delete facebook – A Life Without Social Media

Personally, I would consider the years between 2012 and 2016 to be the highlight of my years on social media. I garnered the majority of my friendships on Facebook during this time, connecting to friends I hadn’t seen since middle school, or those who lived out of state. I learned to use hashtags effectively on Instagram, to find other like-minded artists or people who use the same running app as myself. The Facebook I saw in 2012 was full of shared recipe links, pictures of kids going back to school, amusing cat videos, and vague posts that were clearly directed at an unnamed individual, the comment section ripe for questions and accusations. Perhaps this was just my timeline, based on the friends I had and the people I followed.

Or, maybe it wasn’t. In 2014, the New York Times published this article, along with plenty of other news sources who picked up the story. Essentially, researchers used 689,000 Facebook timelines as a psychological experiment, to see how positive or negative words would effect the user’s posting. Yes, it was years ago. Yes, it was only a bit less than 700,000 people, a mere fraction of users. Yes, responses like those are complacent and changing our society.

To be perfectly honest, I was not outraged then, nor am I outraged now. I was always amused by those viral posts such as this: “Don’t forget tomorrow starts the new Facebook rule where they can use your photos. Don’t forget Deadline today!!! It can be used in court cases in litigation against you. Everything you’ve ever posted becomes public from today Even messages that have been deleted or the photos not allowed. It costs nothing for a simple copy and paste, better safe than sorry. Channel 13 News talked about the change in Facebook’s privacy policy. I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law (UCC 1-308- 1 1 308-103 and the Rome Statute. NOTE: Facebook is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you prefer, you can copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once it will be tacitly allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in the profile status updates. FACEBOOK DOES NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SHARE PHOTOS OR MESSAGES.”

You see, I thought I was smarter than the people who shared those posts. I always kept my Facebook account “locked down,” with posts being made only to friends, and with literally nothing interesting enough going on in my life to make me care even if it were to all go public. I was a safe user of social media. I knew there was a chance my words and photos and likes could be made public, but why would I even care?

Thats the thing about the little screen that separates you from the internet, it feels like a shatterproof piece of glass that makes what you do on it belong solely to you. Recently, not long before I finally stepped away, I would cringe when people shared photos of their topless toddler or adorable naked babies’ bottom, though I am guilty of these things myself. Before I began to, metaphorically, look around, Facebook and Instagram felt like giant photo albums, with the convenience of sharing it to all of my friends at once. But is that really the case?

I know many excellent mothers in my real life, and quite a few online, and I can’t imagine a single one of them would hand over a photo of their toddler to a million strangers, to be cooed at or pored over or judged. When a celebrity posts a photo of their own child, perhaps dressed too maturely, perhaps not dressed enough, comments roar with one side imploring them to take it down, the other side screaming in caps lock to stop sexualizing children. I don’t agree with either of these sides anymore, because I don’t think the photo should be there. The child cannot legally consent to their photo being shared to the internet. Deep down, we all know anything we share is no longer in our control once we press send. Thats the contract we sign when we sign up for any internet convenience. The terms and conditions may state otherwise, but terms like “data breach” and “hacked” are far too common to truly think any company fully has control.

So, does it even matter? Its just a photo. Its just an experience. Its just a statement, no different than the statements I’m making here. I think the seriousness is up to the user. To my knowledge, none of my children’s photos were “stolen,” despite a public instagram page that I frequently hashtagged to collect stranger’s eyes. My question isn’t so much, does it matter, but instead, why doesn’t it matter? When did we go from a world of “stranger danger” to full on transparent lives?

Its funny, I often hear people say they are very precise with what they choose to share on the internet. That they keep most of their life private. Yet, their dinner photo is tagged at the location of the restaurant they’re eating at. Their son’s preschool graduation photo is hashtagged #headedtokindergarten, #growinguptoofast, #mommaslittleboy. Again, I am not judging. I have done these things. I have simply decided I don’t want to anymore, and explore the deeper reasons I have started to think this whole thing is a very, very bad idea, for myself and society.

My most recent delve into a life off of the online grid is not my first. In 2016, I began to realize that social media was negatively effecting me in ways that went beyond the “fear of missing out.” On July 7, 2016, Michael Xavier Johnson shot and killed five police officers and injured nine others in Dallas, TX. This was not long after protests had broken out over the shootings of two men by police officers. I did not know these people, and I have no familial associations with police officers or civil servants. As I randomly scrolled through my facebook feed, I noticed that a race war/police support war had broken out. My friends who had posted articles about the shooting were twenty comments deep in arguments about whether or not “those guys deserved it,” thoughts and prayers floated through the digital air, droplets of well intended hope that were as useful to the situation as the keyboards they were written on. Gun control was hot and heavy, with a lot of opinions and very little action. Everyone had staunchly taken a side, and in between, shared photos of cocktails or hikes or memes.

I deactivated my Facebook profile. Not only did the news I was reading seem skewed or biased, I couldn’t keep myself from scrolling past the article, into the comment sections, where people I will never meet threw verbal insults at each other, thinly veiled racist attacks along with demands of protection for the 2nd Amendment. Not long before this, I had happily declared that I received almost all of my news from Facebook, and it took me a few years beyond this to realize what a terrible idea this was.

I did not know at the time that much of the news I was seeing was balanced and curated for me, a computer algorithm that grouped me with people similar to myself, to show us what it perceived we wanted to see. I did not know that Facebook would soon be embroiled in legal issues, with its failure to stop hoaxes and inaccuracies from reaching millions as the infamous 2016 election ramped up. What I knew at the time, was simply that there was a lot of anger and sadness in my little handheld device, and that anger and sadness was giving me a sense of hopelessness. Was a race war on the horizon, as the collective internet I was privy to seemed to believe? My Twitter account showed David Duke screaming into the void, exploiting the hashtags #waronwhites and #makeamericagreatagain.

I didn’t look for David Duke on Twitter. One person retweeted one thing, something about how horrendous the man was, and I clicked it. I clicked hashtags, I read the vile hatred, I glanced at profiles to see what a human that inherently hated another human looked like. My twitter timeline changed quickly, though I didn’t bother to delete it then. Sponsored posts were no longer jewelry or celebrities, but political minded opinions that were very one sided.

I remained on Instagram, posting about exercise, or maybe a quote that seemed to reflect my feelings at the time, probably a meal at a restaurant that looked just like the same meal anyone else could have posted.

I stared at my phone. A lot.