Should We Hard Delete Facebook?

“Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works. There are certain rules that govern it and we have to make it our priority to understand the rules, or we cannot control it.”

This quote is from Kevin Systrom, one of the co-founders of Instagram who was interviewed by The New York Times for a story published on Sept. 27.

You see, Systrom and his Instagram co-founding partner abruptly-ish quit the mothership Facebook late last month. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and the Instagram co-founders, according to reports, were fed up with Facebook’s leader Mark Zuckerberg.

Oh, and by the way, just a couple of days after they left, Facebook announced that the social media giant had been hacked. Not just hacked; I’d say more like pillaged.

According to initial statements by Facebook about the hack, they’re estimating nearly 50 million user accounts were compromised. And, if we’ve learned anything over the past few years of reporting about hacking of personal information, “compromised” appears to mean “we have no idea what the hackers actually did.”

We can only go by what information Facebook has released so far and that is the hackers could see everything in a victim’s profile. But what we don’t know is what that really entails. Do they have your password, login information, your credit union’s advertising/post promotion payment information, location or access to third-party apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account? Obviously, there was at least a fear that hackers had the login and password information, because Facebook logged 90 million people out of their accounts to have them reset that stuff.

Let’s pile on top of this hack for a minute. Remember March of this year? Facebook admitted that it shared the information of roughly 87 million user accounts with Cambridge Analytica – you know, that data analysis firm that was in the news? This firm then used that information to help target presidential campaign ads and information to you (oh, and apparently, the Russians used your information as well).

As CU Times reported in March, “Software developers always tell you about the risk in working with a third-party vendor and now, more than ever, we all have to ensure that our data is leveraged and limited to the scope that most reasonably serves our clients and nothing more. We all have to ask better questions and understand where the buck and the data stops.”

Let me do some quick math … hacking of 50 million accounts plus data shared of 87 million accounts. That’s 137 million user accounts – that we know of. To put that in perspective, that’s like if you multiply one 137 million times.

For years, I was a huge proponent and manager of social/digital media efforts for large and small corporations, as well as credit unions and other credit union-related businesses.

I am no longer that proponent and/or cheerleader of social media platforms. The risk and ugly underbelly of the social media platforms aren’t worth it to me anymore.

In 2008 and 2009, Twitter was a lovely place to be. You could manage the flow and followers. You had real-time interactions with thought leaders and/or people whose work you admired. It was a much smaller and non-toxic community.

For instance, back then I was part of a Twitter experiment with David Pogue. At the time, he was The New York Times’ personal tech columnist and I was a huge fan of his work. He was working on the first crowd-sourced book all about Twitter. He’d pose questions to his followers and he’d collect the responses. From those answers, he published “The World According to Twitter” in 2009. He posted a number of my answers in his book and even sent me a signed copy.

During that time, Facebook was really a dorky place to hang out. It was a clunky experience, but you could see the potential for brands and marketing efforts. I went all-in with clients and companies to really embrace the new social media culture. And for a while, things basically revolved around those two platforms. We soon discovered that these “free” platforms were a house of cards, built on the backs of our personal data.

As myself and possibly other credit union marketers have experienced, we’ve made a huge mistake.

Months ago, I removed my Facebook and Messenger apps from my phone. I can’t hard delete my entire profile because I’m an administrator for the CU Times page. But, I haven’t personally used Facebook or Instagram for … a year maybe?

Here’s the reason I think it’s time to pull away, and also for credit union marketers to rethink their digital strategies: Your information and your members’ information have probably been compromised multiple times. At this point, working with Facebook feels like working with Wells Fargo. They keep screwing you over, but you keep going back. They might get a $1 billion fine, but consumers continue to trust their information and money with these organizations. By the way, as of Oct. 2, even the Senate Banking Committee isn’t “comfortable” with Wells Fargo’s attempts to unscrew-over potentially millions of its customers.

I enjoy the digital media world of podcasts and videos and that kind of thing. But after doing the research and seeing what’s really been happening with our information, I’m not comfortable with remaining on some social media platforms. As far as what credit unions decide, that’s up to them.

Because, how does a credit union or other organization undo years of going down this path? We’re not sure yet. But, our editorial team has had conversations about it and we are monitoring credit unions that are stepping up or stepping out of their social media marketing efforts. We think it’ll take some months to see a fuller picture, and from what we are hearing from experts so far is … well, I’m not going to spoil it for you yet.

Here’s a thought though: If the co-founders of Instagram aren’t comfortable with Facebook, should you be?

Michael Ogden is executive editor for CU Times. He can be reached at mogden@cutimes.com.