In addition to the obvious reasons — only seeing some of my friends’ posts, never seeing them in chronological order, so many of my friends’ friends being idiots, etc. — here are the rest of them.
They boil down to this: Facebook is a giant company with tremendous influence that acts recklessly, without oversight or regulation. The platform is used to spread hate and influence elections, and Facebook’s reaction is always, “Sorry, we’ve chosen not to exercise any control, so that’s out of our control. Golly, we’re just a li’l ol’ mom-and-pop internet site!” I finally got fed up.
(Links are approximately in chronological order, so skip to the bottom if you want to see the latest/worst ones.)
Facebook Haunted [NOT ENOUGH] by Its Handling of 2016 Election Meddling
Facebook Scrutinized over Its Role in 2016’s Presidential Election
Facebook Is Again Having to Account for Its Role in 2016 Election
Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Been Exposed to Russia-Linked U.S. Election Posts
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
Facebook’s Fake News Problem, Explained
Facebook Said Alex Jones’ Threatening Rant Against Robert Mueller Doesn’t Violate Its Rules. (They did ban him eventually.)
Holocaust Deniers Are Being Sincere So We Won’t Ban Them from Facebook, Says Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook Did Not Inform the FTC About Initial Cambridge Analytica Leak
Zuckerberg Secretly Called Trump After the Election (“Facebook’s own marketing strategy was influenced by what it learned from its valued customer, the Trump campaign”)
Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data Was Accessed from Russia
Fact-Checkers Have Debunked This Fake News Site 80 Times. It’s Still Publishing on Facebook
Facebook Shuts Down Legitimate Page Organizing Protests Against White Supremacists
Facebook Network Breach Affects Up to 50 Million Users
Advertisers Allege Facebook Failed to Disclose Key Metric Error for More Than a Year
If you missed it: today it was confirmed that Facebook massively & knowingly inflated its video-view statistics, which had the DIRECT consequence of 90% of media orgs firing writers in favor of expensive video producers, who also got fired when it turned out video was worthless https://t.co/WqdAUBIe6L
— Chris Conroy (@ConroyForReal) October 17, 2018
A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts from Myanmar’s Military
We Posed As 100 Senators to Run Ads on Facebook. Facebook Approved Them All
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
And the kicker: On Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook Acknowledges Details of Times Investigation
Facebook Filed a Patent to Predict Your Household’s Demographics Based on Family Photos
As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants: The social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed.
Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?
Facebook Used Games to Bilk Millions of Dollars from Children, Rejected Internal Solutions
* ***
I ain’t judgin’ anybody still on Facebook. I’m still on Twitter, after all, and it’s run by people who sympathize with white supremacists. One thing at a time.
