How to Use Facebook

Update 2025-01-10: What with Facebook's latest update to its Terms of Service that completely betrays LGBT people and essentially says it's OK to hate us, I have decided I cannot use Facebook safely and have deleted my account. I encourage everyone to do the same, because Facebook is explicitly positioning itself as a platform where hateful speech is permitted. It has also decided that it's just fine to be a conduit for misinformation.

If after looking at the above links, you still don't want to delete your account, keep reading. But be aware that by using Facebook, you're directly contributing to the wealth and power of anti-democratic plutocrats who are willing to destroy democratic institutions if it means more wealth and power for them.

Running Tally of Shitty Facebook News

I will try to keep this list updated.

2025-01-07 Meta eliminates fact-checking in latest bow to Trump
2025-01-09 Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post "Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!" or "Trans People Are Immoral"
2025-01-13 Meta admits it deleted links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed
2025-01-14 Meta celebrates "freedom of expression" by censoring an LGBTQ group critical of Facebook.
2025-01-15 Lawyer Drops Meta Over Mark Zuckerberg's "Toxic Masculinity" Stanford professor Mark Lemley says the company and its founder have descended into "Neo-Nazi madness."
2025-01-17 Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly blaming former Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg for a company inclusivity initiative. Good ol' Mark throwing someone under the bus to avoid Trumpian attention.
2025-01-17 Meta's Community Notes Will Not Impact Paid Ads, Company Confirms. Sure. Just buy your way around any sort of pesky remaining "fact-checking".

Using Facebook (Somewhat) Safely

While it is best not to use social media at all, it can be nice to follow friends and family on Facebook to be informed of significant events in their lives. I'll try to show you how to use Facebook without harmed too much by it.

The Adversarial Relationship

The truth is that Facebook has an adversarial relationship with its users. Ask yourself what you want to get out of using Facebook. If you're like most people, you want to keep in touch with friends and family, learn about significant events in their lives, and post about some of your own important life events.

What Facebook wants is simple: Your attention. The longer Facebook can keep you on the site, the more ads it can feed you. The more you react to things, the more Facebook knows about your likes and dislikes. Not only do your reactions teach it what ads to feed you, but they also teach it what makes you happy, sad, amused and angry. That last one is a powerful one, because anger drives you to stay on the site and react even more and, of course, see more ads. The fact that excessive anger harms you both mentally and physically is irrelevant to Facebook; its algorithms optimize for profit and not for users' wellbeing. Facebook has recently (Jan 2025) dabbled with anti-features such as fake unblockable profiles and has decided to drop fact checking in the USA.

To thrive in this adversarial relationship, you have to understand Facebook's motivations and the techniques it uses to achieve its goals. And then you have to thwart Facebook from achieving its goals.

Do Not Use the Facebook Mobile App

Your first line of defense against Facebook is to avoid its mobile app. If you use Facebook via the app, then Meta controls both ends of the experience: The server end and the client end. For a real-life analogy, imagine meeting friends at a coffee shop to chat, but being forced to use a specific coffee shop with all kinds of microphones and cameras designed to invade your privacy.

If you use the app, you cannot take meaningful countermeasures against Facebook's exploitation of its users.

Do Not Use Facebook on your Phone or Tablet

Using Facebook on your phone, even via a mobile Web browser, reduces your privacy in two ways: First, mobile Web browsers typically lack some of the privacy-preserving features available to desktop Web browsers, and secondly, your location can easily be tracked with your phone. Only use Facebook via a desktop PC or a laptop, and ideally with a browser that pays at least lip service to privacy, such as Firefox, rather than Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.

Block Ads and Sponsored Posts

Stop whatever you're doing right now and install F.B. Purity. This browser extension completely blocks ads and sponsored posts. Do it now. I'll wait...

Facebook deliberately designs sponsored posts for engagement. A lot of the time, this means making you angry. As an example, I am an atheist and consider myself fairly liberal. A significant proportion of the sponsored posts I used to see were for Christian or Muslim religious groups that promoted values that are the complete antithesis of what I stand for. I made the mistake of reacting to a couple of them in the past, and now Facebook knows they make me angry.

Sponsored posts are Facebook Kryptonite. Keep away from them at all costs.

Optional: Network-Wide Ad-Blocking

If you are technically inclined, consider installing the network-wide ad blocker Pi-Hole. It can block many ads on all devices on your home network without needing to install any software on the devices itself.

Privacy, Please

Never make anything publicly visible if that is possible. Specifically, never make your Friends list public. This information is abused by scammers who clone your profile and then send requests to your existing friends, hoping to trick them. If strangers can't read your Friends list, then they can't target your friends with this scam.

Making things public helps Facebook's algorithm increase engagement, which we've already seen is a hostile behaviour. So don't help the algorithm.

View Posts in Reverse-Chronological Order

One of the psychological tricks Facebook uses to keep you on the site longer is to show posts in a semi-unpredictable order. This makes you forget what you've already seen and spend more time scrolling.

