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More Than 1 In 4 American Users Have Deleted Facebook, Pew Survey Finds (washingtonpost.com)
Gayle BAS writes: Nearly three-quarters of American Facebook users have changed how they use the social media app in the past year, following a barrage of scandals involving the abuse of personal data, foreign interference in U.S. elections and the spread of hateful or harassing content on the platform, Pew Research has found. According to the survey, over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year. The survey findings include: There are, however, age differences in the share of Facebook users who have recently taken some of these actions. Most notably, 44% of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12%) who have done so. Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64% of younger users. In earlier research, Pew Research Center has found that a larger share of younger than older adults use Facebook. Still, similar shares of older and younger users have taken a break from Facebook for a period of several weeks or more.
If that was true, there shouldn't be anything left of it. Including backups.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
More time for real life, real friends & family! ;-)
I'll have to take a look, thanks again
But I definitely trimmed my friend's list and go on there maybe once a month to make sure someone's not reaching out to me. That's what it's actually good for. Not daily faking of a good life while making others feel bad and depressed while FB gets all the money and compiles some insane predictive database. :D I figure they already got most of that so if I just stay inactive they can't get much more.
rm -r facebook.com/*
Dammit.
rm -rf facebook.com/*
Dammit!
killall facebook.com; rm -rf facebook.com/*
Dammit!!!
I came off Facebook about a year ago because it was a time sink. I got nothing out of it, just the habit of checking the news feed and scrolling scrolling scrolling. Within a few hours I didn't miss it.
I came of Twitter a couple of months ago due to it just being a really nasty place. Within a few hours I didn't miss it.
My life is better without social media.
My wife quit after a few things. She made a reasonable comment in a political discussion thread and someone reported it as offensive, and the conversation ended up being removed. Then one of her coworkers got falsely accused of being a drug dealer on one of those "busybody" gossip pages that have cropped up recently -- Facebook should ban those. That would be bad enough, but somebody apparently informed her boss's boss, and it came back down to my wife as the coworker's supervisor, so it has even seeped into the office politics.
I kept my account because I have a few apps that are tied into Facebook--it's the only way to use them. However, I haven't posted in several weeks, and only check in on occasion to see friend & family photos and such. Now FB keeps sending me email that says "Did you see what X said about Y's post!?", as if Facebook is gossiping itself. If it weren't for the apps, I'd probably delete it too.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Get my family freindly Goat C shirt! ~ CaptainSpork
I deleted mine over two years ago, and it was only ever tied to a dummy email account which didn't have anything to do with my actual name, and was never used for anything else.
My browsers all block the shit out of Facebook so they can't track me on every other damned site which embeds their shit.
I don't trust Facebook, and sure as fuck didn't consent to them tracking me ... so I've made sure they can't.
People adjusting their privacy settings are in denial, not only we have multiple accounts (i.e. Google and location data) where these are disregarded, we also have multiple hacking stories (i.e. Ashley Madison breach) that show that data is always retained even when consumers are told it is not.
These companies are not going to voluntarily stop collecting data on you no matter what settings you use.
1. I only do heroin on weekends.
2. He won't hit me again, it was my fault anyway.
3. Now look what you made me do.
4. I'll leave facebook next week.
at least that's how it is with my kid. iMessage functions as a defacto social network. It's the killer app that keeps her stuck on the iPhone.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
During the last election, I made a comment from my conservative perspective. My mostly liberal Seattle friends started piling on. So I go to look at my conservative friend to see if he had anything to say. He had the same situation, being piled on by his liberal friends in Minneapolis. He and I are very close friends in real life.
That Facebook had isolated us, two people who most certainly should be linked up in each other's feeds, from each other told me everything I needed to know. Facebook was steering the conversation. It was only later that all the controversies broke in the news.
Congratulations, big tech. You've alienated your users who don't agree with your narrative.
