Protecting your peace of mind, by bravely deleting your Facebook/Meta account

I’ve on & off deleted FB and generally use it for access to certain groups. This the only Buddhist forum i use and maintain an account on.
I find the using of forums to be with diminishing and something like 5 posts per year is probably oprimal because posting about things like whether i use facebook or not is rather worthless. It’s fun to talk but it doesn’t go with intensive training.

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Exactly why I use it. If I deactivated my acct , there will be as some unhappy aunties and old friends…

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I deleted my facebook account months ago and do not regret it.

Facebook is Māra.

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I’ve managed to get my entire nuclear family onto Signal (6 of us total). Signal Groups can do group voice and video calls too. Just saying.

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I maintain stronger friendships via text, WhatsApp and/or Telegram than I ever did on social. It’s very doable.

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I think that threads like this are most helpful when they are

  • not judgemental,
  • recognize that people use platforms in different ways and have a diversity of social situations, and
  • provide realistic alternatives.

Immigrants are in a very different situation than someone who only needs to stay connected with a handful of people (for whom email is probably a better alternative than any other platform). For some communities a broad network of shallow connections is very important. In this, Facebook excels. Telling people that they should maintain sms communications with 50 people in another country isn’t realistic. And to say that those relationships must not be that important then is quite judgemental.

Using a news feed reader (aka RSS reader) is a very practical, and some would say much better, way to find out about things that are important to us. That’s the point of this wiki page. Please feel free to post questions there about setting things up.

@MattStL, if the pages and groups you follow on Facebook are public, then you can use a service like this one to access the posts in a news feed reader. Unfortunately it won’t work for profiles.

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This is very true. I have quite a few friends all over the world that I get to keep in contact with via Facebook. Similarly, I have work-related contacts on LinkedIn.

For close family-related matters we have private groups on Line, WhatsApp, etc, but as @Snowbird indicates, a platform that does the broad-shallow thing is really useful - occasional photos of friends’ travels, children, new house, etc. These are not things you’d want to message directly to several hundred people. In the old days it was the sort of thing you’d put into a Christmas card, or something…

Of course, I’d prefer a platform that has those positive aspects of Facebook that I’ve described without the obvious negatives that it can induce. But the way I and my friends use it I actually don’t have any trouble. In my circle, it would be strange to get into arguments over pictures of holidays, children, weddings, or funerals…

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I got rid of all my social media accounts a year ago… it actually felt great!

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I couldn’t agree more.

And just to be clear, I always assume any statement or question on a forum about Buddhism is directed to the situation most members would find themselves in - I didn’t realize the question was in regards to the general public. People who have no interest in practicing Dhamma wouldn’t necessarily be bothered by the emotional effects and added stress of social media and therefore would have no reason to come off.

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But I was talking about people interested in practicing Dhamma. Not the general public. And this goes directly to what I was saying about judging others. That the immigrants that I know who use facebook to keep in touch with relatives are automatically not interested in practicing Dhamma? Please. It’s dangerous to project our shortcoming onto others.

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I agree that Facebook is bad, I don’t have Facebook/Instagram myself but it’s difficult to avoid Whatsapp

Then I guess we disagree.

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Let me provide an alternative view then. I am still using Facebook, and I don’t find it necessary to delete it. Most of the time I just scroll, see nothing interesting after all, and get reminded that happiness is not found in the world. That’s a good reminder of seeing dukkha in sankhara.

Facebook is useful for the following reasons:

  1. Listening to Dhamma talks online, so many Buddhist societies are doing facebook livestreams nowadays, and one can like so many Buddhist society pages. This is especially convenient for monks as we don’t have to trouble others to physically fetch us to the Dhamma talk location and trouble the organisers to prepare additional dana lunch, or having to sit in more special seats to listen to the other Venerable, or even lay speaker.

  2. Get to know Dhamma events online, as well as news. I didn’t pick up the habit of reading newspaper until I hit on facebook. So basically any news important enough, it should get shared on facebook, if it’s not shared on facebook, it’s likely to be not important enough to merit notice. Cuts down most news. I can tailor what I want to see too by giving feedback: don’t show me this or that. So my feeds are largely safe from pop culture (not entirely yet) etc.

