Why I Left Facebook and The End of The Internet Golden Age

A lot of people have asked me why I am leaving Facebook and many have told me privately that they wish they could do the same. I would just like to leave some parting thoughts before I unplug.

• The Golden Age of the Internet and the History of Facebook

During the Golden Age of the Internet, everything online was freely accessible and mostly anonymous. There wasn’t a way to monetize videos, songs, or any other creative content, that is until a certain company took over commerce online, that company was Paypal. Paypal’s business model allowed users to trust websites and begin transacting online. Through Paypal, advertisers were able to transact with websites from around the globe safely and securely. Advertisers needed one thing to sell their services to these websites, data.

Facebook was born soon after the government shut down a DARPA program called “LifeLog.” The basic premise of LifeLog was it was a program that would provide the DOD with information about every citizen’s communications, contacts, and whereabouts to target terrorists and isolate extremist groups. It would be the largest data collection program ever. However, after some pressure by civil liberties unions, the government canceled LifeLog in January 2004.

In February 2004, Facebook was born. With a large investment from venture capitalist and Paypal Co-founder Peter Thiel, Facebook started attracting larger investors and media outlets started touting Mark Zuckerberg as a young genius. Schools started to require students join Facebook groups. Facebook soon overtook Myspace and claimed the social media market.

Before Facebook, social media sites were largely anonymous. There was no requirement that you use a real name (there is for Google and Facebook) or that you divulged any private information about yourself to use the platform. The only way companies functioned online was if they could convince users to trust them. Platforms relied on public trust and they have broken that trust.

Facebook lied to users and congress on multiple occasions, Facebook said it wasn’t collecting data from private messages shared on the site, that was lie. Facebook said it wasn’t sharing user’s data with foreign third-party companies without user’s permission, that was a lie. Facebook said that it didn’t censor media or other links and information from users, that was a lie. Facebook said it didn’t use non-user data to market to non-users and collect information on non-users, that was also a lie.

• Facebook Today and Social Decay

Facebook isn't honest with its users and it frequently changes its terms of service so that what users agreed to before is not what the user would agree to now but they are chemically hooked and will accept anything to get that hit.

Facebook and Google are working together to socially engineer our conversations and relationships. They take our data and sell it. They claim they are working against foreign powers to protect the sanctity of our democracy, but they actively censor opinions they don't like and are working to get rid of a President who has fought back against the established entertainment and news media companies that control what people hear and how they hear it.

Before now, Facebook and Google didn't have as clear a link to each other and even if they did, they weren’t obvious in their attempts to disrupt the democratic process. However, Google owns YouTube, and Google worked all week taking down and burying information from the Drudge Report on the leaker and his ties to Joe Biden.

Most recently, YouTube shut down my favorite streamers because they said a name similar to the name of the leaker and explicitly said they weren't sure if that was the leaker. YouTube also went after other independent reporters and took down their videos. Facebook started taking down posts at the same time. I asked my friend if she could see my posts and she confirmed that although she has notifications turned on, and follows me, she hasn't seen any of my posts for the past month! I am already on a cyber island and that is proof enough to me that they are following Pinterest and Twitter's shadow banning practices.

There is enough evidence of collusion between Facebook and Google for me to believe that they are attempting to implement a social credit system akin to the one Google established in China. People can call me a conspiracist, but I am fine with that label. After all, whacky Alex Jones, and people who supported the independent news site InfoWars, were all called conspiracists and de-platformed on every single social media website all on the same day. Alex Jones was right about Jeffrey Epstein and unlike ABC, he didn’t hide the story, he reported on it everyday for years! People have been banned from Facebook for even mentioning Alex Jones or Paul Joseph Watson. At the time, I figured that it was ok to ban one independent journalist because these are private companies that are free to run their platforms however they would like. However, the most recent episode of censorship is clear evidence of these companies colluding to impeach a democratically elected president by unilaterally silencing individuals who talk openly about publicly available information.

I care deeply about this country. I am tired of the paradigm that social media has created. It is as addicting as gambling and is a virtual cockfight where the platforms facilitate the battles and we all hop in the cockpit. The only people who profit are game promoters and facilitators. If we are lucky the rest of us leave our social media encounters bleeding and bruised, those who are less fortunate and more vulnerable like our youth are left dead. Suicide, obesity, depression, childlessness, and severe anxiety disorders are on the rise. The US military has said that we are in a crisis, we don't have enough healthy people who are eligible to serve in the military. We have an aging population of Boomers that won't be able to rely on Social Security.

Meanwhile, we have men who masturbate alone in their rooms all day and girls who are obsessed with outdoing one another in school and in their careers and we wonder why women are so depressed. Women have to work to support the children they biologically want to have and are shamed for choosing to stay at home, social media glorifies childlessness and "alternative families." Men have been robbed of their responsibilities and have been infalentized by a clean, fantasy online surrogate world where they can explore their carnal desires without having to be accountable for playing out those fantasies, whether they be violent fantasies played out in video games or pornographic fantasies. The rate of infidelity is higher than it has ever been because people can play out affairs online. These are all symptoms of a sick society that is being propelled by corporate entities looking to cash in on the madness. We have neglected history's warnings about war profiteers and have opted for the more subtle outrage mongers that feed off our political, cultural and societal discord. It has been proven that social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram make you dumber, less active, and more isolated. I'm not a lab rat and I don't need any social experimentation done at my expense without compensation and without my permission.

It isn't long before the government regulates Facebook and thereby gains total control of our public discourse and our public data. I am not overly optimistic about the government’s ability to maintain a free and open public forum and so rather than demanding that government break-up or regulate Facebook, I left Facebook to go to a truly free forum where I can further my ideas or express my opinions without leaving a virtual trial for the outrage mob to follow.

• A Renaissance and Enlightenment Era

The biggest issue in all of this is that these companies profit off of the worst aspects of our human nature, if we do not live in an online world slanted by group think, we would turn off our devices and go about our days. I believe a simple solution that will bring about a information renaissance and protect our societal interests is the guaranteed privacy and anonymity of all online users. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and almost all influential thinkers have had the gift of anonymity to publish their ideas. By creating free, anonymous online public forums and unregulated markets for ideas to valued, we would exchange information and ingenuity without the ever watchful eye of the government or Google and reignite the private exchange of information that made the internet what it is today. I believe that without the expectation of privacy, none of us are truly free.