How to delete your Facebook account
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My 3rd year I trimmed my friends list down from 10k to 1k, people I actually at least remembered having a conversation with. The next I took it down to about 300 people, and realized “I see or communicate with these people outside of this website already” and killed my account.
Best decision I ever made relative to the topic of social media.
Being bombarded with the thoughts and takes (especially when distorted in content and exposure frequency by an ad platform disguised as a social media site) of thousands of people — only a few of whom you can possibly know closely — is a recipe for mass psychosis.
I’m not saying don’t delete your account - I still don’t have one, but be aware that it may not be as simple as just creating a new one if you change your mind in the future.
This is exactly what happened to me as well.
Subsequent attempts to make new ones were instantly banned for “no reason.”
They did work with me to reinstate the 2015 account. And it’s never been banned or suspended since. I don’t really use it anyway.
But that’s how they are. They trust older accounts. New ones are treated like criminals.
So to them, “this is the profile we’ve decided is amy “ and “this one isn’t.” Even if it is….
I think it makes sense to allow reuse of usernames, but only after a sufficiently long period of time. I don't know if 20 years is enough, but something in that ballpark would be needed to reduce the risk of identity theft.
For all the bots that clearly get through, they have some pretty onerous algorithms at work to figure out if you’ve ever had another account. It seems to matter not whether you use a different email or IP address. The same name alone seemed to be enough for them to lock a business account I was trying to create.
They’ve gotten a LOT more aggressive I think. About 12 years ago I created a second account in my own name for use exclusively with family, and never had issues with that one. I think that part of their risk analysis is that whatever risk analysis was performed at the time the account was created is somewhat sticky. Likely to prevent complaints about changing goalposts.
Of course I don’t use any Facebook/Meta property anymore.
I listed the same 8 things on Facebook Marketplace and sold everything within days...
Might as well poison the well if I'm going to have the account for marketplace
Now they will delete the account after some time if if you refuse to give them ID. But they didn’t always do that, which meant they had your data and refuse to give it up. Basically forever.
They’re not a great company and they don’t care about anything. You might be better off claiming you live in California USA and demanding they delete it under CCPA, than to try as EU Right to be forgotten or EU privacy. And that’s dismal too because your laws are supposed to be better than ours.
You should be able to get a UPS store Mail Drop for a month or two while you correspond with them and or the California attorney generals office and raise some hell. Yes it’s garbage to suggest this but it works. They take ID and all that over the web to open a mailbox and “voila I live in California now.” If you have any friends online there , just ask if you can “live there” and get some mail there while you write letters to the AG and or meta
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
They *have to* comply with the California request. I had to resort to this to get Kinto Share to stop accessing my background and credit every year. (Another trash fire company that doesn’t care how much you beg threaten or cry.)
Then two days later, rather than fix that, they announce the change to moderation methodology which has benefits to the highest bidder rather than the community.
Smells like another cesspit like X in the making.
Gone! Both are bad. The problem is the platform existing at this point.
You act like Facebook isn't already a cesspit. Anyone who claims any mainstream social network site isn't a cesspit is being fruitful with the truth, they're the sum of humanity and humanity sucks.
Facebook at least had some small community groups and market place utility.
I asked them to review their decision and it was a NO... and there are no other remedies.
Does anyone know if there is an option to restore them, so you can then remove them from the people you've sent them to?
Before I delete my account, I'd like to make sure I delete as many messages I sent to people also.
https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lf72fz3fas22
If they'd removed that rule altogether then it could be handwaved as merely "free speech absolutism", for better or worse, but officially stating that certain minorities are acceptable targets of abuse that's otherwise forbidden is something else entirely.
It’s not a mistake or some kind of ambiguous rule that could be misread. Following is the direct quote from Meta’s new guidelines. You can’t insult people based on:
Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
They’re carving out specific minorities to exclude them from protections afforded to everybody else.
It’s exactly like saying: “You can’t doxx anyone on our platform, except Jews because that’s political and religious discourse about where heathens live.”
So here we are in 2025, and this barely gets a mention in the press because they’re so overwhelmed by the president-elect pretending to invade Denmark and whatever.