I tried Facebook about 10 years ago for 6 months. It was like being part of a large trailer park trash convention. I deleted my account from Facebook (did the 14 day wait thing) and never looked back. It's not social media ... it's anti-social media.
The news feed is 99% nonsense. People's ill informed political opinions represented in clickbaity memes, that often end or start "and for the people in back!", "vaguebooking" where someone posts something with zero context and expects me to care, but worse still, Facebook is is impersonal as it gets when socialising online. I've been socialising online since BBS days. Facebook's big difference from BBSes or IRC is that people speak out into a public space to no one in particular while before Facebook, people would talk to you (or your group) directly.
Put it this way, IRC was the equivalent of joining your small group of friends at a bar and talking as a group. Facebook is the equivalent of barging into a bar, yelling whatever you wanted to say to the whole bar, friends and strangers a like, and hoping for the best. It's not socialising.
I keep Facebook around though, because all the weekly freebie magazines are dead and this is how I learn about interesting events around town. It's also convenient to organise events with friends since everyone is there.
But as a "social media" tool, utterly worthless to me.
I'm guessing most of these people "deleting facebook" for trendy political reasons just moved to instagram instead and think it's totally different and ok.
There is a whole planet to look at if you just stop checking your cell phone.
But I'm in Soviet Russia and now I'm deleted.
Please send for help. It's cold down here.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
There's regrettably people who find it weird if someone isn't on Facebook.
If you feel you have to be there, put up a picture and a background image banner saying "This profile is not active and messages are not checked", eventually something like "I can be reached at (email or other social media profile)"
I didn't delete my facebook account because of Russian influence in the elections. I think all politicians should be hanged from lampposts in the town square. Russia had nothing to do with that. I installed the app on my cell phone once because I needed to contact someone during an emergency, then I uninstalled it. Facebook is free, which means I am the product. They don't need my contact list, my GPS location, my current call status, a record of my calls, my wifi information, etc... Duh.
I use Facebook mostly for the groups and pages now. I have a single source for groups that interest me and businesses that are active on social media. All the groups are closed so it all tends to stay in place. Sure people can screen shot stuff but does anyone really care that I was helping someone with a 3D printing problem?
I adjusted my privacy four ways long ago. The first was to clear all those 'About Me' fields. The second was to lock everything down to friends only. The third was to only have people who are actual meatspace friends as Facebook friends. The fourth was to post nothing but memes and cat pictures.
Because of the special interest groups Facebook does have some value. It has combined what used to be multiple forums into one for a lot of things. I've found people with common interests and I'm online friendly with them. But I'm not going to splatter my personal life up there to be harvested.
I assumed from the headline they closed their accounts. Somehow "a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone" does not seem as interesting.
I'm a relatively private person, never drawn to social networking. If someone had described how Facebook would work and how wildly popular it would be, I would have little interest - I'd rather work on something technically interesting like distributed computing.
That said, Facebook, following MySpace, certainly appealed to some part of peoples' human nature. Facebook's popularity will fade, but human nature remains the same and some other service(s) will pick up these users. Though not technically interesting to people like myself, there is an enormous business opportunity for Facebook alternative and/or successors.
Well, hell ya? The Facebook app on a cell phone is buggy has crap and a privacy nightmare. It wouldn't surprise me if 100% of facebook users deleted the app and it was banned from the app stores.
But that in no way means these users have deleted their facebook accounts. I've never used the app. If I need access to facebook from my phone I use the phone browser. Clumsy as it is, it's still better.
"Deleted Facebook" and "Deleted Facebook App from a cell phone" are not the same things. Claiming otherwise is just bullshit news headlines.
I need it for the Facebook messenger lite app. The one that isn't allowed access to anything.
Well, that is I need it if I want to talk to my family.
The account? I don't actually use it. I don't care what's on there or who sees it.
Giving percentage numbers without saying what fraction of the American population were using it in the first place gives misleading numbers. One estimate is 68%, so about 1/3 did not use Facebook anyway.
