The time is rapidly coming when I’m quitting Facebook for good

By David McElroy · December 23, 2019

I joined Facebook in 2007 only because a girlfriend asked me to. Until early 2009, though, I posted nothing. I didn’t see why I needed this social media platform as part of my life.

After I started using Facebook, though, I became a heavy user as I connected with those who shared my political interests and then as I used it to promote the articles I wrote here. I fairly quickly reached the 5,000 limit on “friends,” but I eventually decided things were out of control with the angry arguments on my page.

Over the last few years, I’ve aggressively cut my number of contacts. (Let’s be honest. Most of them aren’t really friends.) I’ve cut it to just a few more than 500. I thought that might be enough for me to think it was worth sticking around.

I’ve recently realized, though, that I need to leave Facebook completely.

It won’t be today or next week. I doubt it will be next month. But sometime — in six months or a year, maybe — I will delete my Facebook account and move on. I want to explain why.

First, I don’t trust Facebook as a company. If you’re interested in the reasons why, you probably already know the details, so I’m not going to go too deeply into this.

Facebook has shown an incredible lack of interest in privacy or honesty. Company executives have made statements attacking the idea that we need privacy and they have been cavalier in their attitudes about the security of information they have about us.

User information is routinely leaked from Facebook and the company has done nothing to change its bad habits. I have to accept that this isn’t going to change, so I don’t want to stick around and get burned when things get worse.

In addition, the company has ambitions to take even more control over our lives. Not only does the company control multiple platforms (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp), it has just launched a project to design a new mobile operating system which will integrate its platforms and compete with iOS and Android.

Facebook already requires users to use its chosen browser for certain functions — such as going live — and I can see the day when it will make its own phone virtually required for the best experience. I simply don’t want a company which I don’t trust having that much control over my data and my online experience. So I’m going to disentangle myself before things can get worse.

Second, I don’t like what Facebook is doing to my mind and my attention span. This is a broader problem with the web in general and with all social media to some extent, but Facebook has become an incredible “time suck” for me and it has also trained me to spend every bit of downtime scrolling through shallow information which is essentially useless to me.

I might or might not withdraw from Instagram at the same time. I enjoy having a place to share my photos, but I’m not sure Instagram works as it was originally intended. Changes since Facebook bought the company have meant that interaction with other users is rewarded by showing your photos more often.

I don’t really want to make friends on Instagram. I just want to share photos for those who are interested — without having to pretend to be buddies with them. The algorithms on the service currently penalize someone who just wants to display photos for the world to see (without wasting time interacting with people he doesn’t know).

I will continue to speak online, although I can’t pretend to be sure what form that will take. As I’ve told you recently, I’m having a crisis in that regard, because I no longer have anyone to whom I’m speaking — in the broad sense — and I don’t know what I need to say.

I had high hopes for the effect the online world could have on public discourse — back when I participated in online message boards in the early 1990s — but those hopes have all been dashed. These tools don’t do what I had hoped they would. Somehow, I’m going to have to find ways to use different tools to connect more deeply with the people who I need to reach.

I’m not looking for a new social media platform, so please don’t write to me to tell me about whatever upstart Facebook competitor you’ve found. I’m simply not interested. It’s the shallow nature of the social media world which I’m escaping, not just the behemoth that Facebook has become.

There have definitely been positives to Facebook for me. I’ve connected with some people with whom I’ll stay connected and I’ve reconnected with people who I might have lost entirely otherwise. But the downsides have finally overwhelmed the upsides for me.

When the time comes, I will make an orderly exit. I’ll leave contact information posted there for awhile before I actually delete the account. I’ll ask for email addresses for people who would like to stay connected. I’ll give you plenty of warning before this all happens, once I have a plan and timeline in place.

But I’ve made the decision to disconnect completely from the digital clutches of Zuckerberg and Co. I’ll be happier when I quit wasting time in a virtual world and spend it working on things I want in the real world instead.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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