At midnight, I kicked Facebook out

It felt like suicide. I deleted 1,106 friends, some 11,000 posts and nearly 1,000 nostalgic photos. But, I’m done being complicit with the evil Facebook does

Yesterday, I deleted my Facebook account for good. Also lost forever were the pages that promoted my past books, my website and a book I’ve just finished writing. 
I deleted 1,106 supposed friends and some 11,000-odd posts, starting with “I’m home!” on September 13, 2007 right up to my last message yesterday. The massacre included 781 photographs—poignant memories of my life, my children, my happinesses, my sadnesses, my celebrations, my wit and wisdom, my sarcastic rejoinders, my tears and sympathies. It was wrenching.

Facebook murmured at every turn: You don’t have to do this. You can just deactivate your account, take a break. Sometimes all you need is some 
time apart.

I succumbed and merely deactivated my account five days ago. Then I panicked about the friends who’d wonder. I reactivated the app from hell just to share my email and details with some selected friends. 

Last night, disgusted with myself, I decided to show some spine. I wrote my last post: At midnight today, I delete my Facebook account. I’m done being complicit in their evil.

I won’t make this easy for you. Your mother, 84, is critically ill and hovering between life and death in the ICU. You hear of a new drug that could save her but you learn that stem cells harvested from aborted foetuses were utilised during the production process. Would you still use the medicine to save your mother?
There are versions of this question—Is it alright to let a really old person die who would have died anyway and instead give the bed to a strong young man of 32? Is it okay to look the other way while a few people die if someone tells you it will save thousands?

And today’s question—is it okay for you to continue using Facebook knowing that it has directly spread lies, misinformation, chaos, hate, violence and death all over the world? Including in your country, India?

You’re smiling indulgently at Gopinath. You think he’s over-reacting to the Facebook whistleblower’s revelations. Well, here’s one, taken from Facebook’s own internal documents—“Facebook is . . . aware that it is used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient.”

At least they’re trying, you comfort yourself, forgiving Facebook its trespasses. Here’s more: although 90 per cent of Facebook’s users are outside the US, the platform devotes only 13 per cent of its time to moderating posts that instigate blood-lust if it’s outside the US. Its users post in over 160 languages but Facebook is spectacularly useless at detecting hate and violence in languages other than English and a few European tongues. 

Two years ago, Bengali Muslims were being savaged on Assamese Facebook. Posts labelling them pigs, rapists and terrorists were shared tens of thousands of times. But so sorry, Facebook’s artificial-intelligence systems doesn’t know Assamese, a language spoken by 23 million people. No, not even today.

Facebook sucks up to governments. When the Hindu-nationalist T. Raja Singh exhorted lakhs of FB followers to shoot India’s Rohingya Muslims, Zuckerberg looked the other way. Not a single post was taken down. India is his largest and fastest-growing market.

At least they commission independent researchers to tell them how to be better, you say.

Um, no, they don’t. They actively prevent independent research from happening at all. For years, Facebook has blocked transparency research from ProPublica, the Markup, New York University, AlgorithmWatch and others. They’ve mastered the art of looking pious and well-meaning and building a better world, but they slow down research, delay sharing of documents—and finally ignore the findings.

Facebook survives because we enable it with our desperate hunger for anonymous applause and the attention and love of strangers. Deleting Facebook will always feel like suicide.

But my 1,106 Facebook friends are no friends. They share farting cat videos with me, and click Like without reading my posts. Facebook friendships are howls in the wilderness. 

Here’s a surprise—nothing happens when you delete Facebook. Life goes on. You even feel a little lighter. The few friends who really matter to me have always known how to reach me. They never needed an app.

Let’s never forget that Facebook’s founder was born with the morals and shallow soul of a frat boy. He started Facebook for rating the sex appeal of girls in Harvard. He’s getting rich now selling my private details to corporations while pretending to have a noble vision for the world.

He’s still a frat boy with the soul of a hyena.

I pressed Delete.

If you want a link to my future columns, send your email address to cygopi@gmail.com

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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