I’m a middle-aged bisexual man. My childhood and early teenage years coincided with the darkest times of the HIV epidemic. At 13 I was deadly afraid of AIDS, and I’m still trying to overcome the internalized homophobia from those times. For years I just tried to blend in, dated women, eventually got married, had children. I thought society had made real progress, but now it’s starting to dawn on me that it’s a mirage like Roe vs Wade or 1920s Berlin, and it can be stripped away at any time. And I feel like a miserable coward for all these years “just minding my own business” and never stepping up to support the community in any way, letting somebody else do the work. That needs to change. I’ll rather be mentally ill than hide in the shadows.
I'm genuinely curious to know what about reality warrants "as close as one can get to it". In my experience, every time I close the browser and step outside I'm generally convinced that what I'm experiencing is real.
Everyone wants to be liked, and search for the venues where they can express their views where they would be a part of majority. Basically the reason why people skew towards echo-chambers, in real and digital life.
At least in lower-stakes online forums, what really grinds my gears is a lack of transparency, where a site or service doesn't explain the moderation or even hides that any action was taken at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630197
or
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630067
Or let’s say, it technically can be said, but you get somehow punished (flagged, downvoted, etc) so you learn not to do it anymore. The incentive is simply not there.
There is a logic, the “community” flags to protect their own interests (financial investments, friends working there, etc).
And since the community is from the same group, they defend the same interests.
The more freely we can talk about a topic, the more genuine and thought-provoking interactions it can create (without intentionally hurting the others obviously).
If you filter too much, you get this LinkedIn-bullshit and it makes a message board super boring, as you live in a closed bubble.
It's not like you get paid for getting upvoted and a making any kind of joke is usually the fastest way to a downvote.
> dictate truth
What about the damage done by the millions of lies that people post on the platform to spread their bigoted agendas? What about how these platforms' algorithms ostensibly promote hatred and shocking material?
Just look at the Rohingya massacre [0] and tell me you're OK with it.
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Of course, if you like your propaganda well-done, Facebook will be a great place for that.
Also are we absolutely sure that community notes have immunity from moderators and they're not manipulated in any way?
Community notes are indeed a good feature at first blush, but considering the current climate of "freedom of speech / post-truth / let's move fast and break society norms", it's more dangerous than a group of allegedly biased fact checkers.
It's a way of deregulating the social media platforms to level of utilities which carry whatever passes through them without prejudice, and shifting blame to the people for believing what they read.
The thing they're designing is very ripe for manipulating people en masse.
They're making a decision based on political pressure.
Money doesn’t care about wings.
So, being elected is by no means an indicator of any sort.
Being elected is obviously an indicator of the will of the people. The platform that leader was elected on includes items that went against the left leaning of third-party so-called fact checking services. This is easily variable by looking at the platform of the winning party and the policies of the so-called fact checkers.
That's true, incl. me.
> that is a straw man you have created to argue with.
Did I said or implied Trump is bad? No. What I said is, being elected is not an indicator of goodness of badness of a leader, and said that there's a large list, without giving any names, because goodness and badness is subjective.
> Being elected is obviously an indicator of the will of the people.
Yes. That part is true, too. People wanted that particular flavor this time, and will decide whether they liked the experience or not.
> The platform that leader was elected on includes items that went against the left leaning of third-party so-called fact checking services.
"So-called" from your perspective, so from that point on your opinions are biased, and there's no point on arguing any further.
Of course you're free to vote for whoever you want, and AFAICS, the person you support has won. Congrats. My only hope is what you get in the end won't be more than what you bargained for.
BTW, on that "getting men out of women's sports" thing, watch this video [0]. In the end, performance is enhanced so much, the gap between genders are closed nevertheless. On the other hand, gender in Olympic games are determined with genetic testing anyway, so your looks doesn't have any effect on whom you compete with.
Maybe we should prevent this in the future, so humans can compete with their true potential, not with "monstrous performances" enabled by designer drugs and doping. So there's a whole forest running when people are looking to the wrong tree.
Yes, you wrote history is full of bad leaders. Nobody is discussing whether Trump is good or bad.
