On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Best thing I’ve done: delete Facebook/Meta. It was very difficult because you kept coming back… Think I “deleted” 20 times and still crawled back to login. Yeh…
So I came up with a plan to purposely delete and lock myself out of it.
This was like 5 yrs ago, I didnt have much uploaded photos so the process was easy. First, I changed the email on Facebook/Meta to a temporary one. Then I went further to use some random password create a new password.
Then I deleted the account with that temporary email and random password and closed the browser. Finally, I nuked my entire OS and reinstall a new one, just in case if the cache contains data about the email and password.
I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it so I just stopped using it, after three months I just deleted it. Facebook legit sucks, like it’s nothing but ads and garbage so it felt super easy to get rid of for me. I also figured if there’s pictures there they’re also already on my phone and if they’re not it’s not like I know which ones to miss them, like it if I don’t know it exists anymore I can’t actually miss not having it so I just straight up chucked the whole thing in the trash. I’ve had zero interest in going back. I think years ago it would have been harder but now? There’s literally nothing of value to bring me back