Reflections Upon Being Kicked Off Facebook

I first got a Facebook account in the summer of 2007. After two years in Texas, I’d accepted a job back in Illinois, and my husband couldn’t follow for a few months. It was summer in a college town and I sublet a townhouse from the grad school classmate of a friend, who didn’t know me and wasn’t particularly friendly about the whole thing. The landlord hadn’t authorized subletting, which added a furtive quality to daily life. His roommate was also gone, so I had the tall, narrow, 70s-built, inadequately lit place to myself. I camped out with only the basics, slept on a couch, watched DVDs from the library on my laptop, walked to the nearby farmer’s market on the weekends when I got bored.

I drove up to Dearborn, outside Detroit, to spend a weekend with a friend who had just left a violent abusive marriage with an infant and a toddler. We rode the elevated tram around downtown Detroit with the kids, taking pictures, checked out a couple of cool Lebanese shops in the neighborhood. But mostly we hung around her apartment, subsisting on instant coffee and English muffins, holing up in the kitchen when the baby slept, as we caught up and I tried to help her talk through the next steps in her upended life. We agreed we should keep in touch more. “You must get Facebook!” she insisted on my last day there. It was the first I’d heard of it.

I was tired and possibly hung over on the drive back from Michigan to Illinois and decided I should try one of these energy drinks everyone seemed to be into. After a few sips of the syrupy concoction I exited at the very next gas station and bought a large black coffee. When I arrived home, I signed up for a Facebook account and started finding friends from high school and college. During my strange, lonely summer in someone else’s townhouse, it was lovely to share funny details of my day with people I knew. We put up random photos. We “poked” one another in a genuinely non-sexual way. It was delightful. I cut my hair short again and put up a selfie taken at the bottom of the stairs in the townhouse, the flattering soft focus an unintentional result of my crappy flip-phone camera.

Nearly 20 years later, it occurs to me that social media itself, other online tech, and our polycrisis of a world may have made all of our lives more like mine was that summer—lonely, unmoored, the dreaded liminal.

And Facebook became less and less the harmless diversion it was that summer. Increasingly the algorithm buries things I actually want to see, so my friends are invisible even if I’m wasting a lot of time on the site. The more often I log on, the more ads and “sponsored content” dilute my feed. My concerns about Facebook’s invasions of privacy, use of facial recognition, and shady data dealing mean I don’t do things I used to do, like share vacation photos.

The addictive, mind-eroding nature of bottomless scroll led me to implement firm boundaries over time—I do not have the app and do not check Facebook on my phone, I use a Firefox container extension to (maybe) keep Facebook from spying on my other web activity, I never click on an ad in Facebook, my page is set to private. I’ve thought many times about deleting my account. My ambivalence about what social media was doing to my brain meant I never created an Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat account. After a brief unsuccessful Mastodon experiment, I got on BlueSky this past year.

But I stayed on Facebook for the same reasons many people stay. Facebook became a way to keep up with events in my community, local businesses, and local politics. A networking group was a great tool for my profession. Long COVID support groups occasionally provided ideas and research updates. I found out about demonstrations. My community has an active Buy Nothing group that I often used, which is a great way to reduce waste that often overlaps with mutual aid. Sometimes I got updates about the lives of old friends and former coworkers. Sometimes I learned about deaths.

At least, that was how it was until last week. An email appeared—my account had been suspended due to not following community standards on “account integrity” and will be permanently disabled in 180 days unless I appeal. A link to a vague webpage with a long list of rules. Of course, no information on how my activity violated any of them. In Kafkaesque fashion, I am invited to “appeal” this decision without knowing what I am accused of doing. The first step in this is to prove my identity with a selfie, which I reluctantly provide, figuring Facebook already has pictures of my face. The second step requests a picture of my photo ID. And that’s where it ends for me.

I am not as disciplined with online privacy as some, but more aware than many. I check settings on most things I use and opt out of information sharing when I can. I keep my location turned off. I compromise for convenience sometimes, but not by default. I would never in a lifetime consider having Alexa or the equivalent listening in my home.

Over the past few years, I’ve heard resignation at times from those around me, “Privacy doesn’t exist anymore,” “They already know everything, haha.” Maybe this felt like a harmless compromise a few years ago. But under the authoritarian power grab now in progress, when ICE is using facial recognition without cause, tapping into local license plate reader systems, disappearing immigrants and citizens both, and when the federal government is shaking down states for voter and citizen information and issuing orders that attempt to criminalize dissent, the reasons I was being such a downer about privacy all those years become increasingly clear.

In this climate, there is no way that I am providing Facebook—a company who has pandered to the current Republican administration, who has made a fortune harvesting and selling our information to Cambridge Analytica and others, who has shut down anti-ICE groups recently, and who has been sued and found liable for violating privacy laws in Illinois and elsewhere—a copy of my driver’s license.

I don’t know and will probably never know if my Facebook account was shut down because of my frequent posts critical of the current Republican administration and in support of resistance and democratic values. It’s very possible that this was a blip in the AI bot reviewing pages that would have happened if I’d only ever posted photos of my cat. But it seems very possible that it is not. It crosses my mind, too, that this appeals process is an easy way to harvest ID information if they want—turn the dial a bit toward shutting down accounts, get people’s IDs as part of the recovery process, turn them into a handy data set, and hand them to the highest bidder, or to good buddies at DHS. I have no evidence supporting this either. I do know I’m not the only one.

This kind of obscurity has been used elsewhere as part of a strategy. Keep motivations and triggers mysterious, maintain plausible deniability, keep it a non-story, keep it about the individual. Make it sound paranoid to even asking if this is about politics. I wonder if this is a small taste of what it felt like to be blacklisted in the McCarthy era, though that sounds dramatic. But what I’ve lost isn’t nothing. I will lose over 18 years of messages and tags and photos, and a list of friends and acquaintances built up over time. I realize the past week that I did get value out of the groups I was a part of that connected me to colleagues and my community, and that, as imperfect as it was, this was a place I heard from friends, family, and neighbors.

I can live with it, though. I never expected all of those comments and posts to be anything but ephemeral, and I’ve had the thought at times that falling out of touch with people used to be a normal part of life, and maybe it’s okay to let it be that again. It feels like an invitation to refocus on more substantive forms of human contact, to send an email or write a letter. I know something that Facebook doesn’t know: I am not my data. It’s possible that someday I’ll make a new account to access some of the groups and spaces that are valuable to me. But I haven’t decided yet.

If I allow myself to ponder that this could be the result of content I posted, it feels like my first concrete personal loss as part of the fight we find ourselves in. I’m very lucky that way, my only losses in the past year have been psychological—damage to my sense of stability and predictability, trust in institutions, beliefs about human nature. (Unless you count silly losses due to boycotts, like the loss of Target’s beautifully efficient curbside pickup. Sigh.) But this is the first time I’m giving up something practical and day-to-day because I’m not willing to comply. Although a social media platform is far from essential, that feels like it means something.

This experience was jarring, and a reminder of how easy it is to depend on large tech companies that have already shown us that they are very willing to bend to the current regime and uninterested in taking a stand for democracy and the truth. It worries me that so many anti-authoritarian organizations and efforts depend on social media to connect and publicize events, or Gmail and Google groups to stay in touch. These services are not run by neutral or supportive actors, and having a backup plan is essential. If you’ve made it this far in this overly long post, I hope it’s a reminder that you should start thinking now about backup plans for the digital service you rely on. You can start by putting together an offline copy of the contact information of as many people as you can. Right now, I’m glad I did that early in 2025.