You have heard the general idea floating around that Facebook is bad. And it can be hard to think that if you are just looking at people’s baby pictures. I was a very early user of Facebook, way back when you had to have an academic email to get access to it because it was for university students. And I liked it.

But at some point, you just can’t ignore the bad parts anymore. And we’ve gone well past the point that the bad parts are taking over the good parts for us.

Did you read or listen to the Wall Street Journal’s investigation of Facebook? It’s pretty chilling. Here are some of the different parts to the story they wrote:

• Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt
• Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
• Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.
• Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show.
• How Facebook Hobbled Mark Zuckerberg’s Bid to Get America Vaccinated
• Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show
• Facebook Says AI Will Clean Up the Platform. Its Own Engineers Have Doubts.
• Facebook Increasingly Suppresses Political Movements It Deems Dangerous
• Facebook Services Are Used to Spread Religious Hatred in India, Internal Documents Show
• Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making
• Is Facebook Bad for You? It Is for About 360 Million Users, Company Surveys Suggest
• Facebook Allows Stolen Content to Flourish, Its Researchers Warned

We hear about being controlled by algorithms, and it’s hard to believe it in ourselves. I know I’ve really struggled with this. It’s so easy to be led into believing that THOSE PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM AND BAD – whoever “those people” might be in the moment.

I like to think of myself as someone who is reasonably intelligent and reasonably good at making good decisions. But the nifty device I wear on my wrist really made me stop and think about how I was reacting to the algorithms in my assorted social media accounts. I’m usually a person with pretty low blood pressure; and, for assorted nature/nurture reasons, I work at being pretty mellow most of the time. I’m usually pretty successful. So when I noticed I was really losing my cool fairly often, noticed my blood pressure rates were starting to climb, and noticed my Garmin was beeping at me to tell me I needed to stop and to take a few minutes to do a deep breathing routine to chill out – I paid attention. And once I had that neutral information to tell me how far off the path of calm and reasonable I had become, I started taking a harder look at my behavior.

Because in the end, it’s only me that I genuinely influence to behave better – so I should work to make myself the version of good behavior I think is important. When I started doing this, I was pretty shocked by myself. It was so very easy to just fling myself down the path of “THOSE PEOPLE ARE HORRIBLE AND WRONG” – forgetting the most basic thing about people.

We’re all the same.

We all want the same stuff. We all want to be sure we have food, water, shelter. We all want to have jobs that are reasonably interesting. We want our families and friends to be happy. We want safety in life, with the flexibility to try new things. We want library books! (That’s not just me, I’m sure of it.)

Nobody wants to be lied to. Nobody wants to be deceived, manipulated, taken advantage of.

It’s easier to just deny there is a problem than to admit: I should not have listened to that person. I should not have followed that account. I should not have commented on that video.

And it looks like the world is falling apart around us. We have armed people invading our government offices on live TV, apparently trying to overthrow an election. We have people encouraging others in clearly, obviously dangerous behavior during a global pandemic. We even have lunatics screaming for librarians to be fired – even jailed – for putting books on the shelves.

These are all bad things. And there are a lot of other bad things out there, on a global scale, on a national level, and in your own home.

There are. No denying that.

And yet. There is more to life.

Objectively, this is the safest, best, most prosperous time in our history. Not “our” just this state or this country – that’s small-minded. But the history of the human race. All of us.

More kids are surviving past their fifth birthdays than ever before. Global numbers of people in abject poverty are decreasing. More people are stepping up to say the old ways of doing things that didn’t include everyone, didn’t take into account the future health and safety of us all, and deliberately cut us into “haves” and “have-nots” are bad. And we are changing them.

Does anyone else remember watching the TV show that launched Pierce Brosnan’s career? It was Remington Steele, and I was crazy about it when I was a kid. The story is that Laura Holt was a PI, but nobody wanted to hire a woman, because only men could do this. So she finds this pretty boy to pretend to be her boss, and suddenly everyone wants to hire the company – with her doing all the work that is now credited to the fictional Remington Steele.

This wasn’t some fuzzy-focused show from an idealized version of the 1950s, this started in 1982. At the time, I thought it was great. I thought it was a show about a cool, tough, interesting woman who – unlike almost every other woman in TV and movies – ran her own business and did good things. I was into that kind of thing. Heck, my dad bought me a shirt to proudly wear that said “A woman’s place is in the House. And the Senate.” I totally missed the point: a smart, talented woman was being shafted by society and some very stupid expectations.

But – would that concept be on TV today??? Would the youth of today even understand the problem with a woman running a business??? Of course not. We are better. We have improved as a society.

This is one teeny example. There are so many more.

Seeing some chaos is good. Bad things have always been around – pretending that’s not the case and keeping things hidden for “the good of the public” or whatever other pitiful excuse the powerful people want to trot out, that’s wrong. And the time for that is over. Great!

We know now about a lot of bad things that were always there, but that doesn’t mean there are more bad things. It means we are better informed. We can make better choices. We can look at these prior bad things and we can decide we are a better society than that.

But the kind of chaos Facebook is stirring is way, way beyond that. Encouraging terrorism. Encouraging white supremacy. Encouraging sex trafficking. Encouraging negative person self-images. On a global and on a person level – they are bringing chaos to our lives. And that is unacceptable. It is unacceptable to continue to participate in this.

Most people are good people. We all want the same things. On some level, we may not be able to fully move past our evolutionary nature of tribalism and being instinctively afraid of new things.

But we can all take a step back. When you feel yourself being tugged down that road of MAD! BAD! GET ANGRY! BE AFRAID! – take a moment. Breathe. Watch a puppy. Water your plants. Don’t follow the algorithm down that road. Make an affirmative choice to reject these pointless divisions.

Remember that Facebook gets paid the more you interact with their stuff. And the best way, the absolutely easiest way, to keep us interacting is to make us feel angry and afraid. We are designed to feel afraid – but we can do better.

This is what they get paid for making our society worse, for making us worse individuals: “Published by Statista Research Department, Nov 1, 2021 In the third quarter of 2021, Facebook’s net income amounted to almost 9.2 billion U.S. dollars. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Facebook net income increased by 43 percent from the previous quarter, reaching the record-high amount for the evaluated period of 11.2 billion U.S. dollars. Facebook’s most recent annual net income amounted to 29.14 billion U.S. dollars.”

And what did we get for selling ourselves to this company? Bad information about vaccine safety during an incredibly dangerous time. Terrorists rampaging. Sex traffickers, arms dealers, drug dealers – all given a nice, easy way to do horrible things. And individually, probably most of us felt a little worse, a little dirtier, and a little angrier.

So, we’re done with this.

We have shut down our Facebook page, and won’t be participating on other people’s pages. I shut down my personal accounts years ago, and I’m even happier about that decision today.

Does this really do anything? Do we change the world with this?

Nope.

But that’s not really the point.

When you see a cesspool of filth covering the road in front of you, one possible solution is to just shrug and dive in – assuming the only way to get to your destination is to cover yourself in crap.

We’re taking a different approach.

In the end, we all know that Facebook is a bad place that does bad things. Sure, not all of it. Not a lot of the people who use it. But at some point you can’t separate out the bad outcomes from the everyday actions.

And we are choosing not to participate in these bad outcomes anymore. It feels good to avoid this problem. There are plenty of other problems in the world; this was an easy to choice to avoid.

Do what you can this week to make the world around you a more positive place. When you can – choose kindness and understanding of other people.