The Crash That Fixed Me

I’d been feeling uncomfortable about Facebook for years. The 2020 Presidential Election campaign just about did it for me. The unwillingness of Zuckerberg to better monitor its content against the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Its harmful algorithms. How it sells negativity and anger. The way it is structured to attract people to behave in the worst ways and how our egos are stroked to sell ourselves - our thoughts, our lives, our extreme selves - even as it sells our information and entices us to buy its wares against our best interests. Today’s outage and yesterday’s whistleblower interview fixed me. It was down. I decided to let it stay down and closed - for me.

I know that all of social media is problematic but Zuckerberg’s apps seem to be the worst of the worst bad actors. My level of complicity, my desire to keep trying to convince myself that it was all horrible so I might as well do what I could within the site to help mitigate its damage all of a sudden ceased to absolve me of my knowingly being deeply complicit. What is happening at Facebook is evil. Insiders in the company know the psychological manipulation of its users is wrong and is doing great damage to the global world. Greed is running the machine.

There will be no correction unless the public demands it of Zuckerberg and his staff. The solution, the demand, will only be taken seriously as users shut down their accounts. If you’re uneasy with that, ask yourself why. If the thought of shutting down this virtual space makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why.

I will no longer justify my complicity in Zuckerberg’s dangerous virtual reality that brings out the worst in people in far more ways than it does the good. Our politicians won’t tame it through regulations. We can and must do this. #ShutItDown