I had high hopes a few years ago when Ello came out. As for keeping in touch with your friends? All we have to do is migrate en masse to another social media platform! Then we can all stay budz!
It turns out it’s not really that difficult to export your Facebook data through Facebook itself. Point 1 might just have me chained to Facebook for life, but there are solutions to points 2 and 3. If it weren’t for Facebook there are a lot of really good friends I would quite simply lose touch with. As a bit of a digital hoarder, it really bothers me to think of losing all of this data. I’m talking about nearly a decade and a half of photographs and updates that tell the story of my entire adult life. I have to use Facebook for my clients and to promote my personal content. This is what my desktop looks like when it’s relatively tidy…įor me, personally, there are three major reasons I haven’t ditched Facebook: There is no defense for this company and, really, there’s no great excuse for using the platform except for the fact that everyone else is using the platform. I don’t like the way the government has backdoors into these corporate platforms and I don’t like the hazy, shady ways these companies buy and sell and program our data, our identities, and our behavior.įacebook has employed some of the most intelligent people on the planet to steer our thoughts, to influence our decisions, to make us spend more time online and more money on things we don’t need. I don’t like the way capitalist entities have complete control over the most important communication systems in human history. I’ve never been comfortable in the slightest with Facebook. I’ve been well aware, since the early days, just how creepily easy it is to access and leverage your most intimate information via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other corporate social manipula… er, I mean, social media platforms. Hell, my day job is in digital marketing so I’ve spent the last decade trafficking in your info and guiding you to click on things. Of course, as a leftist, I was not surprised at all to learn that an international megacorporation was willing to sell my data to the highest bidder (or any bidder at all, really). With the recent not-surprising-at-all revelation that Facebook leaked data from millions of accounts to fascists, a lot of people have been rattled into searching for alternative social media platforms. Evil bourgeois capitalist pig-birds of a feather flock together