Running with the devil

Facebook is very much in the news this week, and it's all bad. In addition to the whistleblower who showed that the company is more than willing to destroy your life for money, alomg comes a five-hour outage that wreaked a fair amount of damage on some businesses, and even on some countries.

Was it a coincidence that both incidents happened at the same time? I don't know. I wouldn't put it past old Facebook to deliberately go down for a while, just to remind everyone, especially the weaklings in government, that Facebook has all the power.

I wish I could get off Facebook entirely, but I can't. A lot, if not most, of the people who come to this blog do so through Facebook links. And I do enjoy seeing old friends and what they are up to. Therefore, until there's some other way to get those benefits, I can't swear it off.

Facebook's cousin Instagram, on the other hand, I can delete. Between the 'Book and Twitter, I have all the social media I can handle, and so I've never really checked into Instagram. So that one, I can just toss. Done.

As for Facebook, although I'm hooked, I'm trying to limit my vulnerability to its worst excesses. And so I'm doing the following:

• I've long since gotten rid of the Facebook app on my devices. I look at Facebook through the Safari browser.
• I do not have or use the Facebook Messenger app. This means I can't see Facebook messages on my phone; I can see them only on my computer, on Facebook in Safari. So far no one has died.
• With the Facebook apps gone, I never use Facebook to sign in for anything. Real passwords are a hassle, but having Mark Zuckerberg going through your underwear drawer is worse.
• I'm going to take Mondays off from Facebook, midnight to mdnight, starting next week. I'll probably lose a bunch of eyeballs on this blog, but maybe I can coax people to come here some other way than through the hideous 'Book.

I probably ought to do a similar assesment of Twitter, but one monster at a time. Plus, Twitter is so hysterically funny if you know whom to follow. I never laughed so much.