After the Break-Up: That lying, cheating bastard was worse than I knew

Well, well, well. I devoted almost a dozen years of my life, time I will never get back, before I found the will to walk away. It has been just more than a year since the big break-up, and now I am discovering the relationship was even more devious and toxic than I ever suspected.

I found a true friend in Frances Haugen, the equivalent to the pal who reveals the dark, dangerous underbelly beneath the iceberg’s tip, finally telling you the whole truth about exactly what a lying, cheating bastard your ex really was. She is courageously illuminating what I refused to see much sooner: Those abusive, faithless acts were going on way before I knew about them, long before I summoned up the courage to break-up with Facebook.

Profits over people, indeed. From the Washington Post: “Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience. The power of the algorithmic promotion undermined the efforts of Facebook’s content moderators and integrity teams, who were fighting an uphill battle against toxic and harmful content.”

This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t, as a lying, cheating bastard might claim, “Just a one-night stand! I swear, it didn’t mean a thing.” For years, partly by weighting and tracking “angry” reaction emojis, Facebook’s algorithms made sure that the content most likely to piss people off was maximized, moving it higher on folks’ feeds so it was seen, and shared, by more users. They did it because it boosted “engagement,” and therefore ad revenue. The result? According to the WP article, “The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity, and low-quality news.” (If you ask me, “low-quality” is an insult to the term “low-quality.”)

The red flags that alarmed Facebook employees waved wildly were largely ignored by a CEO blinded by his designer rose-colored glasses. The employees’ warning cries apparently were drowned out by an irresistible, sirenic sound that was impossible for Mark Zuckerberg to ignore… ca-ching, ca-ching! More misinformation, disinformation (or, in other words, deliberate lies) means more engagement! Tally up the profits, Zuckerberg! You’re already a billionaire, but hey, you can’t be too thin or too rich, right? If authoritarianism thrives and democracy deteriorates, you’ll be OK. Buy an island or a planet and move there as the rest of us watch as democracy is dismantled with a huge assist from the company that made you obscenely wealthy — by making its consumers the product. Worse? Most of the people who made you rich have become unwitting collaborators in your evil scheme. Others participated eagerly as you looked the other way to count the coin.

In Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment, the book I co-authored with my late husband, Jamie, we define manipulation as “trying to get someone to do or think something you want them to without revealing your underlying intentions.” We list manipulative conversation techniques, several of which could have constituted Facebook’s playbook:

· Appealing to an underlying emotion (fear, guilt, desire, etc.)

· Creating fictions, lying

· Denying or avoiding difficult truths

· Disguising agendas

· Overstating or understating threats

· Providing a partial picture of reality

· Offering calculated prescriptions

The book, and our work, was centered on changing conversations in ways that would expose and eliminate manipulation, encourage people to tell the truth with goodwill, and bolster trust in organizations and the people who work in them. It’s an incredibly difficult endeavor. Our culture doesn’t support transparency or truth-telling. It promotes deflection and blame instead of owning our own contributions to the problem. We have been steeped in a culture that reinforces and rewards manipulation. We think it’s the way to get ahead, to score, to WIN!

Let’s face it — an authentic conversation on social media is as rare as an unflattering selfie. Facebook, along with other platforms, has turned manipulation, in every sense of the word, into a high-tech global art form.

So, let me own my contributions: Before the break-up, I used that “angry” icon plenty, (although I had no idea that Facebook would weight that and put the content before more eyeballs.) I wrote long responses to friends’ posts deconstructing arguments and defending my own positions. Occasionally, I threw a turd into the punch bowl by posting reductive, inflammatory memes because hey, don’t you have a sense of humor? Standing upright on my journalist credentials, I made it my mission to alert my friends — publicly — when they posted something inaccurate or inflammatory. Not a lot of goodwill in that, but who doesn’t love a righteous scold? For too long, I defended Facebook even when I suspected it was harmful and dangerous, because I put my desires before “the good of the whole,” a violation of one of my core values.

As I wrote about in my Facebook break-up article last year: “In spite of my commitment to live an intentional life, I often find myself behaving on social media in ways that don’t align with who I want to be in the world.” That was part of the reason I left.

But the main reason I broke up with Facebook was that I no longer wanted to be aligned with something unscrupulous and dangerous. I deleted my account, a bit reluctantly, in September 2020 after reading Jaron Lanier’s 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Among the most compelling of Lanier’s arguments is that social media, particularly Facebook, is bending the arc of history not toward justice, but toward authoritarianism. And now I am getting validation that the danger was much greater than I realized, although vindication brings me no pleasure.

I loved Facebook, and deleting my account was really hard. I still have those “drunk-and-dial moments” where a hook-up seems like not-a-horrible idea. Even though I know the relationship is bad for me (and everyone, actually), I miss — so much — knowing what’s going on in the lives of people I care about. What if I re-opened an account and curated it more carefully? But that’s the thing: You don’t get to curate. Facebook does. We are little more than lab rats in Facebook’s worldwide laboratory of mad scientists.

In the end, I’ve been able to resist the temptation to go back because, as much as I miss my peeps, my desire not to be any part of Facebook’s evil-doing outweighs everything else.

Comparing my break-up with Facebook to an abusive relationship might be over the top, but I can’t deny the parallels being illuminated by news coverage based on the social media company’s internal documents released by Haugen. I tried to separate several times, for example, only to return to a relationship I knew wasn’t good for me. For too long, I refused to see the manipulation for what it was. The lies. I chose to believe Facebook’s defending of the manipulation and lies. I was willing to turn away from bad behavior, even to defend it, because it felt so good when it wasn’t so bad. And while Facebook has promised to change — I see the ads and tepid quotes from spokespeople almost every day — sorry, I am not buying it.

My essay last year was titled “Farewell, Facebook, with regret and relief.” Since the break-up, I’ve found great relief, including restored sanity and peace. I’ve focused on maintaining deeper, richer relationships with fewer people, and looked for ways to keep my connections alive. I’ve lost a little, and gained a lot.

And the regret? Well, that’s gone. It’s been replaced by fresh outrage over the latest information about the actions of my ex, that lying, cheating bastard.

Weight that, Facebook.