Having Skin in the Game Made me Realize Facebook is Not Really Evil
By: Nicholas Robert
Tags: Facebook, Personal Growth, Social Media, Digital Life, Technology

Having Skin in the Game Made me Realize Facebook is Not Really Evil

I deleted my Facebook account in mid-2020.

That time was what seemed like the peak of social media hysteria: a perfect storm of data abuses, political interference, and the threat of an AI apocalypse.

I listened to podcasts, read articles, and followed hundreds of Twitter accounts of people who would attest to Facebook’s negative influence on society. Every other day, it seemed, there was a new smear against Zuckerberg or some aspect of his monstrous company.

I did what was the only logical think to me: took action. Rather than only expressing my discontent with the platform, I removed myself from it. How can one go around saying that this platform is destroying our democracy, blurring the lines between truth and lies, and taking too much control over people’s lives — and the keep on using it. This baffled me, yet it’s what many people did.

For them, the pros that Facebook offered ostensibly outweighed the negatives of being off of it complete. So my departure from the platform was a way for me to test that hypothesis:

Are the actions of Facebook truly as bad as many claim they are? And if so, is deleting it the solution?

If the hypothesis proved true, Facebook would inevitably slowly die as a company. Because companies fail when they lose the fail of their customers, which in turn causes a decline in revenue.

If the things Facebook was doing directly resulted in a large number of people leaving the platform, then it would mean that all the hysteria was justified. But if it’s all talk, and no action, then how can one actually support their claims of abuses and exploitation.

The result: Journalists continued to investigate, to expose, and then they used Facebook itself to spread their reports to the world. Meanwhile, Facebook‘s userbase continued to grow during the time I was off of it.

While there may have been some extreme cases where people, like me, took action, these were the exceptions, because the advantages of what Facebook offers — the ability to remain connected with people in our lives through technology — greatly outweigh the cons of whatever alleged “evils” journalists love to highlight. People’s perception of reality, and reality itself, had grown far apart.

Facebook paranoia had essentially become a form of entertainment. In some masochistic way, we were convincing ourselves that Black Mirror was real, perhaps because we wanted to be a part of something unbelievable — our lives are unfulfilling as they are, so we feel we have to be a part of something greater, even if that greater movement doesn’t actually exist.

I created a new Facebook account earlier this year, and started to reconnect with old friends. Nothing had really changed. People were still sharing photos of their Sunday picnics, their dogs, the occasional meme, as well as a barrage of political and ideological content. Because that’s just it — ideologies are an excuse to complain, and complaining has become a pastime, just like cooking or going to the park. They have no bearing on real-life, because if they did, we would be taking action by adjusting our way of life accordingly, rather than posting memes about them. (Protesting, by the way, is not an example of taking action — it’s just another form of complaining, just on the street instead of on social media).