The number of active users of Facebook (those people who have logged onto the site in the previous month) has reached a historic high of 2.45 billion. To put this in some context, approximately 32% of the global population now use the social media platform, and the trend line of participation is still going up.
With the exception of Google, there has never been a company that has had this many people using its services. In this context, it may seem strange to talk about those who are choosing to leave Facebook. But those who are leaving the platform represent a small, but by no means insignificant, counter current. And many people, perhaps looking to eke back some time from busy lives, are choosing to quit social media as a new year’s resolution.
In 2018, a US survey revealed that 9% of those surveyed had recently deleted their Facebook account, while a further 35% reported that they were using the social media platform less. Despite its economic success and popularity, there seems to be something going on in the original heartlands of Facebook.
Building on my previous work on behavioural influence, I have been trying to find out more about these so called “Facebook deleters”, to better understand their motivations and the implications of choosing to leave the world’s most powerful social network.
The motivation
In conversations I’ve had with those who have deleted Facebook, it has become evident that people’s motivations for leaving the platform are varied and complex.
My assumption had been that major events, such as the Snowden leaks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and revelations about Mark Zuckerberg’s secret meeting with the US president, Donald Trump, were the key motivations for deleting Facebook accounts. But the Facebook deleters I speak to rarely raise political scandals or concerns over data privacy as their primary motivations for leaving the network.
Indeed, when our conversation turns to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many suggest that this had only confirmed what they had always assumed about how their personal data was being exploited (at least one person had never even heard of Cambridge Analytica).
Many of those who delete Facebook speak of widely recognised reasons for leaving the platform: concerns with its echo chamber effects, avoiding time wasting and procrastination, and the negative psychological effects of perpetual social comparison. But other explanations seem to relate more to what Facebook is becoming and how this evolving technology intersects with personal experiences.

While many people find it difficult to articulate precisely why they joined Facebook (being intrigued or attracted by the site’s novelty, it seems), it is clear that for many the platform has started to play a very different role in their lives. The notion of “oversharing” is discussed as an aspect of what Facebook has turned into, as users find their feeds clogged with information they find gratuitously personal and irrelevant.