Still On Facebook

Every few months I open my browser settings and look at the option to delete my Facebook account. I get as far as the confirmation page, read the warning about how I’ll lose access to apps and events and messages from people, and I close the tab. It’s not that I don’t want to leave. It’s just that everyone else is still there.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was supposed to be the reckoning. That hashtag everyone used—#DeleteFacebook—made it feel like the end was finally coming. But it wasn’t. I don’t know a single person who actually deleted their account and stayed gone. Maybe they lasted a week. Maybe they told themselves they were done. But Facebook’s too useful, too embedded. So they came back.

It’s called the network effect. You see it everywhere once you know what to look for. Phones. Fax machines. Now social networks. It works like this: a network is only valuable if other people are on it. So the more people on it, the more you need to be on it too. It becomes mandatory not because it’s good, but because everyone else is trapped there too.

Facebook understood this perfectly. They didn’t just build a bulletin board where you post things. They made themselves into the infrastructure of social life. Your photos live there. Your calendar lives there. Your friends coordinate through Messenger. Some people video chat through it. Walk away from Facebook and you’re not just leaving an app—you’re disappearing from your actual social life.

So we all stay. We complain about it constantly. We know they’re collecting everything, selling everything, manipulating what we see. But what’s the alternative? Be the only one not there? That’s not a choice. That’s isolation. The network effect isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s the system. It’s a trap that keeps you in because the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying.