How (and Why) to Avoid Facebook

By James Milin-Ashmore

Free speech Facebook alternative: The Friendz Network is used by people concerned about privacy and provides you with all the tools to freely share your views without having the fear of getting your account removed.

Facebook’s professed mission (which can be found on its investor relations page) is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

But a slew of recent revelations about the company – among them its role in influencing elections, traumatizing its content moderators and even its involvement in ethnic cleansing – expose the banality of the company’s self-professed aims.

It’s been made terribly clear that Facebook as an entity only cares for hoovering up more and more and more data, gobbling up any budding competitors, and cementing its global domination of the online world – making it harder and harder for the average denizen of the internet to avoid it, even if they don’t have a Facebook account.

I personally gave up on Facebook years ago, after reading about the effects it can have on your psyche. I can’t pretend it didn’t come at a cost – it’s now much harder to keep up with far flung friends and distant relatives, and it’s a shame to hear about their news far later than everyone else. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s been a small price to pay for safeguarding my personal information – and my mental health.

If you’re also tempted to remove Facebook from your life, read on for everything you need to know – from deleting your Facebook profile to preventing it tracking you around the web to ethical Facebook alternatives you can use instead.

4 reasons to avoid Facebook

1. Privacy concerns

It’s been hard to avoid news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the consulting firm secretly harvested millions of people’s Facebook profile data for targeted political advertising. But it’s important to know this was no isolated incident – Facebook’s disregard for user privacy has manifested in plenty of other ways.

In another major incident last year, Facebook clashed with Apple following news that the former had been paying users (some as young as 13) to install a “Facebook Research” VPN on iOS devices – which gave Facebook access to everything their phone sent or received over the internet.

There’s no limit to how intimate Facebook are willing to go – last year, it was revealed that they’d been in secret talks with hospitals to gain access to patient data, and the Wall Street Journal have reported that at least 11 popular health apps (such as fertility trackers) were sharing extremely sensitive personal information with Facebook.

With such a dismissive attitude for user privacy, it’s hardly surprising that Facebook has suffered multiple data breaches, with one of the latest seeing a total of 540 million records potentially exposed – everything from likes and reactions to comments and account IDs have been leaked from insecure servers.

2. Mental health

The link between extensive social media use and psychological issues is now well documented. A 2013 study into ‘the pathway between Facebook interaction and psychological distress’ found that “frequent Facebook interaction is associated with greater distress directly and indirectly via a two-step pathway that increases communication overload and reduces self-esteem.”

And this isn’t just from users passively absorbing what they see on their feeds – Facebook have actively manipulated users over the years, from secret tests to determine users’ addiction levels to their website, to using the newsfeed to influence users’ emotional state through “emotional contagion.”

But perhaps the worst offender when it comes to mental health is Facebook-owned Instagram. A UK-wide survey of 14 to 24 year olds by the Royal Society of Public Health ranked it the most harmful social media platform, finding it associated with high levels of anxiety, depression, bullying and FOMO.

“On the face of it, Instagram can look very friendly,” said a spokesperson for the RSPH. “But that endless scrolling without much interaction doesn’t really lead to much of a positive impact on mental health and wellbeing. You also don’t really have control over what you’re seeing. And you quite often see images that claim to be showing you reality, yet aren’t. That’s especially damaging to young men and women.”

3. Spread of misinformation & hate speech

The spread of misinformation on Facebook ranges from the relatively silly (like the growth of the QAnon conspiracy theory) to the downright dangerous.

Facebook have attempted to clamp down on this to some extent – but only last month campaign group Avaaz uncovered a network of far-right accounts spreading fake news and hate speech throughout Europe. The pages Facebook managed to take down following the revelations had 500 millions views in total – more than the number of voters in the EU. Indeed, in the first three months of 2019, Facebook removed c.2bn fake accounts from its servers, which is almost as many as all the legitimate accounts on the platform.

And just a few days ago, Facebook were refusing to take down a video of US House speaker Nancy Pelosi edited to make her appear drunk, which was being spread by Trump supporters. The top comments on the video show that many viewers were taking it at face value, despite the news reports on its inauthenticity:

If misinformation is rampant in the US and Europe, the situation is even worse around the rest of the world. In Myanmar, where 20 million of a population of 53 million are Facebook users, the spread of hate speech has had catastrophic consequences.

In 2017, Facebook failed to take action when the platform was being used by Buddhist extremists to stoke hatred of the Rohingya minority. Only in August of 2018 – after 25,000 Rohingya had been killed, and 700,000 had fled – did Facebook ban some of the instigators of the violence rom the platform.

(Here are 3 Chrome extensions that can help you filter fake news from your Facebook feed).

4. Worker exploitation

The workers at Facebook’s HQ on Hacker Way in Silicon Valley are famously pampered, with perks including a video game arcade, free meals and on-site dental care. But for the army of 15,000 content moderators Facebook has been obliged to hire as contractors, it’s a completely different story.

A recent expose from Casey Newton of the Verge brought to light the horrors of this job. Moderators are expected to review up to 400 posts every day, featuring the worst humanity has to offer – racism, bestiality and murder are par for the course.

You might think that working conditions would be cushy to compensate for this, but you’d be wrong. Contractors’ time is strictly controlled, with monitored bathroom breaks, 9 minutes of “wellness time” a day to step away from the screens if they’re feeling overwhelmed, and harsh penalties if their moderation “accuracy score” falls below 95/100.

It’s no surprise, then, that many moderators have turned to sex and drugs to cope with their work – Newton reports that employees regularly use marajuana on the job, and have been caught having sex in bathroom stalls, stairwells, the parking garage and even a room reserved for lactating mothers. Many go on to develop symptoms of PTSD.

Free speech Facebook alternative: The Friendz Network is used by people concerned about privacy and provides you with all the tools to freely share your views without having the fear of getting your account removed.

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