hi my name is Nick Briz and I'm a new-media artist / educator / organizer
living and working in Chicago Illinois
and this is a tutorial / personal essay
video for how to leave Facebook by which I don't mean
had a click that delete your account button, which doesn't exactly
delete your account anyways, Facebook uses words like "delete" and
"like" to mean things that they don't actually this is a tutorial / essay
video for how to leave Facebook, in a sort of
performative / activist and slightly glitchy-kludgy sort of way.
before I explain how to do that I'll explane
why, and why like this. I should start by saying that this was a
really really hard thing for me to do
by which i don't mean technically, it was just personally difficult
i've been on Facebook for seven years. Its as long as I've been making glitch art as long as it's been
a new-media artist and facebook's been a big part of my life
and practice in a lot of different ways over that time
and on those folks who think Facebook is an addiction nor do I agree with the
social media luddites that think social media
is distracting us from "real life". social media doesn't replace a pre-existing
relationship it augments them
it helps keep in touch when we are far away and lets us communicate not only in real time
but also with images and sounds and videos and gifs
social media and web in general make possible relationships that otherwise
wouldn't exist
in 1968 one of the Internet's founding fathers to see our look later
said with a great deal of for site, "life will be happier for the online
individual
because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected
more by commonality of interests and goals
then by accidents of proximity" My issue with Facebook is how they've demonstrated time and
time again
a lack of respect for their users in the interest of prioritizing
other interests like those in their advertises in ways that have had some
serious intended and possibly
unintended consequences. And this is a long list which has been accumulating for years
but I'd always love the major ones. first issue is something called the filter bubble
to some extent you probably expect your streams to be the accumulation
of all the posts made by the folks you follow in more or less the order they
were posted in
this is not always the case and is definitely not the case for Facebook. By default
Facebook filters a lot into and out of your streams based on what
algorithms think you most likely want to see. And common sense says
"awesome why wouldn't I wanna catered stream if the algorithms are working
well
then wouldn't i like it?" Not exactly the first problem with common sense here
is that it makes the assumption that the algorithm has your best interest
in mind... which is not the case, more on that later
and so then there's this issue the filter bubble if your algorithm assumes your future
interest based on your
past activity you're setting yourself up for what Eli Pariser calls
"information determinism", essentially your feed becomes a kind
ideological bubble that never shows you anything you disagree with or don't
already like
and so then it doesn't give you the opportunity to change your mind to consider other points of view
to learn to change to grow. this can get a little heady and I'm oversimplifying
here
but you can check out Eli Pariser's TED talk or some of the links I posted in the description
and I should note that this isn't unique to Facebook to some extent this is true
of any account you open online. Another big example is your Google search results, this
is why use use Duck Duck Go more than anything. the second issue
is that Facebook impersonates you to benefit of its advertisers
have you ever been scrolling through your feed and noticed something like "Nick Briz and 7 of your
friends likes McDonald's" and wondered
"hmmm that's weird I thought Nick was a vegetarian what's he doing like
McDonalds?"
somebody makes a post on Facebook with the link and you like their post
Facebook then assumes you like what the post links to
so if somebody makes a post about how nasty the new McRib sandwich is
and they link to McDonalds and you like that post your friend's
feed, unbeknownst to you, will now include your endorsement
of McDonalds. Similarly, if you like something from a particular source on
Facebook, Facebook will assume you like any future posts
from that source, so say you liked a New York Times op-ed
on legalizing marijuana you may unbeknownst to you
like another New York Times op-ed on criminalizing abortion
or whatever, this is why sometimes you might notice deceased friend liking things
after the died. Maybe even worse the recycled "likes" is the very blurry space
between organic and non-organic posts on Facebook
if you're unfamiliar with these terms organic just means a post that one of your
friends makes
and non-organic is something that's paid for like an ad. So, say you make an organic post
about how much you like your iPhone
Facebook could then sell that post to Apple so they can use it as an ad
and your friends will notice that post in their feeds sort of get anchored to the top
like a sponsored post
and maybe you're cool with this and maybe you're not, but the point is
that it doesn't matter because nobody asked for your permission nobody bothered
to tell you about it...
