In a Quandary: Is Getting Rid of Facebook Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater?

Should I delete Facebook?

Every day now, I'm seeing friends and family saying they're leaving the platform. 

I don't blame them.

Facebook's latest outrages include getting rid of factchecking and no recourse for users calling other users "mentally ill" if they're LGBTQ+. Hey, I might be "mentally ill" but don't you dare say it's because of who I love.

My son is leaving and I can't blame him.

But here's the difference between him and me--he's never been much of a user of the platform. He rarely visits and even more rarely posts anything. He essentially has little to no skin in the game. It's gotta be easy for him to walk away.

For me, it's different. Facebook has been, for better or worse, an integral part of both my professional and personal daily life for something like 15 years. I have nearly 5,000 friends and over 3,000 followers on my author page.

Professionally, it has been and continues to be a real boon to getting the word out about my books. I've built up a receptive audience over the years, both with my page(s) and with the numerous LGBTQ+ reading and writing groups I'm a part of. When I post about a book, I often immediately see a jump in sales. I can't get that response anywhere else (other than the also morally questionable X, where I've built up more than 36,000 followers). For a small press author like myself, exposure is hard to come by. For those of us without marquee names and a professional marketing team behind us, social media has been a godsend in getting our work seen. So, while I object to Facebook's latest moves toward supporting cringe-worthy right-wing policies, I wonder: is it cutting off my nose to spite my face to just leave and lose all I've built up over the last 15 years? I don't know. What do you think?

Personally, leaving Facebook would mean leaving behind many valuable friends and family connections. Facebook, for all its faults, has been a real boon to keeping in touch with people who, in a time before social media, would have fallen by the wayside. I value those connections. I treasure seeing what so many family members, friends (especially out-of-town), and previous classmates and coworkers are doing. Nothing, not texting or email, is as a robust and efficient delivery system for staying connected as Facebook (and yes, I'm on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/rickrreed.bsky.social which is great, but it doesn't allow the same kind of connection as Facebook, nor does it have groups that have become so useful). So what do I do with these connections? Toss them to the side? Yes, there's good reason to do so.

There's a Golden Girls episode where Dorothy befriends a local author. When she finds out the author belongs to an exclusive country club (meaning they exclude Jews), she's outraged and tells her new friend so. Her friend tries to defend her membership, saying, "I don't make the rules." Dorothy comes back with, "No but you tolerate them." She tells her snooty and bigoted friend to "Go to hell" and tosses her out the door.

Dorothy was right. I'd like to be like Dorothy. I just don't know if I can throw away so much value in terms of connection and professional promotion in the name of righteousness and making myself feel better.

Where does one draw the line? I'd love to hear your thoughts, as long as they're respectful. I'm also wondering if, by staying, we can fight these unfair and bigoted policies, resisting them and standing up for what we know to be right.