What Facebook Took From Us. And How To Take It Back.

“Facebook harms children, sows division, and undermines democracy in pursuit of breakneck growth and astronomical profits.” [1]

— Frances Haugen, former Facebook product manager, testimony before the United States Senate, October 5, 2021

That is not the opinion of a critic or a headline from a tech blog. That is a sworn statement made under oath before the highest legislative body in the United States by a senior employee who spent years inside Facebook and watched it happen from the inside. [1]

And we’ve been on it this whole time.

You Were Never A User. You Were The Product.

Let’s start with something Facebook has never wanted us to understand about the platform we have handed years of our life to.

Facebook does not make money by serving you. It makes money by selling you. Every minute you spend on the platform is inventory. Your attention is the product being auctioned to the highest bidding advertiser in real time while you scroll. The longer you stay the more money Facebook makes. Your wellbeing is not a metric that appears anywhere in that equation.

Every feature you have ever used on Facebook was engineered by some of the smartest people in the world with a single objective: keep you on the platform as long as possible. The infinite scroll that never gives you a natural stopping point. The notification system that pulls you back the moment you put your phone down. The like button that delivers a small dopamine hit every time someone acknowledges something you posted. None of these are neutral design choices. They are deliberate psychological levers pulled by engineers who understood exactly what they were doing.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania randomly assigned 143 students to limit their Facebook use to 10 minutes per day for three weeks. The result was significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared to the control group who kept using it normally. [4] Ten minutes a day. Three weeks. Measurable improvement in how people felt about their lives and how connected they felt to other people.

The fix is that simple. And Facebook has spent billions of dollars making sure you never figure that out.

A landmark study published in PLoS ONE tracked people five times a day for two weeks and found that the more they used Facebook the worse they felt afterward. [5] Every single time. No exceptions based on gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression levels. Just a consistent and reliable pattern. Facebook use made people feel worse.

A longitudinal study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology tracked 5,208 Americans across three years and found that every increase in Facebook activity predicted measurable declines in self-reported mental health, physical health, and life satisfaction. [6]

And then there is the most damning study of all.

Researchers at MIT, Tel Aviv University, and Bocconi University published a paper in the American Economic Review, the most prestigious economics journal in the world, that used Facebook’s own staggered campus by campus rollout between 2004 and 2006 as a natural experiment. This was not a survey. This was not self-reported data. This was a quasi-experimental study with the kind of causal evidence that is extraordinarily rare in social science research. [2]

The finding: the introduction of Facebook at a college caused a 9 percent rise in depression and a 12 percent rise in generalized anxiety disorder among students. [2]

Facebook made students more depressed and more anxious. The evidence is causal. The journal is the American Economic Review. And Facebook has been on your phone this entire time.

Facebook Knew. And They Did It Anyway.

Here is where the story stops being complicated and starts being straightforward.

In 2021 a former Facebook product manager named Frances Haugen left the company carrying thousands of pages of internal documents. She brought them to the Wall Street Journal, to Congress, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. [12] What those documents revealed was not a company that stumbled into causing harm. It was a company that documented the harm in its own internal research, watched its own scientists describe what was happening to its users, and chose to do nothing about it because doing something about it would have cost them growth.

Facebook knew. They had the research and the data. They had their own scientists telling them what was happening and yet they kept going. [12]

Haugen told Congress directly that Facebook consistently chose to maximize its growth rather than implement safeguards on its platform. [1] She told them the company intentionally hid vital information from the public and from its own investors. [1] She described a company that had conducted internal research on the harm it was causing to teenage users and buried it rather than act on it. [1]

Facebook’s own internal research found that the majority of teen girls reported negative social comparison effects from using the platform. [12] Their own scientists documented it and the data confirmed it. Yet Facebook kept the teenage girls on the platform.

When researchers paid 2,743 people to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the 2018 midterm election something remarkable happened. Their wellbeing went up, their offline socializing increased and their political polarization decreased. [3] And even after the experiment ended and they were free to return they used Facebook significantly less than before. [3]

People felt better the moment they stopped. They connected more with the people in their actual lives. They became less politically extreme. And then when given the choice many of them quietly chose to stay away.

The product that was supposed to bring the world closer together made people lonelier, more extreme, and less satisfied with their lives. And the company that built it had the data to prove it and chose profit instead.

What It Did To The Youngest Among Us

It continues to get worse. Facebook knew its platform was harming children.

Internal research conducted by Facebook’s own teams found that the platform was causing measurable psychological harm to teenage users. [12] Their own scientists wrote the reports. Their own data showed the damage. And Facebook continued to design features specifically engineered to maximize the time teenagers spent on the platform.

In October 2023 a bipartisan coalition of 41 state attorneys general plus Washington DC had seen enough. They filed lawsuits against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, alleging that the platform had deliberately designed addictive features targeting children and had profited from the psychological damage those features caused. [10]

New York Attorney General Letitia James stated in her filing that Meta had profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted while lowering their self-esteem. [9]

In October 2024 a federal judge ruled that Meta must face those lawsuits. [11] The case is heading to trial.

Legal observers have compared this moment to the lawsuits of the 1990s against Big Tobacco. [10] A massive and powerful industry that caused widespread harm to the most vulnerable people in society, knew it was causing that harm, documented the harm internally, and continued anyway because the profit was too good to stop.

