After working at Meta, I deleted social media

I’ve written a lot about social media.

• The square I don’t want to join: The megaphone only amplifies anger, and vendor calls are everywhere.
• Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms: Platforms can change the rules anytime. Your castle can be taken away at any moment.
• Voting for a world without ads: If you want a world without ads, lead by example.
• To be a writer, you must first become an influencer: To become a writer, I reluctantly reopened my social media accounts.

It’s been three years since I deleted social media, and I’ve been re-examining this decision. Should I be using social media?

There are interesting people on social media, valuable content, conversations I don’t want to miss. Social media is also the go-to choice for promoting products or creative work. But after re-reading Stolen Focus, a book that deeply influenced me, I remembered why I left in the first place.

Not because I hate technology. It’s because I worked at the world’s largest social media company and saw how the system operates from the inside.

After leaving, I deleted Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

Three reasons: the algorithm doesn’t serve me, I don’t want my every move tracked, and I needed to address my addiction.

Conflict of interest: the algorithm doesn’t serve you

Meta’s corporate mission proclaims it wants to “connect the world.”

But what are engineers actually doing every day?

Running experiments.

We run thousands of A/B tests daily. Users with the new feature vs. users without. Are they sending more messages? Spending more time? Viewing more ads?

Every user sees hundreds, sometimes thousands of different experimental features each day. So your Facebook looks different from my Facebook. Your friend’s Instagram looks different from yours. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

KPI goes up, feature ships. KPI doesn’t move, feature gets killed.

Sounds scientific, right?

Here’s the problem: KPIs are designed for shareholders, not for you.

Imagine if there was a feature that made users feel better, sleep better, and focus more on real life.

Would that feature ship?

No.

Because well-rested people don’t scroll at 3 AM. Happy people don’t need to keep refreshing their feed for comfort. Who would see the ads then?

Features that make your life better aren’t good for the company.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. This is business logic.

I don’t want to be a cog in this machine anymore. And I definitely don’t want to be its fuel.

Privacy: Meta Pixel is scarier than wiretapping

Many people think Meta is listening through their phones.

“I just talked to my friend about buying sneakers, and Facebook showed me sneaker ads!”

You’re overthinking it. Meta doesn’t bother storing your audio recordings.

They don’t need to.

They have Meta Pixel.

Most commercial websites you visit have this tiny tracking code installed. It reports your every move on the site: which pages you viewed, what you added to cart, whether you bought it.

For merchants and brands, it’s a good deal. They feed your behavioral data to Meta in exchange for free audience analytics and better ad targeting. Meta tells them: roughly how old your customers are, their gender, who else might buy, and how to target them more effectively.

This not only drives more ad business but gives Meta a terrifying superpower.

You log into Amazon to buy something. They know. You book a flight. They know. You’re comparing brands. They know. You’re searching for something weird at 2 AM. They know that too. And through Facebook Login, cookies, and IP addresses, they can link all this data back to your account.

This is just tracking outside of Meta’s products.

The data inside Meta’s own products is even scarier. Your uploaded photos train facial recognition. The pages you liked, articles you read, text you typed, all analyzed to target ads more precisely.

Meta doesn’t need to listen to what you say. Tracking what you do is accurate enough.

I don’t want to be tracked like this. I don’t want my every move recorded, analyzed, and sold to advertisers.

Addiction: a slot machine that never closes

Many people say social media is just a tool. The tool itself isn’t the problem. The problem is the user and how they use it.

I disagree. While it’s powerful, it’s also an ever-evolving drug deliberately designed to make you more addicted.

When you try to use your phone less, you don’t realize you’re up against tens of thousands of highly educated, well-paid engineers and teams. Their promotions depend on making you more addicted. So they’ll do whatever it takes to keep you watching longer, scrolling more.

Some people can resist the temptation. But if you treat social media as a neutral tool, that’s dangerous.

I was a victim myself.

I was addicted to my phone. Addicted to the dopamine from likes. Addicted to the exploration of “let me scroll and see what’s new.” This works exactly like a slot machine: you don’t know if the next pull will hit, so you keep pulling.

Even knowing how the system was designed, I couldn’t escape. Like a casino employee playing the slot machines after work.

The invention of smartphones means this slot machine is with you 24/7, ready to play anytime.

Research shows that just having your phone in your pocket reduces cognitive performance by 20 to 30 percent. Not using it. Just having it “there” is enough to fracture your attention.

Phones and social media also ruined my sleep. There’s always something new to see, always another post. But good sleep requires boredom. It needs a monotonous bedtime routine. When your brain gets used to infinite novelty, silence becomes unbearable.

I feel like I haven’t reached my potential because of this. I wrote in Perhaps we are all geniuses buried by the entertainment of the digital age:

Imagine Newton playing mobile games, Picasso binge-watching anime, Mozart streaming shows all night. If that apple had hit Newton’s head while he was staring at a phone screen, would scientific progress look completely different today?

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, because they lived in an era of “boredom,” a time without even television, when you had to create your own entertainment. Perhaps it was precisely this boredom that made their genius possible.

Are there countless potential geniuses around us being drowned out by this era? While we develop endless channels of entertainment, are we also diminishing humanity’s collective creativity?

I’m probably not going to become a world-changing, history-making Newton, Picasso, or Mozart. But at least I can try to make my life a bit more boring, consume less of the endless content, and become a creator of my own life rather than a passive consumer.

Knowing where the trap is doesn’t mean you won’t fall in.

I don’t want to be that person anymore. I don’t want to be led around by systems designed to manipulate me.

The only way out is to leave the casino. Just like I stopped picking individual stocks.

Meta is just a product of capitalism

After writing all this, I need to add a fair word.

Meta isn’t evil. The colleagues there are smart, kind people. The benefits are like Disneyland: high salary, great food three meals a day, they even do your laundry.

When I was on a business trip in Mexico, I saw a local small business owner tear up thanking Meta for providing such great services for free. Social media and business tools were a lifeline for them.

The main problem is that Meta’s business model requires it to serve shareholders, not users.

This isn’t evil. This is just the capitalist world we live in.

Look at the most valuable companies: Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Apple. They’re all competing for the same thing: our attention. Ironically, we invest in these companies while being harvested by them. Stock prices go up, our time disappears.

But understanding this, I choose not to participate anymore.

Be a minority

If you clicked on this post, you’re interested in reducing social media use.

Why not act on that impulse?

Being exceptional or extraordinary means doing what 99% of people can’t. Deleting social media is one of those things.

If you’re not ready to delete, at least protect your privacy and focus:

• Use Firefox Container to open Facebook and block Meta Pixel tracking
• Turn off all notifications
• Realize that every scroll is making someone else money
• Remember the algorithm doesn’t serve you; log off regularly

If you’re interested in this topic, check out these books:

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Or ask yourself one question:

When was the last time social media made you genuinely happy?

I thought about this for a long time and couldn’t come up with an answer.

So I left.

P.S. I talk so much about Meta only because I worked there. I actually think Google is scarier. But their moat (YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and now Gemini) is just too strong and convenient. I still can’t degoogle.