If ten years ago, social networks like Facebook could be seen as something marginal, things have changed a lot since then. Indeed, what was then seen as something reserved for teenagers has gained momentum.
So much so that today, everyone has an account on at least one of these social networks. Even people who didn't think they would do it at all 10 years ago are starting to get into it more and more.
Moreover, today Facebook is one of the networks favored by a lot of people. However, this is not necessarily the one we advise you to go to and in this article we tell you why!
1 – Facebook is not really free
Facebook is free and always will be. This is the slogan you are given when you want to create an account. On paper, it's true and if we're not going to have fun talking about the future, for the moment, it's free.
You will be able to use Facebook as you wish. You will then never have a cent to spend to be able to walk around. On this point we might be tempted to say that it is true.
But you know the saying that when it's free, you're the customer. As you can imagine, Facebook is not an NGO that lives on love and fresh water. So, you have to make money.
For the moment Facebook assures us that they do not sell our personal information. But given the company's declining results, that could become a possibility. Furthermore, even without selling to you, Facebook uses its users to make money by selling advertising space.
2 – Facebook spies on you on the Web
As we have seen before, Facebook provides its services for free and, in return, we accept that it sends our data to advertising agencies around the world.
However, the most worrying thing is that Facebook also tracks you when you are not using the site. Worse yet, you can't avoid sharing this information by logging out of your Facebook account – the company will still track you.
Information collected outside of Facebook includes:
- the search for an article on a site,
- viewing content,
- the purchase of a particular product,
- donation to any organization,
- downloading a particular file,
- sharing an article,
- etc
Today, you can view this data on Facebook. For this you must go to the Facebook application, open the menu, then the application settings and in the section " Your Facebook information ", open " Activity outside of Facebook ».
3 – We find more and more fake news
A few years ago, Facebook was designed to be a social network where we could communicate and share with friends. But since then, the site has evolved quite a bit and has become more professional.
We thus find the newspapers which have begun to relay information. Except that with social networks everyone starts from the same point, whether you are an approved press organ or even Mr. Everybody.
This has allowed the emergence of new media, which is good, but also a lot of fake news. Today, you can no longer miss it and it is sometimes difficult to sort out the true from the false.
Admittedly, the platform has tried to take the lead by putting warnings under certain content to warn its users. But in practice, a lot of content still goes under the radar. They then have time to spread, much more quickly and effectively than denials.
4 – On Facebook, you are a lab rat
In 2012, Facebook conducted an experiment on the Internet by manipulating the news feed of 700.000 unwitting users. There is no need to force experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms because they have already agreed to the data use policy of the site
Half of the users were exposed to predominantly positive messages. The other half has rather negative content. The service then studied the tone of the messages posted by the people observed.
So is it acceptable for Facebook to play with our emotions to improve its services? Aside from ethical issues, one can only speculate about the negative effect this experiment might have had on users with emotional issues. And this is not the only time that Facebook has conducted studies of this type. There are at least seven other high-profile examples.
Conclusion: Facebook takes us for a lab rat.
5 – You are harassed by message
Facebook is one of the most famous social networks in the world and this unfortunately means that there are people with bad intentions who are attracted to it. Today, it is impossible for you to stop them from contacting you.
This has been one of the platform's major weaknesses for several years and is one of the reasons why more and more people are leaving it. Indeed, it is impossible to miss these many messages.
Besides the fact that they can trick you, what's annoying is that they tend to harass you. Indeed, these messages are sent to a large list of people, which only takes a short time for the hackers.
On the other hand, it is you who must take the time to manually block contacts by hand every time. This is a process that takes more time for you than for them to create new accounts.
6 – You no longer have control over your Facebook news feed
In its early days, Facebook was quite simple, on your wall you had your friends and what they posted. You can also like specific pages and when new content comes out, it appears on your news feed.
But for several years, Facebook's system has changed and many content creators have complained about these changes. Indeed, it is now an algorithm that is responsible for finding what you like or not.
Understand that even if you like a page, there are chances that you will miss some posts. Conversely, there are pages that you didn't like that often appear on your posting feed.
It is certainly possible to configure this a little by asking Facebook to no longer display this content, but it is quite long and repetitive to do so. If we also add the advertisements that we told you about before, we end up with a news feed that seems more and more polluted in recent years.
7 – Facebook is gradually losing interest
As we told you in this article, Facebook has clearly been losing momentum for several months and, if we want to go even further, for several years. They who were synonymous with modernity 10 years ago seem a little behind today.
User expectations have evolved and faced with the emergence of a whole bunch of new social networks, Facebook and more broadly the Méta group is struggling and this has been seen recently.
Around you, you may have noticed that more and more young people end up leaving Facebook. Worse still, they don't even sign up anymore. This led the platform to take drastic decisions and recently, dozens of people lost their jobs!
A situation that still plunges the facebook security in doubt and who questions. Indeed, we have already seen very influential social networks end up forgotten by everyone. This was the case for Myspace before Facebook.
This uncertain future and all the other reasons you have been given before, might make you think. More and more people are asking questions about whether or not to stay on the platform. Maybe it's time for you to do the same? In any case, if you want to delete your Facebook account, here's how to achieve it.