How I deleted myself from Facebook forever (and why it felt great)

For years, Facebook directed disgruntled users to a page where you could “deactivate” your account - leaving it dormant until the moment you decided you rather missed those “Keep Calm” posters in pidgin English which people with low IQs find hilarious.

This week, I went a step further. I deleted myself - or one of my selves. I am not alone. Twenty thousand site users are currently giving up Facebook for 99 days to see what effect leaving the world of “Likes” and “Shares” has on them.

They might come back - they’re just deactivated. I can’t. I am gone. So far, I don’t feel bereaved. At most, I feel like one might if, say, Channel 5 suddenly vanished.

 I tend to use the app as a hamster wheel when I have a minute to myself - a cascade of ‘content’ which bears little relation to the Facebook I first joined. I no longer have conversatons on the site - or post on Walls. I miss Pokes - and SuperPokes. I miss my friends.

                                      [Twitter 'set to soar']

Social, to me, is about people. For me, the news stories, the photographs, and the endless adverts for baldness cures (I’m 40 and male, and refuse to “Like” anything, so baldness is the best they can do advert-wise) don’t even remind me of people.

Leaving Facebook isn’t like being barred from a pub. The old friends, relatives, colleagues and hangers-on who I listlessly exchange Likes with feel like the cast of a soap opera - not people I know. We barely talk. We “Like”. Previous research from the University of Michigan showed that heavy site users had lower levels of satisfaction with life - and the head of the 99 Project has a theory on this.

Facebook is a gigantic advert we are trapped inside.

The site's relentless prodding to be happy, to Like, to Friend, to Share, makes people create a “false identity” to fit in with a world as sugary and artificial as Coca Cola- and the stress of this makes us feel like failures. Previous University of Michigan research found that heavy site use lowered people’s satisfaction with life. I know that my (departed) Facebook self is a fiction. He listens to cooler music than I do. He never listens to the Frozen soundtrack (I put on Incognito mode to sound cool).

For some, this fiction is clearly more attractive than reality.

“I have had emails from all around the world - and they are all positive about the idea,” says Dutch Merijn Straathof,  “People tell me, “II use for Facebook for hours a day and I don’t know if I can quit.” People couldn’t imagine this world we live in now, where we look at this site all day. The step of leaving it is too big for people. That’s why we came up with 99 days.”

The project was a reaction to Facebook’s “experiment” on its users by altering News Feeds with happier or sadder articles to gauge their effect. But while the “99 days” project started as “a joke”, says Merijn Straathof, he found himself receiving emails from around the world. Scientists from Cornell and Leiden universities will test the volunteers with standard psychological questionnaires every 33 days.

“Does Facebook make you happy?” asks Straathof. “Happiness is the bread and butter of advertising, and I work in adverts. But this is staged happiness. Users are creating this persona, and they realise that other people are doing it. It’s not 100% reality. All those amazing things in your friends feeds - it’s narcissistic. People are just trying to be popular. No one ever posts, “I’m feeling sad.” The only possible response is positive - sharing positive things.”

Now Facebook lets you kill yourself - or your Facebook self - for good. It’s a process a little like arming a nuclear weapon (a lot of “are you sures?”), then you have two weeks to think, then you’re dead, forever. Photos gone. Comments gone. Your apps gone - even that lovingly tended Farmville smallholding.

I don’t feel unhappy. In fact, I miss practically nothing. When I grew up, I thought it was insane to live in a world with adverts printed on eggs - now adverts personalised to my thinning scalp leap out at me, and want me to “Like” them.

Can any social network make us happy, though? In a non-scientific experiment, I started my own, Pure Misery, and invited my closest friends to enjoy posts such as an experimental-music tribute to the battle of Stalingrad which probably sounded worse than the real thing.. One friend accepted, and never came back.

Other networks smile even harder than Facebook - and the posts are so vacuous it feels like a vox-pop in Hell.

Happier - built only for “Happy” posts - is “a beautiful way to collect and share happy moments you find in everyday life Brighten up someone’s day by smiling at their happy moments and get ideas for what to do to be happier!”

 “Almost missed the bus this morning. Almost! But I caught it!” says one user. Happier is filled with the sort of posts people used to lampoon Facebook for - breakfast menus - but which now seem charming.

“Woke up this morning feeling well rested after a good night's sleep,” chirps one user. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with Happier users - but even a post about having a croissant elicits dozens of comments, from real people.

Facebook’s problem, perhaps, is that this is automated - increasingly with each passing month. Watches record and post “personal bests” at running. Spotify shares what people are listening to. Product, product, product.

A page with instructions on how to permanently delete your account is available here (note: you have to be logged in to Facebook to read these instructions, and following them will send a deletion request for that account). Once done, you have 14 days in which you can log back in and cancel the request, but after that point, there is no way to restore the data, and (crucially) people will not be able to search for or see your profile or any content you have shared on Facebook.


“it feels like adverts from years ago. Coca Cola is a brand that’s about happiness - and years ago, those adverts were people smiling, enjoying Coca Cola. Now adverts are more sophisticated," says Straathof. "Is there a recipe for digital happiness? I don't know."