Note: this post was originally published in early 2019, before the Meta rebrand. I lost the original data but was able to recover it from web.archive.org. Republishing given the discourse around recent public events.

Delete your Facebook account.

Facebook preys on your mind. Teams of highly-skilled computer scientists tune algorithms to extract data from you, and as a by-product, take energy from your life.

Facebook loots and pollutes your headspace for the sake of maximizing profits. Facebook poisons and tampers with our social psyche.

As each of us leans into the always-connected lifestyle, real-world events become atomic bits that may or may not reach our consciousness. Humanity gets reduced to instructions written by engineers, themselves humans chock-full of biases that haven't seriously been reckoned with.

How these algorithms surface what we see is mysterious, deliberately opaque. The algorithms are designed first-and-foremost for profit generation.

Facebook has completely changed the landscape in which citizenries are informed. Once reputable news institutions have fallen prey to the need for clickbait headlines to maximize their own profit, prioritizing surface-level takes rather than digging deep on the issues of our times.

Now that all content is optimized for clicks, optimized for transactional engagement best characterized by HTTP requests, our discourse gets ever-more influenced by sound bites, out-of-context tweets. We ourselves become more tribal, more divisive, more isolated.

Facebook, in its great crusade to connect the world to the internet, has disconnected us from our humanity.

Facebook does not care about your well-being. Facebook has no monetary interest in improving the health of our society. Facebook will feed on your interests, classify your personality, log intimate details of your existence, and sell it to the highest bidder.

Stop filling the unimaginably large coffers of these people. Facebook built a product designed around exploiting you and your personal information. Stop letting them win the game of what consumes your attention. In today’s connected world, having a cell phone is enough to globally stay in touch with your friends and relatives.

Facebook may be free, Facebook may be convenient, but you pay with the most precious resource there is: your time. There is so much life outside Facebook. Try to imagine a world past one that is so co-dependent on Facebook’s existence. They’ve caused enough damn suffering.

and delete your instagram too.