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I deleted my FB a while ago and it truely helped my online mental health. The fb feed was full of false news and hate speech. I reported as much as I could but

• carabiner 5y ago
  You must have spent a lot of time arguing politics with your friends. My feed is really benign. It's mostly family/travel/outdoors photos.
• marto1 5y ago
  > false news and hate speech I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.
  • raducu 5y ago
    Just unfollow everybody. It's such a liberating thing to do. You can still manually check on people if you want to and you can still message them. After a few weeks it feels like a superpower "wow, so I can just use facebook for 5 minutes every couple of days and easily stop using it? Unbelievable!"
• nradov 5y ago
  If that's what your friends were sharing then maybe you need better friends?
  • feupan 5y ago
    Yes and no. Groups are the best part of Facebook and with good information also comes the spam.
  • nomel 5y ago
    Maybe I’m old school, but there’s usually more to someone than what they share on Facebook. One of the funniest people I know, and a good real life friend for nearly a two two decades, posts dumb stuff like that all the time. We also have great conversations full of conflicting viewpoints, which I love, and we’ve both changed the others perspectives. I don’t really care what their political beliefs or medical choices are. We can find common interests outside of that. It doesn’t affect me. For some reason, that’s now the primary focus of many peoples lives and identity. He’s more than that, and I hope I am too.
    • ribosometronome 5y ago
      Posts dumb stuff like fake news and hate speech?
  • sudhirj 5y ago
    Social media worsens people’s perceptions of the world can actively influences what they share and consider their own opinion. The same point applies to family, for example, and whether I need better family or not they’re all I’ve got. And Facebook has pushed them really far down whatever fringe they had a slight inclination to. Before Facebook any extreme views could be tempered a bit in family conversations, but now everyone thinks they have the weight and authority of the whole world, or at least their tribe, behind every argument. This bait and switch is not something we agreed to as a society. We joined for the pics of partners, kids and puppies, and to stalk and ‘poke’ people we had real life crushes on. We stayed because we found a million welcoming tribes all defined by hatred and anger.
    • markdown 5y ago
      > but now everyone thinks they have the weight and authority of the whole world, or at least their tribe, behind every argument. You hit the nail on the head. I have close relatives I'd never ever imagined I'd not want showing up at family functions :(
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      I still have mostly kids and puppies. Occasionally some not especially funny jokes. YMMV
    • scarface74 5y ago
      But either way, is FB really to blame for your family’s lack of discernment? I’ve set plenty of family members to “unfollow” so I don’t have to deal with their craziness. I’m also not above to distancing myself from crazy family members in real life.
      • twelve40 5y ago
        Yeah, I really don't get this all or nothing approach. Either I'm on Facebook reading every single piece of crap whoever throws my way, or I'm quitting the evil social media cold turkey. Why?
    • collaborative 5y ago
  • Morgawr 5y ago
    I hear this very often and while deep down it's a reasonable take, the more you think about it, the less useful as advice it becomes. While I can't comment about Facebook specifically (I haven't been on it for over a decade by now), but I've seen the same happen on many other platforms as social media has become staple of life. I know people I've been friends with (and I mean, close friends) for almost two decades by now. I have all kinds of family members, far and close friends, acquaintances, online friends that go back to a decade or two ago on IRC channels, etc. I'm not saying every single one of them has changed, but a very LARGE portion of them has. We all have our own demons, our own beliefs, our own pet peeves and general grievances. People are sharing all kinds of sensationalist news and (let's say it) garbage all the time related to whatever orbits their belief or view of the world (or what they are afraid of). The more sensationalist something is, the more divisive it is, the more rounds it will do and the more it will get entrenched into the minds of someone. Very often, that someone can be you, your friends, or your family. That doesn't make them (or you) bad people necessarily. I know people who I'd consider to be very good people, nice, caring, outgoing, friendly, etc. And yet they still share their demons on social media. The vitriol-induced "us vs them" articles, the fake news-style misinformation, the half truth, whatever fits their view of the world (because we simply don't know better). It's a huge mental and emotional toll to be consistently bombarded by this kind of stuff. I don't mind talking about certain topics with certain people, what I do mind is getting consistently dragged (either willingly or not) into the same topics/conversations all the time, mostly fueled by emotional outrage (whether it is justified or not). This doesn't make them "bad" friends. It just makes them "human" friends. You can definitely be completely and utterly emotionally drained talking with friends about topics that you care about, not in a bad way, it's just the way it is. The world is being more and more painted like it's all going to shit (whether or not that's true depends on what news you're being fed, I'm not making judgement here), and that does have a toll on you as a human. Sorry for the long rant, but I just had to get it out there.
