Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

That’s the title of a book by Jaron Lanier. He poses the question:

How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history, which have no way of making money except by being paid to manipulate your behavior?

He wrote the book during the final months of 2017 – before the explosive events of the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved his thesis that we are the product of platforms such as Facebook and Google – not the customers – and that the real customers include bad actors who certainly do not have your, or society’s, best interests at heart.

As the title suggests, he presents ten (very persuasive) arguments as to why you should stop using these platforms. And as he says:

…being able to quit is a privilege; many genuinely can’t. But if you have the latitude to quit and don’t, you are not supporting the less fortunate; you are only reinforcing the system in which many people are trapped. I am living proof that you can have a public life in media without social media accounts. Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical. Business follows money, so we who have options have power and responsibility.

I have long loathed and detested Facebook, so when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, it provided the impetus to delete my Facebook account, and I’ve never regretted it for an instant. I confess that I still have a WhatsApp account (WhatsApp is owned by Facebook), but this is only because our neighbourhood and community council have  group accounts. I would much prefer to stick to SMS, but alas, that ship has sailed.

I read (and have monetary subscriptions to) newspaper websites directly instead of getting news through personalised feeds – Lanier writes that when “Facebook announced that it will deemphasize news in its feed: the journalism world celebrated, for the most part, because now it might become freer to connect to audiences on its own terms”.

I use Pi-hole as our home network-wide Ad blocker, which has the added advantage of preventing Ad services from spying on us.

I avoid using Google services as much as I can (for example I use DuckDuckGo as my search provider, and refuse to use Gmail). Nonetheless, my smartphone runs Android – thanks to Microsoft not having the guts to persevere with Windows Phone, so Google probably know more about me and my habits than I do myself.

Instagram and Twitter have never appealed to me; I have never used them.

Here’s an interview with Lanier on the subject of his book. I heartily recommend that you read Lanier’s book for yourself – it is likely to be an eye-opener. Hopefully it may also help some social media addicts to kick their habit.