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I have been mulling cancelling my Facebook account for a while now. Today as I was browsing I saw several Scientology ads. I know Facebook doesn't have an agend

I have been mulling cancelling my Facebook account for a while now. Today as I was browsing I saw several Scientology ads. I know Facebook doesn't have an agenda per se - you have the money, they have the adspace - but I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized. Facebook will never change unless they are forced to. We have signed away perhaps one of the most important experiments ever in digital social networking to a behemoth that chips away at your humanity the longer you stay on it. People who think I'm being dramatic almost always underestimate exactly how much data Facebook, Google, et al. collect on you and the extent to which they use it to manipulate you emotionally or with your wallet. Every facet of Facebook is designed to coerce you into an addiction that results in you spending more and more time on the site while you consume ever more advertising content. These enormous tech companies are kind of like the fast food of the Internet. They have erased individuality and served us an experience that is mass produced and shrink wrapped for our convenience. It's delicious and addictive, but we keep being told lies about the quality and safety of what we are consuming. We've become so reliant on it we've forgotten how to cook, if you'll extend the metaphor. I increasingly hate a lot of the what the Internet is. I always feel watched and directed to the point where I have trouble trusting what I'm reading, like watching manufactured drama in a reality TV show. I'm planning on setting up my own website as an expressive space where I can go to be creative and try to consume thoughtful content and (hopefully) make thoughtful content for people in return. I'm hoping there's a world of expressiveness and fun to be had in interacting with people on the Internet on one's own terms. Hope it turns out well!