    • nradov 5y ago
      It doesn't take any mental or emotional toll on me. It helps a lot to "hide all from" all third-party pages so that you mostly just see original posts from your friends.
  • amatecha 5y ago
    Have you ever used Facebook? You see divisive rage-bait garbage regardless of whether your connections specifically shared it. The Algorithm(tm) decides what you see, and it favors whatever is as "engagement"-worthy as possible.
    • nradov 5y ago
      Yes I've been using Facebook several times per week for years. I have hundreds of friends there and don't really see any divisive rage-bait garbage, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. Maybe you're using it wrong? What I have done is "Hide all from" most of the pages that show up in my feed. So I mostly only see original content posted by my friends and very little shared from other pages like the fake news on CNN or whatever.
      • darkstar999 5y ago
        So you had to modify your default Facebook experience to not see that stuff.
        • lmm 5y ago
          You have to adjust your feed a little for the best experience, yes. Hard to imagine HN being against taking a little up-front effort to get something that's more efficient in the long term.
        • blipvert 5y ago
          The algorithm is dogsh*t. It somehow got it in its head that I was a Harry Potter fan (I’ve never read a book or sat through a film - no interest at all). It kept pushing HP fan groups at me. Constantly. I would hide all from them, but there are thousands. It felt like I was going mad. In the end I just Social Fixered the hell out of it all - bye bye ads too. I can’t imagine what it must be like it wasn’t something so innocuous.
  • wussboy 5y ago
    You’ve identified what makes Facebook evil. If your friend shares two things, one of which enrages you and causes you to post an angry comment, and one of which causes you to smile gently and scroll on by, which one do you think Facebook is going to show you? They probably don’t need better friends. We need a communication medium that isn’t powered by hate.
  • wsc981 5y ago
    I don’t think all friend need to share political views. Just from my own group of friends, I know our views vary wildly. I am libertarian, I don’t buy the COVID and climate change narratives and I just want to live my life and want to deal with as little of the government as possible. However most of my friends like big government (socialist welfare state) and do buy in the COVID narrative as pushed by big media and government. In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this. So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues. We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.
    • noduerme 5y ago
      >> I don’t think all friend need to share political views. This is the #1 thing, and I upvoted because you said this. I'm also mostly a libertarian, but I think anyone who doesn't get a vaccine is extremely stupid. I'm also prone to conspiracy theories - I tend to think 9/11 was an inside job, for example. But let's say you believe in conspiracy theories, like, let's say the government wants to kill a few million people. Who do you think they want to kill? The people who line up and take the vax? No way!! Those are compliant people (according to this kind of reasoning). The people they'd want to kill - hell, the people I'd want to kill - would be the people who refused the vaccine. So they can just let them die from the virus, or let out a stronger virus next year. Anyone who thinks they're "smart" for avoiding a vaccine has not thought about what the government would do if they really wanted to kill the non-compliant people. But having said that: I don't believe that this is all being coordinated. I think there are just a lot of countries and health agencies that all have partial information and do the best they can with it. And a lot of individuals who try to make political impressions with it. But if it were coordinated, if it were a conspiracy, then the only logical people to kill would be the ones who refused vaccination. And again, I mean this as a libertarian. If you think this is a "test run" for when a really bad virus comes out, you can bet that if you're unvaccinated for covid you're considered an enemy. I don't know why a rational person would put themselves in that position when you look at all the evidence. And I know my balls still work after having a vaccine. To me the biggest proof was Israel being first up front to vaccinate the population. (I'm Jewish). I know Israel isn't in the business of killing Jews. It's in the business of keeping Jews alive. So when I talked to Israelis who were asking why I wasn't vaccinated yet, and I had to explain it wasn't even available in America, I was sure the vaccine was nothing to worry about.
  • selfhifive 5y ago
    It's not friends. Facebook's boosted content/recommended content is what it is. Having a friends only feed would actually save the product.
