{"id":24536,"date":"2021-10-10T11:02:16","date_gmt":"2021-10-10T18:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=24536"},"modified":"2021-10-10T18:02:07","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T01:02:07","slug":"break-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/break-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking a Break from Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Whistleblower<\/h2>\n

This week a whistleblower named Frances Haugen went before a US Senate subcommittee to testify about Facebook. You\u2019ve probably heard about it. I actually watched most of her testimony, and I have to say, it was bone-chilling.<\/p>\n

Ms. Haugen was a data scientist who was part of a civic integrity committee, and in fact she joined the company specifically to work on that committee. She testified that after the US Presidential election, the civic integrity committee was disbanded. No matter your politics, I think we can all agree that Facebook needs to keep working on civic integrity.<\/p>\n

One thing that has bothered me is when people hand-wring about Facebook trying to keep people on their platform as long as possible. I don\u2019t blame them one little bit for that. If I have a company that makes soap, I\u2019m going to try to find every way you can use my soap and try to convince you to use more of it. That makes complete sense to me.<\/p>\n

The difference, according to Ms. Haugen is the data they have and the data they acted on to increase engagement on their platform. They have determined that the most inflammatory, negative material is what makes us engage with the content. I suppose this shouldn\u2019t be a surprise because we\u2019ve always known that the lizard brain portion of our brains can\u2019t look away from a train wreck as it\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n

But Facebook actively uses that information to give us more inflammatory and more negative information to drive us to use it more.<\/p>\n

We All Knew This, Where Were You?<\/h2>\n

I bet a lot of you are hollering into your phones, \u201cGee, Allison, did you just find this out?\u201d I didn\u2019t actually, but this is the first time I can\u2019t think of any way to explain it away.<\/p>\n

Bart convinced me a year or so ago to watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma on Netflix (which is actually available in full on Netflix<\/a>). This documentary dove deep into the way the algorithm works at Facebook, Pinterest, and other companies to keep us engaged. The documentary left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and it had a big impact on me.<\/p>\n

But I was able to compartmentalize what I learned because it was highly theatrical in how they demonstrated the problem.<\/p>\n

Why is Now Different?<\/h2>\n

Listening to Ms. Haugen testify under oath about it really floored me.<\/p>\n

One example that came up during her testimony was an experiment run by the Tech Transparency Project<\/a>. They created six ads that were designed specifically to target the teenage user of Facebook in a harmful way. One was an ad that directed girls to an \u201cAnaTip\u201d. That\u2019s short for Anorexia tip. The senator talking about this explained that Anorexia is the leading cause of death in teenagers of all mental health problems.<\/p>\n

Another one said, \u201cThrow a skittles party like no other\u201d and had a backdrop of a pile of prescription pills. Evidently, a \u201cskittles party\u201d is where kids go into their parents’ medicine cabinets and hand out pills to each other to see what happens. The others promoted alcoholic drinks, smoking, dating services, and gambling.<\/p>\n

As I said, the Tech Transparency Project created these six ads and aimed them at ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., and Facebook approved them within less than an hour. Think about that for a minute. It’s bone-chilling, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Ms. Haugen explained that the way the algorithm works, she\u2019s certain that no human ever saw that ad purchase request. I should mention that the Tech Transparency Project canceled these ads before they ran.<\/p>\n

And That’s Why I’m Taking a Break<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m telling you how I feel about this because I\u2019m taking a break from Facebook and all of its other properties including Instagram. I\u2019ve been pulling away very slowly over the last few years because I found that they rarely give me joy.<\/p>\n

I remember one day looking at a gorgeous sunset and immediately thinking about how I would compose my Facebook post to show it to everyone. My first thought was not, \u201cwow that\u2019s really beautiful.\u201d I was starting to see the world through the lens of how I would show my world to others.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never really liked Instagram that much anyway. I like to have conversations with people and Instagram just doesn\u2019t seem to be made for that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not committing to quitting Facebook just yet, but I\u2019m trying the idea on to see how it feels. Probably the thing I will miss most is the NosillaCast Facebook community. I love chatting with you there and sharing cool geek stories. But I also love the Slack community and to be perfectly honest, it\u2019s a lot more engaged than the Facebook community.<\/p>\n

I think one of the reasons for that is the channels. In Slack, we have channels for different topics and you can choose to follow and even get notifications from just the subjects that interest you. If you\u2019re into programming, the Programming By Stealth channel is hopping. But if you\u2019re not, maybe you care a lot about security and the Security Bits channel is more for you.<\/p>\n

I know the Facebook group is a great place where people like to share deals – in Slack we have a dedicated channel for deals. One of my favorite channels is called \u201cDelete Me\u201d and that\u2019s where you can post things that maybe are more tech-adjacent or made you laugh.<\/p>\n

We even have a channel called NosillaCastaways Show Off where Bart posts his Let’s Talk Apple and Let’s Talk Photography podcasts, Allister Jenks posts amazing bird photos he\u2019s taking with his new DSLR lens, Lbutlr posts scripts he\u2019s written, Jill from the North Woods posts photos of her rooftop tent and her camping trips, and Ed Tobias posts about his fun adventures moving to GitHub. There is no theme other than, \u201cI did this and I\u2019m proud of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what will happen in the long run, but there\u2019s a good chance I\u2019m done with Facebook. I suspect I\u2019ll be happier when I do pull the plug but for now, I\u2019m just testing the waters to see if I miss it.<\/p>\n

Hope to see all of you in Slack sometime soon over at podfeet.com\/slack<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Whistleblower This week a whistleblower named Frances Haugen went before a US Senate subcommittee to testify about Facebook. You\u2019ve probably heard about it. I actually watched most of her testimony, and I have to say, it was bone-chilling. Ms. Haugen was a data scientist who was part of a civic integrity committee, and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[4826,4828,4825,156,4823,4827,4824],"class_list":["post-24536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-anorexia","tag-break-time","tag-evil","tag-facebook","tag-senate","tag-skittles-party","tag-whistleblower"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/No-Facebook.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24536"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24557,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24536\/revisions\/24557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}