I deleted my Facebook account today and it was long overdue. Here are the reasons:
•    It was a frivolous time sink. I can think of many other things I can do or should be doing.
•    Corporate Facebook is not to be trusted. I’d rather trust the NSA with my personal data.
•    Just another attack vector for hackers and cyber threats.
•    Who needs propaganda when you have Facebook? Social media is the propagation of disinformation and half baked news. No one reads books anymore or the real news for that matter.
•    Benign posts were mostly of idle glimpses or what my friend’s kids were doing, easily summarized in conventional year end newsletter. It was rare that a benign post might also be interesting.
•    Malignant posts made unilateral remarks about traditional people, particularly men, fathers and husbands, lampooning conservatives, Christians and traditional values all while claiming to be tolerant. At first I thought Facebook might be the marketplace of ideas among rational and respecting persons. No—it’s basically a high school food fight.
•    George Takai. I never friended Sulu but would still get his crap on my newsfeed anyhow. I wonder if he weren’t gay would people find him as interesting.
•    My own posts, as creative and rare as I tried to make them, were seldom liked or commented and then by my immediate family. With some streams, I’m sure they got lost in the noise, and there is a lot of noise.
•    The temptation to argue, fight and eventually transgress was too great for me. I have little self-control, especially when it comes to *(*&$# imbeciles who parrot whatever they read in the New York Times, the Mary Sue or Gawker.
•    Lack of reciprocity. I unfriended people who I liked / commented on their posts with no indication that they ever cared or saw anything I did.
•    It amazes me that grown men and women feel the need to use, let alone type, profanity, indicative of a society that is out of ideas, civility and language skills.
•    A lot of my very smart friends don’t use Facebook. I think they are on to something.
According to policy, my account will be dead in 14 days. I’ll check to make sure it really is so.