Last year I deleted my Facebook and Instagram. Since then, I have found that the quality of my life has improved. Although deleting social media did not automatically improve my life by itself, it did clear the time and mental space for me to make those improvements.
I don’t trust Facebook, Inc.
The first reason I deleted my Facebook (FB) and Instagram (IG) is because I don’t trust the company, which owns both FB and IG. From the CEO calling Facebook users “dumb f*cks” for handing over their information, to the secret mood manipulation experiment, to providing Trump’s Presidential campaign with Facebook company staff members, to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – I just became fed up with Facebook’s immoral and unethical shenanigans. And even though it’s been a full year since I deleted my Facebook and Instagram, the privacy issues still haven’t stopped. Yesterday, Facebook confirmed that millions of Instagram users’ passwords were being stored on their servers in plain text form and viewable by 2,000 employees. For a $500 billion tech company (in terms of market cap), this is simply unacceptable. And it’s not like they just started – they’ve been around since 2004 (or 2003 if you account for the time they used to be called FaceMash.)
The social media sites weren’t useful anymore.
The second reason that I deleted Facebook and Instagram was because I didn’t find it useful anymore. It was a big distraction that sucked time out of my schedule and mental clarity while providing me nothing back in return: selfies, pics of vacations, food, pets, rants, fake news – how was any of this content I was absorbing from others making me a better person? The rare times I found social media useful was far outweighed by the nonsense on it. Perhaps 15 million others who have left since 2017 feel the same way, too.
I wanted to get rid of potential liabilities.
The third reason I deleted Facebook and Instagram was because I wanted to create a better environment for myself as a newly married man. To a married person, social media is a liability, a net negative. There are more important things for a newly married person to attend to than being on a social network. In my view, social media is most useful for singles or a brand/public figure marketing something. But even then, time and time again, social media has shown to do more harm than good for average folk and celebrities.