disparate_dan 7y ago
I deleted mine a couple years ago and I haven’t regretted it or missed it at all, though I agonized over the decision for a long time because of fomo.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> I have been mulling cancelling my Facebook account for a while now Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years: 1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; then 2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; next 3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then 4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally 5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop. It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been over a year since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
- smichel17 7y ago
  When I deleted my account, I went through one additional step: 6. Delete your account. Create a new account under a pseudonym. Add a single friend, who can add you to group chats. At this point, you should have a near-empty news feed; Facebook is only for staying in touch with the group (eg, not missing out on social events) until people have gotten used to texting you to invite you to things. You won't be able to comment on anything public because if your account gets reported as a fake, you'll be locked out of the account unless you provide ID (which of course you can't do, since it's not your real name).
  - JensRex 7y ago
    >Create a new account under a pseudonym. I've not been on Facebook for years, and I tried doing this recently. It was relentless in pestering me for a phone number for "security reasons". It would not accept any of the online SMS services I found. I ended up abandoning it.
    - lisper 7y ago
      Sounds like a job for a burner phone.
      - JensRex 7y ago
        Yes, but there's no way I'm investing neither money nor time in jumping through silly Facebook hoops. What's to stop them from suddenly requiring dental x-rays, or some other nonsense, for "security reasons"?
      - markovbot 7y ago
        Why would someone buy a whole new phone just to use a shitty advertising network they explicitly did not want to use?
        gambiting 7y ago
        Who said anything about a phone? Prepaid SIM cards are free, top one up with £5 and you're good to go.
basicplus2 7y ago
Even worse, even if you don't have facebook you are still tracked by facebook from apps you use that track your activity for them. The only way to interact with what they collect is to have a facebook account! https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity
- lightswitch05 7y ago
  I maintain a hosts-formatted blacklist for all Facebook owned services, like Facebook and Instagram. Combined with a PiHole, its a fairly effective way to reduce tracking exposure to Facebook. https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/
Thriptic 7y ago
It's worth it. It is occasionally annoying to not be able to easily interact with some people or find a person or two to talk to, but other than that there isn't much downside. I got back time each day that I was wasting on FB, I found that I didn't care much about the content that I was missing, my privacy has improved, and I got away from the outrage culture that permeates most social networks. After I quit FB I was living with roommates who were constantly agro about random stuff that was ultimately irrelevant which they learned about through IG and Twitter. It was definitely making them less happy.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
I'm on -20 here so we don't care, but I wish these were "tech" companies as that would benefit society through actual physical innovation, but having some servers and (trivial) logic does not deserve the label tech. ASML does, AMD does. Facebook? No way. Google.. maybe. Why not just advertisement industry?
sleavey 7y ago
A few weeks ago I just logged out. I have since then never felt the need to log back in. Occasionally on autopilot I start typing the domain but when I realise I need to open my password manager and click a link in an email to log in, I lose interest.
ailideex 7y ago
> I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized. I actually don't entirely see the problem here. I mean taking money from Scientologists to fund services I use (I don't use facebook, but hypothetically if I did ...) is a good thing in my view. I guess you are worried that people will convert to Scientology, but really if the only thing that is keeping people from being Scientologists is not knowing about it then I think the problem is in no way related to Scientology. The real issue then is that large swathes of society have been advocating for completely abandoning any sense of objective values while they loudly shout value judgements at the top of their lungs like petulant children with no sense of propriety having temper tantrums. Blocking Scientology ads won't change that. You can't fix a problem not caused by the visibility of Scientology adds by changing the visibility of Scientology ads.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Ads don't just inform people that Scientology exists, that's widely known. They try to manipulate them into joining. The "real" problem here is that people can be manipulated like that. But until we find a way to remove that vulnerability we must stop Scientology from exploiting it.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    But is Scientology's view not that we are essentially manipulated into our current value and belief systems? Why does your goal of trying to limit their "manipulation" have more validity than their goal of limiting yours?
    - nemo 7y ago
      "Why does your goal of trying to limit their "manipulation" have more validity than their goal of limiting yours?" Because Scientology's views aren't held in good faith and claims about society should be assumed to be pretexts used to justify the quoted excuse for predatory behavior. Scientology has a history of fraud, kidnapping, extortion, and other extreme exploitation and don't deserve any benefit of the doubt. Their views do have less validity since they're known bad actors.
amelius 7y ago
Someone should write and maintain a library that can scrape Facebook accounts. This library could be used by software that can help people stay away from FB without the downside of missing out on things like events or groups.
- vermilingua 7y ago
  This would be impossible to maintain. Facebook regularly changes the layout of pages, and mangles the DOM to defeat adblocking, and also likely take anti scraping measures.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Yes, but are you familiar with the tool Youtube-DL, which is open-source, runs on Linux, and allows users to download content from youtube? This tool is very useful, and is constantly being updated after changes on YouTube that break the tool. If the tool doesn't work, you simply invoke it with the "-U" flag and it updates itself. So far, this tool has not failed me. I think a similar approach could be taken by this scraping library, though I admit it would be a lot of work to maintain it.
  - kodablah 7y ago
    There are other approaches like accessibility APIs and text selection based on positioning and visibility.
mdre 7y ago
Having deleted Facebook 3 years ago made my social life miserable. Any time I tried to join a real-life group activity I was always the one person being out of the loop and I had to pester a single person I chose, constantly, to get any updates. So after a few groups and gigs like that I finally chose to rejoin Facebook. One thing I tried to keep me out of addiction this time, was to unsubscribe from everything, so my wall is always either empty or only showing updates from the current group I'm participating in. And thus I have no real desire to scroll FB, cause nothing really happens there for me - automatically. What really bugged was that none of my closest friends really wanted to chat with me for those few years - they seemed to have a real mental barrier against switching to the regular Messages app.
stOneskull 7y ago
i'd love for everyone to have a website and a connection system so you 'friend' other websites.
Kaze404 7y ago
What an interesting timing. Just yesterday I got fed up with Facebook after I realized I was somehow angry about politics at 2am on the comments of a post that was 100% filled with bots. I can honestly take everything they (Facebook, Twitter, etc) do to a certain point to claw interactions out of me, but making me angry and my day worse is the breaking point.
muzani 7y ago
I quit FB as a new year's resolution. The main problem is that it's evil and I don't want to be encouraging more friends into the addiction. Something like TikTok has its evil, but it seems more trapped by their choices. Facebook has had their clear ethical choices and they prioritized growth every time. I feel we're approaching a sunset of companies that blatantly violate privacy. It's similar to how cigarettes and sugar were king once and suddenly society strikes back at them hard. As time goes by, bad stuff will gain traction faster, like a global virus, but we'll also develop antibodies for them faster.
clairity 7y ago
> "...I saw several Scientology ads. I know Facebook doesn't have an agenda per se [...] but I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized." scientology is certainly ethically dubious. it's a tax shelter and MLM to financially benefit it's leaders disguised as a religion, which attacks its detractors publicly. that some people find meaning and belonging there is incidental to it's purpose. so no love for scientology. but why would you expect facebook to ban advertising from them? and why would that be the last straw that made you quit facebook? facebook (particularly zuckerberg) itself has poor ethics, and that's as good a reason to quit facebook as one should need.
boublepop 7y ago
To be fair, the “ethical dubiousness” of Scientology isn’t much different from the chatholic church, Islam or other organized religions. They’ve just been the target of specific bad press, which they’re naturally trying to rectify. And I mean sure we can argue without end if preventing medical care to mentally disabled people is worse or less severe than harboring and protecting child molesters, or if it’s more unrealistic that we all have Alien soul fragments from a Vulcano explosion or that a superhuman beings once defied the laws of biology, chemistry and physics all in ways that are less impressive than what David Copperfield can pull off without assistance. But at the end of the day the all fit in the catagory of “Tax avoiding institutions based on a belief in obvious falsehoods harboring and protecting criminal behavior in their organizations” At time it honestly seems that the Mobs biggest mistake was not openly proclaiming a belief in man-bear-pig to justify their operations.
birdyrooster 7y ago
Step 1: Admit these people are not your friends and you don't actually have as many friends as you would like and that their lives are meaningless to know about Step 2: Download your backup copy of horribly over-compressed images and videos that Facebook ruins on your behalf Step 3: Deactivate and cancel your Facebook Step 4: Enjoy life

