Say Goodbye to Meta
February 21, 2025
“So many faces in and out of my life
Some will last, some will just be now and then
Life is a series of hello’s and goodbyes
I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again”
--Billy Joel, Say Goodbye to Hollywood
It makes me sad to say this, but it’s time for me to say goodbye to Facebook/Instagram. Meta has been going downhill for a long time, but after the 2024 election—once Zuckerburg bent the knee to the white nationalist MAGA movement—I decided I wanted nothing to do with it and I’ve started to wind it down.
It’s a shame. I WILL miss it. Younger generations born into the social media age may never know how exciting Facebook was for Gen X’ers like myself when we first joined sometime around 2008. Suddenly, people I hadn’t seen or heard from in decades, who seemingly existed only in my memory, were back in my life, easily accessible. It was suddenly possible to re-connect with long-lost people from high school, college, old summer and high school jobs. So many people re-surfaced seemingly out of the blue, reminding me of the affection I had for them. It was exciting to be able to reminisce with others about cherished long-ago shared memories. In the beginning, Facebook was so FUN.
Life really is about the connections we make, and the people who touch our lives. Facebook has been a way to easily see the collection of people whose lives have intersected my own in big ways and small over the decades. And throughout the past 16 years or so, it’s been fun to watch friends’ children, and now often grandchildren, grow up—even if I never got to see them in person. It’s been fun to live vicariously through others’ travels, milestones, and accomplishments.
But over the past few years the experience has been consistently deteriorating. I can’t pinpoint when it started, but my Facebook feed now seems to be dominated by ads and reels and links to other Meta apps instead of posts from my friends. And since Zuckerburg decided turn Meta into yet another propaganda arm of the Trump/Musk white nationalist dictatorship, I’ve also seen some right-wing leaning groups come across my feed, even though they have no business being there. I know there are ways to try to make the algorithm more appealing, but I’ve gotten to a point where I just don’t want to constantly fight with an app to try to force it to provide content I want to see. I don’t want to stay in an abusive relationship with an app just because we had some good times together once. I’ve accepted that it never again will be what it once was.
Facebook started to be less fun and more polarizing and depressing back in 2015/2016, when a serially bankrupt, belligerently ignorant former reality TV game show host inexplicably emerged as a viable political force and started to gain a bizarre cult-like following. Trump clearly never wanted to be a traditional president—he wanted to be an authoritarian dictator, a more cartoonishly corrupt version of his idol Putin.
And, as I could see from Facebook, many of my relatives and former high school classmates seemed to eat this up. They seemed to be blinded to the obvious danger Trump posed to traditional American Democracy by the allure of his promise to elevate them, the white, heterosexual X-tians (those who believe in a “Christianity” that idolizes wealth and ignores the actual teachings of Jesus Christ) above all others. It has been bizarre to see people who were in the same history and government classes as I was, now embracing right-wing authoritarian fascism when I had left those same classrooms having learned a completely different lesson. I still can’t wrap my head around how some people I know apparently believe that we should throw away our nearly 250 years of Democracy and instead emulate authoritarian dictatorships like Russia, Hungary, and North Korea.
And…okay…I know that, in order to be “politically correct,” I’m not supposed to make any comparisons to the rise of Hitler, despite the many glaringly obvious historical parallels. For the record, I’ll state that I know that my MAGA friends and acquaintances are horrified by the idea of killing people in gas chambers. They are good people at heart. And they obviously understand that 6 million people killed is unspeakably awful. But it seems like, other than that, they must think having a ruler with Hitler’s absolute power would be a good thing. It’s as if they think that, aside from being a bit too extreme with the genocide, an authoritarian government with lots of flag-waving and goose-stepping and seig-heiling would be a good time for them.
I admire my liberal friends who patiently try to engage in conversations with Trump voters to help them understand what’s really at stake. I know that one of the tools to try to fight autocracy is to communicate with people on the other side of the aisle, and to try to cut through some of the misinformation and disinformation they’re fed on a daily basis. The only way we’re going to get out of this mess is if enough people who voted for Trump realize very quickly how bad things are going to get for them. But I don’t think that I’m the right person to do that myself—I’m just too angry that they put us in this situation in the first place.
It's like the frog-in-a-boiling-pot analogy. Thanks to MAGA voters, we’ve all been cast into the same slowly boiling pot. The chefs in charge of the water temperature have gained their wealth by winning frog-leg-eating contests their entire lives. They’ve TOLD us—all of us—their intentions to boil us alive, whether it’s Nazi-sympathizing co-president Elon Musk, who promised us all “hardship,” or Project 2025, which laid out the detailed framework to replace democracy with a Christofascist autocracy, or the open support of broligarchs like Musk and J.D. Vance’s owner Peter Thiel for tech authoritarianism. Unfortunately, we frogs can’t jump out of this pot individually, as much as we’d like to—our legs are tied together. So our only chance of getting out it is if nearly all of us jump quickly, at the same time, before we’re so weakened by being boiled alive that we’ve lost the ability to jump.
