Unfriend & Break Up Facebook. I finally deleted it, after several…
By: Jack Rainier Pryor
Tags: Friendship, Facebook, Politics, Relationships, Social Media

I finally deleted it, after several deactivations & reactivations across several years. My Facebook account is no more.

I kept going back because, as many people can attest, it’s hard to let go of relationships with partners who only want to use Facebook to communicate.

For those who say it or are about to say it: no, it’s not as simple as, “Those friends are fake anyway.”

The problem is billions of people use Facebook in place of email, the phone, and text messaging. It has ingrained itself that deeply into regular, interpersonal communication.

In this respect, Facebook is the new Ma Bell. “Ma Bell” was the nickname for AT&T, which for a long time in the United States was the phone company. Sure, there were tiny competitors but Ma Bell was a protected monopoly for decades. The government didn’t even consider phone conversations private until regulations started changing in the 1970s.

In the 1980s the US government finally broke up AT&T’s monopoly on telephone communications. Today its successors live on in the form of the current AT&T, Verizon, and others.

Facebook has become that ubiquitous. Unlike AT&T though, which was back then a telephone service alone, Facebook is a social media provider. People don’t just talk. They spread information through video, text, and voice. As has been covered extensively in the past four years: such as the fake news phenomenon; the Trump-Russia scandal; Cambridge Analytica; Russia’s IRA information operations; and the sheer plethora of conspiracy theory and hate speech on the platform; Facebook is a much peed-in public pool. Only the pool is a publicly-traded company whose founder-CEO owns majority stock.

Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaigned championed the break up of several corporate giants, Facebook among them. Facebook also owns Instagram (Where I still have an account) and the message service, WhatsApp. Separating those three alone would still leave three, looming giants in the telecommunications industry.

I believe, however, that because Facebook is so constant, so broad, and has so many users that it is effectively seen like Ma Bell was at its peak. People complained about AT&T often in that era. They complained about their bills, the service quality, the bland and blocky phones you had to rent from the company, and they had privacy complaints then too. Yet AT&T was The Phone Company. It was everywhere. How could that ever change?

Change came though. In 1984 the Bell System, by that point operating as AT&T, broke up into the “baby bells,” multiple, regional phone companies. This change was reflected in Sen. Warren’s presidential campaign. She still supports it today and is working in the Senate, and with former Vice President Joe Biden, to include it in her party’s legislative and regulatory agendas.

Facebook can change and be broken up. Individual action isn’t enough, but I don’t personally discourage it. Delete your Facebook account. Go ahead. Enough people have complained about the toxicity by now to wholly justify the move. I just did it. Honestly, I’m anxious about it. I have relatives and friends who depend on it. I have just deleted my main line to reach them. On the same token, it’s not my responsibility to leave that line in place. Not when I still have a phone number and email address from which they can still reach me.

Speaking of relationships, let’s go back to that refrain about how Facebook-based relationships are fake. They’re not. As I wrote already, Facebook’s size and mass are the issue. That doesn’t mean relationships aren’t made problematic by it. This aspect, I think, is well understood.

For instance, I’ve seen my friends list slowly dwindle through the years. This resulted from my own choice to unfriend people I believed had grown toxic, or we had grown distant for different reasons. People self-sort their relationships all the time, often based on trust and intimacy. Likewise other people unfriended me based upon the same rationale. The third reason was people deactivating or deleting their own Facebook accounts.

While logically, this is easy to detail, emotionally it’s harder to take. For one, who likes opening that friends portion and seeing that number go down, when it wasn’t their doing? I don’t believe anybody really enjoys that. Second as a lot of us age, we tend to lose more friends than we gain. Some of this, again comes from that self-sorting and discernment. On the other hand, reaching middle age is the period where you realize that the last time you saw a distant, former friend was indeed the last time ever in both your entire lives.

I recently lost a friend I hadn’t seen in at least thirteen years. We knew each other in the military. We kept in touch through Facebook. We saw, as many connected to each other that way did, our big life moments: couplehood, children, a wedding, a new house, new jobs, and more. I also saw the other ways they changed. I saw their empathy dry up. I saw their fear warp their worldview. I saw their fake news and conspiracy theorist posts. Last we had that fateful confrontation which has often ended many a friendship. We engaged over politics and the experience cratered what remained of a long-lasting, albeit distant relationship.

Was that relationship fake, just because we corresponded through long distance? Facebook took the place of pen pals. Instead of letters, we had our posts. I told this person about a mutual friend of ours, another airman we both hadn’t seen in a long time, who had died. I used our correspondence to keep them abreast of those huge moments. I did it because I cared about my friend, even if we hadn’t seen each other for years. I still have a card they gave me from fifteen years ago. I have pictures of them stored away.

That friendship slowly ebbed but I cared about it. I cared about my former friend. I hated seeing them slide further and further into fear and shame based views of the world. I hated seeing what the pandemic brought out of them. I saw the caring person I once knew shut out other people, and eventually shut me out also.

I can’t say it was one-sided though. I took steps to distance them. I slowed down how often I saw their posts as they grew more toxic. I messaged them less often. I clicked “like” more seldom than before. When we argued that fateful day, I didn’t personally attack them. I didn’t block or unfriend them. I did, though, put more distance between us.

In the end, that former friend did what one would do when there’s little left to salvage, and they decide what remains isn’t worth saving.

Tell me how that all was fake, just because it happened through Facebook?

That break-up though, is one of dozens I’ve had through Facebook. Like billions of us have experienced. That’s the both relevant and problematic crux of the matter.

Now I decided to break up with Facebook itself. I also call on our government to break up Facebook too, in order to force it into social responsibility and accountability, and hopefully so people might use more options and stop relying on Ma Facebook.