We Are Closing Our Facebook Page. Here's Why:

Zombie Facebook by @creadoorm at dada.nyc

By Judy Mam

We have hosted a DADA page on Facebook for about four years, in which we share the creations of our artists and keep people in the loop. We have over 16K followers but Facebook does not show our posts to the vast majority of them unless we pay to boost posts or buy ads. This means that only a couple of hundred souls, if not less, see our posts at any given moment. Our efforts to communicate with our Facebook followers are totally wasted.
Facebook behaves like a monopoly and makes it hard for people to share links that take them away from Facebook. It essentially stonewalls any effort from our page to reach out to our followers while it profits from every time we so much as blink at the damn page. DADA is free to use by artists and art lovers alike. We are a small startup. All our social reach is organic; we don't currently pay for our posts to appear on any social media. We find Facebook's tactics insidious.

Facebook lets you post and communicate with friends and loved ones for "free". In exchange, it makes money off all your personal information. It spies on you. It knows what you like, what you want and what you dream of, and lets marketers know so they can sell it to you. Everyone makes money from you except YOU. On Facebook, you are not the customer, you are the product. They are selling you.

It's all very Orwellian. Drawing by Javier Errecarte

Recently, the very disturbing news that Facebook was hosting fake accounts that spread political disinformation, not only in the US but elsewhere, have given us pause. We run a social network. We know how these things work. We know that every design decision we make impacts the user experience and the behavior of people in our community. Facebook's disingenuous claim that they didn't know about these accounts and their cavalier irresponsibility in their search for more clicks and more ad dollars, strikes us as nefarious.

Visual conversation by Beatriz Ramos and Otro at DADA

We are not naive. Facebook has become an essential means of communication for billions of people. Many of our artists use it to keep in touch with each other. I have no doubt that this can be positive and very entertaining. But to be honest, we know that the kinds of social network pitfalls that we have mostly avoided on DADA such as gossip and miscommunications can happen frequently on Facebook. We cannot really compete with the powerful monopoly of social information that is Facebook. All we can do is improve our chat and our platform so our artists can feel free to communicate with each other within DADA. At the very least you can do so knowing that we do not profit from your personal information nor do we spy on anyone. In this respect, DADA is truly free for artists and art lovers.

Still, I believe that Facebook has made a positive impact on people's lives. It has allowed me to remain in touch with friends and family. It has reconnected me with people from my past. But at the same time, I spend far more time managing superficial Facebook "friendships" and find myself disconnected from actual friends who are not active in the platform. My feed is a random queue of people decided by a clumsy algorithm. Facebook makes friendship convenient, instead of meaningful. Convenience always means sacrificing authenticity. Relationships on Facebook are like junk food: fast, convenient, and addictive but not very nourishing or good for you.

The toxic effects of these new digital social interactions have been widely documented. Because of its business model, based on advertising and personal data sales, Facebook encourages facile, lazy connections (likes) and noxious bickering (not to mention cyberbullying and interference by a foreign power). Just yesterday Facebook announced that it suffered a data breach that impacted 50 million people. It is too powerful and too vulnerable, and frankly, it has become scary.

Drawing by Moxarra at DADA

It is for these reasons that we will be discontinuing our Facebook page and our DADA Facebook account.
People will be no longer able to sign up for DADA via Facebook. If you signed up for DADA via a Facebook email account, we will ask you to sign up with your own email account and a strong, secure password. You will still be able to share your art from DADA on Facebook.

As for me, I will continue posting stuff about DADA from my personal page until I find the courage to abandon ship.

Not all is lost. Here are the ways in which you can enjoy DADA:

Make and enjoy art at dada.nyc.
Join our chat.
Follow us on Twitter, or instagram.
Subscribe to The DADA Digest, our monthly newsletter in English and Spanish.
Read this blog.

Visual conversation at DADA

We are very proud that we are a social network where people contribute meaningful, beautiful art to the community and where profound connections happen between people from all over the world. We try to keep DADA a safe and welcoming home for everybody to make and enjoy art. You are always welcome to join us.