How To / Why Leave Facebook

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