This is not a fringe matter. This is the legal apparatus of the United States treating Facebook the way it once treated cigarettes.

The Blood On The Algorithm

The damage Facebook caused did not stay inside American borders.

In 2017 the Myanmar military undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Thousands were killed. Women and girls were raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence. Villages were burned. Over 700,000 people were driven from their homes into refugee camps in Bangladesh where most of them remain to this day. [7]

In 2022 Amnesty International published a comprehensive investigation into Facebook’s role in what happened. Their conclusion was clear. Facebook’s algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content that incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya. [7] The platform poured fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increased the risk of mass violence. Amnesty International concluded that Meta substantially contributed to the atrocities. [7]

The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar reached the same conclusion. Facebook played a significant role in spreading the hate that enabled the violence. [8]

What’s worse, Facebook was warned. Activists and researchers raised the alarm repeatedly in the years before 2017. [7] Facebook acknowledged after the fact that it had not done enough. But the company was generating enormous profit from engagement in Myanmar and engagement meant keeping inflammatory content in front of people’s eyes.

The algorithm that keeps you scrolling through your feed is the same algorithm that amplified calls for violence against an ethnic minority until thousands of people were dead. It is not a different system. It is the same logic applied at scale. Maximize engagement. Worry about consequences later or even worse, never.

What It Took From All Of Us

Let’s step back from the studies and the lawsuits for a moment and consider what Facebook actually did to the texture of everyday life over the past two decades.

It took the version of you that used to be fully present at dinner and replaced it with someone who checks their phone between bites.

It took the version of friendship that required actual showing up and replaced it with the performance of friendship. Liking a photo. Commenting on news. Scrolling through a highlight reel and mistaking surveillance for intimacy.

It took the version of political discourse that happened between neighbors and replaced it with an algorithmically curated outrage machine that showed you the most inflammatory version of the other side and called it staying informed.

It took our time. The average American spends over two hours a day on social media. [4] Over the course of a year that is more than 30 days of our life. Thirty days handed to a platform that undermines the user at every turn.

Why Leaving Is The Most Reasonable Thing You Can Do

Most people who stay on Facebook do so out of habit and a vague fear of missing something. But researchers at the University of Pennsylvania already ran this experiment for you. Ten minutes a day for three weeks. Significant reductions in loneliness and depression. [4] The fear of missing something is a feeling Facebook spent years and billions of dollars engineering. It is not real.

The people worth staying connected to have your phone number. The moments worth remembering do not need to be posted to be real. The relationships worth maintaining require something Facebook was never designed to provide: actual presence.

Leaving is not a dramatic gesture. It is not a political statement. It is not something you need to announce. It is simply a quiet decision to reclaim the hours, the attention, and the version of yourself that existed before Facebook.

If real connection in the real world sounds like something worth reclaiming Disconnectd was built for exactly that moment. See you out there at disconnectd.com.

How To Delete Your Facebook Account

Before you delete make sure you download your data first. You may have photos, memories, and messages stored on the platform that you will want to keep.

To download your data: Go to Settings then click Your Facebook Information then click Download Your Information. Select the data you want to save and request the download. Facebook will email you a link when it is ready.

To delete on a computer: Go to facebook.com and log in. Click your profile picture in the top right corner. Select Settings and Privacy then click Settings. In the left hand menu click Your Facebook Information. Click Deactivation and Deletion. Select Delete Account and click Continue to Account Deletion. Click Delete Account and confirm with your password.

To delete on your phone: Open the Facebook app and tap the three horizontal lines. Scroll down and tap Settings and Privacy then tap Settings. Scroll down to Your Facebook Information. Tap Account Ownership and Control then tap Deactivation and Deletion. Select Delete Account then tap Continue to Account Deletion. Confirm with your password.

The 30 day grace period: After confirming your deletion Facebook begins a 30 day countdown. Your account will not be permanently deleted until those 30 days have passed without you logging back in. If you log back in during that period the deletion is cancelled and you start over. After 30 days your account and all associated data are gone permanently.

Thirty days from now it will all be gone. That is not a loss. That is a new beginning.

Sources

[1] Haugen, Frances. Testimony before the United States Senate Commerce Committee. October 5, 2021.

[2] Braghieri, Luca, Ro’ee Levy, and Alexey Makarin. “Social Media and Mental Health.” American Economic Review 112, no. 11 (2022): 3660–93.

[3] Allcott, Hunt, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” American Economic Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 629–76.

[4] Hunt, Melissa G., Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, and Jordyn Young. “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37, no. 10 (2018): 751–68.

[5] Kross, Ethan, et al. “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults.” PLoS ONE 8, no. 8 (2013).

[6] Shakya, Holly B., and Nicholas A. Christakis. “Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study.” American Journal of Epidemiology 185, no. 3 (2017): 203–11.

[7] Amnesty International. The Social Atrocity: Meta and the Right to Remedy for the Rohingya. September 2022.

[8] UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. 2018.

[9] New York Attorney General Letitia James. Attorney General James and Multistate Coalition Sue Meta for Harming Youth. October 24, 2023.

[10] NPR. “States Sue Meta, Claiming Instagram and Facebook Fueled Youth Mental Health Crisis.” October 24, 2023.

[11] Motley Rice. Social Media Harm Lawsuit Updates. October 24, 2024.

[12] The Wall Street Journal. The Facebook Files. September 2021.