I'm writing to you off-schedule from my desk at work. You may have heard that as I write this at 1200 Pacific (1900 UTC), Facebook and its properties are offline.
The reaction at my office is widespread and the anxiety is palpable.
From a desk just outside my door, "I can't show you pictures of my car at the car show over the weekend because Instagram isn't working." I remind her that the pictures are probably still in the photo gallery on her phone. "Oh yeah!" she exclaims. She shows me the pictures but only by opening Tik Tok instead (where she had also posted them).
A voice from a private office down the hall, "Hey the internet is down!" To him, Facebook is the internet.
Clients can't be contacted on Facebook Messenger, a platform our company uses quite a bit. Our staff have to resort to standard texting, or worse, making a phone call.
A member of the C-suite strolls out of his office to comment. "Did you know a whistleblower took thousands of documents out of Facebook, and he [sic] said they knew about all the misinformation on their platform and did nothing about it?" Possibly referencing the recent Wall Street Journal exposé on Facebook, or the 60 minutes interview of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, this is only a problem because he believes opposition to forced vaccinations are a result of misinformation being algorithmically spread on Facebook. He also thinks President Trump was elected because of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The idea that there exists legitimate arguments countering his worldview is impossible to imagine, in part, because of the bubble he lives in on Facebook and other social media. Everything outside the bubble is illegitimate because it must have been caused by misinformation.
Other colleagues are just anxious for a fix. They don't need Facebook or Instagram to do their jobs. They just feel overwhelmed with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and crave a dopamine hit by seeing the latest updates from their friends, family, and the celebrities they follow.
Some might argue that Facebook is more than just a platform for mass addiction and manipulation. Some people make their living selling things on Facebook Marketplace. Content creators on Instagram are losing valuable metrics. Businesses cannot reach their audience with ads they already paid for. Families cannot communicate today because they use Messenger or WhatApp. For those outside the US for whom Facebook really is the internet, their Facebook sites are unreachable. For many, that is their only presence on the internet because of how embedded in the economy Facebook has become.
But I maintain that today is a great day. Hearkening back to the good old days pre-2004 before Facebook was founded as the next iteration of Mark Zuckerberg's earlier project "FaceMash," which featured images of his female classmates at Harvard. Users on the site were given pictures of two women and could select which one was more attractive. He obtained the pictures not from the women themselves, but by gaining unauthorized access to university servers and taking the student photos stored there.
Facebook has been the subject of numerous lawsuits by the FTC, the most famous of which involved a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica, which was able to collect user data from Facebook and use it for political advertising. Facebook was caught conducting psychological experiments on its users as early as 2012. The list of known transgressions committed by Facebook are too numerous for me to detail here before the site inevitably comes back online. The list of currently active but unknown transgressions is probably even longer.
I typically run through multiple drafts of my posts before sending them out. But I was compelled to get this out to you today for one reason. Facebook owns the social network, Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and many more platforms and brands. According to the aforementioned WSJ report, they are pulling out all the stops to addict and retain young users. Instagram Kids, a new product under development by the company, was recently put on hold.
Use this opportunity today to quit Facebook and its properties. Don't log back in. Lose your passwords. If you do business on Facebook, make plans to migrate to another platform. Get your family and friends on Signal instead of Messenger or WhatsApp. Delete Messenger Kids for good. The good parts of Facebook can be replaced and, in my opinion, they do not justify the bad parts because the bad parts form the core of the platform.
The world is a better place without Facebook in it.
Don't forget to like this post, share it with your friends, and bookmark my censorship-resistant backup site in case I get deplatformed (Tor network access required).