disparate_dan 7y ago

I deleted mine a couple years ago and I haven’t regretted it or missed it at all, though I agonized over the decision for a long time because of fomo.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> I have been mulling cancelling my Facebook account for a while now Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years: 1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; then 2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; next 3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then 4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally 5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop. It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been over a year since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)

smichel17 7y ago
When I deleted my account, I went through one additional step: 6. Delete your account. Create a new account under a pseudonym. Add a single friend, who can add you to group chats. At this point, you should have a near-empty news feed; Facebook is only for staying in touch with the group (eg, not missing out on social events) until people have gotten used to texting you to invite you to things. You won't be able to comment on anything public because if your account gets reported as a fake, you'll be locked out of the account unless you provide ID (which of course you can't do, since it's not your real name).
- JensRex 7y ago
  >Create a new account under a pseudonym. I've not been on Facebook for years, and I tried doing this recently. It was relentless in pestering me for a phone number for "security reasons". It would not accept any of the online SMS services I found. I ended up abandoning it.
  - lisper 7y ago
    Sounds like a job for a burner phone.
    - JensRex 7y ago
      Yes, but there's no way I'm investing neither money nor time in jumping through silly Facebook hoops. What's to stop them from suddenly requiring dental x-rays, or some other nonsense, for "security reasons"?
    - markovbot 7y ago
      Why would someone buy a whole new phone just to use a shitty advertising network they explicitly did not want to use?
      - gambiting 7y ago
        Who said anything about a phone? Prepaid SIM cards are free, top one up with £5 and you're good to go.

basicplus2 7y ago

Even worse, even if you don't have facebook you are still tracked by facebook from apps you use that track your activity for them. The only way to interact with what they collect is to have a facebook account! https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity

lightswitch05 7y ago
I maintain a hosts-formatted blacklist for all Facebook owned services, like Facebook and Instagram. Combined with a PiHole, its a fairly effective way to reduce tracking exposure to Facebook. https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/

Thriptic 7y ago

It's worth it. It is occasionally annoying to not be able to easily interact with some people or find a person or two to talk to, but other than that there isn't much downside. I got back time each day that I was wasting on FB, I found that I didn't care much about the content that I was missing, my privacy has improved, and I got away from the outrage culture that permeates most social networks. After I quit FB I was living with roommates who were constantly agro about random stuff that was ultimately irrelevant which they learned about through IG and Twitter. It was definitely making them less happy.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

I'm on -20 here so we don't care, but I wish these were "tech" companies as that would benefit society through actual physical innovation, but having some servers and (trivial) logic does not deserve the label tech. ASML does, AMD does. Facebook? No way. Google.. maybe. Why not just advertisement industry?

sleavey 7y ago

A few weeks ago I just logged out. I have since then never felt the need to log back in. Occasionally on autopilot I start typing the domain but when I realise I need to open my password manager and click a link in an email to log in, I lose interest.

ailideex 7y ago

> I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized. I actually don't entirely see the problem here. I mean taking money from Scientologists to fund services I use (I don't use facebook, but hypothetically if I did ...) is a good thing in my view. I guess you are worried that people will convert to Scientology, but really if the only thing that is keeping people from being Scientologists is not knowing about it then I think the problem is in no way related to Scientology. The real issue then is that large swathes of society have been advocating for completely abandoning any sense of objective values while they loudly shout value judgements at the top of their lungs like petulant children with no sense of propriety having temper tantrums. Blocking Scientology ads won't change that. You can't fix a problem not caused by the visibility of Scientology adds by changing the visibility of Scientology ads.

