Guide to Leaving Facebook

It took me seven years to leave Facebook. I wanted to leave in 2018 but, as administrator of a work account, I had to remain.

While greatly reducing my activity on the site in that time, I saw the steady decline of the platform (what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’). My timeline was filled with advertising, some of it creepy because it was for things I had searched for elsewhere online, most of it completely irrelevant. I was also getting suggestions to follow people I had never heard of. And, I was seeing less and less activity from the people I had ‘friended’ on the site.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg announced there would no longer be comment moderation, I was done. It also didn’t help when Meta, the company that owns Facebook, said it was going to introduce AI users on the platform. Think of it! Do you want to interact with completely fake, AI-generated users? Not me!

I was no longer tied to the site by being a work account administrator and was already in touch with the Facebook ‘friends’ I most wanted to maintain contact with. When I stumbled upon Janet Vertesi’s Opt Out Project Cyber-Cleanse a couple weeks ago through Mastodon, I had the final push I needed to leave permanently, which I did on January 23, 2025. A red letter day, indeed!

The Quick & Painful Way to Leave Facebook

So, how does one leave a social media site you may have been enmeshed in for two decades?

You can quickly leave Facebook by asking for a backup of your data and deleting your account once you have downloaded the backup.

In choosing the quick, painful way to leave, you’re ripping off the bandage. The pain may be intense, but if you keep busy with other things, it should soon subside. If the withdrawal symptoms are too intense and you feel you must return, Facebook gives you 30 days to change your mind before permanently deleting your account. Try to slower, less painful way to leave Facebook below when you are ready to try again.

If you know the pain of leaving will be too great, you can temporarily deactivate your account, instead. Go ahead and use this option, then monitor yourself over the next few weeks to see how often you try to return. If you discover you don’t miss it and are enjoying the extra time you’ve gained by not mindlessly scrolling, jump back on and gleefully delete your account. (It was certainly gleeful for me!)

If you are a quiet quitter of Facebook (see below), you may find that deleting your account quickly is also painless, which is great.

The Somewhat Slower, Less Painful (Maybe Even Fun!) Way to Leave Facebook

Facebook has been designed to mess with our psychology, providing us notifications (those damn little red numbers), easy reactions, and continuous scrolling that trigger our addictive tendencies, as well as lacing our feeds with stories designed to enrage us. And, the platform uses the connection between us and our family and friends to keep us hooked. Of course we want to see what our nearest and dearest are up to!

Facebook also uses guilt to make us stay. With a simple word – ‘unfriend’ – we are kept tethered to the platform. It’s as though by unfriending someone on Facebook, we have kicked them out of our lives for good. That’s what makes leaving so painful.

This emotional blackmail is a bunch of utter hogwash. Mark Zuckerberg is not your mother, so you can safely ignore the guilt trip.

To make leaving less painful, I’m going to dispense with the word ‘unfriend’ here and use ‘disconnect’ instead. You’ll want to disconnect on Facebook in a way that reconnects you with your family and friends elsewhere.

On Day Ten of the Opt Out Project’s Cyber-Cleanse, Leaving Social Media, Janet advises collecting the data you need from your Facebook friends before leaving the platform. This was my instinct 7 years ago, when I first wanted to leave. I went through my friends list and wrote down all the birthdays I wanted to remember.

Go ahead and mine your friends’ data, noting the name of your cousin’s husband or where your niece is attending college or your high school friend’s favorite pizza restaurant. If Facebook can use this data for advertising, surely you can collect a little of it in furtherance of your relationships.

After collecting information from your friends’ accounts, make a backup of your account and download it to your computer.

When you request a backup file, you’ll be given a choice between the easier-to-read HTML format and the easier-to-import JSON format. I’m not sure where, exactly, you’ll be able to import a JSON file, so I chose HTML. Somebody deeper in the weeds of tech probably knows what to do with a JSON file.

Making a backup can take a while. It took a few hours to create a backup for my husband’s account, which is about 20 years old. You can click the ‘X’ on the backup window to close it, just don’t click the ‘Cancel’ button. Once your backup is ready, you’ll get an email letting you know it is available for download.

Be sure to make backups of any pages you administer, as well.

