BYE BYE FACEBOOK!

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and CEO.

My relationship with Facebook, like for many of us, has been challenging to say the least, especially in the past year. On the plus side, it has kept me in touch with friends and family overseas. It has helped me to feel less lonely. It has given me the chance to join groups and learn a lot from the exchanges that took place there, and promote my writing career.

In time, I’ve become more and more resistant to using it for reasons I’ll explain later. I’ve kept it till now because I hoped it would help me to reach more and more potential readers. However, organic growth is non-existent, paying for ads is not worth it as I’m traditionally published, and giving money to an organisation like Facebook makes me gag.

Why? For starters, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described us users as “dumb fucks”  in an instant messaging conversation in 2003; and in 2009 he lied in a BBC interview when asked whether he would sell our Facebook users’ info:

MZ: "This is their information. They own it."
BBC: "And you won’t sell it?"
MZ: "No! Of course not."

Truth be told, I used its ads 2 years ago for a few months to build a mailing list. At the time, though, I didn’t know what I know now.
When I heard that even Elon Musk deleted his Tesla’s FB account, I thought that I had no more excuses to postpone the deletion of my own account.

So, here are my reasons:

• Facebook is addictive, and it is not surprising because it applies mind control techniques used in casinos, like the rewarding sound of its notifications;
• Most of my relationships on Facebook are shallow, and take up precious time I can dedicate to important real life relationships;
• The blatant censorship;
• The shadow-banning;
• I can’t trust Facebook with protecting my privacy. Not even if Sheryl Sandberg, FB’s CEOO, has her way and makes its users pay for keeping their privacy. And it’s not just because of Zuckerberg being a liar, and Facebook being involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

          No, there’s much more. For example, Facebook’s paying feature
       Onavo Protect (which Facebook owns), is a VPN which, instead of protecting data from prying
      eyes, you guessed it, spies on its owners.
       Another example: FB has a patent, approved a year ago, for “Techniques for emotion detection
       and content delivery.” The patent “proposes capturing images of the user through
       smartphone  or laptop cameras, even when the user is not actively using the camera.By visually
       tracking a user’s facial expression, Facebook aims to monitor the user’s emotional reactions to
       different types of content.”
       Why does it do that? To analyse our facial expressions so it can deliver more engaging/pleasing
       content to us. Maybe that’s why Zuckerberg has a tape on the webcam and microphone of his
       laptop, as you can see in photos and many videos, like on this  video.

• Its facial recognition software makes it possible to track us everywhere we go. Again, no privacy and always dangerous in the government’s hands, but especially now that, to cite a quotation attributed to George Orwell, “…, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

• In 2012 FB conducted a psychological experiment on unsuspecting users. In a paper published in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS), researchers state: “The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing. It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend’s content directly by going to that friend’s “wall” or “timeline,” rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed.”  This study demonstrated that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.” According to the researchers, their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy.   What does this mean? FB can manipulate our feelings to get us to behave in the way FB wants us to. In other words, it can brainwash us.  
  
• It’s very likely that DARPA (the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) founded FB according to the article “Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project” published on Wired.com, and Inforwars (you can watch the video here).                                                                                                                                                                                                               “LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does.” Like FB. And the day LifeLog was cancelled, FB was founded. Coincidence?                                                        

         As my post is already very long, I’ll just add only one more detail: “A researcher connected to a
       Department of Defence-funded program to use the military to quell civil unrest also participated
       in the study [the psychological experiment I discussed above].” (Source: RT)

I know what you’re thinking. All big corporations are just as bad and we can’t win. I beg to differ. I have cancelled my Google+ account, don’t use Chrome anymore and rarely use Gmail.

Since I’ve discovered that Microsoft reads all my emails, I’m using the Swiss Protonmail instead for all important correspondence because it encrypts my emails.

I use Firefox and Tor instead of Edge and Chrome. However, I’m becoming more and more concerned about Firefox so I may drop it and use DuckDuckGo.

Moreover, I have a tape on my laptop and smartphone webcam, and plan to put it on the microphones too. I have disconnected my Smart TV from the net and put a tape on its camera for good measure. And smart meters will gain access to my home only over my dead body, like Alecsa and the other spying devices similar to it.

The countdown has started: in 2 weeks I’ll delete my FB account.  Just enough time to inform my connections.

I’ll still be on Twitter, although I’m planning to leave it too, and on Gab.ai  @AngelaGuidolin

What about you, dear Seeker, when are you going to #deletefacebook?