Facebook (FB). By any objective measure, it should be dead now. It lies, it steals, it believes itself to be above moral, legal and contractual considerations.

Increasingly, consumers are aware of this. There is vocal disgust. There are movements urging us to quit Facebook. And yet, the company appears impervious to scandal. We’re told that numbers remain robust.

Frankly, I wouldn’t put too much faith in that, I have no doubt that Facebook has no compunction in lying about numbers. They lie about everything else.

Why stay?

Actually, on a personal level, I am disengaged from Facebook. I have tied down the privacy settings as much as I can, and I no longer post there directly. I stay for two reasons;

  1. Nero’s Notes. To have a company page, I need a personal profile.
  2. As a signpost. When I post articles like this one, some people find out via FB.

However, even these prompts to post are diminishing. Dealing with FB as a small business is almost impossible. To inform:

  1. The FB page points to http://nerosnotes.co.uk but is called pocketnotebooks (the original name of the site). Changing the FB page name to nerosnotes would be confusing. Apparently.
  2. Many products are not available on the FB page as they breach FBs rules. “#DigitalDetox” for example is disallowed for making false health claims…(by nature of its name.) Bots, it turns out, love a rule, dislike an appeal.

Ethical Use

I wrote before about ethical use of social media. I stopped using FB’s advertising tools,  and ads.

Consequently, I have mimimised the data that I give out and I make no use of the data that FB offers me. Nor will I give it any money. I daresay that a combination of those things will mean that my pages appear less often in other’s timelines and the utility of the profile and pages will gradually decrease, dying of natural causes, as it were.

I’m comfortable with that.

Instagram

On the other hand, there’s Instagram (IG). That’s a much different place. It’s lovely. Rainbows and Unicorns. Isn’t it?

It’s true that there is a nicer feel about IG. However, it was bought by FB. There is no indication that there will be any difference in the business model. My response therefore is the same. I’ll keep posting, but I won’t buy advertising, I won’t buy data, and I’ll be very careful about what data I give them.

Conclusion

I’m sure that people working at FB are lovely. However, the single-minded pursuit of capturing personal data for corporate profit means that as an entity, it’s poisonous.

Bottom line for me – people are on these platforms, so I have a presence, but I’m being very intentional about how I use and/or support Facebook Inc.