• iamthemonster 5y ago
  It's so interesting how different people's Facebook feeds are so different. I do have excessive ads for products, that's fair enough, but I have absolutely nothing political. My only issue with Facebook is that it's poorly designed, actually very dated and cluttered, and none of my friends really use it for personal posts except me. I suspect that each Facebook user exists in a different bubble. Possibly they see someone reporting frequently and think "oh great, here's an engaged user, let's show them some more hate speech to get them even more engaged".
  • KerryJones 5y ago
    This is exactly what happens. What's worse, I thought it was doing that because I had responded to some political post, but FB just sees "you engaged with person-X, I will now alert you when person-X posts, and when people respond to his posts, even if you haven't looked at it" This led to increasingly divisive messages literally showing up in my notifications that I had nothing to do with. This still happens months after I stopped responding to any of those messages.
    • des1nderlase 5y ago
      The same is true for YouTube. Somebody sent me funny cat video which I don't usually watch, and now my feed is full of funny videos, or I quickly searched some Minecraft guide for a friend (which I don't play), and now I have many Minecraft guides in the feed.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      Ye FB does something like this. I hate "funny" videos where people hurt them self. But somehow FB thought my annoyance with them was that I liked them, so they spammed them on me. Maybe I moved my cursor to slow over them or something when I took my time to mute the guy posting them.
  • grujicd 5y ago
    FB is RSS for non-tech content. In my experience FB is what you make it to be. It requires some curration effort but you can mold it to be useful. But you can’t just add, you’ll have to block as well, including ads - each ad source can be turned off. For me, FB is the main source of news about local concerts. Sure, you’ll find about major ones anyway, but there’s no way to effectively track small ones. It doesn’t have to be music. FB is the easiest way to track niche local businesses, events, or groups of interest. Some of them even don’t have web sites and FB is where they post. Even when they have sites, you wouldn’t visit each of them every day to find out what is new and interesting and you’ll miss stuff.
• scarface74 5y ago
  If your FB feed is full of false news and hate speech, that says a lot about who your “friends” are.
  • buitreVirtual 5y ago
    It says a lot too about FB having no qualms in amplifying and profiting from propaganda and hate.
    • scarface74 5y ago
      Yet I never see propaganda or hate on my feed. If your feed is full of hate and propaganda, it’s coming from the people you choose to allow to enter your feed.
      • boredtofears 5y ago
        Well, sure, but back in 2011 when a family member taught your uncle moe how to signup onto facebook at a christmas event you only now realize how little you actually knew your uncle moe.
        • scarface74 5y ago
          Well, treat your uncle just like that creepy Uncle that everyone knows about, no one talks about, but you know to be careful when he is around your kids.
• haskal 5y ago
  Why not just stop visiting FB? You might lose access to things you logged in with "Login with Facebook" or lose out on some connections that are only on FB. Doom-scrolling FB is a bad idea, but whenever I log in to FB, I do it with a purpose (usually to text someone on FB) That's a big jump from the time when typing "facebook" in the address bar used to almost be a reflex on opening a new tab.
  • t_christensen 5y ago
    Another approach is to unsubscribe from everything (friends, groups etc.). You feed is empty, but you can still visit profiles/groups etc. but nothing will be pushed to you.
    • raducu 5y ago
      I did the same thing when I read about a plugin that was banned by facebook for allowing you to unsubscribe form everything and decided I was going to do it manually. Funny that facebook temporarily banned me from unfollowing people even though I was doing it manually, not using an app/plugin. It's wonderful really.
  • timmytokyo 5y ago
    I deleted my FB account years ago primarily due to its aggressive tracking. The mental health benefits have been a nice bonus.
  • NamTaf 5y ago
    The change I made was to change my facebook bookmark to messenger, and thus I can still chat to all of my mates who use it to talk but otherwise have to consciously decide to visit facebook itself. I find myself doomscrolling WAY less, and maybe visit it once a day if I'm bored.
• WeekSpeller 5y ago
  I recently reported a hate speech targeted at Indian minority (not Muslim). The text literally had gen$c!d3 threats and other usual trigger words in it, and there were like copy paste of same post in thousands (probably a campaign). Facebook replied "does not violate their conditions blah blah".
  • naruvimama 5y ago
    I guess it very much depends on the minority in question, FB like the government only responds to "mi orities" with street veto or global muscle power.
  • yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    Just curious, why did you write “gen$c!d3”? The options I can think of are: 1. You’re worried that a script on HN will delete your comment, similar to how this seems to work on YouTube 2. You’re censoring that word to avoid “triggering” people 3. You’re copying verbatim an excerpt from the hate speech you’re referencing I’m asking in earnest; I honestly don’t know which of those three (or any other option?) it is.
