Facebook – You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave!

Can You Leave Facebook?

In the words of Don Henley of the Eagles from the song Hotel California – yet written long before Facebook existed.

How intuitive, indeed, Mr. Henley!

If you try toi actuall cancel your Facebook account, you’ll get an email likely almost every day trying to draw you back with notifications of birthdays and pictures you’ve missed.

But more and more people are getting tired of having their life sucked out of them by Facebook and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has noticed.

In his New Year’s resolution, he acknowledged people have become discontent with Facebook and he has pledged to make changes that encourage more well-being amongst its users.

ZUCKERBERG wrote, “The world feels anxious and divided and Facebook has a lot of work to do”.

While Facebook made an effort to provide more meaningful content, it attributed its decline in the last quarter of 2017 to it.  Users during this time spent 5% less time on Facebook, this means people spent 50 million hours less on it.

It also says the number of users dropped for the first time in the 3rd quarter of 2017, from 185 million to 184 million users.

Even with this drop, the people that have stayed are spending more money.   The year 2017 finished off 47% higher than 2016 with a revenue of $40 billion.

It’s hard to totally get away from Facebook because so many things use it and have become dependent on it.

Facebook is working hard to improve, a spokesman says. “That’s why we’ve recently made adjustments to News Feed. When it comes to the safety, security, and integrity of our platform, there is nothing we take more seriously.

With over 1.4 billion people on Facebook every day, six million active advertisers, and more people and businesses joining each day around the world, we know we have a responsibility to make Facebook a safe and civil environment.”

Facebook is changing things to help advertisers on Facebook, by decreasing how many times a viral video is shown, Facebook research shows it does not help advertisers to keep showing these.

They are also putting a stop to publishers that share misleading news and use clickbait to increase views.  In general, it will also reduce the amount of news on its platform, putting more value on personal posts.

When Zuckerberg announced the shift in January he said, “When we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health.

On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos, even if they’re entertaining or informative, may not be as good.”

There are still a lot of critics out there; especially after the 2016 election and we saw what social media could do.  What emerged were fraudulent headlines and bad actors who made easy work of Facebook users during the presidential campaign for a mix of profit and international politics.

Zuckerberg played down that Facebook had any impact on the election.  But after a few investigations, the result was that there was a lot of disinformation targeted to U.S. voters on social media and it did have an effect.

Jim Carrey said he was quitting Facebook and selling his shares because Facebook “profited from Russian interference in our elections and they’re still not doing enough to stop it.”

But it’s not just about the elections.

People are getting tired of the fake news and getting harassed for the views they have.

Facebook has noticed and had tried to implement new fact-checking measures last year by teaming with PolitiFact and FactCheck.org to vet news and apply “disputed” labels to dubious posts.

Facebook is getting sloppy and we’re seeing that.

People are getting bored and finding that there isn’t enough value in Facebook anymore to stay.

You can close account today and you have two weeks to change your mind before your information is gone.

Going off Facebook can be hard for the first few weeks; the habit of constantly checking your news feeds is like an addiction.  But you will see over time it will get easier and you actually might be happier because of it.  You might actually start noticing what’s beautiful around you and actually be surprised and happy when someone has a baby because you haven’t been seeing their posts constantly on Facebook.

Give it a try for a week and be comforted that Facebook will send you an email to remind you what you have been missing 😉