On Leaving Facebook

My Attention Is a Precious Resource

After 16 years, I finally left Facebook the other day. Today, as I walked down the streets of my small town, everything felt realer: the handsome old buildings, the sky, the trees, myself.

I experienced myself walking down these streets, saw the shops, saw people drinking coffee and talking, saw the mountain curling around the town toward the east: nothing needed an audience. It all just was.

For years, Facebook has been making me feel sick when I read it, a combination of sick and bored, or sick, bored, and excited. It’s also been — no lie —the most unshakable addiction I have ever experienced.

It made me feel good sometimes too, of course. That’s how it got me addicted! The supportive choir of voices I came to think of as a Greek chorus in my head, of people from all over the world who knew me somehow — though I sometimes forgot who everyone was, or confused people with other friends who had the same first names — there they were in my head all the time, or available on a moment’s notice on my phone, cheering me, hearing me, being my “friends.”

When I say it was an addiction for me, that’s exactly what I mean. I was never addicted to drugs or alcohol, but no matter what I did — take Facebook off my phone, put “controls” on my phone to limit screentime, speak very sternly to myself — I could not not look at that thing dozens of times a day.

Even when the platform “enshittified,” to use Cory Doctorow’s word¹, I couldn’t stop. Even when the feed got progressively shittier and shittier, over the past five or six years as far as I can tell, but noticeably, aggressively , offensively, shittier in the past six months. Post from pages you never followed, and never would follow (“Dumb Men Who Are YouTube Stars!”) Post from groups to which you did not belong, and did not want to belong (“Bizarre Moms of British Columbia”!) Once in every 10 posts, a post from one of your friends. Not necessarily someone you really knew, but at least someone whose name you recognized.

I hated the new feed, but I went back to it anyway. I couldn’t stop going back, so that Facebook came to define my days. Came to define my understanding of what the world was.

It may seem a little on-the-nose, this February of 2025, to note that this is dangerous.

Even when I left last month, I opted to stay on Instagram, because it seemed beyond the pale, as a writer, to leave myself with no social media at all on which to promote my work. Writers have to run a three-ring circus these days to be viable, and having social media of some kind seemed an irreplaceable tool if I wanted anyone to read my work at all. ²

What’s more, I had never found Instagram addictive before. It had just been a fun place with pretty pictures. (Many of them of food!)

But now that I wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram was suddenly becoming addictive to me, too, and mysteriously shittier. Back in 2014, Facebook admitted to the Guardian that it had conducted a large-scale psychological experiment to see what amping up either negative or positive posts did to users’ emotions.³ Given the huge changes to my feeds this year, I wouldn’t be extraordinarily surprised to learn Meta was now manipulating my Instagram feed to make it shittier. Counterproductive? I’m guessing the goal is to get me to stay on the platform longer.

Doctorow thinks enshittification is mainly about putting profit way, way ahead of any benefit to users, but I believe that the shittier experience is also (paradoxically) more addictive: Deprived of what I actually like in a platform, I am forced to keep coming back to try and try to get — please, Meta! — some more of the good stuff that will make me feel okay again. I understand that a similar process happens with narcotics. This is the origin of infinite scroll.

On Instagram, I began to stay on much longer and to feel sicker and unhappier the longer I stayed. What Meta kept showing me: sponsored posts from far-right and homophobic organizations. Alliance Defending Freedom (the largest anti-queer hate group in the country), Judicial Watch, various “anti-DEI” activist organizations. Why would these groups want to spend their money to target me as an ad recipient? When I clicked on “Why am I seeing this ad?” Instagram would claim it was because I was interested in posts about food and travel, which I am. Do homophobes and racists really think all people who like food and travel will be particularly drawn to them, or is the far right made of money? I kept identifying these ads as “not appropriate” for me, and IG kept showing me more.

I recognize that speculating about experimentation and manipulation sounds like the stuff of tin-foil hat theories. And I have no evidence whatsoever that Meta is trying to make my experience worse. But we do know Facebook has experimented on and manipulated users a number of times before (anyone remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a far-right firm owned by Robert Mercer paid Facebook to improperly harness the private data of tens of millions of users to psychologically profile them, in order to influence the 2016 election?⁴)

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

Adrienne Rich said that in 1968. She was right back then, but she is, horribly, even more right today. The tools through which we have become accustomed to talking to each other, connecting with each other, comforting each other are all owned by billionaires who have always put their own interests first and are now abandoning all of us to King Trump.⁵

Both Google and Apple now refuse to properly identify the Gulf of Mexico, and Google Calendar has begun insisting there is no Pride or Black History Month. These are services we use every day. The Washington Post, owned by the Chief Dickhead of Amazon, just refused to run an ad it had originally accepted from Common Cause that was critical of Elon Musk.

The only thing left to do: connect with each other, and talk to each other, in ways that circumvent these networks owned and operated by our class enemies who have sold us to Trump. It’s not easy, or perhaps even possible, to circumvent all of them, but I myself am giving Meta a wide berth because it is easy to see that it is making me sick. By playing games with my head (my attention, my spirit, the most precious thing I own) for money.

I’ve been enjoying long phone calls with friends, and more in-person coffees, too. Give me a phone call! Arrange to get together. I like emails, also. Or think about hosting or attending a community dinner in the place you live, like the free Friday night dinner hosted in my town, Beacon, NY, by an excellent local food-security organization called Fareground.⁶ The dinner costs nothing and is intended to feed residents who have trouble affording meals, but also to feed the souls of anyone who would like to be there just to connect with their neighbors. I’ve heard it’s a great time, and am planning to head there soon.

Connecting with people in more personal and immediate ways has felt fabulous. Come eat, have a coffee, and fight for democracy with me on the phone or in person sometime soon.

1. Cory Doctorow, “The Enshittification of Tik-Tok,” Wired, January 23, 2023.

2. The value of writers’ work is not in question here. What has brought in the requirement for the three-ring circus is the hypercapitalism we’ve all seen, and the attendant hyper-corporatization of publishing.

3. Samuel Gibbs, “Facebook apologizes for psychological experiments on users,” the Guardian, July 2, 2014.

4. Nicholas Confessore, “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far,” New York Times, April 4, 2018.

5. Yeah, okay, maybe Bluesky is not doing this.

6. The dinner is a collaboration between Fareground, First Presbyterian Church of Beacon, and Songbird, a community spiritual and arts space, 5:30 to 7:30 PM, every Friday. More info here.