Question from a reader: Why delete your social media accounts?

Happy Monday, friends!

I know you JUST heard from me yesterday, but if I’m being honest, with the speed at which things are moving in the world I could be writing you every day with some fresh update about how your privacy is being exploited… but I’m not a monster.

Today, I’m actually writing you because I received a great question in response to yesterday’s post:

I'm getting all sorts of posts from you about all the things we should do to delete content from various types of social media, but I seem to be missing the why. How can we know what is at stake so we can make good decisions for ourselves? It's really hard to understand when we're getting considerable value from some of these sites.

This is a great question, and one that I’m sure many of you are also grappling with, so let’s talk through it together. I managed to make it 3Ps for your consideration: Privacy, Perspective, and Politics.

Privacy

We’ve gone over the many, many, many, MANY ways that these companies exploit your data for their profit. What data are we talking about? Let’s break it down so we’re all very clear on this one.

Let’s start with the metadata (metadata is the stuff that you don’t explicitly tell a company, but they collect by accessing what you do). So what are they collecting?

• Location history: where you’ve been, what you did there, and even who you were with.
• Contact history (calls, texts, messages): who you contact, the frequency in which you contact people, when you contact them (dates and times), your location when you contacted them, and the contact information of those people—not to mention that text messages are completely unencrypted and can be easily intercepted.
• Web history: if you are logged into these services or have them installed on your phone, they also likely have access to your web history—they can likely see what websites you visit, what you do on those websites, and how frequently you visit them.
• Photo details: photos you upload contain metadata about where they were taken, what sort of device they were taken with, who took the photo, and even who is in the photo.
• Device details: they can tell what device you’re using, what operating system it uses, where it’s located, and since that device is connected to the internet, they can also see every other device that’s connected to that network. Consider the implications of this in a school—one device with Facebook Messenger installed and connects to the school wifi can share details about every other device connected to that network with Facebook.
• Other app data: if you use social media apps on your phone, they can also read data from other apps on your phone—ever looked something up on Amazon and then see an ad for it on Facebook immediately after? Not a coincidence. Ad networks are shared across apps.

None of that is even taking into account the actual actions that you take on these sites. Let’s just talk about Facebook for a minute. Here are a few actions you might have taken and some questions for you to consider:

• Like or follow a pages: What’s the page about? Is it a hobby or interest? Is it a local neighborhood group? Is it political? Is it a place you shop? Is it a company you’ve worked with? Is it a disability community? Now, consider how many pages you’ve followed. What do YOU think they could gather from this?
• Search the marketplace: What did you look for? How far were you willing to travel to get it? Did you meet up with the person who was selling it? Did you pay full price? What do YOU think they could gather from this?
• Make a post: What do you write about? Did you share a link? Where was the link from? Did you read the whole thing before you shared it (yes, they probably know)? How did people react to it? Did they laugh? Were they angry? Were you angry? What do YOU think they could gather from this?
• React to someone else’s post: What was it about? News? Were you angry about the news? Were you joyful? Facebook creates a psychological profile of you based on how you react to content you see. Heart a post your friend made about breaking up with her abusive ex? Angry at an article about Roe v Wade being overturned? Laughed at a post from Jezebel? You’re probably a pro-choice, white, liberal woman who is between the age of 25 and 45. You might be into crafting or reading, and you may be diagnosed with ADHD or an anxiety disorder. And that doesn’t even take into consideration all that metadata we already talked about.

If you want to see for yourself what they’ve collected on you, go ahead and open up that download you requested. Besides details like your full call histories, your private messages (they’re not encrypted by default), and details about all your contacts, you’ll also find personal details about your own demographics including but not limited to your inferred race, age, gender, where you live, your hobbies, interests, net worth, medical conditions, political leanings, and on and on. Don’t believe me? Open it up, see for yourself. And remember, if they have it, they’ve sold it.

Perspective

Now, I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. I’m here to keep you informed about the implications. I’ll even be here to challenge you on some of those decisions, but only to open you up to the possibilities that exist outside of these platforms.

Running a Business

For instance, maybe you run a business or you’re an artist. You might think that not having a Facebook page or Instagram profile means that no one will ever find your work—and maybe you’re right! I’m not here to suggest you’re wrong, though plenty of businesses are successful without social media—but if that’s the case, then you should protect yourself. We’ve gone over many ways to adjust privacy settings, what to leave off of profiles, how to delete (some of) what they know, even just generally giving tips like removing those apps from your phone. And I’ll continue to do that.

