Leaving Social Media

 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

--Mark Twain 

Michael was still smarting from falling for a scam involving an email claiming excessive activity on his credit card when he told me that Facebook had locked his account for a short time due to his violation of Facebook’s Community Standards.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. They don’t tell you the offense is, only that it violated community standards.”

Wait. Drug dealers, loan sharks, and bookies have better respect for their customers than that. That is the kind of institutional arrogance a prison guard has over his inmate, not the attitude we would expect from a business toward its customers. Facebook pages make a tremendous amount of money from the data gleaned there. To treat those members like minions beholden to you demonstrates a hubris that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the already corrupt business world.

But the story isn’t about Facebook’s failure at human decency. The issue goes deeper. Much deeper.

You see, a large but unknown number of people whose access to their Facebook feed has faced restrictions, will live out the limit to access and continue as before. Facebook faces no consequences for its algorithmic arrogance.

On my friend’s recounting of his Facebook offense, I thought If Facebook ever restricted my account over a non-specific charge, that would mark the end of my relationship with Zuckerberg & Co.

Well, it did happen to me.

Several months ago, I had two Facebook accounts: one, a tame mini blog for keeping in touch with friends and family, and another, a firebrand in-your-face political partisan rag. Over time, I tired of the partisan wrangle. I was arguing with people who appeared to have struggled to complete their eighth-grade education. Winning was not fulfilling. I closed that account and turned the keeping-up-with-family page into a display of literary memes and links to bookish articles.

I committed the Community Standards sin in those displays of the love of books and was locked out of usual activity for 24 hours. I was told I could find the nature of my offense by following an arcane regimen of nested menus, but they didn’t work. They called for me to navigate to something called “Account Quality” which, guided by my limited computer tech skills, I found does not exist. So, I closed the Facebook account.

I’m only one of millions of Facebook users, so my little protest won’t make a blip on the consumer trend to obsequious fealty to the mega-corporate model, but I can only hope that, over time, others will follow in ever-growing numbers.

Michael’s gullibility will, I’m sure, lead him into another scam. Social media has conditioned him into the victim mindset.

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