Why Facebook Is Done

Facebook. Is it done? I think so. Something is done when it becomes a New Year’s Resolution. Like smoking. I don’t smoke but I do have Facebook and in the summer of 2017 I decided I was quitting it, as soon as the clock struck midnight on December 31. I even pre-wrote a crappy status in my Iphone notes for the monumental day. I was to post it and then delete my account which is a little counterintuitive. But my stupidity failed even itself and like most New Year’s Resolutions I never followed through. So now I just have News Feed Eradicator installed on my computer and the endless scroll of death is gone; replaced with some quote from Donald Glover’s New Yorker profile aptly titled, “Donald Glover Can’t Save You”. A daily reminder even Donald Glover can’t save Facebook. Because it is done.

If Facebook wasn’t done when it became my New Year’s Resolution, it was done when Cambridge Analytica happened. It was done again when Mark Zuckerberg trundled over to Capitol Hill from Silicon Valley and answered pretty much zero of the questions fielded by politicians about the data breach impacting more than 80 million people. It was done when it became the poster child for Fake News following Trump’s election. It was done when it ran an advertisement on bus stops saying, “Data misuse is not our friend”. It was done when I started using it as an example of bad advertising. It was done years before, when people started calling it The Facebook. It was done when my dad started posting #hashtags with spaces between the words. It was done when The Algorithm changed. And if it came back for one more round, a cat with nine lives, it was done when Zuckerberg claimed Facebook wasn’t a company driven by data and engagement but one driven by meaningful connections. It’s like Zuckerberg in a suit. No one trusts that.