Unfriending Facebook

I hatelove Facebook. Many people I talk to these days seem to express the same sentiment. For God’s sake, I just wanted a service where I could look at cat videos my family and friends posted and be able to keep in touch with them as our lives moved on. Others have tried to provide that, but when you present an alternative to Facebook, nobody buys in. You can’t switch social networks alone.

It was like a Trojan horse. It started as this and ended up as that.

A few years ago, I got invited to a party and started talking to a woman there, and the conversation turned to social media. I mentioned some of my misgivings about Facebook, and she said “You need to just get that out of your life. If you were meant to maintain contact with those people, they’d be calling you on the phone or coming over.”

Well, the logical part of me completely agrees with her. But then, I wouldn’t know which cat videos are my friends’ favorites. I wouldn’t know the detailed politics of people I no longer know. I wouldn’t get the cutesy animations about daylight saving time ending.

On a more serious note, I wouldn’t know about some family get togethers until after they happen. Facebook has in a real way replaced our communication. This isn’t by chance.

I haven’t unfriended Facebook. But I kind of want to.

It’s like putting down a coke habit; I just want one more last line.

My thinking Facebook is an insidious disease has been simmering under the surface for some time. A few recent incidents have brought it more to the surface.

There’s the whole them getting paid to promote Russian propaganda and denying it until they couldn’t thing. This subject has been pretty well covered.

Former executives have been lamenting how they purposely addicted most of the planet but they still live large on their financial gains.

My personal incident is that an older friend of mine has taken to friending every “woman” who sends a friend request just for fun. I rarely if ever friend people I haven’t at least met in person and just delete junk emails, and so I was quite oblivious to romance scams.

A friend of mine pointed out to the other friend that one of the “women” he was talking to was, in fact, a porn actress. Or at least her pictures were of one.

My friend and I decided to help get rid of the fake profiles. We went through them and found that many if not most of them would come up as actresses or other famous people in a reverse image search. The young blonde from Chicago would for some reason have an African sounding username and a bunch of Nigerian friends tagging “her” in pictures. They also usually had a vast collection of older men as friends.

We spent the day reporting them to Facebook. It was actually sort of fun. We figured we’d probably be doing hundreds of men a favor by eliminating at least a few scammers.

You can flag a post as fake, but you can’t say why. Initially, Facebook would fairly quickly send a response saying the profiles were deleted. Then, the responses from Facebook stopped for a day. The following day, I got a batch of responses from them all saying they don’t violate community guidelines. The same happened to my friend.

Apparently, we got flagged as the problem even though many of the reported profiles magically turned from a black man with an African sounding name to a young white woman. Blaming the people who bring up the problem and failing to fix the problem is par for the course.

I did some further reading and found that Facebook’s method of verifying that someone isn’t a fake is having them upload another photo of themselves. I then read further that when accounts are sold on the dark web the better ones come with additional photos of the person whose identity is being stolen.

Facebook has claimed that their facial recognition software is better at recognizing faces than people are. So, why can’t their software detect when a porn star’s photo is being used in a profile? Why can’t it detect duplicates? Why can’t it detect when a black man turns into a white woman? Even in the case of someone transitioning, their facial biometrics stay the same. This isn’t even difficult.

Facebook has aggressively sought to replace what’s left of our social connections. It wasn’t an accident, and it succeeded. Now, unfriending Facebook is a serious life decision. I know by hitting that delete button on my account that I will very likely never hear from most of those people again. I do, in fact, sometimes see some of them just because I saw an event on Facebook.

So, my real life conversations about Facebook have turned to its responsibility in its role. It is known to be an addiction, but it’s not treated as one. It was very purposefully built to be addictive. Many addictive substances and activities are regulated. Should Facebook be? Should they be allowed to continue to allow this abuse and just say they’ll fix it?

People have literally committed suicide over their programming mistakes outing people among other things and from being taken in scams.

People make excuses for them not policing their content and making serious programming mistakes by saying that it’s not possible at their scale. We need to quit taking that excuse from companies.

If a company can’t afford to police its content, it can’t afford to be in business.

Some of the billions that went to their stockholders could have been used to make better community policing software and hire people to administer it. Fixing many of the fake profiles wouldn’t even be difficult with software. There just needs to be a genuine desire to fix the problems.

In the meantime, people are losing hundreds of millions of dollars to scammers just for being lonely.

Besides the obvious abuse Facebook overlooks, there’s the abuse of our data. I recently read an article explaining how ads about things you talk about mysteriously show up. Facebook claims they don’t listen in on you, but they do track your location, your purchases at retail stores, your web browsing, what wifi networks you connect to, and more.

If it’s free, you’re the product. It’s sage wisdom we all know. What we overlook is the extent to which we’ve become the product. We went from being okay if you show us some banner ads in exchange for content to accepting tracking that would make the NSA and the CIA envious.

So, why do we accept being tracked in exchange for looking at cat videos?

We’re stuck. We’d have to put in effort to get those family pictures. We might need to see people in person more. We might need to pick up the phone.

We give more than we get.

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