Why I left Facebook

If you've been paying any attention to the news, you'll know that Facebook have been caught red handed harvesting and improperly sharing personal data from around 50 million Americans. Here's a quote from The Guardian:

'The Facebook CEO broke his five-day silence on the scandal that has enveloped his company this week in a Facebook post acknowledging that the policies that allowed the misuse of data were “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it”.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote. He noted that the company has already changed some of the rules that enabled the breach, but added: “We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”'

 (Full article here -) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/21/mark-zuckerberg-response-facebook-cambridge-analytica

I just want to say, is anyone really that surprised? We live in a world where everyone knows everything about everyone. Doesn't matter whether or not your profile is private on any kind of social platform, you and your personal life and details all live on the internet. And even if you delete your accounts from these said platforms, you will inevitably still pop up somewhere if someone decides to google you.


                                               


Of course I think it's pretty shitty what FB have done, but I can't help feel a little smug knowing that I deleted my account over a year ago, and it isn't anything to do with worries over companies misusing my personal data. Far from it in fact.
My decision to delete my Facebook profile is one of the smartest things I've done in terms of healing myself and dealing with my own mental health problems.

Many times over the 8 years I had Facebook I closed and re-opened my account. I really struggled with properly letting it go. I felt like it was my own personal diary or journal that my friends could read and show their interest, and whenever I shut it down I felt like people worried about me a lot more and contacted me as soon as I'd done it asking me why. It's funny how people can instantly assume there is something seriously wrong if you come off of a social platform."Why did you delete your account? Did you block me?" etc. If you've deactivated yours, maybe you can relate. But the truth is I just found FB so poisonous.

Over time Facebook just became a fucking drain on me. More adverts popped up. More trash came up on my feed, someone liked what someone said from a post someone posted 3 years ago etc, and before you know it you're balls deep in some random Facebook rant that's been liked and shared thousands of times, and you end up arguing with some randoms in the comments section. It's so distracting, and mentally and physically draining. Sometimes I'd come away looking at the clock thinking, 'Oh my god. I just literally sat here for 30 minutes scrolling through something that isn't real, reading stuff from people I don't care about, but who I insist on having on my friends list because If i deleted them they would want to know why, and I can't block them because it's too harsh'

Am I starting to sound a bit crazy yet? I know I am, but I can bet my life most of you reading this have done the exact same thing. But why? What do we gain from doing that every single day? Absolutely nothing.

The thing that enraged me the most whilst having my FB account was bullies, and people I absolutely loathed from my childhood trying to add me. And when I had George, my girl friends were posting on their walls their congratulations and tagging me in their posts. The next day I had about 5 friend requests from a load of old bitches who used to spread rumours about me and take the piss out of me all through high school. I honestly couldn't believe the audacity of all of them. Oh, you've seen I've had a baby through my friend from school, so now you wanna add me so you can have access to my entire life because you're a nosy piece of shit? Don't think so! BLOCKED 😒

Eventually my block list became about 30 names long. I even changed my FB name to Violet King and started over, only adding my closest and most dearest friends. I always had my profile picture to private so absolutely no one could see it was me. But somehow down the line, some people caught wind that it was actually me, and again came the friend requests from creeps I barely ever knew from years ago when I used to go to the fucking skate park.

                                       

Even writing about it is so draining, and honestly just makes me think about how pathetic people are, and how far they will go to stick their nose in to someone else's life. Other people don't have a problem with this; I had some friends on FB who had over 1000 friends on their list. (But I bet about 5% were their real friends in actual real life.) These people would purposefully post photos of themselves in underwear or swimwear, sticking their bums out in a mirror selfie, or posting photos of their newly done gel nails with their new engagement rings, or perfectly constructed poses with their significant others that were so heavily airbrushed they looked like bloody mannequins. All fake. Fake fake fake and false. I couldn't believe the facade so many of these people were putting out there, like their lives were fucking picture perfect because they got the keys to their new house/got a new car/ got engaged/had a baby/went on holiday/ when in reality their lives were nothing like that at all.

                                       


I'm not saying I'm innocent of this. Of course I have posted and documented my own family life and posted photos of myself with my kids or significant other. But I didn't bombard my entire feed with it. And like I said, the people on my friends list were my nearest and dearest, the people who genuinely loved me and cared about me and my family, so of course it never bothered them that I posted things like this. Eventually just having a profile started to do my head in, and I started seriously thinking about deleting my account once and for all.

