10 Good Reasons to Delete Facebook

Are you considering deleting Facebook? You are not alone. As the #DeleteFacebook movement shows, many are finding good reasons to say goodbye to the social giant. And most are not looking back.

Facebook is a huge network. But it has seen a few of these #DeleteFacebook campaigns since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And they have even spread to its other properties, namely Instagram and WhatsApp.

While it is a great tool for school reunions, keeping in touch with friends and family, and making new acquaintances. Facebook is not perfect. Plus, the company’s prioritization of profit over its user’s welfare puts it in a bad light.

There are many good reasons to delete the Facebook app, but this post looks at the 10 best. They should help you to make up your mind if you are still undecided.

10 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook

1. Your Mental Health

We have all been there. That moment when you want to post on Facebook. You re-check the post for correctness. Will your friends approve? Will you get enough likes? Will the post get you more sympathy and friends, or get ignored?

Social media use, including Facebook, can become an addiction. It creates anxiety in your everyday life, as you are constantly afraid of missing out on the latest viral posts, trending topics, and the like.

Secondly, when you try to post only stuff that will get likes, comments, and shares, you are seeking validation. This might appear harmless when it happens once in a while. But it can lead to anxiety, inadequacy feelings, desperation, and depression when it happens often.

The social media anxiety disorder is real and can negatively impact your work and personal lives. Following are some warning signs that Facebook could be disrupting your life:

• You are constantly checking updates
• You check your account in the middle of conversation
• You neglect your work or chores because of Facebook
• You always need to share stuff or make your voice heard
• You see Facebook as a refuge to withdraw from friends & family
• You find yourself lying about how much time you spend on the platform

The only cure is to delete the app or your account completely.

2. Regain Your Privacy

Facebook is a data-mining monster. The company gets you to publicly share as much information as possible, while not explicitly making it clear to you that they will own whatever you share and use it however they like.

Of course, their primary use of your shared information is for generating ad revenue. But it goes further than that, as Facebook additionally shares your information with third-party applications that are part of its ecosystem.

A look at Facebook’s history makes it clear that the company values profits more than its user’s privacy, as one privacy law suit settlement shows.

Asides from that, sharing detailed information about your life with total strangers is risky. As you never know who is looking at your pictures or videos and what they intend to do next.

3. Stop Consuming Useless Information

Social media is the hotbed of misinformation and Facebook ranks #1. There is no guarantee that the information you see on your wall is legit. And even when you follow official news outlets, Facebook will only show you what it wants to show you.

Of course, there are many good pages and groups on the platform. But the distractions far outweigh them. Before you know it, you can go from reading a helpful post on data science to checking out profiles and eventually find yourself enjoying cat videos.

The system is optimized to feed you worthless information that keeps you glued for more. One way out is to find and follow helpful blogs that focus on the subject matter, without endless distractions. The search engines can help.

4. Regain Your Time

Facebook is designed to be addictive. You scroll and scroll, then click, click, scroll some more, click, and so on. Before you know it, you have spent 15 minutes or even an hour browsing mindlessly.

Combine those few hours per week over many months, and you will find that you are spending a large portion of your life in maintaining a cyber profile.

Yes, it is a profile of your real self. But, it is not you. And you can exist very well without it. So, if you are not getting any tangible benefits from that profile, then all the time you spend in maintaining it is wasted. And you will never get it back.

By resisting that urge to maintain your “digital self”, you will free up a lot of time that you can invest in worthy endeavors. Remember that time is the most valuable asset that we have and it is very limited. So, please don’t waste it on Facebook.

5. Ignore the Drama

Facebook is a haven for narcissists, drama queens, and trolls. While they can be entertaining at times, they are often loaded with negative emotional energies that explode at the slightest provocation.

These types will lurk in Facebook groups or seek out active stories to engage in. They leave you emotionally drained and lacking focus, often for the rest of the day. The only way to deal with them is to leave Facebook.

6. Re-focus & Boost Your Productivity

Facebook does not sell ads per click like Google does. Rather it sells ad views, which are calculated per 1,000 impressions, also known as Cost Per Mile (CPM).

This means that all the company has to do to make money is to get you to see as many ads as possible. So, they prey on your attention, optimizing their algorithms and taking other steps to keep you distracted and on the platform for as long as possible.

When you turn your back on Facebook, your focus and time will get a boost. All you then have to do is concentrate them on productive endeavors and watch your productivity soar!

7. Build More Satisfying Relationships

Human beings are mammals and that means we depend on emotions for healthy existence. Social-media interactions may elicit many emotions, but they are no match for face-to-face interactions.

There is a natural exchange of emotions between two or more people in a face-to-face interaction. And it is absent on social media. So, by pulling the plug on Facebook and engaging in more physical interactions, you can experience deeper emotional bonds and higher levels of personal satisfaction.

8. Boost your Self Esteem

Focusing on celebrities and their shiny profiles often come with the negative side effect of feeling unworthy, not good enough, or simply below average.

Most of those celebrity’s and influencer’s posts are planned and carefully executed with one or more business objectives. In other words, you are often being sold a lie, because their real lives are not as glamorous.

The same goes for your friends and old classmates who only post the best versions of themselves, often leaving out those days that they are in a bad mood.

When you delete the app or your entire account and spend more time with physical friends, you will continually discover their flaws. The reason is that they cannot hide those flaws like on Facebook. And the good part of it all is that flaws make us human. So, you are okay, just the way you are.

9. You can Still Use it on a Browser

If you are concerned about your privacy but are not yet certain about deleting your Facebook account, then consider deleting the app and only visiting the platform through a web browser.

The point with this approach is that you are 100% in control of your web browser’s privacy and other settings. So, this limits Facebook’s data collection, as it has no power beyond a browser tab.

On the other hand, the app practically does whatever it likes. It even tracks how you use other apps, including which websites you visit. That is too much data for one company.

10. Stop Working For Free

Facebook makes billions of dollars every year from ad revenue, but they don’t share their earnings with you. Meanwhile, the actions you take on the app or website are what helps the company to generate the revenue.

Every time you post a link or a picture, or you like a photo or video, you are creating data that gets sold to advertisers. The same goes for all those comments and unending discussions. So, except you are making money through the platform, you are simply working for free.

Once you delete the app or your account entirely, you will discover that you have more time available to you. And they are those periods that you often wasted on the platform, which you can now channel into more productive and rewarding endeavors.

Conclusion

We have come to the end of this post listing good reasons to delete Facebook from your life. From improved mental health to better emotional stability, you have seen there are plenty of reasons to do so.

So, unless you are making money on the platform or gaining some other advantage that outweighs those listed above, the best advice is #DeleteFacebook.