Bye Bye Facebook

I’ve been mulling over deleting my Facebook account for about 18 months now.

Since reading Adam Alter’s fascinating book ‘Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked’, which delves deep into behavioural additictions to social media, digital devices and online gaming, I’m been contemplating cutting off from Facebook.

When the Cambridge Analytica crisis for Facebook kicked off earlier this year, I started to look at this even more seriously. I spent 3 hours one evening going through all the motions of disconnecting myself from Facebook, which is surprisingly involved and a giant pain in the neck when you think of how many times you’ve hit “Connect with Facebook” when creating a new account anyone on the web. 47 in my case. I stripped down all my setting to remove any and all alerts, silencing updates from FB contacts and cleaned up everything, with the exception of hitting de-activate my account.

Now reading Evan Osnos’ deep expose on Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker, I’m pulling the plug. I’ve been a big proponent of big tech for years but the time to reign in big tech is well overdue. As Scott Galloway puts it in his book The Four: “A perfect storm against big tech may be brewing.” The growth at any cost attitude over the last 10 years at Facebook is deeply worrying.

Now when I told my wife I would be deleting my Facebook account, she asked me “Can you do your job if you’re no longer on Facebook?” It’s a fair question. Leading the digital offer at Edelman in Hong Kong, where client work sitting on Facebook makes up a large chunk of our revenue, it’s a question worth pondering. But my gut says it won’t be an issue. I’m not saying I’m giving up on reading about Facebook, its product updates, its F8 conference, and its news stories. Just giving up on my account. I gave up Instagram and uninstalled it on my phone about a year ago as it was too much of a drag on my time. I’m still on Whatsapp, so I won’t have completely severed my ties to the Facebook ecosystem. In the words of Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice-president of user growth, I’m giving up “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that [Facebook] have created [which] are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

So for the next 4 weeks my first step is de-activating from Facebook. And if all goes as planned, I’ll take the next step and permanently delete Facebook. I’m curious to hear from my peers in the industry what they think Ed Williams, Jason Fashade, Katheryn Lui, Dwayne Searjeant, David Jessop, David Francois, Paul Phillips, Emma Davey, Annouchka Behrmann, Camus Chung, Adrian Warr, Andreas Krasser, Chris Dobson, Sandipan Roy, Simon Murphy, Leo Wood, Carolyn Hammond, Shilpa Sharma, Gabor Koska.