[2OEH8eoCRo0]

It is though. It's astonishing how little people are willing to sacrifice for their ideals.

If you don't have an issue with Facebook then disregard and continue using their services. If you do have a problem then try being the change you want to see. Tend your garden. You cannot control other people but you can control yourself.

[seoaeu]

"Be the change you want to see" doesn't really work for society level collective action problems. My concern with Facebook isn't that they have too much information about me, it is that they know too much about my country's citizens in aggregate (and thus can manipulate them). Whether I opt out has a real impact on me, but zero impact on whether they can run disinformation campaigns and swing elections.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

>Whether I opt out has a real impact on me, but zero impact on whether they can run disinformation campaigns and swing elections.

Being the change you want to see doesn't automatically mean the world changes. It just means live with principles regardless of external factors. You don't like Facebook? Then don't use Facebook. It's as simple as that. Others can take it or leave it.

I just see it as people complaining about Facebook while continuing to use Facebook so it must not be a very big deal to them.

[chickenmonkey]

The two actions people can take are: 1. Delete Facebook apps, Whatsapp and IG. This can have low to high utility loss for you, but has negligible effect on Facebook. It would have a bad effect for me, who has many family members and friends connected on whatsapp and needs whatsapp to connect to anyone whom I meet in my country.

2. Lead a movement to switch away from these apps. This has an insanely high overhead, and requires significant organisation of people and a large individual commitment. This would have a significant effect on Facebook.

This is how I view the problem. This is not an example of people being unwilling to act on their ideals. It's a situation where acting on their ideals would cause them a significant burden with no effect, and causing the intended change would require ridiculously large effort.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

>has negligible effect on Facebook

This is irrelevant to me and can be left out. My goal is not to hurt Facebook but to not betray my principles.

[cvwright]

> You don't like Facebook? Then don't use Facebook

It’s hard though, because what alternative do people have?

I didn’t log in to my Facebook account for 7 years, and I got way out of touch with most of my old friends in different cities.

[manquer]

Facebook makes it easier, but it is not like friends did not keep in touch before Facebook. I regularly send SMS/ email friends I make it point to spend writing and replying to mails regularly.

Sure, occasionally people get frustrated that you are not on these platforms, however I ended up being lot more responsive and attentive to non social media forms of communication. Social media is usually low effort, I rather have one person wishing me with personal email on my birthday, rather than hundreds of meaningless FB posts.

It was actually harder for business contacts than personal, customers want to chat in whatever works for them, harder to say no to someone paying you. However Teams/Slack has helped a lot and dose of compliance reasons which customers find easier to go along with.

[S_A_P]

I deleted all social about 5 years ago I did notice a narrowing of my friend circle. However, I also noticed a net uptick in my own personal happiness. There will be tradeoffs that you have to consider and figure out what is best for you. I personally believe that social media in general is responsible for a lot of the problems in our society, so take my opinion with appropriate grains of salt.

[im3w1l]

Facebook benefits a lot from a martyr-or-submission choice, but we don't have to play their game.

[speedgoose]

I believe that forcing such companies to respect privacy better is the right solution.

Deleting the Facebook owned applications from my phone would achieve close to nothing positive. I may convince a few family members and good friends to use another application only for me, but I will lose a lot of relations and Facebook wouldn't care. However I also did work in small research studies to expose to everyone the bad practices of some companies about privacy. It's not much but it helps when our governments make laws such as the GDPR.