my Friend list to no more than 100 people. This is based off Dunbar's number, which is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Clarifications

So if I'm only following my wife’s account, what's the point of adding people to my friends list? Good question. The point is to be intentional of my use of Facebook. I want my newsfeed to be as short and tidy as possible. I'm even willing to unfollow my wife’s account if the newsfeed starts giving me problems. I will be scheduling days when I will visit my friends profiles to see what they're up to. It's as simple as that.

How did I come up with these rules? If you're wondering why the guidelines/rules I have are the way they are, you should look into why I tried quitting social media in the first place. In addition to that, I got some of those ideas from Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism book and from the various comments you can find on his blog posts.

Tags: #SocialMedia #Facebook

They're not going to do this as long as they're doing so well financially and there's no regulatory oversight. And consumer backlash doesn't really work because I can't leave Facebook, all my friends and family around the world are there. You might not like the company. You might not like its privacy policies. You might not like the way its algorithm works. You might not like its business model. But what are you going to do?

I feel trapped in the same way. All my family and friends are on Facebook. None of them maintain personal websites or blogs like I do. It's not that FOMO got to me, but more of the fact that they can't seem to reach me after I've deactivated my Facebook account. It doesn't help that all my really close friends, my “barkada” as we call it in my native tongue, they all live in a different continent than me. So, I don't have the luxury of hanging out with them on weekends to maintain our friendship. Had I had that option, I'm positive I could have gone on without a Facebook account.

The second event is a comment a good friend of mine made on Facebook, on a post my wife shared from Valentine's Day. He asked my wife to send his regards my way. I was like, “Why does he have to do that? Well because I'm not on Facebook.” I kinda felt bad that it seems like I’m making it hard for them to reach me. It’s really not that hard, they can send me a message through Facebook Messenger or send me an email, but they probably didn’t know that they could do that. When I deactivated my Facebook account over a year ago, I didn’t have a personal website yet at that time. And when I did get my sites up and running a couple of months later, I didn’t exactly go back to let them all know that I now have a personal website they can visit.

Some more notes and observations I made from a year away from Facebook:

• People are just not going out of their way to communicate with me outside of Facebook. Usually they would just tell my wife, who would then tell me. They have the option of sending me a message or an email, but that didn't happen. Anyway, the point being, they would rather stay in Facebook, most likely because it is easy, it is convenient. I can't blame them for that because it is true, Facebook makes it easy and convenient.
• The experiment with Instagram didn’t work out. I was hoping they (my family and friends) would find my site through Instagram, but that just isn’t happening. Also, I was hoping my friends would share more photos in Instagram, but most of them just post photos on their Facebook accounts instead. This was evidenced by the lack of photos in my Instagram feed during the holidays. In the meantime, my wife kept telling me about how big the sons and daughters of my friends were based on photos she was seeing on Facebook. So yeah, they weren't really posting to Instagram like I thought they would.
• My friends exclusively post to Facebook. I don’t know anyone who maintains a blog like me. To comment on their posts, I have to be in Facebook. I mean I could send them a message through Facebook Messenger, but then my comment would have no context.
• I need a way to let them know that I have a website without having to message them one by one. I don’t want it to look like I’m promoting my site via messages. I want to try and get people out of Facebook and into the world wide web, by sharing links to this site on my Facebook wall.
• There’s built-in comments section for my friends only since they stay in Facebook all day. If that doesn’t get them to comment on my posts, I don’t know what will.
• Nowadays people announce events on Facebook first, versus any other option. My friend invited me to their wedding on Facebook. Thankfully my wife is still on Facebook, otherwise I’m not sure how we would have known.
• People are reluctant to move on from Facebook. They don’t have the same motivations I do and I don't blame them for wanting to stay. So, I need to adapt to the current way of life online. My friends live in a totally different continent than me, so it is hard to maintain that connection when I could not hang out with them every weekend. Since my only way to stay connected is through messaging and social media, a new Facebook account is a compromise I'm making. If I can't reach them from the outside, I'll try to reach them from the inside.
• Mastodon would have been a nice alternative to Facebook, but most of my friends don’t even know it exists. I asked friends of mine who are also software developers and not one of them have ever heard of Mastodon. If my techy friends didn't know about it, you can bet my non techy friends didn't know about it either. Just knowing that it exists is one thing, convincing them to ditch Facebook for Mastodon is a totally different undertaking. There's no point for me to be on Mastodon, if I can't convince my friends to join in.

At the end of the day, my attempt to replace social media (Facebook) with a personal website didn’t really work out. Most of my friends still probably don’t know that this site exists. (I'm working on changing that with my new Facebook account.) The others know for sure, but that’s because I share links to this site in our group chat. I always feel slightly embarrassed about doing that though, because it feels as if I’m promoting my website to them. So, I’ll share links to this site on my Facebook Wall instead. Nothing is changing as far as this site is concerned. I'll still be posting on here regularly as this is still my preferred home on the web.

I have to admit to feeling like I lost my battle with Facebook. With all my posts on #DigitalMinimalism, I felt like a fraud creating my Facebook account last night. However, I also know that it was not really working out for me. More than one year away from Facebook taught me that. That said, I'm not going back to Facebook empty handed. I have since learned a number of tips and tricks that I can apply on the use of this new Facebook account of mine. In a future post, I'll share some guidelines for how I'm going to be using my new Facebook account with the goal of minimizing distractions and keeping my attention intact.

Tags: #Facebook #SocialMedia

Update: I ended up creating a new Facebook account, here's why.

It didn’t feel that way in the beginning though. I thought sharing photos about my car, my gadgets, my road trips/vacations, my son, was one of the best ways to utilize Facebook. Somehow I forgot that the point was to connect with other people. But what else is there to do after you’ve added them as a friend, have browsed through their profile and liked/commented on their posts? Anyways, of course I was rewarded with some likes here and there, which simply made me want to do it more. It was not until I noticed other people doing the same thing that I started to question what I was doing.

