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Should you #DeleteFacebook? More importantly: can you?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, turning his back on the camera as we might wish to turn our backs on his network.
Flickr Photo/Alessio Jacona (CC BY 2.0)/flic.kr/p/Du4fYm
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, turning his back on the camera as we might wish to turn our backs on his network.

#DeleteFacebook is trending right now… on Twitter. And that’s part of the problem, says Abby Ohlheiser. She reports on digital culture for the Washington Post, and says that while we wish we could kick our social network habits, the reality is much more complicated than it seems.

“Facebook didn’t get two billion users by not providing anything of value,” she points out. It might be memories of relatives who have passed away. Or it might be its program in some formerly colonized countries, where Facebook is the internet.

Whatever the case, people don’t tend to switch to a rival network. They tend to just quit. Returning to our lives pre-Facebook is perhaps the most complicated part of all.

Year started with KUOW: 1985 – 1986, 1991 – 2004, 2012