The "#deleteFacebook" tag is so quaint. It's quaint that anyone believes they can "delete" their Facebook account, or that doing so would ever be up to the user

The "#deleteFacebook" tag is so quaint. It's quaint that anyone believes they can "delete" their Facebook account, or that doing so would ever be up to the user to decide. Need evidence? The centralized nature of websites is structural evidence -- any service can offer you a "delete" button and let you think you're causing that item to be deleted. In reality, service admins control what happens to the data. Hacker News post revisions, for instance, could be kept at HN admin's discretion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962 is a discussion about "Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted". Any time you rely on someone else's computer ("the cloud") to store your data, you rely on them to act in accordance with your choices. This is basic 'how information flows' stuff and it's still valid and still true. Centralization is popular with admins because of the power it grants them. The issues are much the same for "deleting" an account on some service as they are for censorship power on web-based discussion sites because the same underlying centralized structure is at work. Website discussion forums are single points of censorship (including this one); the same site deployment choices are made in order to allow the elite few (site admins and those they choose to grant some morsel of censorious power -- moderation point holders) to decide which posts are hidden (moderated down so they're silently obscured) or promoted (moderated up so the thread shows in default settings). And all of this is designed to be done in a mostly unaccountable way by people whom you'll never identify. The differences from one discussion site to another tend to be relatively minor, the running theme of "don't you dare deviate from the narrative!" persists across implementations. So be careful; your past edits and ability to be heard are more in the hands of people you don't know (and therefore can't trust) when you use sites like these.