Even though you’ve got a backup, the reality is that you’re not likely to look at it again. I haven’t looked at the backup I made in 2018, when I first wanted to leave, so I’m going to suggest a trip down memory lane while you clean out your Facebook account.

Plan for this process to take several days. It will give you a chance to review what you have shared (which is probably a lot of inconsequential stuff) and say goodbye to the platform.

Scroll through your timeline and take screenshots of posts that are special to you. If a family member left a particularly poignant comment on your timeline that you want to remember, that’s a good candidate for a screenshot you save to your computer. Don’t try to save everything this way … that’s why you have a backup.

Also, download any photos that your friends shared with you that you want to save, or your own photos that you don’t already have in storage. I deleted my photos as I went through this process, which included the posts they were associated with. You won’t be able to delete photos your friends shared with you because they belong to your friends.

What you’re trying to do is empty significant data out of your account before you leave. By stripping your account, you’ll be less tempted to return. You can do the following in any order that makes sense to you.

Delete profile information in your About section (where you live, work, go to school, website, contact info, etc.). Delete profile and header photos you have saved. I kept one profile photo active until my last session on Facebook, then I deleted it before deleting my account.

Remove yourself from any groups you joined. Pay particular attention to groups you administer. I found a family group for which I was the only administrator that had been dormant for years. I had to remove everyone else from the group before I could delete it and leave. Also, delete any pages you operate.

You’re also going to disconnect from your Facebook friends, but not before you gather the info you need to stay connected elsewhere.

It may seem daunting to disconnect from a couple hundred people, but it won’t be as bad as you think. You’ll find inactive people, accounts of people who may have died, acquaintances and other weak ties, like those you met on Facebook who were part of some random group that you have no other relationship to, and those who have quiet quit FB and never post, though their account is still active. You can quickly disconnect from these folks … no guilt required!

For very close connections you are regularly in touch with, let them know off Facebook that you are leaving so they aren’t caught unaware, then disconnect from them. I have heard that posts announcing someone is leaving are not shared widely by Facebook, so don’t bother making a public announcement on your timeline.

Once you’ve gotten through the above groups, you’ll be left with a small number of people you want to maintain contact with, but you have no other means to do so. Reach out to them on Facebook Messenger and share your phone number or email with them.

I spent a couple days doing this and had the best chats with family and friends I haven’t directly talked to in ages. You see, friendship on Facebook is performative. It makes you feel as though you’re having an authentic relationship by commenting on or reacting to someone’s post, but it’s a highly controlled, mediated relationship.

What you’ll find in the process of disconnecting is who you are truly connected to, likely your last 20-25 ‘friends.’ Watch to see who your last connection is before you disconnect and delete your account. (For me, there was no question. It was my husband. 🙂 )

After all the work of leaving Facebook, you deserve a treat, so indulge in your favorite snack or do something fun. Then read Janet’s post, Day Eleven: Get Social Again, on what to with yourself and your relationships after Facebook.

My suggestion is to take your list of close family and friends from Facebook and calendar dates to contact them via text, email, phone, or [gasp!] get together with them in real life. Put them on a regular schedule until you make a habit of staying in touch.

If You Can’t Leave Facebook Yet

If you can’t leave because Facebook is your only connection to international relatives and friends, you’re the admin of your workplace account, it’s important to your business, or there are specific groups you are active in that can’t be found elsewhere, it’s time to employ a couple of strategies suggested by Janet of the Opt Out Project: Balkanization and Rendering to Caesar.

These are explained on Day Three of the Cyber-Cleanse. Balkanization is spreading your information across different tech services so that no one service has everything. Rendering to Caesar is using a tech service, like Facebook, for one thing only and keeping it at that so the rest of your data stays private. If you need to remain on Facebook for your business, then don’t share personal posts or information there. It’s an excellent strategy, and I recommend reading Janet’s post for more information.

Quiet Quitting Facebook

A word about quiet quitting Facebook, which is leaving your account active even though you never visit the site. This allows Meta to continue using your data and claiming to have more users than it actually does.

Don’t do it. Just, don’t.

Either deactivate your account if you intend to return someday, or leave completely. And, pat yourself on the back! You have managed what is troublesome for so many. You’ve resisted Facebook’s siren song.