Was I rubbing people the wrong way by regularly posting about my “highlight reels” on Facebook? Was it offending people that I was posting about my car or mobile phone, when other people on my friends list can’t even readily afford those items? Was I being insensitive when I post photos of my son when I have friends who want to, but could not have kids?

One time I kept posting about the car seat that I bought for my son. It was a Britax B-Safe 35 Elite infant car seat. I thought it was really cool and so I was regularly posting photos of it online. At one point a friend commented, asking me if I was advertising the car seat. I was like “no, I’m not,” but that made me stop and reflect on what I was doing. I couldn’t tell if my friend was offended or if he was just genuinely asking a question. Either way, after receiving that comment, I never posted about the car seat again.

I also noticed that it became more of a competition when other people started posting about the same thing or the same themes. It was like a contest of:

• who had the best vacation?
• who had the newest phone?
• who had the coolest gaming PC?
• who had the most expensive car?
• who had the fanciest dinner?
• who has the smartest kid?

All of it leading up to, who has the better life? It was like people were unconsciously one-upping each other. Anything you can do, I can do better. If I can’t do it better, then I will at least show everyone that I can keep up.

Such is the extent of the influence that Facebook has on how people use their app/service, that people don’t even notice what they are doing. As long as the likes keep coming, they’ll want to continue doing what they were doing, almost unconsciously. All this happens almost unconsciously. Whether or not people knew what, or why they were posting about the things they were posting, I don’t know. All I know is, I was unconsciously a participant in that contest, a contest that I no longer wanted to be in.

If you stop posting about material things, what is there to post about everyday? Well you can post selfies, or you can post about your feelings or you can post about your kids. I don’t do selfies, and I don’t post about dramas in my life, and I have stopped regularly posting photos of my son due to privacy concerns, so that left me with nothing to post about. And considering how much tiring the news feed was and how it was making me judge other people, why bother keeping my account active?

#SocialMedia #QuittingSocialMedia #Facebook

Anyway, check out the link below. The readme page should have all the info you need to do this.

Link: DeleteFB

Tags: #Facebook #Tools

Update: I ended up creating a new Facebook account, here's why.

My wife said the problem with me is that I read through every post that is shared on my news feed. Yes, I do. Isn't that the point of the news feed? To see what people are sharing? My wife has this ability, where she can just scroll through posts without really looking at them, or more importantly, without being affected by them. I don't have that ability. I stop to look at every post that is shared. And so if the post evokes some kind of negative emotion in me, I sometimes, unfortunately start getting judgemental. And I really, really don't want to be that kind of person. Who am I to judge really? I don't know what that person was going through when they shared that post; I shouldn't be judging.

So I started trying to be mindful of my thoughts. Whenever I see a post, I would try to remind myself not to judge. I can't really say that it worked all the time. Sometimes my brain was too tired from work that I didn't remember to be mindful anymore. I would then catch myself being judgemental and feel bad, feel embarrassed. Then I wonder, what am I even gaining from browsing through my news feed?

What's weird is how I don't get judgemental when interacting with people in the real world. Maybe it's the fact that I can talk to them, I can read their body language, I can listen to the intonation of their voice when they speak. I feel like you don't get judgemental when socializing with people in the real world, because you get some context with regards to what they are saying or doing at the moment.

Unfortunately you don't get that context online. I found that this problem for me only occurs on social media, like with Facebook. So as soon as I realized that the news feed was making me unconsciously judgemental, I cut it out. I quit. Deactivated my account and now I don't have this problem anymore.

#SocialMedia #QuittingSocialMedia #Facebook

Update: I ended up creating a new Facebook account, here's why.

I couldn't control the news feed. It wasn't for lack of trying too. During the months leading up to the day when I deactivated my account, I put in a lot of effort to try to control my news feed. Here are some of the things I tried:

• I went through all the pages I followed and “unfollowed” those that didn't post worthwhile content, or those whose content no longer meant anything to me.
• I went through all the Facebook groups I was member of and left those that I didn't want to be a part of anymore. One group I was in had some form of online drama every month or so. I was surprised that I didn't leave that FB group earlier. I didn't just leave a group because of what showed up on my news feed either; I left other groups due to privacy and security reasons. Some groups I only became a member of, out of courtesy to the one who created the group. However if I didn't know the other members, that ends up as being a security issue for me.
• Lastly I did the same thing for my friends on Facebook. I went through all of the people on my friends list and evaluated whose posts get to show up on my news feed. I gotta be honest, while some people had really worthwhile posts, others posted or shared crap. The people that posted crap got “unfollowed”, sorry. However, just because they were “unfollowed” doesn't mean I no longer want to be friends with them; I just couldn't stand their posts. Which is sad really. Facebook is supposed to connect people, but here it is causing a rift between friends.

So anyway I did all that plus implemented a new rule for myself. Whenever I open up my Facebook news feed, I would go through the first 5-10 posts and evaluate them. If the post wasn't worth my time, in other words if it didn't add value to my life, the post will get blocked/hidden. If I notice that I keep blocking posts from the same person, I then “unfollow” that person.

All this worked for a week or two, but I still always ended up unsatisfied after browsing through my news feed. (Side note, infinite news feeds are evil!) After awhile I simply got tired of policing my news feed. Why was I wasting all this time trying to clean up my news feed, when I could be doing more productive things? So I simply quit. Deactivated my account and never had to deal with the news feed again.

Wow it feels good to write all this down. Thank you write.as!

Also thanks to bleak and pretty for the idea of using giphy to add memes on here.

#SocialMedia #QuittingSocialMedia #Facebook