Still Logged In
I’ve disliked Facebook and Zuckerberg for years. Unsympathetic is closer—there’s something about the whole operation that’s never sat right with me. The thought of deleting my account comes up regularly, for all sorts of reasons. But I never actually do it.
The Cambridge Analytica reporting made that harder to ignore. Fifty million profiles, data siphoned through a fake psychology app, then fed into a political campaign. Edward Snowden called it what it was: a surveillance apparatus in a social media costume. People started the #DeleteFacebook movement. Even Brian Acton, who’d sold WhatsApp to Zuckerberg for billions, was out.
I read pieces about it at the time from people I respected. One said Facebook had become one of the most powerful companies on earth in terms of shaping how people perceive things, and it had shown, repeatedly, that it couldn’t handle that power responsibly. Another went deeper: Facebook doesn’t even understand how it works. It perfected the machine for selling ads, then treated everything else—the social impact, the world-building, the actual effects—as secondary. That’s the real danger. A system so vast and so broken that even its creator doesn’t know what it does.
I’d been thinking about this longer than most. Years before the scandal, I’d written about how we’d all walked into a trap willingly. Content creators, bloggers, everyone with something to say—we’d fed ourselves into these platforms because that’s where the audience was. And once you do that, you’re done. The platform owns the reach. The algorithm decides what gets seen. The company that built it controls the whole game.
I remember arguing, back then, that the only real escape was to stop using social platforms for distribution entirely. Build your own place. Let people come to you. But I knew nobody would do it. The validation is too real. The likes and retweets and shares matter too much. We’d rather delete critical comments that pull people away from our links than admit we’ve given up our independence. We cross our fingers and hope the American company with our data doesn’t abuse it too much. And they do, and we know they will, and we stay anyway.
Facebook had become something viler over time—a gatekeeper that censors and hides and blocks, all in the service of engagement and profit. When the Cambridge Analytica story broke, it felt possible, briefly, that maybe this was the end. Maybe it would collapse like MySpace, like Friendster, like StudiVZ. Maybe we’d actually get that weirder, freer internet back.
I’m still waiting. Still logged in. Haven’t deleted anything. Haven’t moved my accounts anywhere. Maybe it will die. Maybe the octopus’s grip finally loosens. Or maybe nothing changes and we just stay here, complaining about it while we use it, until something else comes along and we walk into the same trap again.