Dear f***book.

I’m really sorry to do this on Valentine’s day but I’m finally breaking up with you and that’s that. We’ve been on and off for ages now, but your most recent fuckery was the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Back when we first hooked up, you empowered people (not ‘users’) to spread truth, to pursue justice and freedom. You helped us organise resistance movements all around the world.

When we first met, you promised that you were ‘free and always would be’. Now you try to get me to pay to ‘boost this post’ and ‘reach more people’ every time I log in. It’s become most irritating. You even do it when I’m logged out now…pinging my inbox every few hours. It’s just so…clingy…it’s claustrophobic.

Over the last few years and particularly in the last few weeks though, you’ve fucked me off so much and I want you to know why before I go, because I’m not sure you’ve even realised.

Recently, you arbitrarily changed some of my pages into ‘business’ pages with no real explanation of why, or what this means. You then started preventing me from posting links to this site in comment threads, which was my primary means of ‘reaching’ people since you’d already filterbubbled me and I can’t afford to waste money on ‘advertising’, even if I approved of that sickening industry. Which I don’t.

Now you’re telling me that my personal posts from my website violate your ‘community standards’ if I try to use them in comment threads. You’ve effectively blackballed me from posting links to my site at all unless I post them from one of my pages. If I post from the pages though, You restrict the post’s reach, so only 1% ish of my friends miiight see it. Then you tell me this and try to extract money from me to ‘reach more people’. The reason 330 something people, or 5k odd people, or 150,000 odd people ‘haven’t heard from me in a while’ is because I don’t have any money to pay you to let me talk to them and vice versa. Even if I had money and was into wasting it, I wouldn’t waste it on spamming people with adverts and ‘promoted posts’, on principle. It’s anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, anti-poor, anti-social,….

I know you want me all to yourself but you can’t keep me in this little filter bubble any more. We all know that the only reason you let a few of us see each other’s posts and talk with each other is so you can sell the data to UK Gov. Plc and their pals in big business, banks, security services and so on. It’s become a laughable joke. You’ve got 2.27 billion friends, not counting all of your corporate advertisers. It’s not fair to keep us away from all of ours, trapped in an increasingly invasive algorithmic surveillance state, marketing machine nightmare.

I should have done this after Snowden warned everybody about you. I should have done it after the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out. Jaron Lanier was right about you. There were so many times I should have left you but I loved you so much that I couldn’t let go. I wanted to believe you could change, that things could somehow get back to how they used to be…

Then last week, I was midway through chatting with an old friend who I haven’t heard from in ages and halfway through our chat you blocked me from sharing a Bruce Lee video with them. In a private chat. Because it ‘violated your community standards’. That was a week ago today. I filled in your ‘review’ form and you said you’d get back to me but you haven’t even bothered to do that.

It feels like you’re overtly telling me I’m not welcome on your platform. Either because of my political views, or because I’m skint. Regardless why it is I can take the hint, so I’m out of here.

I’ll leave my channels and pages open for posterity and in case you decide to sort your shit out and explain and reform all this fuckery but for now, we’re done. We haven’t spoken all this last week and you haven’t seemed to notice, so I doubt you care anyway.

Fuck you and your fake hope peddling, election meddling, profiteering, social engineering, snitch arse, spycop grass, black suit collaborating, hate and fearmongering, fascist corporate media pushing nightmarish hellhole mindfuck of a platform.

Again, I’m sorry to do this on Valentine’s day but I really have had enough and I’m not taking it anymore. You have amazing potential to unfuck the world facebook. Stop making everything worse than it already is and start helping again. I really hope you do.

Despite everything, I’ll miss you. It’s like you’ve programmed a stockholm syndrome response into me.

Thanks for all the memes.

Ann

*this post is of course, mostly post-satirical. All big tech is playing the same game but fb is really taking the piss now so I am going dark on that platform ’til they shape up. Which is, let’s face it, unlikely.

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