John Biggs can use TechCrunch's platform to deliver his message without necessarily agreeing with everything TechCrunch does (such as advertising for Facebook via those buttons).
Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...
> Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...
These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:
1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or
2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.
The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.
I generally agree with this point, in the same way that I think that people are far too ready to call "hypocrisy" when the deed that is 'hypocritical' is just a small subset of the original 'evil'.
Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account.
As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).
From Facebook's perspective, dissatisfied users who delete their accounts are a sort of immune system response. The spread of contagious memes like "Facebook is a pointless, addictive time suck" are contained because those "infected" with them take themselves out of the population.
Rather than just deleting your Facebook account, if you spend some time using it to push articles and posts out onto your feed describing your position, then the memetic contagion can spread over Facebook. If enough people do that, it could hasten their collapse (unless they actually manage a heroic effort to successfully address the critics, not just a PR band-aid).
Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...