anoncake 7y ago
Ads don't just inform people that Scientology exists, that's widely known. They try to manipulate them into joining. The "real" problem here is that people can be manipulated like that. But until we find a way to remove that vulnerability we must stop Scientology from exploiting it.
- ailideex 7y ago
  But is Scientology's view not that we are essentially manipulated into our current value and belief systems? Why does your goal of trying to limit their "manipulation" have more validity than their goal of limiting yours?
  - nemo 7y ago
    "Why does your goal of trying to limit their "manipulation" have more validity than their goal of limiting yours?" Because Scientology's views aren't held in good faith and claims about society should be assumed to be pretexts used to justify the quoted excuse for predatory behavior. Scientology has a history of fraud, kidnapping, extortion, and other extreme exploitation and don't deserve any benefit of the doubt. Their views do have less validity since they're known bad actors.

amelius 7y ago

Someone should write and maintain a library that can scrape Facebook accounts. This library could be used by software that can help people stay away from FB without the downside of missing out on things like events or groups.

vermilingua 7y ago
This would be impossible to maintain. Facebook regularly changes the layout of pages, and mangles the DOM to defeat adblocking, and also likely take anti scraping measures.
- amelius 7y ago
  Yes, but are you familiar with the tool Youtube-DL, which is open-source, runs on Linux, and allows users to download content from youtube? This tool is very useful, and is constantly being updated after changes on YouTube that break the tool. If the tool doesn't work, you simply invoke it with the "-U" flag and it updates itself. So far, this tool has not failed me. I think a similar approach could be taken by this scraping library, though I admit it would be a lot of work to maintain it.
- kodablah 7y ago
  There are other approaches like accessibility APIs and text selection based on positioning and visibility.

mdre 7y ago

Having deleted Facebook 3 years ago made my social life miserable. Any time I tried to join a real-life group activity I was always the one person being out of the loop and I had to pester a single person I chose, constantly, to get any updates. So after a few groups and gigs like that I finally chose to rejoin Facebook. One thing I tried to keep me out of addiction this time, was to unsubscribe from everything, so my wall is always either empty or only showing updates from the current group I'm participating in. And thus I have no real desire to scroll FB, cause nothing really happens there for me - automatically. What really bugged was that none of my closest friends really wanted to chat with me for those few years - they seemed to have a real mental barrier against switching to the regular Messages app.

stOneskull 7y ago

i'd love for everyone to have a website and a connection system so you 'friend' other websites.

Kaze404 7y ago

What an interesting timing. Just yesterday I got fed up with Facebook after I realized I was somehow angry about politics at 2am on the comments of a post that was 100% filled with bots. I can honestly take everything they (Facebook, Twitter, etc) do to a certain point to claw interactions out of me, but making me angry and my day worse is the breaking point.

muzani 7y ago

I quit FB as a new year's resolution. The main problem is that it's evil and I don't want to be encouraging more friends into the addiction. Something like TikTok has its evil, but it seems more trapped by their choices. Facebook has had their clear ethical choices and they prioritized growth every time. I feel we're approaching a sunset of companies that blatantly violate privacy. It's similar to how cigarettes and sugar were king once and suddenly society strikes back at them hard. As time goes by, bad stuff will gain traction faster, like a global virus, but we'll also develop antibodies for them faster.

clairity 7y ago

> "...I saw several Scientology ads. I know Facebook doesn't have an agenda per se [...] but I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized." scientology is certainly ethically dubious. it's a tax shelter and MLM to financially benefit it's leaders disguised as a religion, which attacks its detractors publicly. that some people find meaning and belonging there is incidental to it's purpose. so no love for scientology. but why would you expect facebook to ban advertising from them? and why would that be the last straw that made you quit facebook? facebook (particularly zuckerberg) itself has poor ethics, and that's as good a reason to quit facebook as one should need.

boublepop 7y ago

To be fair, the “ethical dubiousness” of Scientology isn’t much different from the chatholic church, Islam or other organized religions. They’ve just been the target of specific bad press, which they’re naturally trying to rectify. And I mean sure we can argue without end if preventing medical care to mentally disabled people is worse or less severe than harboring and protecting child molesters, or if it’s more unrealistic that we all have Alien soul fragments from a Vulcano explosion or that a superhuman beings once defied the laws of biology, chemistry and physics all in ways that are less impressive than what David Copperfield can pull off without assistance. But at the end of the day the all fit in the catagory of “Tax avoiding institutions based on a belief in obvious falsehoods harboring and protecting criminal behavior in their organizations” At time it honestly seems that the Mobs biggest mistake was not openly proclaiming a belief in man-bear-pig to justify their operations.

birdyrooster 7y ago

Step 1: Admit these people are not your friends and you don't actually have as many friends as you would like and that their lives are meaningless to know about Step 2: Download your backup copy of horribly over-compressed images and videos that Facebook ruins on your behalf Step 3: Deactivate and cancel your Facebook Step 4: Enjoy life