December 30, 2018

Where Do We Go Now: Why Delete Facebook

I think it's mostly a given that not too many people care about what I have done on Facebook. Facebook (as known to the majority of the world at large) is merely the big thing where your family members or relatives or your boss is posting photos or text. A supervisor posing with their spouse, with the kids cased with glee.
I honestly hope to god that some of the people reading this have heard of the absolutely scummy and deceptive actions the Facebook corporation has enacted. A/B testing users to deliberately invoking suicide in users, hiding real actions to replace with sponsored content, collecting information about your personal identity without even registering your own Facebook account, lying under the dozens of faces and names in court. And it's more than just Mark Zuckerberg alone. Their Lead Attorney had also lied under oath when answering questions from Congress.

Facebook has confirmed to have worked with the military state by providing personal information of over billions of human lives. Recently leaked email exchanges from early as 2012 confirm employees of attempting to take down competing services and platforms. In fact, one of the descriptions for a certain kind of platform

The number one threat to Facebook is not another scale social network, it is the fracturing of information / death by a thousand vertical apps which are loosely integrated together - FB exec Sam Lessin to Mark Zuckerberg, 2012

I opened a Facebook account in late 2016 after years of pressure and arguably the presence of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) from the immense Networking Effect that having over 2 Billion products Users. I believed that needing access to all of these people was such an absolute necessity just to grow my own personal brand. Every quarter of the year I was proven wrong. Those not on Facebook were more proactive, reaching out to actual blogs and websites. People that understood the game of Internet Virality more than anything I could perform.

I have had enough of Facebook. I have had enough of yet another wasteful online account. Another chance for Silicon Valley to mine information from the most sensitive of subjects and topics and thoughts. At this point, I would much rather put my (Web of) Trust in collectives of hobbyists and non-profits, instead of a "Social News Aggregate" that does nothing but bend towards the wishes of federal intelligence, shareholders, and the military state, with little to no regard of making a proper website. Instead Facebook cares more


So, where will I be now? WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by Facebook, with the latter already having some recent controversial changes. WhatsApp also had broken compatibility with other programs using the same Communication Protocol (OWS), which a program like Signal has successfully implemented for years at this point with no hitches.

I've still my website at http://harney-barrow.pw/. It also works dual-purpose as a cleaned up portfolio of my current work, with links to other websites where I keep my art and more.

But for the time being, I am still own a Twitter account with the handle @Harney_Barrow . Keep in mind that the mentality for this account is far more different, and less inhibited when it comes to discussing topics. Plus I already have got a handful of bones to pick with Twitter (though nowhere near as much as YouTube).

I have an account of the platform pleroma.site with the account name "@HarneyBA@pleroma.site". Pleroma is just strung along with hundreds of thousands of other fellow servers, bringing back the pre-Social Media Trust in users. In terms of network design, it's like how cells attach and clump together, or counting the individual corners and segments of a spider web one-by-one. I'm not a PROFESSIONAL WEBMASTER, so my information is corroborated from multiple people and conjecture from my experience with programming.



Thank you for reading.