How "social media" has changed society and why you should consider deleting Facebook

In my opinion there's a lot of good stuff in this article about Facebook and social media by Nat Eliason

https://medium.com/s/story/yes-you-should-delete-facebook-heres-why-bc623a3b4625

In particular, I'd highlight:

Facebook’s product is not the platform, it’s us

a company wants to control how you interact with other humans so that they can make money off of you. This isn’t some secret, evil motivation driving the company behind closed doors. It’s a necessary consequence of the incentives that shape it.

How did Facebook get so ingrained in our lives that people who lived without it for thirty years are suddenly concerned about losing it?

Facebook has changed friendship from an active to a passive process. You can sit back and wait for some update to appear from a friend or acquaintance and then respond to it.

We don’t have to put in the work, the information comes to us, and so we’ve lost the muscles we used to use for staying updated on our social circle.

This would be fine if Facebook relationships were as meaningful as in-person ones, but they aren’t. Conversations through chat apps and getting up to date on your friends through the newsfeed is the relationship equivalent of Soylent. A technological pseudo-improvement over an ancient human process, and one that falls dramatically short of the value it’s trying to recreate.

Facebook has become the abusive partner in many people’s lives. They’ve carved out such a seemingly important role in your life that even though you want to leave, you’re scared of the consequences.

and finally:

If a company can’t be trusted, ditch them, and let them feel the consequences. If a product can get away with mistreating its users to make money, it will keep doing it until they feel the consequences.

I'm particularly in-tune with the idea that switching from active engagement with other people to passive role where someone else controls what you see and learn has been damaging to our society. Far from being social it is anti-social. People simply aren't being social anymore, it's fake-social.

Extend that thought to how we now consume almost all information passively instead of actively and it should be clear why we have a country being controlled by people who vote purely on what they are told to think, what they are told is "real", and what they are told is "true". They've lost that muscle for determining true from false, right from wrong, fact from fiction. And that is why we aren't really living in America anymore (or whatever social-media besotted country you live in), we are living in the Soylent equivalent of it. Synthetic. Fake. It'll keep you alive, but there is ultimately no joy or substance to it. We might as well be in a bathtub of goo plugged into the Matrix...

Or we could all just wake up one day and decide to, you know, delete Facebook...