Exactly. I said "we'll see", not "Trump is bad".
> Errm, history is full of bad leaders who were elected by people and by democratic means.
You then wrote that being elected is by no means and indicator. It is not an indication of being good or bad, but rather an indication of the will of people. Which in this case, for the fifth time is that men should be out of women’s spaces.
I don’t think this conversation is working. We have very different ways of engaging in debate.
Yes.
> It is not an indication of being good or bad, but rather an indication of the will of people.
I did tell "elected by people and by democratic means", which squarely means "this was the will of the people", so we have no disagreements on that front.
> Which in this case, for the fifth time is that men should be out of women’s spaces.
?
> I don’t think this conversation is working.
That's absolutely correct.
> We have very different ways of engaging in debate.
Yes. I won't argue about that further.
Have a good day.
* Trump has explicitly threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg [1]
* Trump has threatened to use the justice system against his enemies
* Trump's 'best mate' (who's about to get a job in government) owns a rival social network
* Facebook banned Trump over the Jan 6th insurrection
* Trump could use the banning of TikTok as leverage
With all that Occam's Razor tells you that an authoritarian leader is taking over the USA and the oligarchy that are the tech-billionaires are lining up behind him lest they feel his wrath.
These are extremely dangerous times for the US. An authoritarian leader paired with an extreme concentration of power (the tech companies). You have something approaching a turnkey feudal system. With willing participants.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-threatens-to-impriso...
Lying through omission. The rest isn't worth responding to.
Yes, lies are bad and dangerous, but censorship is much worse and far more dangerous.
As anti-maskers laid dying in their hospital beds they denounced the misinformation they had been fed. Lets not pretend that misinformation is entirely impotent.
And let’s not pretend like the internet hasn’t exploded the reach misinformation.
How about we settle for a middle ground where Americans are allowed free speech on American platforms but let’s not give foreign actors/governments the same freedom?
Is this some kind of…
I never had a Facebook account and as such I can not delete it but had I had one the time to delete it would have been when they started censoring anything which went against the desired narrative - probably around the time of the SARS2 unpleasantness - and not now that they claim to have been too censorious and 'promise' to allow more free speech. The same thing happened when Musk turned Twitter into X which makes me wonder why some people are so eager to embrace the censor and shun those places where he was kicked to the curb (even if I don't trust anything Zuckerberg says on this subject, he has shown his true colours a long time ago and they are dark and unpleasant to look at).
Also on the subject of FB moderation, I distinctly remember seeing a photo in my timeline that was censored like adult content. I clicked it, and it turned out to be some Christian thanking Jesus for something good. Real hateful content, that.
This hasn’t been proven as the case is still ongoing. Also the plaintiff in this case got arrested last year for tax fraud
Is there an "are we dating the same guy?" group for every city? Sure I believe that. Do 100% of those groups commit Doxing? Well, that I'm not so sure of.
In fact, I've literally never heard of that before, it doesn't sound like the objective of the group. So I googled it and I found one case where a guy is arguing that people in the group manipulated his messages and so he's suing Meta for Doxing.
Also, if you read closely you might be confused like I was. Defamation is not Doxing.
So if you have evidence of Doxing in these groups I would love to see it.
That is literally the point of the group. They are violating the privacy of users on the regular, whether or not they actually give out whole names, addresses, or whatever. This WAS widely reported.
>Also, if you read closely you might be confused like I was. Defamation is not Doxing.
You have to correctly identify someone to effectively defame them. It's implied in the group name. That involves violating their privacy, which is essentially a form of doxxing (as far as dating online goes). Posting and/or offering up details of dates along with names, photos, or even phone numbers is all enough to identify many people on apps and in real life. And if not technically doxxing, even getting people identified to the point where they are excluded from dates is nasty behavior. You essentially can't defend yourself from these accusations, and in most cases you won't EVER find out that there are vicious rumors against you circulating among potentially thousands of people.
You can find plenty of information about people's experiences of being targetted by those groups. Here's a pretty good link to get started I think: https://www.vice.com/en/article/are-we-dating-the-same-guy-f...
