Donald Trump is the reason I left Facebook after more than 10 years
And I want to say thank you.
Here’s a little personal story about the reason I ended up leaving Facebook after more than 10 years. I actually really loved Facebook back in the day. Being a bit of a nomad, having the ability to find and connect with long lost friends and new friends alike, internationally on a platform like Facebook, was great. I was an avid photographer, especially during the Facebook era, as it provided a platform where I could upload tens of thousands of photos to share with all my friends around the world. An album a day kept the doctor away! That has new meaning for me now.
I would post photos like this. Water. And sky. What could be more beautiful?
I would use it to find stuff like a new-old bike to buy, and the groups were amazing. You could always find a group of people on Facebook to share whatever it was you wanted to share and feel heard. I would also use it for connecting with people from way back in the day - like high school. It was fun and useful.
One morning, in the early days of the Co[n]vid era, I found myself opening up my laptop as always, coffee on the side, and chipper to read about the ‘current events’ that ensued while I was sleeping. I remember this morning very well. I was sitting on my cushion on the floor (I don’t own furniture) in front of my home-made ‘desk’ made from recycled bed scraps, and started to scroll having opened up Facebook. Then I saw one of many posts about Donald Trump.
Back then, I was one of those people who saw Trump as the ‘orange man’ or some other derogatory sling. I, like so many others nowadays, had a visceral reaction to seeing or hearing about this man. I thought he was boarish with funny hair, disrespectful to women and overall, not someone I would ever be interested in speaking to.
But here’s the thing…
Looking at this post about Trump - and it was just a “normal” post about him (whatever that means) - I remember vividly, all of a sudden it was as if I could see myself looking at the post, that random Facebook post about Trump, and I was seeing someone raging out. Raging out at 6 am in the morning at a screen. A screen with some pixels on it that my brain translated from my eyes to my voice as something to get enraged about. My cortisol went up, as did my blood pressure, and this did what you would think it would do to my stress levels. This was routine. Every morning was like this.
And then, for some reason on that morning, it was like another level of awareness kicked in and I saw myself seeing myself rage out at this screen. And I was horrified.
I realized in that moment that I had been programmed by the ‘advertising power’ of Facebook. I had had no idea. I had been kind of brainwashed - for lack of a better word - to “hate Trump”: a man I had never met, never spoken to, never made eye-contact with, and pretty much knew nothing about. Regardless of my created ‘feelings’ toward this man I had never met, it was the effect on me that really bothered me. I found myself asking questions like: Was I so ‘influenceable’? How was it possible that I was so ‘simply’ ‘made’ to have such a negative and visceral response to an image on a screen? I decided to do something about this because - now aware that I had been under some kind of social media/propaganda spell - I could un-bind myself from it.
I don’t know why I was able to reflect in such an important way on that particular morning. It was pretty much a life-changing day for me and I still don’t know why it was that day that I was able to see myself in this way.
After this day, I started to ask myself even more questions - the questions that I came to realize through self-reflection that I should have been asking myself - Why were those posts about Trump there in the first place? Why were there so many ad hominen interjections? Was there an intention to polarize people against him using social media as a tool? If I could be swayed so easily, why wouldn’t it happen to others? How many others are still caught in the polarization trap? Is Facebook being used as a political weapon?
I had to start asking myself these questions because of my own experience, regardless of how I felt personally about Trump. But having said that, I did start to ask myself important questions about Trump himself. If he is just an orange baboon as portrayed on many social media posts, then why would he need to be discredited? Wouldn’t a baboon simply retreat back to the forest - a threat to no political agenda? Maybe the things being said about him on social and legacy media weren’t true? Or horror of horrors, maybe they were completely false!
It is safe to say that the events of that morning were not insignificant in my own journey to self-awareness. I actually saw Trump at a recent CPAC event in DC and he was quite funny. The people came in droves to hear him speak and all I heard as per feedback was how funny he was. A sense of humor is very important to me, personally. I think humor is the highest form of intelligence. And for someone to maintain a sense of humor in light of what he must know as a privileged individual having held the title of United States President, is no small feat. I have come to think of Trump as someone I would really like to have a conversation with, and having said this, I would also guess that he has grown and become more self-aware in the past few years as well.
Getting back to the life-changing day story, that day I decided - with regrets I might add - to delete my Facebook account. With all the control, division, diversion and conversion experiments ongoing on social media platforms including Facebook, combined with the fact that these same platforms were deleting many groups that had formed organically, (deleted simply because they violated the ‘terms and conditions’ that were subsequently based on some false sanctioned narratives), I couldn’t justify staying on board.
I miss Facebook - the old Facebook, that is. It was a nice idea. It got corrupted, which is a shame. Backdoor shenanigans and bitch-slapping CEOs is the way to go these days it seems, and many don’t have the moral character or vision to say “No, thank you, backdoor man”. Whatever the reasons a prominent leader in the social media platform community may provide for censoring public voices, it’s not good enough. Censorship is bad. It’s the precursor to totalitarianism. And if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t be in that role of prominent leader.
So I would like to say a heart-felt Thank You to Donald Trump. You didn’t do anything specifically to engage my own self-awareness journey, but you did do something generally. It’s funny isn’t it? His existence, and the narrative created about who he is prompted a huge change in my own awareness journey. My critical thinking skills and my open-mindedness to what I might have thought were mere remote possibilities have all amplified. And this extends to the science realm of my brain. It’s very useful, and not only that, I don’t rage out at screens like I did before. That wasn’t good for me. And it’s probably not good for all those people who are where I was.
Dem poor followers. Pun intended.
So thank you Trump. Maybe when you and Robert Kennedy start putting things in order you can appoint me CDC director. I would say yes, and I could have that conversation with you. I would be interested to hear more about your journey in the past 4 years and also to tell you what I have learned. I have a lot to tell you.
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