Don't play Facebook's sneaky psychological games. F.B. Purity lets you configure your news feed to show posts in strictly reverse-chronological order. Set it up to be so. Once you see a post you've already seen, you'll know you've also seen all following posts and you can stop scrolling.

Turn Off All Notifications

One way Facebook makes itself more addictive is by pestering you with notifications. Who can resist checking what's up when a notification appears? For this reason, disable all notifications that you possibly can. Specifically, never let Facebook send you SMS or email notifications. And since you're not using the mobile app (right???) app notifications are not an issue.

About Your Friends...

Take a long, hard look at your friend list. For each friend, go through this checklist:

Have you ever met the person in real life? This might not necessarily be a physical meeting; a remote working environment counts. But if you've never interacted with the person except on Facebook... that person is not a real friend. Unfriend them.
Ask yourself the following four questions: Is the person family? Have you hung out with them or would you like to? Would you give up an hour of your time at short notice to help the person? Would the person give up an hour of their time at short notice to help you? If the answer to all four questions is "No", the person is not a real friend. Unfriend them.
Do you like the person? If not, then unfriend them!
Does the person post material that makes you angry? If so, unfollow or unfriend them.
Does the person post material that would make someone with completely different views from you angry? Be honest now; no political side has a monopoly on provocative postings. If so, unfollow or unfriend them.
Are most of the person's posts links to videos or news articles, or simply other posts shared rather than original content? If so, they are directly participating in Facebook's engagement algorithm and helping Facebook's adversarial behaviour. Unfriend or unfollow them.
Are most of the person's posts self-promotional? If so, they're using Facebook to promote themselves and not to share real information. Unfriend or unfollow them.
Does the person's profile have a verified badge? If so, they fancy themselves to be an influencer important enough for someone to impersonate. They most probably are not, but they also will be using Facebook to promote themselves and not share real information. Unfriend or unfollow them.
Has the person ever posted more than four times in a day? Averaged over a month, does the person post more than once per day? If so, they are posting about trivialities and not significant life events. Unfollow or unfriend them. You won't miss much.

About Your Behaviour

The "About Your Friends" section lists some behaviours that should make you unfriend or unfollow someone. A corollary is that you should avoid those behaviours yourself. Engaging in them simply assists Facebook in its adversarial behaviour. So:

Don't post material designed to make people angry, even if you really agree with it.
Don't post news articles on Facebook. If you live in Canada, Facebook made that easy by banning Canadians from sharing news articles. This is a rare example of a Facebook Own-Goal.
Don't share posts, no matter how tempting. You'll be participating in the adversarial algorithm.
Don't make your posts public. Public posts are more likely to attract bad actors and end up in flame wars.
Don't post self-promotional content on your personal feed. Create a page if you want to do that and put the promotional stuff on the page.
Don't bother with a verified badge. You're not important enough for someone to want to impersonate you.
Don't post often. Try to keep under one post per day. Ask yourself if what you are posting is important and worthwhile. If not... don't post it.
Avoid joining groups. You'll be exposed to a lot more content you can't control in a group and you'll see content from people other than your friends. If you must join a group, unfollow it so you only see postings when you specifically go to that group. And you can't unfollow or unfriend a group member who breaks a rule in "About Your Friends", so unfortunately you'll need to block them instead.

But That Will Make Facebook Boring!

"A reverse-chronological news feed consisting only of your friends posting original content about life events will be boring!" you say. To which I say: "Yes! That's the point." Facebook uses psychological techniques and algorithmic trickery to steal your time. You need to use countermeasures to reclaim your time.

Before I started using these techniques, I'd spend probably at least an hour per day on Facebook, and always feel worse for it. With the countermeasures, I would spend about fifteen minutes per week on Facebook. I would quickly glance through my news feed for important friend updates, go through the "About Your Friends" checklist above on occasion, and then log out. I kept up with my friends' and family members' life events while not damaging my mental health.

Now, of course, I have deleted my Facebook account, so I no longer spend any time at all on Facebook (or Instagram).

What About Other Social Media?

Lest it seem that I'm picking on Facebook, other social media companies such as Tik Tok, Twitter (or "X"), etc have similar problems. However, I concentrate on Facebook because it's the most widely-used social media platform, and also is one in which countermeasures are practical in the form of F.B. Purity.

Twitter ("X") is much worse than Facebook. Don't use it at all. Same with Tik Tok, Instagram and other forms of social media that don't allow meaningful countermeasures, with the possible exception of LinkedIn. As of this writing, LinkedIn is not quite as bad as the other social media platforms.

The best social media platform is Mastodon. It operates the way Facebook should: Strictly reverse-chronological newsfeed and only shows you posts from accounts you follow. There are no ads or sponsored content, and Mastodon has no algorithms designed to increase engagement.

Feedback

Do you have other ideas for thwarting Facebook's adversarial behaviour? Let me know; you can reach me via my contact page.

Version 5 - 2025-01-16