    • jdkjs 5y ago
      People are hardwired to censor some words like that (like cov!d) precisely because of 1
    • airstrike 5y ago
      4. 7h3y d0n’7 kn0w 13375p34k /s
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    The reports are useless. I guess the reviewers have to achieve some KPI and have to just click past reports to have a chance.
• sabarn01 5y ago
  I have seen zero hate speech, but I mostly use FB to share pictures of my kids.
  • ergocoder 5y ago
    It is because this person is surrounded by toxic people. My feed is updates from friends. I don't really hate speech or anything toxic.
  • beermonster 5y ago
    Why use FB for that and not a picture sharing site, just out of interest?
    • missedthecue 5y ago
      The people he'd like to show the pictures to are all conveniently aggregated on FB, but not on the picture sharing site.
      • CodeGlitch 5y ago
        Or use a service like Dropbox or OneDrive where you can share folders to select people (they don't need to be signed up- you just send them a link). Of course this means you need their email or phone number... But using either of those is way better than a service like Facebook.
        • The_Colonel 5y ago
          You lose the ability to comment/like photos. Also, it will get messy with a collection of links. For small audiences I like google photos the best. If you want to share something with more people (all your friends) then facebook is probably the best option.
          • CodeGlitch 5y ago
            > You lose the ability to comment/like photos. They can reply with any comments to the email / txt can they not? I'm thinking of the scenario of sending photos to close friends / family. For larger audiences, I'd use my own platform running something like WordPress. As for "likes" - I guess I'm of a generation where they are irrelevant to me :) > For small audiences I like google photos the best. Will check that out. cheers.
• baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Was your page full of actual hate speech such as "exterminate the jews" or was it full of "hate speech" such as criticizing politicians who happen to be minorities? Same question regarding fake news: was your page full of actual fake news suh as "Elon Musk has died", or was it full of political speech you don't like, such as "wearing masks is not worth the inconvenience"?
  • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    • mikevm 5y ago
  • danans 5y ago
    Your definition of hate speech is irrelevant. Whatever the GP saw was enough for them that they made a decision to remove their personal exposure, which is their right. They aren't censoring you or anyone else by making that choice.
    • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      Sure. And if GP genuinely believes that what they saw was actual hate speech and fake news, they may (or may not) feel like they want to explain that yes it actually was that. At least that's how I usually respond when I see outrageous lies being spread.
  • laumars 5y ago
    Unfortunately most of the arguments against wearing masks are petty and bullshit given that the inconvenience of wearing one is insignificant for most people. Sure, if you have genuine health concerns wearing one then don’t. But most of the people that moaned about it were really just moaning about being told what to do. I had one mum in my kids school quoting the Magna Carta as a reason not to wear masks, which is simply ridiculous. And others claim that long term use of thermometers could be damaging to kids health, which completely misses the fact that such devices are entirely passive instruments. That was the point I quit Facebook. I realised my time was too valuable to read so much stupid.
• baby 5y ago
  I’ve seen some of it. But it’s an essential app to maintain contact with my friends around the globe.
• deanc 5y ago
  My FB feed is essentially zero content (500+ friends mostly over 25). It’s an aggregator nowadays of group discussions and primarily page content, even pages I don’t follow. Nobody but boomers use it to share nowadays.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    I haven’t been on Facebook for a few years, but I saw the same the last year I was on the site. I had unfollowed everything, except friends. You could go through my entire feed in 3 minutes once a week. Almost nobody was posting anything, mostly it was shared posts. If it wasn’t for Facebook killing forum and small websites, more people would have left years ago.
• smsm42 5y ago
  I actually didn't have any false news and hate speech in my feed - I used FB purity and consistently blocked all bad actors. I left the FB anyway, because it's has been a terrible platform for discussing anything even before the latest bout of censorship, but with redesigns, bans and constant intrusive hectoring about what I am supposed to be thinking is really getting old. It just became not good for anything but wasting time, and even that wasn't really enjoyable. And there are so many other places to get news nowdays...
