#DeleteFacebook — Let's be clear. Facebook is a prolific data miner, and abound with false information. You should fear this.

In considering such a momentous divorce, one day I'd question my thinking, and consider how I would lose connections to friends travelling overseas, distant relatives and past acquaintances I no longer see.   There have certainly been advantages to being able to minimally promote something you want people to become aware of, without paying $$$ for it. 

The next day would be filled with big eye-rolls over blatant click-bait, scams about FB hacks, dipshit memes and puzzles, cute animal videos, apparent endorsements from Friends who 'like' sponsors, alerts for events that I have little interest in, mundane moments in bold text with pretty background colours, and rants from people who bleat the obvious to provoke reactions and angry ill-considered comments.  By the time I've scrolled through this river of intellectual novocaine, I've quit the site and learned little of what is actually affecting the lives of the people I care most about.

More annoying is being constantly tracked, so because I looked at 'this', I also need 'this' shoved in my face, or "We care about you and the memories that you share..."  NO you don't.  Here's a stupid animated video of non sequiturs that we've made after trawling through your photos.

In hindsight, I know that the final trigger for me to leave was the live streaming of a mass murder in Christchurch. No tweaking of the user "rulebook" will imbue a conscience in someone capable of doing that.

Every FB user should download their FB data to reveal that everything you've ever 'liked' can never be undone, and that every word you've typed into Messenger is stored in perpetuity.  It's impossible to erase your record of all previous activity and interaction, because much of that data is mined and aggregated outside your profile.

I had to laugh when it was reported very recently that a server migration deleted vast amounts of content on MySpace, that horribly badly-coded and executed forerunner that degraded into little more than a publicity machine for music artists.  Did anyone else know it was still operational, or care?  I've been watching with interest how marketing and ideology is gradually subsuming the individual on FB, in a similar way to the demise of MySpace, but FB is a juggernaut.

One day I might be the hypocrite who comes back to social media like this, but if I do, it will be with greater caution and little interaction.

Let me recommend to you a recent keynote address by award-winning producer and musician T Bone Burnett.   It's as incisive and pertinent as it gets.  His argument is that the goal of art to create conscience is struggling in a world where the internet is numbing us into failing to retain our humanity.  He articulates many of the fears and reservations I have in ways that I could not.   It's a great read.
http://buzzbands.la/2019/03/13/t-bone-burnetts-keynote-speech-at-sxsw-d…