Anyway, my point in all of that is to say that Facebook tolerated these groups for a long time, despite their vicious and secretive attacks on people, and violations of privacy. Their moderation team cares more about people posting wholesome religious memes and funny political commentary than content that is definitively toxic. We don't hear a lot about these groups because their membership is locked down. They exist(ed) in many major cities. I think they are thankfully falling out of fashion because their members are way too petty and toxic even for each other. But I don't know that for sure, as I can't join one even if I find it.
There wouldn't be any need for or interest in such groups if there wasn't such a problem overall. Keep in mind that this is the sex responsible for over 95% of violence, sexual assault and rape. Is it any wonder women are being cautious while seeking out a partner?
You don't know what it's like to be a man. Some women are crazy, and their word is taken by default. You can double that effect easily by not giving the guy a chance to find out or issue a defense. I'm quite sure a lot of the complaints are based on practically nothing. Stuff like the guys fashion sense, choice of venue, what he talked about or didn't talk about, politics, "He told us different things about X" (nevermind opinions change and people tell white lies to get along), and private matters shared with ONE other person. Guys aren't trying to broadcast their life on a billboard just to get laid, OK?
>There wouldn't be any need for or interest in such groups if there wasn't such a problem overall. Keep in mind that this is the sex responsible for over 95% of violence, sexual assault and rape. Is it any wonder women are being cautious while seeking out a partner?
Being cautious is one thing. Spreading vicious rumors and making fun of people secretly with much of the dating population is another. Any real safety problem can get a user banned from an app, and the police might be interested if there's anything more than a hunch to justify the claim.
I think my really long comment in response to someone else in this thread explains the expectation of privacy very well. Women expect privacy, often to the point of not giving out real names or phone numbers. Guys have many of the same actual issues with that. A psycho woman can set your car on fire, kill your dog, get you robbed by her drug dealer, etc.
It would be interesting to see where people draw the line. Do you think it's cool to record the date and upload it to the group? Because that is technically legal in some places, and it is toxic behavior. Now what if you transcribe it and post that instead? What they do in spreading rumors is not far from either of those things.
No buddy. Doxing is not identifying that you dated the same person, it's almost exclusively providing their address.
> In the United States, the act of publishing someone's personal information is not, in and of itself, illegal.
> However, the act can lose First Amendment protection if it's part of an effort to truly threaten or harm someone, if it intentionally inflicts emotional distress, or if it invades someone's privacy by revealing a highly offensive personal fact about that person without providing the public information about a matter of public concern.
Basically, if it's newsworthy it is protected as long as you're not inciting violence or publishing highly personal information that isn't relevant like their exact address.
The only reason anyone should hyperfocus on this issue is if you're someone with a very dark past and you're afraid it will catch up with you, or perhaps a nice person who is just too paranoid.
In reality, false allegations of rape are incredibly rare and even then a rape allegation is not actually going to exclude you from that whole pool of potential relationships. A lot of the people in those groups have bad reputations. Leaving multiple reports on ex's makes you look undiscerning and people do pay attention to these things.
There are two sides to every story and a lot of people want to hear both sides. I don't always agree with this outlook. But the reality is one bad review on a "are we dating the same guy" thread is not deathknell you seem to believe it is.
> Facebook tolerated these groups for a long time, despite their vicious and secretive attacks on people
I mean if those attacks are based in fact then.... I dk what you're saying. You think we should censor everyone so they can't say anything negative ever?
Should we also ban history books that don't paint us as saviors?
If your best friend hits you up in DMs and tells you the girl you just went out on a date beat him, are you gonna call the cops on him?
I don't think there is a universal definition of it, and even if there was this is toxic behavior. People on dating websites have a higher expectation of privacy than people on the Internet in general. I'm pretty sure you could be banned from a dating website for having participated in one of these groups, if only the victims would know about it. Especially if you were to switch the genders.
>Basically, if it's newsworthy it is protected as long as you're not inciting violence or publishing highly personal information that isn't relevant like their exact address.
