A version of what I posted on Facebook yesterday.
Okay, folks. Most of you should know that I’ve pretty much removed myself from Facebook, popping in now and then just to share a link to a blog post and comment on friends’ posts. I went from being on Facebook for more than an hour a day to being here less than an hour a week and I love having that time back in my life.
I’m still on Twitter a lot and although I know a lot of you “don’t get” Twitter, I do and I really enjoy it. One reason: every tweet from every person I follow always appears in my newsfeed, in reverse chronological order. In other words, Twitter doesn’t use algorithms to decide what I should see and bury the rest.
I’ve been wanting to delete my Facebook account for quite some time now and recent news is making me think again about how foolish it is to participate in a social network that manipulates what content appears for me and other users. I’m very upset that the manipulation has changed how some of my friends and family members think about what’s going on in the world and the amount of hate the content they share seems to generate.
In short: I feel that Facebook and its paying advertisers are brainwashing users, making the people in the country I love ever more divided. I don’t want to be part of that in any way.
So there’s a pretty good chance that the blog post link I share in a moment will be the last one I share here. And an equally good chance that I’ll be deleting my Facebook content and account very soon.
That said, I’d like to keep in touch with all of you. Although I assume that Facebook’s algorithms will show this to a tiny percentage of the 300+ friends and hundreds of followers I still have here, I’m asking those of you who see this to take a moment and let me know where else I can find you online: your Twitter name, blog URL, email address, and/or cell phone number. You can put it in a private message if you like. I want to keep in touch with the folks I like, but I don’t want to do it on Facebook.
I hope you understand.
Recent revelations about the way Facebook harvests private data and your friends private data, their favourites, links and contact numbers, makes me think of the old Eagles song ‘Hotel California’. The song ends with the rather prophetic line..
“You can check out any time you like but you can never leave”
They will never wipe your data. And they will know that your old friends are still in contact with you via new numbers or ISP’s. What they do is creepy.
You have to manually delete your data to get it off there. It’s extremely time-consuming. Simply deleting your account is apparently not enough; they hold onto your data even if your account is “deleted.“ I use a cookie destroyer so that Facebook and other websites I visit can’t follow me around the Internet. It’s extremely effective, but it’s not available on my mobile devices. I manually delete cookies on those about once a week. Since posting this here and on Facebook, I’m number of my real world friends have begun following me on Twitter. I’m also trying to make a list of their websites and blogs so I can visit them on a regular basis and stay in touch.
For tracking your friends blogs, you can use Feedly – most blogs these days can be accessed by RSS feed, and you can aggregate them all into Feedly, and never miss a post ;) (Not a shill, just a user) (but bring back Google Reader ftw)
I used to use a newsfeed reader back when I did more reading and less podcast listening. I think it’s a good idea to do that again. A few of my friends do have blogs and I’m just not disciplined enough to check in with them regularly. My loss! Thanks for the suggestion.