Mark Zuckerberg’s media ban prompts Facebook addict to go clean

Mark Zuckerberg’s latest move to ban media pages in Australia has prompted this Facebook addict to give up cold turkey, writes James Morrow.

My name is James, and I am a Facebook addict. And I have been clean now for a good two, maybe three hours.

I first joined the platform back in 2007, and with friends and family around the world it became at its best a sort of rolling 24-hour discussion group and virtual dinner party.

But like a drunk who starts to wonder if the hangovers are worth the high, for some time now I have been wondering if it was giving back anywhere near as much as I was putting in – not just in terms of data family photos and God knows how much personal information, but also time and energy and the danger of developing a relentlessly online personality.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: Kenzo Tribouillard/ AFP

I’ve long worried that far from elevating the discourse, Facebook and the like have been making us stupider.

Anyone who’s gotten into a good sparring match on the site has felt that limbic pleasure of driving a point home – and then wasted hours checking and re-checking for replies, and answering them.

It’s not an accident. That’s exactly what they want us to do.

Facebook has long been implicated in ethically dubious experiments in mass mood manipulation, to say nothing of its efforts to tilt elections.

This was seen perhaps most blatantly when Facebook (as well as Twitter) tried to stop people from reading the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden and his dodgy dealings with foreign governments.

But more than anything about Facebook, for me and I suspect a lot of people, the loss of time it represents has been catastrophic. If your phone gives you a weekly screen time report, it can make for depressing reading indeed.

Major news sites have had their Facebook pages wiped. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty

Instead of reading books, we’re reading headlines, and drawing huge, simple, and wrong conclusions from them.

Instead of playing with our children, we’re commenting on pictures of our friends’ children.

Instead of phoning or video-calling or emailing our nearest and dearest around the world, we’ve liked each others’ photos and called it staying in touch.

And all the while being served up advertising that always feels a little too coincidental to just be the work of black-box algorithms.

What a waste: Like so much else in the internet age, we’ve allowed ourselves to be tricked into thinking we’re being cutting edge and efficient and celebrating our own individuality, when in fact we’ve just been commoditised into drones.

Now that Facebook has effectively stopped itself from being used as a discussion platform of anything vaguely current events related – they even blocked The Betoota Advocate! – I reckon I, and a lot of other people, will have a lot more time to do productive things, with real people.

I’m still on social media, of course. My Facebook page will remain, mostly because I don’t know how to get back all my pictures. And no true junkie can go completely cold turkey.

I’ll still have a scrap on Twitter (though I’m trying not to for Lent), and even though it’s part of the Facebook empire and might conceivably enrich Mark Zuckerberg by a few more pennies, I’ll still share pictures of my puppy on the ‘Gram.

James Morrow is The Daily Telegraph’s Federal Political Editor