No one is using it anymore. Itâ(TM)s old technology.
When you join FB or any group they turn on everything possible to nag you.
I was getting too many friend requests from strangers that turned out to be dating scammers (I always check their FB page for telltale signs) and finally had to adjust my settings so that only mutual friends could send me friend requests. I don't subscribe to many groups, but they are ones I have an interest in and I had to change my settings so that they are at the top of the timeline when I start surfing.
After I join a group I have to manually turn off notifications which are redundant.
I restrict personal information in my profile. Despite repetitive nagging from FB, I refuse to provide my current location, my employer, the education institutes I graduated from, etc. Being well aware that FB uses aggressive marketing, I didn't want to be barraged with ads for products and local businesses. They try to trick you by encouraging you to contact your local representatives.
I will never install the FB app on my mobile. I do not need mobile access to FB, I don't want constant alerts, and that damn app has been known to prematurely drain the battery on the mobile. I also refuse to accept "suggested posts" from FB. And don't get me started on FB censorship of news.
Big reason why I enjoy FB is to see what my friends are up to and to enjoy my interests (which are few). But it takes a lot of manual configuration to eliminate the nagging from FB.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
That's called paranoia and confirmation bias. But hey, if people are actually deleting Facebook for that reason, I'm all for it.
I am going for my four-year anniversary next april without Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter. My life is better without social media. And I don't waste time with bullshit anymore, nor I have to dodge invites from people I don't know or want. I found everyone I wanted to find from the past, together with a bunch of jerks I did not want to find. So, Facebook is simply useless. I created a ghost account with nothing on it because some stupid companies only use Facebook. And that's that.
Delete all the cloudy services, then come back.
If you aren't paying for a service, then YOU and your DATA are the product being sold.
You've heard it before. You know what it means. I find it strange that otherwise smart people just don't get it. The worst ones are those who claim to fully understand, but clearly do not.
IMHO, there should be about 200K facebook users - those are the people employed by facebook and their subs.
Same for google, twitter, insta-whatever, snap-y, box, and all the cloud storage vendors.
Denial isn't just a river.
And if it isn't clear, Google is 100x worse, since they've taken over email and there isn't ANY way to opt out of that. Fuck you very much to all the gmail users giving up MY privacy because you are lazy.
I'm amazed that that many had a cellphone that would let them do that. Neither of my two cellphones will allow Facebook to be deleted. I'd like to, because I've never used it and never will.
Not on my phone.
Rarely on anything else.
Never automatically logged in.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Facebook is great for logging in to comment in lots of sites, without having to bother with registration chores. Even better, all the garbage resulting from that action will go to the Facebook account. I care as much about what is in my Facebook account as about what is in my garbage bin. That's what Facebook is really good for.
Now how do I stalk the girl I had a crush on in highschool???
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Neener neener!! Never had facecrook. Always used tracking blockers.
FB is bad but Google is worse for tracking.
The web is a war zone. Be careful.
... Facebook has become boring in the last year.
Politics is so divisive that my circle of Friends and I have learned that it's best to behave as most of us do in face-to-face social settings.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Hope they go away.
I also deleted Facebook (the app), long ago, because it's crap.
Although I still use Facebook (the web page) nearly every day.
I don't want to be notified whenever someone has put up a clever post. I want to read it on my own time, when I'm good and ready.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
OK, so did they ask the question everyone wants to know? Did more progressive Democrats delete it or conservative Republicans? It is bad politics to get your side to delete it if it means that you will get trampled on whenever you make a comment. And it also limits how effective you can reach voters in the area to make sure they vote.
aren't listed.
Convenient.
I'd delete my facebook account if I thought I could still communicate effectively with people.
Minds isn't quite ready yet.
I use gab.ai daily.
as if Facebook is gossiping itself.
Not as if, they are gossiping. And stalking. The fact that they are a corporation that automated it and is doing it on a huge scale doesn't mean it isn't gossiping and stalking.
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