  3. Share the Dhamma or connect with others. Given the possibility of changing phone numbers or losing phones, contacts on phones can be lost altogether. Facebook contact and messager provides an easy way to communicate with friends. As well as in monasteries with no phone allowed policy, but limited internet are allowed, facebook is the main way for people to contact me via chat, as whatsapp depends on the phone.

  4. Reflecting upon aging, as people around my age got married, I can see the suffering of their married life, young parent life etc, and their lost of youth, beauty as time goes on. And get reminded that: nope, that’s not real happiness.

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@NgXinZhao, Facebook doesn’t “own the patent” on any of those things in your thoughful list, though. Your argument is sort of like “since Dhamma can be squeezed out of it, that launders its use”. I disagree; Facebook’s pernicious nature doesn’t get laundered by anything in your list. Just because you don’t personally experience that pernicious nature, doesn’t mean that this pernicious nature magically somehow doesn’t exist, despite bountiful critical credible evidence (see 4 links to past threads, in OP).

Here’s a recent, pertinent development:

“We’re Making the Facebook Papers Public. Here’s Why and How”:

Choice quotation:

rare are stories about the violent collision between Facebook’s outwardly professed goal of “bringing people together,” and that of its underlying technologies, which seem to derive greater profits when driving people apart, and into increasingly dark places.

Bhante, just to clarify: are you claiming it’s a Vinaya violation to use Facebook? :pray:

No, no Vinaya violation. But I feel I should make some sort of effort to stick up for values that are found in the suttas, like those found in AN 4.198:

“Having abandoned false speech, he abstains from false speech; he speaks truth, adheres to truth; he is trustworthy and reliable, no deceiver of the world. Having abandoned divisive speech, he abstains from divisive speech; he does not repeat elsewhere what he has heard here in order to divide [those people] from these, nor does he repeat to these what he has heard elsewhere in order to divide [these people] from those; thus he is one who reunites those who are divided, a promoter of unity, who enjoys concord, rejoices in concord, delights in concord, a speaker of words that promote concord.

Contrast this with what is quoted above:

[Facebook’s/Meta’s] underlying technologies, which seem to derive greater profits when driving people apart, and into increasingly dark places.

My concern is with the underlying technology (the “dark patterns” which are built into the platform, which leverage people’s emotions in unwholesome ways), whereas the apologists of Facebook look at the surface-level content (you know, the Buddhist content), saying, “where’s the problem?”. Those apologists aren’t looking deeply enough at the platform of Facebook/Meta as a whole.

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Ah ok! Well, I’m glad we agree it isn’t a Vinaya matter. :slightly_smiling_face:

So, if I understand your point, I feel like it’s a parallel with climate change. You’re essentially arguing that every time somebody uses Facebook, they’re contributing a bit to the division and confusion in society, similar to how, every time one travels, they’re contributing a little bit to the warming of the planet. Is that a fair summary of your point? :pray:

Well, I consider tackling the problems of climate change, and tackling the problems of Social Media to be fairly separate social causes, but yes, your analogy certainly has a lot of merit.

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Yes, I wasn’t trying to unify them, merely an analogy to make sure we’re communicating.

So then, I think using Facebook is morally like travel, right? The carbon isn’t “laundered” if you’re flying for a good reason… but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reasons to travel. Sometimes, for some people, there really are no good alternatives to Facebook right now.

So, we can work on building those alternatives… but until those exist, it’s a bit “divisive” to yell about carbon at every passenger who comes out of the nearest airport, no? :pray:

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I think that one should be very careful speaking in praise of deleting facebook and it being a virtue in front of people who are using those services because it might come of as insinuating that they are bad people by comparison. When one speaks in praise of good qualities and people don’t see those in themselves, it upsets them and one should take care not to compare one to another.

There is a sutta with a close to this kind of message.

Mendicants, it is inappropriate to speak to five kinds of person by comparing that person with someone else. What five?

It’s inappropriate to talk to an unfaithful person about faith. It’s inappropriate to talk to an unethical person about ethics. It’s inappropriate to talk to an unlearned person about learning. It’s inappropriate to talk to a stingy person about generosity. It’s inappropriate to talk to a witless person about wisdom.
[…]
they lose their temper, becoming annoyed, hostile, and hard-hearted, and displaying annoyance, hate, and bitterness.
An5.157

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