Why I Decided to Leave Meta; And Why I Can't.

Facebook became an enchanted mirror, showing me glimpses of the outside world as I spent countless hours nursing and holding my newborn. He had spent 11 terrifying days in NICU and I had hemorrhaged. I was weak, in shock, and my world had tilted on its axis. After the trauma of his birth, I decided not to return to my work as a registered nurse in the same hospital where he and I had fought for our lives. I would stay home to take him to every cardiology, neurology, pediatric and early intervention appointment for at least his first year of life.

I woke several times each night in panic, cold sweat beading on my my brow, heart racing, breath caught in my chest, limbs reaching in terror to his chest as he slept in the bassinet beside our bed. I would feel his beating heart, the rise and fall of his breath, count the beats and breaths to ensure they were in normal range, and desperately try to fall back to sleep. Over and over. At least a dozen times a night.

My mental health was stitched together by his need for me, his older sister’s need for me, and my dissosciative scrolling through the enchanting world of performative normalcy that Facebook provided. For the first year of his life, this is how I survived. This and binge watching The 100 series and Orange is the New Black.

In the hospital holding our son for the first time.

In time, I started working again and he went to preschool and then elementary and our daughter’s life blossomed into that of a teenager and then a high school graduate and then a college student. I had started my own business, which also required significant time on Facebook for marketing and engagement. Facebook, which I had become intimately familiar with in that first year of our son’s life, became a valuable tool for community organizing, business, and activism.

I was deeply involved in local Facebook groups for merchants, mothers, herbalists, and activists. I met friends who have become more like family and felt truly woven into a community that was both geographically relevant and ideologically relevant. It was local and global. It felt miraculous. Until it didn’t.

I noticed that the Facebook culture started to really change in relationship to political divisiveness, and the cruelty and personal attacks became steady and brutal. I took this as an opportunity to practice firm boundaries and to learn how to respond to provocation without losing my integrity. I was grateful for the learning environment this created, and the skills I honed were transferred into my relationships IRL. Overall I have been a big fan of Facebook and an outspoken advocate for the connectivity that this platform has cultivated.

And then, something changed. My husband and I watched the documentary The Social Dilemma in 2020. The information we discovered in this film was stunning, and I felt a tectonic shift in my understanding of, and trust in social media. Especially related to the work of Cambridge Analytica, which is disclosed with far greater detail in the documentary The Great Hack (available on Netflix).

Suddenly I understood. I remembered the work of Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein in their book Nudge. There is a large body of work in the fields of psychology and social engineering that made it clear, human behavior can be managed and directed, and it’s not actually that hard to do. The marketing industry has spent unfathomable amounts of money studying our decision making and how to predict and shift our behavior. This science was turned into strategy, and then into technology, and aided by the algorithms generated by machine learning, or AI.

There are many, many other books on these subjects (like Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge and The Every by Dave Eggers) but I will not go into all of them here. Even though I had contacted a mountain of growing evidence that the technology behind social media was distracting, destructive, and mind-altering, I just couldn’t give it up. And I got defensive with everyone who suggested I should. Why was that, I started to wonder…

In the past year or so I have started hearing about dopamine addiction and the deeply addictive structure of social media browsing. I understood why I couldn’t leave, why I didn’t want to. This platform had become a sort of soothing, dissosciative stand in for real life. And I was addiced to it. It was also deeply connected to a profound trauma, and I felt like it saved my life, which added to the weight of the dopamine reward that each blue light scroll session offered.

I have known that social media is addictive, destructive, manipulative, divisive, and a major time sink, for awhile now. And then I saw Zuck standing behind Trump at the inauguration. On that day, the bell tolled for Meta. I knew I couldn’t continue to be an apologist for this platform.

I watched cliques of people swarm others in comments sections, reinforcing their echo chambers like pack animals circling prey.

I watched strange and deranged videos popping up in my stories. Giant pimples needing popped. Starving children covered in sores. Addicts falling out. Near nude women in propositioning postures. I think that Facebook knew it was losing me, so it tried to engage my kink. My shadow. My dark passenger. Don’t leave, let me show you the back alley. Let me get you hooked on the really good stuff.

And when I didn’t engage with those stories my old posts started getting pushed out into the algorithms again. Their ability to cultivate engagement is a science, guided and directed by machine learning and decades of psychology.

Suddenly, it all collided in my mind. I knew I was dancing with the devil. A quiet, certain voice bubbled up from deep in my core, “Eryn, it’s time.”

And now, for several days, with different devices and dozens of tries, I still have a Facebook and Instagram account. Every time I try to delete or deactivate, a message pops up on the screen: “Something went wrong…please try again later.” Followed by being logged out of my account.

For at least fifteen minutes afterwards, attempts to log in fail due to having the “incorrect password.” Then miraculously the password starts working again….

This has fully validated my suspicions about the depravity, disdain for consent, and manipulative powers of this platform. Please use this platform with extreme caution. Please know that the science behind these algorithms is designed to modify behavior, beliefs and buying power. You are in a cattle shute based on tens of thousands of data points that are collected all day every day across the learning apparatus of YouTube, Google, Meta, X, and more. With this data they have a digital profile that they use to predict and manipulate your behavior. We are arrogant to think that we are the ones in control, but I assure you that we are not.

I don’t know what cliff my cattle shute would have had me leap off of, or at what point, but I am reclaiming my agency, my independent thought, and my sovereignty.

Even though I still have a Meta account…..against my will.