24 October 2019

asking for a friend



I deleted my fb account about two years ago and never missed it. This was easy because everybody in my family had already (or was on the way to ) deleted theirs and most of my friends are real ones anyway.
Let's remember that fb started as a simple method for college nerds to rate the women they had been dating or wanted to date. It grew from there and it was fun for a while, looking up all school mates and stalking former work mates or exes, the cat videos and stuff, also following our kids around their adventures until they figured out what they wanted to share with us old ones (very little). And then the kids dropped out, literally en masse and we were stuck with the likes of us and nah, no fun. It got weird and weirder. We asked ourselves, why share pictures to whom? What do we want to show off here? When one of my nieces shared  to the family a little video where she told her 3-year old that there was going to be another baby and her 3-year old threw a massive tantrum for us to see, and when this video was later found on a geeky "news" website, we had a couple of phone calls allround and decided, no more sharing about kids, not from our family, never mind the "privacy settings" - which had failed anyway.

Then came Cambridge Analytica, data mining and Mr Zuckerberg feigning ignorance and that was it for me, for us. Surely, anybody with eyes and a bit of a brain . . .

So tell me, if you want, why are you still on fb? Or let me rephrase that: why do you let fb make money using your data, supporting fraud, fake news and vote tampering and more?


11 comments:

My life so far said...

That's a good question. I tend to read news on Facebook but you're right, it's skewed or untrue. I used to see what my kids were up to but they're gone now too. So the question is, why bother? Time to think.

Roderick Robinson said...

My fb account lasted twenty minutes. I was terrified. All those folk who wanted to be friends. People I'd dropped decades ago, people I'd hoped were in jail. Deleting the account took time and demanded ratlike cunning but afterwards I felt purged. Ughh.

Steve Reed said...

I'm still on Facebook and I still use it quite a bit. Dare I say I even LIKE it. I like being in touch with people from all stages of my life, and I don't worry too much about FB using my data. I don't follow their advertisements or their suggested purchases and I don't do those silly quizzes and memes by which information is collected and disinformation is spread. I also don't care if they know I'm a Democrat-voting Remainer. I have nothing to hide politically (or socially, for that matter). (I do have most of my posts and photos set to "friends-only," so they aren't available to the general public. But my blog is publicly available, and I'm not sure that's much different.)

I agree FB should do all it can to ensure that its platform is not manipulated by nefarious users. But ultimate responsibility lies with us -- we all have to be more knowledgeable about avoiding fraud and "fake news." (Just as we must be elsewhere on the Internet.)

Linda said...

I get to see my nieces and nephews and their kids on FB. Otherwise we only meet once a year at Christmas. I used to use it a ton but mostly I pop on and see what they are doing and then take off again. I am not a fan of the Zuck and feel that the old white men in Washington are too stupid to understand the extent of which these tech savvy guys are infiltrating every part of our lives whether we want them to or not.

ellen abbott said...

I still have my account mainly for news and keeping up with the glass art community. plus I get exposed to a lot of art that my artist friends share in all mediums. like Steve I don't take the quizzes or pass on memes or buy anything advertised or sign petitions. I'll share an occasional news story but I try to make sure it's from a reliable source. I don't and never have shared pictures of my family. my news feed is about half art related and half political. I don't accept friend requests from total strangers unless we have shared friends and something in common like glass or social or political views. all the info sharing doesn't really bother me as, like Steve, I have a public blog and I'm pretty open about who I am and what I do and there is no way to avoid info sharing even if you don't have a FB account. every time you visit a website, your info is collected. that's just the state of society and capitalism in this country at least. I do, on occasion, take a break when it gets too political. it's all in how and why you use it. I also have twitter and instagram accounts though I don't post on those very often.

Anonymous said...

I much prefer blogging to Facebook, and if I could figure out a way to do a group blog with my Facebook friends I would do it. I don't like Facebook at all. I hardly ever post anything there, but it's the only place many of my friends post things. It's weird, though, because it seems most people just post goofy unoriginal things. I prefer original posts about life. I am furious with Facebook's bullshit business way of doing things.

37paddington said...

How I love AOC. Your question stops me cold. It took me several days to really consider it, as I loathe Facebook, and would like to close my account, especially now that Zukerburg has partnered with Breitbart News as a "trusted news source." I might get there yet; for now, I worry that because I am in the business of "news" and information, cutting off this one source, no matter how fraudulent and flawed, will put me at a disadvantage in my industry. It's akin to needing to know the enemy to fight it effectively. I do see Facebook as the enemy these days, even though many people I enjoy being in contact with only post there, and contact would be lost with them otherwise. Are they real friends, then, you might ask? Of a sort. There is real affection for a shared past, but no impetus for real world interaction in the present. Hard to explain. In any case, I seem not to be ready to do what I wish we would all do en masse. What I really hope is that someone starts a Facebook alternative and we all gravitate there and leave Mark Zuckerburg to play with his morality free toys alone. Ugh. It's a piercing question you've posed.

Secret Agent Woman said...

Much of my family communicates only through facebook so if I want to see how the nieces and nephews are doing, that's where I go. I don't read news on facebook much and fact check the little I do read. Its a pretty fucked-up platform, but I don't have a good alternative since my family and old friends are spread around the world.

am said...

Thanks to Rosemarie for this:

"What I really hope is that someone starts a Facebook alternative and we all gravitate there and leave Mark Zuckerburg to play with his morality free toys alone. Ugh. It's a piercing question you've posed."

Every time he says "Congresswoman," I feel my anger rising. He knows she is right, and he has so much to lose by acknowledging that.

Was only on Facebook briefly. It was not a good experience for me. Only signed up with Facebook in 2014 when I learned from my middle sister that my only nephew, whom I haven't seen since he was 10 years old because of a family estrangement and who had just turned 21 years old in January 2014, had called her and told her to tell me that I was going to become a great aunt. Thinking that my nephew was reaching out to me in one of the only ways he could, I signed up for Facebook in order to be in touch with him, knowing that his generation communicated through Facebook at that time. I had a recurrent dream that I would see my nephew again. He never responded to my friend request. I haven't had that dream for a long time. My great nephew is 5 years old now. It was extremely painful to only learn about my great nephew's life through visiting Facebook pages where I was unwelcome. I found Facebook to be emotionally painful, seductive and addictive, found myself spending too much time trying to keep up with it, was annoyed by how it was becoming difficult NOT to be on Facebook when even applying for jobs in my field of medical transcription began to require having a Facebook page.

Facebook has taken on a dark life of its own that it is beyond Mark Zuckerberg's ability to control it. And yet, Facebook has given marginalized people a platform for organizing in revolutionary ways. Right now I'm thinking of the Standing Rock Tribe's ongoing use of Facebook as a tool for community and that anyone can look at their page without being on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/StandingRockST/

Thanks for bringing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's much-needed voice to me through this post. Difficult questions move us forward.

LL Cool Joe said...

I've never had a FB account, or Twitter, or Instagram. I just don't understand the appeal of sharing boring crap with one another. Although I do that on my blog, so maybe I'm just as bad.

beth coyote said...

I organize a feeding program for homeless teams 4 or 5 times a year. I use Facebook to get in touch with my far flung team when we have a meal to plan. Otherwise I don't use it for anything. Bye bye Mark. I wish you well.