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hi my name is Nick Briz and I'm a new-media artist / educator / organizer

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living and working in Chicago
Illinois

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and this is a tutorial / personal essay

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video for how to leave Facebook by which I don't mean

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had a click that delete your account button, which doesn't exactly

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delete your account anyways, Facebook
uses words like "delete" and

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"like" to mean things that they don't
actually this is a tutorial / essay

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video for how to leave Facebook, in a sort of

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performative / activist and
slightly glitchy-kludgy sort of way.

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before I explain how to
do that I'll explane

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why, and why like this. I should start by saying that this was a

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really really hard thing for me to do

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by which i don't mean technically, it was just personally difficult

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i've been on Facebook for seven years. Its as long as I've been making glitch art as long as it's been

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a new-media artist and facebook's been a
big part of my life

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and practice in a lot of different ways
over that time

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and on those folks who think Facebook is
an addiction nor do I agree with the

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social media luddites that think social
media

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is distracting us from "real life". social
media doesn't replace a pre-existing

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relationship it augments them

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it helps keep in touch when we are far away and lets us communicate not only in real time

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but also with images and sounds and videos and gifs

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social media and web in general make
possible relationships that otherwise

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wouldn't exist

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in 1968 one of the Internet's founding
fathers to see our look later

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said with a great deal of for site, "life
will be happier for the online

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individual

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because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected

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more by commonality of interests and
goals

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then by accidents of proximity" My issue with Facebook is how they've demonstrated time and

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time again

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a lack of respect for their users in the
interest of prioritizing

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other interests like those in their
advertises in ways that have had some

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serious intended and possibly

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unintended consequences. And this is a long list which has been accumulating for years

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but I'd always love the major ones. first
issue is something called the filter bubble

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to some extent you probably expect your
streams to be the accumulation

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of all the posts made by the folks you
follow in more or less the order they

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were posted in

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this is not always the case and is definitely
not the case for Facebook. By default

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Facebook filters a lot into and out of
your streams based on what

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algorithms think you most likely want to
see. And common sense says

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"awesome why wouldn't I wanna catered
stream if the algorithms are working

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well

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then wouldn't i like it?" Not exactly the
first problem with common sense here

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is that it makes the assumption that the
algorithm has your best interest

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in mind... which is not the case, more on that later

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and so then there's this issue the filter bubble if your algorithm assumes your future

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interest based on your

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past activity you're setting yourself up
for what Eli Pariser calls

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"information determinism", essentially your
feed becomes a kind

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ideological bubble that never shows you
anything you disagree with or don't

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already like

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and so then it doesn't give you the opportunity to change your mind to consider other points of view

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to learn to change to grow. this can get
a little heady and I'm oversimplifying

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here

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but you can check out Eli Pariser's TED talk or some of the links I posted in the description

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and I should note that this isn't unique to
Facebook to some extent this is true

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of any account you open online. Another big example is your Google search results, this

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is why use use Duck Duck Go more
than anything. the second issue

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is that Facebook impersonates you to
benefit of its advertisers

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have you ever been scrolling through your feed and noticed something like "Nick Briz and 7 of your

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friends likes McDonald's" and wondered

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"hmmm that's weird I thought Nick was a
vegetarian what's he doing like

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McDonalds?"

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somebody makes a post on Facebook with the link and you like their post

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Facebook then assumes you like what the
post links to

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so if somebody makes a post about how nasty the new McRib sandwich is

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and they link to McDonalds and you like
that post your friend's

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feed, unbeknownst to you, will now include
your endorsement

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of McDonalds. Similarly, if you like
something from a particular source on

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Facebook, Facebook will assume you like any future posts

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from that source, so say you liked a New
York Times op-ed

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on legalizing marijuana you may
unbeknownst to you

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like another New York Times op-ed on
criminalizing abortion

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or whatever, this is why sometimes you might notice deceased friend liking things

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after the died. Maybe even worse the
recycled "likes" is the very blurry space

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between organic and non-organic posts on
Facebook

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if you're unfamiliar with these terms
organic just means a post that one of your

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friends makes

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and non-organic is something that's paid
for like an ad. So, say you make an organic post

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about how much you like your iPhone

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Facebook could then sell that post to Apple so they can use it as an ad

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and your friends will notice that post
in their feeds sort of get anchored to the top

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like a sponsored post

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and maybe you're cool with this and
maybe you're not, but the point is

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that it doesn't matter because nobody
asked for your permission nobody bothered

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to tell you about it...

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...or they didn't bother to tell you about
it when they told you they change their

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terms of service and the technically did
ask your permission when you signed the

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9000+ word

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Terms of Service. And if you're the kind of influencer that charges companies to

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make promotional posts

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Facebook just cut you out of that
equation. And even if you're not in the

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business of making promotional posts

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I think if somebody's using your posts
as an ad, you should be getting a cut

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of that

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and i'm not just trying to be greedy here, there's some pretty long-term consequences with this

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there's a reeally great book called "Who
Owns the Future" by Jaron Lanier where he

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describes this in detail

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and he also describes what a micropayment
system could look like

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where users get compensated for the
wealth that the generate on social media

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which up until now doesn't really exist...
YouTube and

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and Google Adsense maybe being the kind
of exception which brings me to my last issue

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Facebook implements these things in a 
really sneaky way. And if we noticed and

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if we backlash than they post an apology
after the fact

