Departure From The Book Of Faces

I’ve been looking at doing this for five years.

In this blog from five years ago, I wrote about an impending change in my social media routine and now’s the time has come to finish what I started. September 2020 is my final month on Facebook.

It’s a bittersweet deal, you know? Loads of fun has been had on the service, reconnections with family and old friends, discoveries of new and exciting things, much of it has been great. Though I didn’t sign up for the social aspects of the service, it’s mainly what’s kept me around, even through the changing of the guard.

That is, all the young folks who came to Facebook from MySpace, looking for a new place to congregate and call their own. And it was, for a while, before all of their parents joined and could easily tag them in posts. Many of those social media pioneers have long since bailed for other networks while Facebook has bloated into a multi-faceted giant of a platform offering commerce solutions for businesses, video conferencing and targeted marketing support. Sort of like LinkedIn but with cat pictures.

It also became something else, though. A battleground.

With increasingly turbulent times all around us in the world, Facebook has reflected much of that in the exchanges between its denizens. Amidst all of the memes, name-calling, finger-pointing, blocking and arm-chair quarterbacking were whole families shut out, friends disowned, enemies taunted and harassed. It got to the point where looking at your newsfeed served as a meta-commentary on all that’s horrible and wrong with the world.

Admittedly, I didn’t do a lot of skimming feeds and stalking pages, in fact, often-times I wasn’t there at all, allowing a number of post-bots like Buffer and Zapier to slip in unawares, post content in numerous locations and then bug out. It may’ve looked like I was always on Facebook, but 80% of my posts were pre-written and scheduled to go live at different times of the day, all in support of marketing and promoting my music and all that goes with it. It’s why I joined the service in the first place; to expand my network as a small business owner.

I wasn’t the only one, obviously, because you can buy whatever you like on Facebook. It follows you around the site, ads that somehow know that you’ve been looking at Bose bluetooth headphones or surfing web sites for cruise vacations. Facebook, for all intents and purposes, is a mega advertising church. Connecting family and friends is simply a by-product that it’s come to live with.

In becoming so giant, so vast in its scope, it was becoming easier to disappear within the cracks of its user interface. Just another organic one or zero in the mainframe. Not to mention that it’s also a huge target for scammers, hackers and other ne’er-do-wells that are seemingly omnipresent. At any given time, you probably knew someone who was posting things like “if you get a friend request from me, don’t add me again because someone got into my account.” Some folks were doing a lot of advertising on the service, as I did for a short time, before I realized that the analytics were swayed in Facebook’s favor, and we had financial information tied into our accounts in order to fund the paid content ads and other services.

Somewhere, at some point, I began attracting suspicious activity on my account. Attempted logins from overseas and strange spoofed e-mails that tried to get me to click a link to “update” important information, something that I know is a total no-no (why not just give them the keys?) These attempted breaches gave way, in time, to successful breaches and there was a lot of password-changing, credit-card cancelling and case-opening going down on my part. I ended up removing all of my products from Facebook, disconnected apps designed to sell merchandise across multiple platforms and deleted my financial information.

But news headlines raised the question of what was actually happening with all of that data. And with scandal after scandal erupting with the social network being a hunting ground for Russian influencers and the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, suddenly shit got a lot more real.

All the while, I was starting to change my business model and move it towards creating content exclusively for Patreon. On Facebook, your pictures, videos and posts are the content that Mark Zuckerberg sells, and you curate that content for free! I was spending a lot of time in the FB network, time that could’ve been applied to a different area of my life, like practicing. While standing around talking about how much we’re all on Facebook, the joke is usually that we should all be spending a lot less time lurking on the service and a lot more time working on our individual passions.

So, after a particularly gnarly week of hacks on my account, I finally decided to drop the hammer and get out.

Unfortunately, the hackers were able to remove me as an admin on my Music page, and had actually added five people and a fake business to my Business Manager. I have the IP address of the fraudsters. 42.114.202.97 based in Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It’s a well-known scam and the irony of it is me, jumping through all kinds of hoops with Facebook Legal in order to restore admin control over my own intellectual property.

Yep, The Final Straw.

If the coronavirus has taught me anything, it’s that you gotta learn to adapt and roll with the punches. I’m doing a lot of things differently now that all of my in-person gigs have dried up for the time being, including focusing more time on chill stuff like reading, studying, practicing, writing, recording, you know, all the really fun and edifying stuff. As much as I do it, all of the posts and promos, advertisements and notices, e-mails and Photoshopped ads, it all serves a purpose, to keep income flowing, but it doesn’t give me anywhere near the satisfactory thrill of discovery and creation.

Many have asked me if pulling the plug on Facebook doesn’t actually run contrary to why I was there in the first place. Not really. Based on Google analytics, most of my traffic comes through YouTube, which has its own slice of the social media pie. There’s a Community component of YouTube that would allow for the kind of interactions that I had on Facebook. Same with Instagram, where I’ve maintained an account for a while and plan to use as my main social media platform. Owned by Facebook, it’s a simpler format, a little easier to manage and I won’t be using it for paid advertising, so no risk to my financials.

An interesting response from some folks has been one of jealousy, like folks who so want to leave The Book of Face as well, but still find themselves needing it, addicted to it and dependent upon it. I can get that - that’s why it’s taken me five years to leave, and who knows how much longer if my account hadn’t been so egregiously compromised? And I wonder if I’m doing the right thing for my business, what if traffiic does drop off? What if the network on Facebook really was the backbone of traffic flow to my other sites?

I guess we’ll see in a little while, right? There won’t be inspiration to try unless there’s willingness to fail.

And many others have written to congratulate me on something that they did long ago, citing how much more time they had, how much better they felt and how glad they were to be no longer a part of it. I’m not saying that Facebook is a terrible thing. Lots of good has come out of what the company has innovated over the past ten years. Still, there is a danger in too much of a good thing. Hopefully, we learn to find the balance in all of it.