• sgpl 5y ago
  If others are looking to keep up with news in a low key way (including the OP), I'd highly recommend this approach that's been working well for me. 1. Create an instagram account to follow just one account. 2. Follow an account called @mosheh. It's run by a former CBS News Producer [1] 3. 1x or 2x per day, go through his stories. No affiliation but I'd highly recommend this approach for those that are already on instagram or want to use the platform to keep up with the news. He aggregates news stories from most major news sources and in a couple of minutes you can be informed of what's happening around the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosheh_Oinounou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosheh_Oinounou
• Lamad123 5y ago
  The only useful thing about it was messenger but they disabled that on mobile browsers, so I stopped using the whole predict and then deleted it altogether.
• winternett 5y ago
  At least the account blocking features still works for users, unlike with youTube and Twitter. The UI is more and more horrid though on FB and Instagram with every update. My ability to do the most simple things is extremely frustrating, and I don't understand how they believe those changes help to inspire deeper engagement, It's getting really difficult to see any value in either platform as they shrink organic engagement of each post to 1-2 people when I have over 1k followers. I refuse to pay for ads just to reach the audience that has already chosen to follow me. Instagram shows a mile of ads and posts from accounts I follow on every news feed before my desired content now, it's totally outrageous. Likes are completely worthless across the web right now, they mean absolutely nothing... and the stats aren't even accurate on so many of these sites, they're really showing desperation by pushing their user base away, I honestly can't believe that "brilliant minds" are at the helm any more... It feels like they sacked the experienced development minds and are just left with interns, marketers, and psychiatrists on staff. Something's either got to fail or change majorly before year end or I'm going back to IRC and local message boards for good, social media has become a total waste of energy.
  • mise_en_place 5y ago
    Totally agree with your criticism of the UI and news feed. I rarely use Facebook to begin with, but I noticed a major decrease in user experience and usability as of late. Infinite scroll is just...laggy. I don't have this issue on Tiktok (which to be fair I also don't use often). The news feed used to be curated for me specifically, but now it seems to be the same recycled content I see on YouTube recommendations. I don't want to see the same sh*t over and over again, show me something unique and new.
• lostlogin 5y ago
  Reddit can be like this. But delete your account, Make a new one then add r/homelab r/homeassistant and r/chainsaw and it becomes a very positive place. Your desired subs may be different. Some of the subs are just so helpful and so good.
• sircastor 5y ago
  I once reported explicit pornography that posted on an electronics group I belonged to and the response I got from the system was that it was deemed not inappropriate and no action would be taken. I don't know what good reporting does for anything...
  • monocasa 5y ago
    I reported a comment thread discussing which ethnicities needed to be put in camps, and got the same thing about it somehow not being against the community standards. I did catch a 30 day ban for saying that 'men are trash; I'm going back to dating women' though.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      Shows you who is paying for Facebook. I deleted my account, to the extent that one can (which is… limited)
• martinsb 5y ago
  For me, personally, FB just became boring and uninteresting at some point. I sometimes open FB for Marketplace and, I think, this is it. Had no need to go cold turkey and delete the account. I still have it for Messenger which I use as an app both for desktop and mobile because I don’t want to lose touch with my friends, esp. during these times.
• AndrewTerry 5y ago
  You may think you've deleted your FB account, but its probably still there... I "deleted" my FB after they acquired FriendFeed (still the best social network I've ever come across) back in 2009. I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in. "Impossible", I thought, "that account was deleted!". So, I visited Facebook, and because my old username/password were still in my password manager, I was able to log in! Imagine my shock to find my old profile, still there with it's old profile pic, my old connections, etc. When will "delete my account" actually mean my account is deleted? (The final kick in the nuts to this story is that within 2 minutes of logging in, I get a chirpy, "Welcome back to Facebook!" email. Fuckers.)
  • ArnoVW 5y ago
    If you live in Europe, you can contact the facebook DPO and request a (legally mandated) hard delete. They're then allowed to keep data for legal reasons (tax, legal intercept, etc) but not beyond.
    • moffkalast 5y ago
      "Well you see your account it still up... for legal reasons."
  • nabla9 5y ago
    You just deactivated your FB account. Deleting FB account is slightly more complicated. After you have deleted it, don't try to login for months to check out if it's gone. To permanently delete your account: 1. From your main profile, click account in the top right of Facebook. 2. Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings. 3. Click Your Facebook Information in the left column. If you have Facebook access to a page in the new Pages experience: Click Privacy, then click Your Facebook Information. 4. Click Deactivation and Deletion. 6. Choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion. 7. Click Delete Account, enter your password and then click Continue.
    • AndrewTerry 5y ago