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and retrofit their site with a sort of "opt out"
option. But this is never the default

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and they never want to opt out and these
changes are made in such a way as to

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keep us in the dark

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and sometimes years can go by before
anybody even noticed face but fucked with us

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and one of the worst examples at this came out recently here's a quote from the Atlantic

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"for one week in January 2012 data
scientists skewed what almost 700,000

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Facebook uses saw when they logged into its service. some people were shown content

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with the preponderance

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happy and positive words. some were shown
content analyzed as sadder than average

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and when the week was over these
manipulated uses were more likely to post

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either especially positive or negative
words themselves

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this tinkering was just revealed as part
of a new study published

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in the prestigious proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences"

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in short, facebook just wanted to see if they could control the emotional states of their

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massive network of

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guinea pigs. and it turns out they can
for a week in 2012

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hundreds of thousands of us were made
depressed and hundreds of thousands

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of us were made happy. high-fives data
scientists

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what's next? so I'll admit have some
pretty radical ideas about what I would

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like the web to look like

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and I realize a lot this isn't happening
anytime soon. but I do appreciate

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all the awesome shit we have now so I partake in internet culture

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but there's a balance that needs to be met
and a line that needs to be drawn

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and it really sucks and it pains me to say that Facebook crossed it

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now I have to leave and this is how I did that. So facebook gives you the option to

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deactivate your account or even

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"delete your account", but keep in mind
anytime you upload anything to the Internet

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it's being copied over and over again
it's been crawled is being scraped

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when something goes online, its virtually
impossible to delete

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so when facebook gives you the option to
"delete your account" this is a relative term

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also with something as ubiquitous as
Facebook deleting or deactivating your

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account means

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much more than just losing your feed and
your information

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it means losing all of my albums, it means
losing

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all of my Spotify playlist, it also
throws a wrench in a lot of the work

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that I do

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as a new-media artist I produce a lot of
work for myself and for clients

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that involves Facebook apps and Facebook Graph so I thought about this for a while

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and decided I wouldn't press the "delete
my account" button

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that instead I'd leave Facebook on my own terms

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by manually deleting all of my photos, posts, comments, likes

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by un-tagging myself from everything by
leaving all my groups, etc.

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essentially manually wiping out all of
my activity on Facebook

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or at least scraping it off the surface. And I've already done all that

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with the exception unfriending my
friends which I'm gonna do in a few days

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before i show you how to do this you should
probably backup anything that's

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important to you on facebook. if you're
like me you probably got a lot of

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sentimental moments on there

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so if you go to your settings Facebook
actually gives you an option to

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download a copy of your facebook data
and you should do this, but in my opinion

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thiss actually leaves out

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a lot of other important things. So while this download includes all the photos

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you've posted to Facebook it doesn't
include all the photos photos your friends have

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posted, and then tagged you in

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Which for me was what initially
motivated me to get on facebook

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and what makes up the majority of my photo history over the last seven years

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at this point in time Facebook has no
easy way to download all the photos you're

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tagged in

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so i wrote a custom script is to get that
done.

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So big disclaimer here, this script and all the other scripts i wrote and i'm gonna share with you in

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this video

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is a sort of brute force hack, its really dirty

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and might take some experimentation.
that's just the style of this here tutorial

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as the result the circumstances
Facebook has placed me in

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also keep in mind that facebook
changes shit all the time with no notice

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But I've posted all of these on github as gists, so you can fork them

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and make any changes if and when they're
necessary. So after you download a copy your

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data, go ahead and watch this video
were i kinda go through step by step

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how to hack your way to saving a copy of all the photos that your tagged in

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another thing i'm gonna miss is all of my wall posts. there's a lot of really sentimental stuff

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people have posted on there, like birthday wishes and other personal things. So I made this

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other video for had a download a copy
of your entire wall

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so after I saved all the stuff that I wanted to save I started wiping out all my activity

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i started with some of the stuff that Facebook makes easy for you to manually remove

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like I removed all of my information from
my About section

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I also manually removed

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all of the app's except for some the
ones that are connected to other things

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like Spotify

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and some of my client apps. then comes
the trickier part

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I want to delete all of my photos but I
also wanted to untag myself from all the

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photos my friends have posted

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and Facebook doesn't really give you a quick easy way to do this

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so I also wrote a few custom scripts to get
that done which are on the website

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and also on this video where I walk through 
step by step how to do that

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I also wrote a script for quickly leaving all of your groups. Also documented on the site

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and in this video. And lastly a script for
deleting all of my activity

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that means comments, likes, search results, stuff like that

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the video on the site also includes some
tips for how to do is a bit more

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effectively remember that this is all
kind of experimental

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I notice that if I tried to delete years worth of activity at once

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it would crash my browser and not work, but it worked ok if I did

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a few months at a time. Which is
still a lot easier than going through it

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one by one

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although admittedly just as sad. So to recap

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facebook gives you a couple different
ways to delete your account, this is NOT

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one of them. This is an alternative based on a different set of priorities

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like i said before, this is meant to
be kind of performative

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activist and some what cathartic process. As a right now

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all but my friends list and this post have
been removed

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and in a few days I'll be unfriending
everyone leaving only

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this post on my Facebook account

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its sad. I'm afraid of losing touch with
friends, i'm afraid of missing out

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on future activities and posts on
Facebook

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but I hope you all will find me elsewhere on
the internets as I hope to find you

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I've got other accounts, f*ck Facebook