Right now half of the frogs in the increasingly hot pot of water—the ones on my side—are screaming at the top of our lungs that we need to jump before it’s too late, before the smirking, condescending chefs clamp the lid down on us once and for all. The other half of the frogs (the green frogs in the red hats) are LOL-ing at our panic and either telling us that the warm water is soothing, or laughing cruelly at the prospect of “other” frogs in the pot being boiled alive, somehow oblivious to the fact that they’re in the same pot.
And I really don’t know what can be done to convince the other side of the danger. I’m afraid that the more I scream that we need to get out of the fucking pot, the more the frogs in their red hats insist we just need to relax and give the chefs a chance to succeed. I fear that if I lash out at the red-hatted frogs, they’re going to be even more committed to letting themselves be boiled alive just to spite me. I don’t know what it's going to take, or how much they need to be personally harmed, before they see what the leaders they chose actually have in store for all of us—including them.
It's frightening to me how quickly MAGA supporters obediently acquiesce to what their cult leaders tell them. Before the election, MAGAs constantly shouted that the WORST thing in the country was inflation, and that Trump was going to wave a magic wand and instantly solve that problem. But they immediately abandoned that talking point once Trump was elected and he quickly admitted he doesn’t actually give a flying fuck about bringing inflation down. Now they mindlessly parrot co-president Musk’s talking points about “waste,” as if leaving medicine to rot and children to die in Africa is going to somehow bring down the price of eggs here. Instead of complaining about inflation (which continues to rise), now they say it’s a GOOD thing that we’ll get to go through the “temporary” hardship that Musk promised us, without ever indicating how long they think is reasonable for this hardship to last. Months? Years? Decades? Centuries? Who knows!!! We should just be happy to make this sacrifice for our genocidally wealthy tech overlords, right?!?
How bad will unemployment have to get before MAGAs realize that billionaires who have spent their whole lives ripping off the little guy don’t actually have their best interests at heart? How high will inflation have to get? I have little confidence that Trump voters will have this epiphany while there’s still enough time for any kind of correction.
If I were to stay on Facebook, it would be so hard for me not to vent about leopards eating peoples' faces when the real hardships inevitably start to hit the people who voted for Trump. And when the promised hardships start to hurt me and my family, I don’t think I’d be able to hide my anger. So I think I need to take myself off the platform for fear of alienating people who we’ll need to join our side.
Still, I’ll miss the community of Facebook. I’m in a few neighborhood groups, and these groups have provided a nice way to find out about local activities and events. And I belong to a few groups of likeminded patriots opposed to Trump, Musk, and the white nationalist MAGA party. But I think there’s something problematic about trying to oppose Trump/Musk while using a platform that has recently dedicated itself to maximizing white nationalist MAGA misinformation and disinformation. Plus, I’m afraid that rage-scrolling and sharing memes runs the risk of being a substitute for real action, at least for me. I mean, there is definitely a place for memes—we need to vent and to share ideas and enjoy some gallows-style humor, and I’ve certainly shared a lot of memes myself and will continue to do so in other places online. But for myself, I feel like sharing memes on Facebook runs the risk of being a distraction.
Instead of a Facebook meme-exchange group, I’d rather reach back to the Covid era and have monthly Zoom meetings (virtual happy hours?) with other members of the opposition party in which we focus on the most important issues and keep each other honest by reporting on things we’ve done in the real world, whether that’s protests, or attending local community/school board meetings, or even just calling our representatives. I’m hoping to either find or start something like that.
Again, I don’t expect others to join me in a mass exodus from the Facebook now, although I have to admit I’d like that. I mean, I doubt that my Trump-supporting Facebook friends will be too distraught by my lone departure—I can’t imagine that my “likes” or yearly happy birthday posts or my annual vacation photos will be missed too much. So I guess part of me thinks that if more liberals leave en masse, it’ll have more of an impact, and some of our more moderate MAGA-sympathizing friends will have to take a good look at the right-wing extremists they’re left with and decide whether or not that’s the company they really want to keep. And I also hope that if enough people leave Meta, another platform could eventually emerge to fill the void like Bluesky did after co-president Musk nazified Twitter. But on the other hand, I know that it’s important to keep communicating with and reaching out to those on the other side of the soon-to-be-boiling pot, so I do commend those who stay. But for myself, I’ve reached a point where I don’t think I can do any good on the platform.
So, I plan to spend the next few weeks collecting contact info, photos, etc. And then after I delete my account, I’ll try to be more present and more social in the actual, real world. To all of my good friends on the right side of history, I hope to see you there.
Peace.