It might be protected but it is certainly nastier content than things that ARE actively moderated on Facebook, which is my entire point. These groups are private because the information in them is so toxic, that nobody in them wants to stand by it. You could argue that some people might share legitimate concerns about "safety" of dating a specific person, but the same kind of concerns (if substantiated or plausible) could get the accused banned from the dating website or something.
>The only reason anyone should hyperfocus on this issue is if you're someone with a very dark past and you're afraid it will catch up with you, or perhaps a nice person who is just too paranoid.
There are many reasons to be concerned about this. There's the general privacy issue (even private things like "this guy has a lot of money" are private and can cause a lot of damage, perhaps leading to a robbery). Secondly, some people are petty, vengeful, and willing to lie. I've known several people like that. The fact is that if one of these people puts on a persona of credibility, they can cause a lot of trouble for you, not least of which is that other people won't date you.
>In reality, false allegations of rape are incredibly rare and even then a rape allegation is not actually going to exclude you from that whole pool of potential relationships. A lot of the people in those groups have bad reputations. Leaving multiple reports on ex's makes you look undiscerning and people do pay attention to these things.
The content in these groups is far more petty than that. The content shared about you could be stuff like, what kind of job you said you had, how you reacted to her telling you that she was promiscuous to some extent, the size and proportions of your genitalia, details about your family or past relationships, etc., all of which can be made up to make you sound very undesirable.
>There are two sides to every story and a lot of people want to hear both sides. I don't always agree with this outlook. But the reality is one bad review on a "are we dating the same guy" thread is not deathknell you seem to believe it is.
The reality is that one bad review can destroy your dating life, especially if these groups are allowed to flourish. Dating is so hard for a lot of people that if even one person is turned off by a bad review, that essentially ruins their whole love life. I hate to make it gender-specific but most attractive women have literally hundreds of choices in men, and even a slight doubt about a guy who is not absolutely stunning will rule him out.
>I mean if those attacks are based in fact then.... I dk what you're saying. You think we should censor everyone so they can't say anything negative ever?
I'm saying that it is hypocrisy to allow extreme toxicity in these groups but not very mildly "problematic" content elsewhere. If the goal of moderation is to reduce toxicity and potentially illegal content, then allowing this at all means they've failed. If you were the victim of one of these attacks you'd never know it, unless a member of one of those groups told you.
>If your best friend hits you up in DMs and tells you the girl you just went out on a date beat him, are you gonna call the cops on him?
That example is not comparable at all. If anyone beats up another person, the victim has legal recourse if they want it. People have been successfully convicted of assault for even spitting on another person. Guys have been convicted of rape with no witnesses or physical evidence at all (although this is thankfully rare). False rape reports carry weight, and they are not as uncommon as you think.
If you want a comparable example, it would be something like a group of guys creating a Facebook group to share photos, names, and identifying information about women they dated along with details about their experiences, including a hot/crazy scale rating and a bedroom rating. They could also report such things as cup size and which psychoactive medications the women are taking. Now further imagine that the group was restricted to men only. How far do you think that would fly? Should it be allowed on Facebook, where your whole family and friend circle can easily access it? Is that less toxic than Jesus memes and obviously AI deepfake memes of political figures?
Another similar idea would be for delivery drivers to start a group sharing how much people tip, how many people were seen living in each person's house, and offering up details to confirm who placed the order. It is technically within their free speech rights to talk about where they drove all day and what they saw, right? They can even take pictures of all your cars and license plates from the street and share those too. So you could certainly imagine members of that group refusing to deliver to your house because you left a bad tip one time. Hell, the other day a delivery driver stabbed a pregnant woman to death because she only gave a $2 tip (I think more was offered as well, and she didn't have change!).
It would be hard to classify these groups as a form of harassment, but that's probably the closest thing you could call it. It might be legal but it certainly isn't pleasant, and being pleasant is one of the apparent goals of the platform. Conveying accurate information is also a goal of the platform. But the only people who are likely to defend those being smeared are the victims, who are banned from the groups. Courts have upheld that platforms like Facebook can censor people, for better or worse. Censoring this type of privacy-violating, toxic content would be one of the better cases.
““Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and “Trans people are immoral.””
is a net improvement?