I permanently deleted my personal Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp accounts I used Citymapper instead of Google Maps. I turned my settings within Brave to program my search engine to DuckDuckGo instead of Google. I replaced my Chrome browser with Brave. I switched to an account on my own private domain that I hosted on KolabNow, which I ran through Outlook So I set out on my course and hard deleted my Google accounts, my Facebook accounts, and as much of Apple as I could wean myself off of (an overly ambitious choice as somebody who exclusively has Apple devices). Any incremental benefits on my mental health would be a bonus. I wanted to see if getting off social media could help me find alternative platforms that I could direct my client’s ad spending toward, even if I’d have to position those platforms as innovation opportunities or a way to put their media money behind their brand purpose.
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This was a compelling enough reason for me as an individual to get off social media, but as somebody who works with brands and has the power to influence advertising decisions that brands make, it felt crucial. And it’s made our politics kind of unreal and strange, where we’re not sure if elections are real anymore, we’re not sure just how much the Russians affected Brexit.” Society has been gradually darkened by this scheme in which everyone is under surveillance all the time, and under this mild version of behavior modification all the time. The reason for society might be even more important. So if you get off that, you can experience a clearer view of yourself and your life. For your own good, it’s because you’re being subtly manipulated by algorithms that are watching everything that you do constantly and then sending you changes in your media feed and your diet that are calculated to adjust you slightly to the liking of some unseen advertiser. “One of them is for your own good and one is for society’s good. He argues there are two reasons to delete social media: Watching his visionary and prescient plea for remaking the internet was the thing that finally got me to delete my accounts. His articulate argumentation in books like “Who Owns the Future” and “You Are Not a Gadget” gave me a way to express everything that had made me itchy about Google and Facebook for years. Ultimately though, it was Jaron Lanier who solidified my decision. There is no alternative to the 2.9billion people on Facebook.” As fellow strategist Dan Hartley pointed out when I chatted to him about this, “How can I knowingly recommend to clients not to use these platforms when they have the user base that they do. Not to mention how deep of a stranglehold they had on the industry I work in.
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Without a shadow of a doubt there are insights that analysts with access to my Google and Facebook data could glean about me that I could not tell you about myself. Their geolocation tools knew where I lived, my phone number, who the most significant people in my life were, anything I’d bought recently, where I was flying to, and hundreds of other data points. In the month’s prior, I’d become increasingly aware of how deep of a stranglehold Google and Facebook had on my data. I work in media and advertising, and Wylie’s presentation outlined how he had quite literally weaponized the type of digital strategy I do every day, in a way I’d never imagined possible. The impetus for this decision came from watching Christopher Wylie, the digital strategy mastermind at Cambridge Analytica, give a fascinating and horrifying talk at Business of Fashion’s VOICES conference about how he’d weaponised fashion brands to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States. I spent the year and a half between the autumn of 2018 and the spring of 2020 off all Google and Facebook platforms on my personal devices. We imagine the peace of mind we’d have without constant WhatsApp notifications, or the what we could do with the hours we spend watching Instagram Stories and YouTube videos we can’t even remember.
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We’ve all thought about deleting our Facebook or Google accounts at one point or another.