Weighty ghosts

There are a lot of reasons to leave Meta.

I started trying to get friends to leave Messenger for end-to-end encrypted chats in 2022 after a Messenger chat between a mom and daughter about the daughter’s abortion allowed Nebraska to send them to jail. Beyond that, I’ve been reluctant to use Meta apps for sharing life updates, especially about the kids, since the apps started prompting me to make private photos from Messenger chat histories and photos not even on Meta but in my phone’s storage—photos I had specifically decided not to share more widely—into its “stories”. I don’t want apps that allow me to essentially pocket-dial my way to unthoughtful photo sharing.

Plus, you know, all of this stuff.

But there are reasons to stay on Meta.* There are family and friend connections that will not be replaced if we leave. The alternative often isn’t better connections, but no connection. And autonostalgia features anywhere, including the Meta apps, really are nice.

There is another reason it’s hard to leave that I haven’t seen talked about: Facebook’s ghosts.

If you’re old enough, you’re probably included when I say we were all on Facebook. We were all on Facebook because we were all on Facebook, and because we were all there we didn’t just poast through things, I don’t think. We shared our lives in a less cynical and less guarded way. We didn’t realize how optimistic we were.

Now not everyone is on Facebook and a lot of people are leaving. The thing is, we’re not all here anymore, and some of the people who aren’t here didn’t leave Facebook while they were. Whatever the rest of us do, they’re still there and they can’t move with us. Their chat logs, photos, post and comment thread memories are like ghosts.

If you were on Facebook in its heyday, you almost definitely have a few Facebook ghosts.

We used to live without these kinds of memories, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile. For many of us, it’s nice (even if sometimes overwhelming) to see a post come up in our newsfeed with a face we’ll never see again. Like Wash looking over his shoulder at the Serenity Memorial.

One of the ghosts that live on Facebook is our unthinking optimism about social media. The unguarded sharing of even intimate memories, left where someone else owns them. That could have been OK. I am not reflexively against important things being for sale. I’m sure some people still don’t mind. And that’s fine.

But I think I’d like to move more things to where my data is mine, and more of the scraps of me that people look back at belong more to the people who want to look back at me. YMMV.

*FWIW, I think you can reduce the cost of staying on Meta by a lot if you take a few steps to make sure they’re used more mindfully. Most importantly, turn off notifications, turn off recommendations on Instagram whenever they’re offered, and browse Facebook through the chronological “feeds” feed. You can also delete the apps, or at least strip their permissions. All of these things reduce the chance the platforms can do stuff you don’t want them to, including keeping you thoughtlessly engaged with outrage fuel.