I recently canned my Facebook (and Twitter, why not?) account when I discovered that they were attempting to monitor my “offline” behavior to determine whether not I was a “hate agent”. Such behavior would include any kind of association with people like Tommy Robinson, Laura Loomer, Carl Benjamin, Milo, and Paul Joseph Watson. I expect the circle of “hate agents” to only widen as people talk to each other. Anyway, it’s gone, and today was my first full day Facebook free.
I still had the habit of looking for Facebook in the morning. So instead, I opened up my Kindle app and started reading. I just started The Rational Bible: Genesis, by Dennis Prager. I read Exodus earlier, and liked it quite a bit. So far, Genesis does not disappoint. I hope to get a lot more reading done in the days ahead. I believe it will prove to be a much healthier habit than Facebook.
17 replies on “Life Without Facebook”
For those with a business reason to use something like Facebook, I am trying Minds.com. I’m not an expert at it yet, but I hope enough people will migrate to a place where we can get back to the business of life without the massive intrusion that Facebook is.
Facebook?
You’ll quickly adjust to being (happily) FB-free – and filling that time with almost anything else can only be a positive thing. I agree with you that we have to assume any and all of our online and offline associations, no matter how fleeting, peripheral or minor, are under scrutiny.
I ditched my FB account in 2016 after the nasty political rhetoric overwhelmed the positive interactions I’d enjoyed in previous years. Then I deleted my two Twitter accounts. I still have IG and Pinterest but those will probably go at some point – especially since FB owns IG and Pinterest is apparently censoring pro-life organizations. I’m going even further, though. I’m slowly extricating myself from Google’s reach by deleting Chrome, their Cloud service, a couple of gmail accounts and my YouTube account (I’ve switched to BitChute). Just the other day I learned that Google owns Waze, a navigation app I’ve relied on for years. I’m afraid I’ll have to break ties with that, too, because all of that data is being vacuumed up by the Don’t Be Evil corporation.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if one day I go back to using a road atlas and an old flip phone that has no extras besides being able to take small, fuzzy photos and sending text messages :-).
I haven’t de-Googled myself yet. I too, rely heavily on their navigation software and watch a lot of youtube. I also have accounts on all of the alternative social media platforms like mewe, minds, parler, and telegram.
Very much healthier. Good decision.
Will you please explain a little more about FB looking into your “offline” behavior as a “hate agent?” I have not heard of this. How do they do it?
Like others, I maintain my FB account only for family and old friends. For example, my niece and her family took a long, old-fashioned camping trip this month, and it was to FB where she posted all the photos. But she had to send me a message through other channels to tell me to look at them and show them to my mom (who does not have a FB account). And like it or not, that’s where all the family is and will remain. (And I speak as one who, in the days before FB, created and maintained a private bulletin board for my family.)
Way back when, I used to do some online gaming on FB, the kind with teams, and I developed some good online relationships with people all over the world. But it was a huge time-waster, and I gave it up probably ten years ago. Never booted all of those people off my friends list, but since I don’t say much on FB anymore, it’s more trouble to remove them than to leave them.
FB was absolutely invaluable in the weeks and months following Hurricane Harvey. My neighborhood association has a private FB group and it was the best and only place to get news and share info with my neighbors about what was going on there. It all would have been so much harder without those connections and info. I also posted periodically about how my family was managing, which many, many people on FB responded to.
So I am deeply appreciative of how effective FB is for keeping up with friends and family.
It was first revealed by Breitbart. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/06/13/exclusive-facebooks-process-to-label-you-a-hate-agent-revealed/
Wow, huh. Well, since I don’t have my FB account linked anywhere else (because I don’t have anywhere else) and I don’t make political comments on FB, or post any photos at all on FB, I’m probably okay. I don’t use the FB phone app, refuse to provide FB with my phone number, and never leave a tab open to FB in the background of my browser (and try to remember to close all other tabs before opening a tab with FB). I suppose they have some kind of black magic that tracks me anyway.
Congratulations. I have a FB account almost entirely due to family members who maintain contact that way. The FB “friends” I miss not at all.
I have largely left the platform except for these contacts. We really should create a ME-We that is just our family for these purposes. But as others have pointed out, it has convenience. And the octogenarians among my family are not learning something new at this point.
I left twitter shortly after Scott Ott talked about his departing. I don’t miss it at all.
I would recommend reading the Best of Afterburner e-book after you finish that. You should have received it in an email a while back.
Help, my family is trying to get me to make a Facebook account! They say that it’s how people communicate now days and that I’ll miss out on information if I don’t have one, which is probably true, but I don’t care.
Ignore them like cable news.
You may miss out on some information, but likely not the really important stuff.
I’ve survived many years not only effectively without FB (my family knows that I won’t see anything they post there unless they tell me to go look) OR texting on my phone. I had a twenty-year-old flip phone and got my first smartphone a couple of months ago. Still haven’t let most people know that I can text now.
So it’s possible to live without these things. There is this nifty old-fashioned thing called email, another called phone calls (which allows you to talk to someone located far away), and a third is using your hand and a pen and an actual sheet of paper, putting it into a thing called an envelope, and putting a thing on the envelope called a postage stamp. Two or three days later the addressee will receive your message. You can even include photos! (I can provide more precise instructions if needed.)
Sarcasm aside (not trying to be nasty to you, only moderately obnoxious), it really is possible, and arguably easier, to live a fulfilling life without FB and I encourage you to Stay Away.
Look into the research about dopamine hits, how FB changes your brain, and, having discovered how it changes your brain, deliberately tries to manipulate you. If you allow yourself to be sucked in, you will waste enormous amounts of time (which you could spend more productively doing literally anything else) looking at photos of what people ate for lunch, cat videos, stupid memes, aggravating and completely unnecessary political fights with people who will unfriend you because of your beliefs (arguments over which you will sometimes literally lose sleep–who need that?!?), and inbox spam that is the modern equivalent of chain letters.
I got a smile out of this. I totally agree.
You’re “missing out” on wasted time and a lot of nonsense. Stay strong!
You are a better person than I.
FB is still a convenient way to keep up with friends and family. Though, like Bill, I have FB friends who I don’t even interact with even on a superficial level. I don’t want to unfriend them because I don’t want to hurt their feelings.
Other than that, I enjoy sounding off there about various and sundry political issues.
And, of course, there’s The Stratosphere Lounge FB page, which I started. It’s become my online version of Cheers.
Congrats my friend! I got involved on FB due to necessity for an animal rescue organization. That stuff is addicting. I left after my need passed and I discovered I had lots of “friends” whom I really didn’t know.