I was conscious that I was holding on to my account for all the wrong reasons. I was so concerned about the idea of deleting it, deleting all of the treasured photos of me and my friends, years old statuses that made me reminisce about the 'good old days', and just the general feeling of feeling more connected to the people I knew. But I realised that I could still have all of these photos on a memory stick, or better yet printed off and hung up in my house. The memories would always be kept in a special drawer in my brain somewhere. And the people who cared about me truly madly deeply would still do so with or without a FB account.

                                  

There was one main thing that tipped me over the edge to do this. At the beginning of 2017, I became heavily involved in signing petitions, attending peaceful protests and marches, donating to causes on www.change.org and just generally trying to spread some happiness and positivity. At the end of January a documentary called '13th' on Netflix put me in floods of tears. It was about the racial injustice that America faces, and has had to face for hundreds of years. Of course being over in the UK, I couldn't really do much, but being the determined and stubborn person I am, I trawled the internet to try and find a way in which I could help. I found a group through Fb called 'Manchester against racism'. They'd organised a peaceful rally beautifully named 'Anti Trump' in the city centre and I immediately hit the 'attend' button.

I posted a long and thorough status about it, about the documentary that I'd just watched, about how it touched my heart and how I wanted to do something to help. I waited for the likes and comments to flood in, for my friends to say they would go with me and how they supported it. But nothing came. Tumbleweeds. No likes. No comments. Not one person on my friends list batted a fucking eyelid. And it made me so angry and emotional that I de-activated my account. I ranted and raved. I couldn't believe it. Oh of course, if I ever posted a picture of myself covered in make up and posing into the camera, the likes and comments would roll in like a shit storm. But this? No. This wasn't what anyone wanted to see. No one cared.

                                       

Not too long after that, I became engrossed in the case of Charlie Gard. If you hadn't heard about this, Charlie was a baby who was fighting mitochondrial depletion syndrome. Great Ormond Street hospital had stripped his parents of their parental rights, and fought for months in court against them to have his life support switched off. Millions of people protested against this and supported Charlie and his parents, managing to raise over £1 million to fly Charlie to the states for life saving treatment. I created a new Twitter account so I could help spread awareness. I posted and posted and shared all over my Facebook and Instagram. I printed out flyers about him and posted them around my neighbourhood, asking people to donate and to help. I immersed myself into helping Charlie and his family as much as I possibly could  (seeing as I wasn't able to get to London and join the peaceful protests people were having outside of Great Ormond street and the courts on a regular basis.) Of course, a couple of friends donated and helped to share, and I'll always be grateful to them for even taking notice considering the disaster of my anti racism essay. But it wasn't enough, eventually I just lost faith in people and deleted my account for good.

Unfortunately Charlie died at the end of July 2017, and I deleted my twitter account absolutely wrought with grief. I just couldn't understand how a photo of myself or my family would gain so much attention, but as soon as I posted about an innocent baby fighting for his life no one seemed to notice. It broke my heart, because all I could think was, if I posted on here that one of my baby's was poorly like that, literally everyone on my friends list would step up and support me. So why was it less important to people that it was a baby they didn't know?

I don't want anyone reading this to feel personally attacked or judged. I understand that a lot of people have these FB accounts and just don't use them, or post their own things but don't bother looking through the news feeds. And that's fine. Of course every one has the free will to do what they want. The free will to donate to whoever and whatever charity they want. I can't force people to become as immersed in a case like that as I was, but I can't deny the fact that it definitely stung and was the straw that broke the camel's back with regards to deleting my account.

                                                        

A lot of you reading this will know I have an Instagram account, and are maybe wondering why I've not let go of it. The truth is, I find Instagram to be much better for my mental health. I prefer the way it's laid out. I love looking at people's lives through photos, or pictures of art work or comic strips. They make me smile. There isn't really a time when I've had a scroll through my Insta and something hasn't made me laugh. I also use it to plug things about my blog and my YouTube 😏 and of course keep in touch and connected with my friends who I love so much.

Overall, FB made me dislike people that I loved in real life. It's funny how we all kind of have our own mask on all social media platforms. Sometimes we post the bad stuff, the nitty-gritty - having a very bad time of it - posts but let's be honest, they're few and far between compared to beautifully constructed photos of your Vegan lunch...or whatever. And what's funny, is that when I ran a poll yesterday asking my followers if you would ever delete your FB account, there were more yes votes than no. So what's stopping you?

Until next time my loves,
Violet x

Charlie Gard: http://www.charliesfight.org/charlies-fight/
Instagram: @VioletKingWrites
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BeautifulFlamingo/videos