My 3rd year I trimmed my friends list down from 10k to 1k, people I actually at least remembered having a conversation with. The next I took it down to about 300 people, and realized “I see or communicate with these people outside of this website already” and killed my account.
Best decision I ever made relative to the topic of social media.
Being bombarded with the thoughts and takes (especially when distorted in content and exposure frequency by an ad platform disguised as a social media site) of thousands of people — only a few of whom you can possibly know closely — is a recipe for mass psychosis.
I’m not saying don’t delete your account - I still don’t have one, but be aware that it may not be as simple as just creating a new one if you change your mind in the future.
This is exactly what happened to me as well.
For all the bots that clearly get through, they have some pretty onerous algorithms at work to figure out if you’ve ever had another account. It seems to matter not whether you use a different email or IP address. The same name alone seemed to be enough for them to lock a business account I was trying to create.
They’ve gotten a LOT more aggressive I think. About 12 years ago I created a second account in my own name for use exclusively with family, and never had issues with that one. I think that part of their risk analysis is that whatever risk analysis was performed at the time the account was created is somewhat sticky. Likely to prevent complaints about changing goalposts.
Of course I don’t use any Facebook/Meta property anymore.
I listed the same 8 things on Facebook Marketplace and sold everything within days...
Might as well poison the well if I'm going to have the account for marketplace
Now they will delete the account after some time if if you refuse to give them ID. But they didn’t always do that, which meant they had your data and refuse to give it up. Basically forever.
They’re not a great company and they don’t care about anything. You might be better off claiming you live in California USA and demanding they delete it under CCPA, than to try as EU Right to be forgotten or EU privacy. And that’s dismal too because your laws are supposed to be better than ours.
You should be able to get a UPS store Mail Drop for a month or two while you correspond with them and or the California attorney generals office and raise some hell. Yes it’s garbage to suggest this but it works. They take ID and all that over the web to open a mailbox and “voila I live in California now.” If you have any friends online there , just ask if you can “live there” and get some mail there while you write letters to the AG and or meta
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
They *have to* comply with the California request. I had to resort to this to get Kinto Share to stop accessing my background and credit every year. (Another trash fire company that doesn’t care how much you beg threaten or cry.)
Then two days later, rather than fix that, they announce the change to moderation methodology which has benefits to the highest bidder rather than the community.
Smells like another cesspit like X in the making.
Gone! Both are bad. The problem is the platform existing at this point.
You act like Facebook isn't already a cesspit. Anyone who claims any mainstream social network site isn't a cesspit is being fruitful with the truth, they're the sum of humanity and humanity sucks.
Facebook at least had some small community groups and market place utility.
I asked them to review their decision and it was a NO... and there are no other remedies.
Does anyone know if there is an option to restore them, so you can then remove them from the people you've sent them to?
Before I delete my account, I'd like to make sure I delete as many messages I sent to people also.
https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lf72fz3fas22
If they'd removed that rule altogether then it could be handwaved as merely "free speech absolutism", for better or worse, but officially stating that certain minorities are acceptable targets of abuse that's otherwise forbidden is something else entirely.
It’s not a mistake or some kind of ambiguous rule that could be misread. Following is the direct quote from Meta’s new guidelines. You can’t insult people based on:
Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
They’re carving out specific minorities to exclude them from protections afforded to everybody else.
It’s exactly like saying: “You can’t doxx anyone on our platform, except Jews because that’s political and religious discourse about where heathens live.”
So here we are in 2025, and this barely gets a mention in the press because they’re so overwhelmed by the president-elect pretending to invade Denmark and whatever.
I’m a middle-aged bisexual man. My childhood and early teenage years coincided with the darkest times of the HIV epidemic. At 13 I was deadly afraid of AIDS, and I’m still trying to overcome the internalized homophobia from those times. For years I just tried to blend in, dated women, eventually got married, had children. I thought society had made real progress, but now it’s starting to dawn on me that it’s a mirage like Roe vs Wade or 1920s Berlin, and it can be stripped away at any time. And I feel like a miserable coward for all these years “just minding my own business” and never stepping up to support the community in any way, letting somebody else do the work. That needs to change. I’ll rather be mentally ill than hide in the shadows.
> dictate truth
What about the damage done by the millions of lies that people post on the platform to spread their bigoted agendas? What about how these platforms' algorithms ostensibly promote hatred and shocking material?
Just look at the Rohingya massacre [0] and tell me you're OK with it.
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Yes, lies are bad and dangerous, but censorship is much worse and far more dangerous.
As anti-maskers laid dying in their hospital beds they denounced the misinformation they had been fed. Lets not pretend that misinformation is entirely impotent.
And let’s not pretend like the internet hasn’t exploded the reach misinformation.
How about we settle for a middle ground where Americans are allowed free speech on American platforms but let’s not give foreign actors/governments the same freedom?
I never had a Facebook account and as such I can not delete it but had I had one the time to delete it would have been when they started censoring anything which went against the desired narrative - probably around the time of the SARS2 unpleasantness - and not now that they claim to have been too censorious and 'promise' to allow more free speech. The same thing happened when Musk turned Twitter into X which makes me wonder why some people are so eager to embrace the censor and shun those places where he was kicked to the curb (even if I don't trust anything Zuckerberg says on this subject, he has shown his true colours a long time ago and they are dark and unpleasant to look at).
Also on the subject of FB moderation, I distinctly remember seeing a photo in my timeline that was censored like adult content. I clicked it, and it turned out to be some Christian thanking Jesus for something good. Real hateful content, that.
““Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and “Trans people are immoral.””
is a net improvement?
