Stephen Rees's blog

I clicked on that blue button on the bottom left of that screenshot. Nothing happened. I did not get any kind of confirmation. What is supposed to happen – according to Facebook is “Enter your password, click Continue and then click Delete Account.” but I didn’t get to that page where I can do that.

This blog started to get neglected as Twitter and Facebook began to get much more attention. But I increasingly got more concerned about the direction that Facebook was taking. Not the people I was following or the ones who followed me (and those were easy enough to quietly ignore when necessary). More disconcerting was the attitude of Mark Zuckerberg as described in this Mother Jones article.

I did contact Facebook help and, of course, I didn’t get any.

So I have now removed the Social Media widgets from the right hand column, and I have also deleted Facebook, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) and Messenger from all my devices. When you are on a “service” which is “free”, you are the product. So simply saying you are not going to patronize the advertisers doesn’t actually change anything. Facebook still gets revenue for serving you the ad. Only by leaving Facebook can you change anything – but the first thing is that you will not any longer be going down that rabbit hole. If you miss the people you used to enjoy seeing posts from, there are other ways that you can contact them. And all the rest was fluff anyway.

UPDATE June 16

I am pleased to report that I have found a solution. I had installed a Facebook app called “Fluff Busting Purity” which ran as an extension on Chrome. Simply removing that enabled me to get to the account deletion. But then I discovered that the password – as recorded by Chrome – did not work. So I changed the password then deleted. I now have 30 days before the account finally disappears.