I finally quit meta
TLDR: I deleted my Facebook and Instagram for good. Not because they weren't working (they barely were — £200 in referrals this year vs £800 last), but because Meta's new terms would've let them scrape my website and feed my life's work into their AI. I'd rather lose the reach than hand over the work.
Here's where to find me now:
I did it. I finally hit delete on my Facebook and Instagram accounts.
I remember when I first got a Facebook page — back in college, when Facebook was still a college thing (am I showing my age?). It solved a real need at the time. I was a student in Canada with family back in the UK, and the internet wasn't what it is now. I had either family group emails to update everyone, or expensive international phone calls to make. This new thing showed up and let me stay in touch with family, share photos and experiences. It felt great.
Many years on, it doesn't feel so great. Now I can't even see what's going on with my family for all the suggested posts and adverts. And I get that old adage — the one I've spoken many times myself — that if the service you're using is free, then you're the product. That has become increasingly clear.
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking — and honestly, it's what I've been thinking myself. I was perfectly happy with this trade for twenty years. I knew, or should have known, that I was the product. So what's changed? Am I being a hypocrite, only objecting now that it's gone too far?
I've turned this over a lot, and here's where I've landed. For years the deal was that I paid with my attention and my data, and what they sold on was that attention — to other people's adverts. It was an unfair trade, but it was a trade with a rough symmetry. My work wasn't the raw material; I was just the field being farmed.
What's changed is that they've started taking the harvest. They don't just want my attention anymore — they want the paintings, the words, the life's work I've pulled out of myself at 2am. They've taken the thing that makes me me and fed it into a machine that can now be sold back to my own audience. That's not more of the same. That's a different kind of taking entirely.
What's also become crystal clear is that, with the arrival of AI, the makings of all human creators are considered fair game when it comes to training generative AI machines. I wouldn't have an issue with that if a fair licensing model were put in place — one where creatives were actually paid for their work. But sadly I don't appear to live in that timeline (yet).
As many of you know, earlier this year I stepped away from social media — Facebook and Instagram — to see if it would affect my business. It didn't. Last year, social media referrals to my site earned me £800. This year to date, they've earned me £200.
£600 only just covers one month of my mortgage. It was clear to me, in that little experiment, that I didn't need to chase the algorithm. And conversations with peers who did chase it told me they weren't any better off either — the hurdles just got higher and the payouts lower. One friend was required to post every twenty minutes just to maintain her good standing and monetised status on Facebook.
I didn't miss the addictive nature of the apps, either — the thing recent high-profile legal cases have shown they were deliberately designed to be. I didn't miss opening the app, becoming immediately distracted, tumbling down a scrolling session, and surfacing some time later wondering why on earth my phone was in my hand and what I was even doing there.
But recently I went back. I wanted to see whether, after such a long break, if I started posting again — at my own pace, with absolutely no adherence to the algorithm — traffic might start flowing to my website again. It didn't. And the addictive thing just sank its claws back into me.
Then, while I was in the Business Manager side of my Meta profile, I noticed a notification bar: new terms and conditions were coming into effect on 30 October, and my continued use of these apps as a business would count as agreement to them. These new terms would let Meta access not just all the data posted to my accounts, but any website I'd linked to Meta — including my own — and use that data to train their AI.
Read the article here for context: https://www.unite.ai/meta-rewrites-web-crawling-clause-in-pending-commercial-terms/
I'll note that Meta have since quietly deleted that one term, because everyone started kicking up a fuss about it. But it stuck in my craw regardless.
To cut a long and frustrating story short, I'll get to the point.
What I want…
Is to share my art with you — my successes, my creations, my mistakes and mishaps perhaps, the occasional antics with my animals, my big hairy audacious dreams (read: horse). To share other fellow creatives who inspire me. To talk about my journey as a creative, and what it's all like behind the scenes.
What I don't want…
Is to mindlessly post reels, film myself painting, plan carousel posts and inane "viral-worthy" content, all in the hope that my following might, one day, actually see my work.
I can guarantee you that none of us creatives want this. We want to be doing our thing — whittling away at our craft into the wee hours of the morning, then emerging hours or days later like some feral thing from the wild, saying look — look what I've made! I made a thing! It consumed me for days, it filled me with inspiration, and now I've brought it into this world.
I also don't want to make a thing, struggle to make a living at it, and then find that a vast global billionaire broligarchy has inhaled my life's work so other people can generate art, memes, or worse — false news and propaganda — and then have that same company tell me I have to pay to have a link on my page. Pay to post. Pay to be verified. Pay, pay, pay.
So I deleted them.
I even deleted my personal Facebook page. Twenty-plus years of memories, of interactions, of silly memes shared — gone. I deleted the whole lot.
This is what they hold over us: this sense that by saying no, by taking back control, we lose something. That we lose our families, our friends, our connections. But I can say, assuredly, that I have lost nothing. I have only taken back control.
This isn't a post begging you to do the same — you can do as you please. I often wish I wasn't a creative, so I could use these platforms as a consumer and keep watching silly cat videos, or glorious videos of dolphins filmed underwater. But at some point these things start to stink, and at some point the injustices have to be stopped.
I hope that in my lifetime as a creative we'll see justice served. That we'll see compensation sent to every artist whose artwork, music and words were used to train these machines. But for now, I do what I can with the tools I have that don't infringe on my rights as a creative.
Where you can find me on the internet:
Here — my website. This is my domain, literally. It continues to be the place where I love to create and curate.
My newsletter — where I share updates on what's going on.
Bluesky (like Twitter used to be)
YouTube (ish)
