Breaking Up (With Meta) is Hard to Do: A story of two successes and a failure
I thought removing Meta from my life would be too hard, especially WhatsApp. But I’ve made great progress in 2025.
Back in January, Meta decided to make their hateful conduct policy homophobic and transphobic. It now says:
Do not post content targeting a person or group of people on the basis of their protected characteristic(s) with insults about mental characteristics… We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.
I think it’s unacceptable to be on a platform, generating revenue for its owners, that explicitly allows harassment against LGBTQ people, and so my de-Metafication began. I had Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Let’s see where I’m at today.
Status: Success!
This one was easy. I suspended my account in January and deleted it last week. I do miss the updates from friends around the world, whose lives I’d catch glimpses of through their stories, which would occasionally provoke a quick conversation after a few months of not chatting. I’ve tried to make up for that by being more intentional about keeping in touch.
Status: Failure
I immediately suspended my account. It was no great loss, except in a couple of areas. Firstly, Facebook Groups. There are a number of groups for political activists that exist solely there. I tried a few different things to encourage people to move, which got a universal response: “Everyone’s here already and there’s nowhere else to go”. I accept that Facebook Groups have the benefit of most people having a Facebook account, but should organisations really be using the services of a company that has repeatedly shown itself to fly in the face of their values? From Cambridge Analytica to this new policy, the use of Facebook is dripping with hypocrisy. I wish people would try harder to find alternatives. That’s what true allyship would look like.
I gave in and reactivated my Facebook account last week. I felt too left out of the groups. I have reduced my account to a shell, unfriending everyone, making all my pictures private, and setting my profile picture to a “No Facebook” image. There’s no way to unfriend hundreds of people in bulk, so I resorted to automating it with the help of Gemini. If you’d like to do the same, check out the scripts.
Secondly, Facebook Messenger. My initial approach was to keep that active since you can suspend your Facebook account without suspending Messenger. After a while I got alternative channels of communication going with people I only spoke to on Messenger, but it was a hassle.
Status: Trending towards success
WhatsApp is by far the hardest. It’s how I keep in touch with most people I know. Until this year it was mostly only tech folk I know using Signal. However, that’s been changing. Members of political groups were very willing to give it a go for our group chats, so we moved.
I didn’t want to move family until the much-awaited backup feature in Signal was launched. That happened a few weeks ago on iOS, so I suggested to each family member that we move, and gave the reasons why. It was surprisingly frictionless, and we even have my 85-year-old relatives moved over.
Yesterday, 75% of my active conversation channels (individual and group chats) were on Signal. Result!
A challenge to your group
If you are part of a group using Meta products, ask them today: is this convenience worth subsidising hate? Just because a move might seem hard, it’s worth it. A move to Signal from WhatsApp is easy. Consider evaluating Discord as a Facebook Groups alternative.
I know I’d appreciate that thought, and I expect LGBTQ members of your community would too.
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