How to Finally Break Up with Facebook
A guide to clawing your way out of Zuckerberg’s infernal rabbit hole and riding off into the sunset
This article won’t be about why to break up with Facebook. I’m not here to talk you out of it or shame you for using it. But you clicked on this story so perhaps you have a few reasons to hop off that rusting blue merry-go-round, ranging from data exploitation to plain old burnout. Maybe you yearn to escape the barrage of opinions, attention hoovering, ads, false news items, questionable politics, and misplaced apostrophes. Maybe it’s soaking up too much of your energy. Maybe you just don’t enjoy it like you used to.
I won’t attempt to provide the exact steps for deactivating or deleting your account. Facebook changes the process with alarming frequency, burying it under increasingly byzantine click paths. They don’t want you to quit and their UI designers are shuffling plastic cups as fast as they can to frustrate you into giving up. Don’t let them win.
This is more of an emotional guide to escaping the tentacles of the social media juggernaut. Hey, I get it, it’s hard. I joined Facebook in 2009 and wanted to break up with it for years before I actually succeeded. I tried and failed many times but learned a few things along the way.
