My Facebook account is now reduced to a groupie boosting Like-counts on my wife’s posts, but even this strange marital responsibility and my occasional anti-anti-China taunts are becoming less effective motivators for me to log into the social network.
I can’t deactivate the account outright because I know that there will be that one need for Facebook when it is least expected — like, an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, and the only way to secure a passage to Mars is with a Facebook login. So I leave the account active but slowly undo the Timeline. The concept is simple: I ruthlessly eliminate old posts that have lost their appeal until only the bare minimum is left.
But recently when a post is deleted, Facebook moves it into a recycle bin. And for it to be gone completely, there is a hurdle of manually emptying the bin. I suspect that Facebook does this in order to retain the precious user creations that underpin its business model. Or perhaps users asked for a way to recover deleted posts. Regardless of their justification, Facebook is malign enough for me to remain sceptical.