However, if you want to try something different, might I suggest having your own website where you control and own the content (you do not own anything you post on social media, and it can be deleted by them, without cause, at any time), and creating a mailing list of devoted fans which also happens to have the highest ROI of any marketing investment.

Staying In Touch

Maybe Facebook or Messenger is the only way you can keep in touch with friends and is essentially your long-distance network. I hear that. I had probably close to a thousand friends when I deleted my accounts back in 2017.

You know what I did? After I removed a bunch of people from my friends list that I no longer kept in touch with, I downloaded the remaining folks’ birthdays from Facebook (yep, that’s a thing you can do), uploaded them to my personal birthday calendar, and if I have their number (because I ACTUALLY know them IRL), I send them a birthday text to let them know I’m thinking of them. This usually leads us to chat and reconnect for at least a few minutes, get some quick life updates, and generally acknowledge that we still care about each other. And isn’t that better than sending (or receiving) a post once a year that gets maybe 2 seconds of view time and a thumbs up?

If you want to replace Messenger, ask your friends to switch to Signal for actually private conversations. You’d be surprised how many people are also starting to consider their privacy and will be interested in moving to a platform that ensures that.

If there’s someone you truly want to get in touch with, you can and will find a way.

Communities

Maybe you’ve found your people in a group or a page. I get that, too. It’s hard to connect with people offline, especially around niche hobbies or interests. While I encourage everyone to find their local community, especially in uncertain times, I also encourage you to simply move your online communities elsewhere. There’s no requirement that a community must live in a Facebook group. Consider finding a similar Reddit community or creating a private Discord server for your group (if one doesn’t already exist). While these are not perfect alternatives (they both collect data, and Discord messages are not encrypted), this part might come down to…

Politics

We all have to make decisions that are based on our own personal values. I can’t tell you what you should value any more than you can tell me what I should value. For me, knowing how the money these companies make off of my data is being spent affects my interest in using those platforms—in much the same way that my aversion to milk is heavily influenced by the affects it has on my lower intestine.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook and all its affiliates), is a misogynist whose first major web project was a hot or not website that he used stolen student ID images of women on campus to create. He’s not a person who has ever cared about others’ privacy, though he seems to care about his own, and he has never shown any remorse or faced any actual recourse for his deliberate invasions of privacy. (Facebook allegedly paid the FTC $5B—$4.9B more than necessary—to keep Zuck’s name out of the Cambridge Analytica complaint. A sum which, for the record, would have been about 26 days worth of income for Facebook when it was paid in 2019—and, for reference, only 14 days worth of income in 2023.) None of that is to mention the recent policy changes across Meta with regard to fighting misinformation, rolling back DEI protections, and Zuck et al. just generally being losers.

Zuck isn’t alone, though. Let’s not forget about Elon. Elon who, you ask? Remember when he said he was buying Twitter to ‘help humanity’, tried to get out of it, failed, showed up at the office carrying a kitchen sink, fired 80% of the staff, offered people 3 months severance and then never paid them? The one who’s trying to do the same thing to the federal government as we speak?

This guy?

THIS guy??

• USAID officials put on leave as Elon Musk says time for agency to ‘die’
• Exclusive: Musk aides lock workers out of OPM computer systems
• Musk Says DOGE Halting Treasury Payments to US Contractors
• Elon Musk’s PAC spent an estimated $200 million to help elect Trump, AP source says
• Musk causes uproar for backing Germany’s far-right party ahead of key elections

THIS GUY??!

Enough said.

Finally, let’s not leave TikTok out of this, it IS on our list after all. Now, do I buy that the company is delivering user data straight to the Chinese government? Not really, but I can’t say that with certainty. What I can say is that there have been some changes recently that suggest the company is likely to be sold to one of these bozos (not to be confused with Bezos—different oligarch with different privacy implications).

So, am I focused on these two guys in particular? Yes, for the purposes of this particular series. There are plenty of other companies and folks I can, and likely will, focus on in the future, but we’re talking about social media right now, and these guys are the keepers of pretty much all the keys (they literally bought all the other keys).

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
—Maya Angelou

Final Thoughts

I’m not here to tell you how to think or what to do, I’m just here to inform on matters of privacy and explain how to act on those ideas—what you do with that information has to align with your own perspective and your own values.

So what do I think is at stake? Democracy, but that’s just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

—KL