...or they didn't bother to tell you about it when they told you they change their
terms of service and the technically did ask your permission when you signed the
9000+ word
Terms of Service. And if you're the kind of influencer that charges companies to
make promotional posts
Facebook just cut you out of that equation. And even if you're not in the
business of making promotional posts
I think if somebody's using your posts as an ad, you should be getting a cut
of that
and i'm not just trying to be greedy here, there's some pretty long-term consequences with this
there's a reeally great book called "Who Owns the Future" by Jaron Lanier where he
describes this in detail
and he also describes what a micropayment system could look like
where users get compensated for the wealth that the generate on social media
which up until now doesn't really exist... YouTube and
and Google Adsense maybe being the kind of exception which brings me to my last issue
Facebook implements these things in a really sneaky way. And if we noticed and
if we backlash than they post an apology after the fact
and retrofit their site with a sort of "opt out" option. But this is never the default
and they never want to opt out and these changes are made in such a way as to
keep us in the dark
and sometimes years can go by before anybody even noticed face but fucked with us
and one of the worst examples at this came out recently here's a quote from the Atlantic
"for one week in January 2012 data scientists skewed what almost 700,000
Facebook uses saw when they logged into its service. some people were shown content
with the preponderance
happy and positive words. some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average
and when the week was over these manipulated uses were more likely to post
either especially positive or negative words themselves
this tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study published
in the prestigious proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences"
in short, facebook just wanted to see if they could control the emotional states of their
massive network of
guinea pigs. and it turns out they can for a week in 2012
hundreds of thousands of us were made depressed and hundreds of thousands
of us were made happy. high-fives data scientists
what's next? so I'll admit have some pretty radical ideas about what I would
like the web to look like
and I realize a lot this isn't happening anytime soon. but I do appreciate
all the awesome shit we have now so I partake in internet culture
but there's a balance that needs to be met and a line that needs to be drawn
and it really sucks and it pains me to say that Facebook crossed it
now I have to leave and this is how I did that. So facebook gives you the option to
deactivate your account or even
"delete your account", but keep in mind anytime you upload anything to the Internet
it's being copied over and over again it's been crawled is being scraped
when something goes online, its virtually impossible to delete
so when facebook gives you the option to "delete your account" this is a relative term
also with something as ubiquitous as Facebook deleting or deactivating your
account means
much more than just losing your feed and your information
it means losing all of my albums, it means losing
all of my Spotify playlist, it also throws a wrench in a lot of the work
that I do
as a new-media artist I produce a lot of work for myself and for clients
that involves Facebook apps and Facebook Graph so I thought about this for a while
and decided I wouldn't press the "delete my account" button
that instead I'd leave Facebook on my own terms
by manually deleting all of my photos, posts, comments, likes
by un-tagging myself from everything by leaving all my groups, etc.
essentially manually wiping out all of my activity on Facebook
or at least scraping it off the surface. And I've already done all that
with the exception unfriending my friends which I'm gonna do in a few days
before i show you how to do this you should probably backup anything that's
important to you on facebook. if you're like me you probably got a lot of
sentimental moments on there
so if you go to your settings Facebook actually gives you an option to
download a copy of your facebook data and you should do this, but in my opinion
thiss actually leaves out
a lot of other important things. So while this download includes all the photos
you've posted to Facebook it doesn't include all the photos photos your friends have
posted, and then tagged you in
Which for me was what initially motivated me to get on facebook
and what makes up the majority of my photo history over the last seven years
at this point in time Facebook has no easy way to download all the photos you're
tagged in
so i wrote a custom script is to get that done.
So big disclaimer here, this script and all the other scripts i wrote and i'm gonna share with you in
this video
is a sort of brute force hack, its really dirty
and might take some experimentation. that's just the style of this here tutorial
as the result the circumstances Facebook has placed me in
also keep in mind that facebook changes shit all the time with no notice
But I've posted all of these on github as gists, so you can fork them
and make any changes if and when they're necessary. So after you download a copy your
data, go ahead and watch this video were i kinda go through step by step
how to hack your way to saving a copy of all the photos that your tagged in
another thing i'm gonna miss is all of my wall posts. there's a lot of really sentimental stuff
people have posted on there, like birthday wishes and other personal things. So I made this
other video for had a download a copy of your entire wall
so after I saved all the stuff that I wanted to save I started wiping out all my activity
i started with some of the stuff that Facebook makes easy for you to manually remove
like I removed all of my information from my About section
I also manually removed
all of the app's except for some the ones that are connected to other things
like Spotify
and some of my client apps. then comes the trickier part
I want to delete all of my photos but I also wanted to untag myself from all the
photos my friends have posted
and Facebook doesn't really give you a quick easy way to do this
so I also wrote a few custom scripts to get that done which are on the website
and also on this video where I walk through step by step how to do that
I also wrote a script for quickly leaving all of your groups. Also documented on the site
and in this video. And lastly a script for deleting all of my activity
that means comments, likes, search results, stuff like that
the video on the site also includes some tips for how to do is a bit more
effectively remember that this is all kind of experimental
I notice that if I tried to delete years worth of activity at once
it would crash my browser and not work, but it worked ok if I did
a few months at a time. Which is still a lot easier than going through it
one by one
although admittedly just as sad. So to recap
facebook gives you a couple different ways to delete your account, this is NOT
one of them. This is an alternative based on a different set of priorities
like i said before, this is meant to be kind of performative
activist and some what cathartic process. As a right now
all but my friends list and this post have been removed
and in a few days I'll be unfriending everyone leaving only
this post on my Facebook account
its sad. I'm afraid of losing touch with friends, i'm afraid of missing out
on future activities and posts on Facebook
but I hope you all will find me elsewhere on the internets as I hope to find you
I've got other accounts, f*ck Facebook