Virtue Signaling? Why I’m Deleting Facebook

My world might feel a lot smaller at first, and I have the sense that it’ll eventually expand like exhausted lungs finally getting a full breath.

From my Compaq Presario, I was emailing the university I’d join in the fall by February, begging for early access to my new email address. To get ahead? No — to get on Facebook. It was 2005 and the social network with its one million monthly users hadn’t yet expanded beyond universities, so an .edu email address was required to join. Introverted, socially awkward, yet obsessed with and fascinated by people, I needed to be there.

What started as a place to figure out who I’d meet in class, over the course of nearly twenty years, has become a cherished record of my life. Gritty entrepreneurship, falling in love with a drummer, getting a job at Facebook, getting married, 3 pregnancies and their resulting pudgy-perfect babies, work trips, illnesses, girls nights, family vacations, first days of school, a divorce, a pandemic, coparenting, losing myself, losing my dad, coming out of that darkness - it’s all chronicled there.

When my 9-year-old was a baby, she had serious, mysterious health issues that meant a mama repeatedly resuscitating her blue, seizing infant and many overnights at Seattle Children’s Hospital. It also meant hours of searching and researching; studying studies.

It’s hard to imagine coping through this without the outlet, the community, the resources that Facebook and Instagram provided. Many months into it, curled up in the glow of my phone in an icy yet comforting hospital suite, it was my girlfriend Julie’s suggestion on a Facebook post that led me to the intervention that saved my daughter. The contributions I made while staying at that hospital landed my work on stage at Cannes. It was my health insurance from Facebook that fully covered our hospital stays — my gratitude knows no bounds.

It was on Instagram that I later posted a video of my baby girl toddling out of the hospital, healthy and free. I love Facebook and Instagram.

If you love to fail, you could’ve tried at any point in the past to pry these products out of my elder millennial hands. Even still, twenty years after emailing for early access, I’m writing now to share my decision to permanently delete my profiles and data from these platforms.

Last week, Mark said that people leaving in response to recent company changes would be virtue signaling. This term is usually used pejoratively to describe someone who is more concerned about appearing virtuous than actually supporting the belief. Examples of virtue signaling include dramatically changing your appearance to cater to an audience you previously denounced, or repeatedly claiming to stand with women, LGBTQ+, disabled people only to pull the rug out from under them when the position no longer fits your agenda. 👀

Living in alignment with your values, on the other hand, is when your words and actions match even when it’s difficult or inconvenient.

There’s certainly a huge amount of fear to sign out for the last time, grief over what I’ll miss by leaving and even more grief that it’s taken this long. As an employee for 15 of the 20 years I was a user, I was so convinced that I could make a difference, so I fervently bailed water out of a sinking ship — focused only on the bucket in my hands. I wasn’t giving people the power to build community, but helping inauthentic fence builders accumulate power for power’s sake. I am so sorry.

I am ashamed that I didn’t reconsider everything after the insurrection, the CrowdTangle decision, and as teen safety issues surfaced. In 2017, hate speech and the Myanmar military’s propaganda spread like wildfire on Facebook, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of Rohingya people. I’m ashamed that I didn’t pay more attention

Now that I’m no longer bailing, but bailed, I see clearly that these weren’t matters of unavoidable collateral damage — they’d be avoidable with adequate systems and third party fact checking measures like what Meta just canceled.

I am fascinated by the lies we tell ourselves to justify abusive behavior, because I stayed at Meta in the same way I spent 3 years in an abusive relationship, like a lobster getting boiled in a pot thinking that managing the temperature was her responsibility.

When I was offered a severance deal in exchange for holding Meta harmless despite the toxic and hostile work environment, I said no. I was far enough away to see the sinking boat was on fire, and had been close enough to now fully consider its disproportionate scalding of vulnerable groups. That wasn’t virtue signaling, either.

Screenshot from Meta Careers Blog

You can’t say the same about behaviors like terminating efforts to hire employees and pay vendors equitably after spending a decade taking stages and publishing reports arguing that diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential for better ads and a durable business.

Where I see an absolution of accountability for their role in genocide, an absolute handwashing for enabling insurrection, and internal equity programs that were once lifelines turned into one-liners, I prepare to leave the platforms. With my first-hand understanding of Meta’s business model, I know that every moment I spend with these apps open is funding harm and financing hate. Yes, I love to discover recipes and it’s a great place to grow a business, but could I look a refugee mother displaced by misinformation in the eyes and say it’s worth it?

2017, Myanmar / Photo from Mamunur Rashid for Shutterstock

I’ve got some stuff to figure out, like the management of three Messenger Kids accounts (I want to let them make their own decision), the four day wait to download 20 years of photos and videos (but how wonderful that you can!), and what life might look like after deleting these apps.

My world might feel a lot smaller at first, and I have the sense that it’ll eventually expand like exhausted lungs finally getting a full breath. There will be things I miss, updates and events and opportunities, yet it’ll force intentionality. I’m sad that I won’t discover new authors in Reels, and I also wonder if I might actually read more books?

I will feel all the FOMO feelings and tolerate the pain because the other side offers peace. Maybe it wouldn’t for you, and that’s okay. We aren’t told what our values are, we sense them by paying attention to ourselves. Does something feel out of alignment? We build a values aligned life through the courage to prioritize and honor ourselves with our actions every day.

Whatever your values are, if you’re not ready to live in alignment with them, there’s always a proverbial black t-shirt and gold chain, and the option to do whatever takes you further, to say whatever gets you to the next day.

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Thank you to my friend, Brian, for your leadership through example.