How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

Gizmodo's post on this has the most honest title: A Lot of People Are Searching for How to Delete Facebook and Instagram, and We Would Like Their Clicks

LOL! They’re not even pretending to be a news outlet anymore.
(Let’s see how many people miss the projecting by saying I’m missing the “joke”.)
- Woosh

Real question is, how can I uninstall Zuckerberg...

That requires an adjuster
- a special adjuster that andy has left at the office...
Don’t stop there:

sudo apt purge billionaires
- sh
  
  && sudo apt autoremove

How to delete is not the problem. That's the trivial part. In fact, you don't even need to delete your account. Just stop using it and it's practically the same effect.

The problem is how to get your friends and acquintances out of there. Lots of things are there and only there. Like for instance, it's my jujitsu club's main place of information. If I quit FB, I will no longer know what's happening there.

The only thing keeping my meta account alive is Marketplace. Unfortunately, it’s much busier than Craigslist in my area.
Facebook has become a dirty flea market for me.
- Yeah the world moved from Craigslist to marketplace before I did. I found out the hard way when nothing was selling.
  One thing I like about marketplace is you can view someone’s profile to see if they are an actual human that lives near you.
- Marketplace needs to die, it's got most of the downsides of craigslist except for making it super easy for prospective purchasers to spam "still available?" Ad nauseum
- Same. I live on an island and the only way to sell anything is on two fb groups. Craigslist is there but half the time you get people on the big island and have to take a ferry to sell. I’m thinking of starting a small website/app, not sure it will take off though.
- One can hope it turns into a flea market. Off the side of the hideway everyone passes but few seldom go.
Put pressure on the group owners to pack it up and move the group elsewhere. Where the group goes, they’ll follow.
This is the problem I've run into. I wanted to stay as part of a social group I'm nominally in, but that group's only presence is on Facebook. And the group admins don't want to move somewhere else because a) it's change, and b) there aren't many other options as good at managing such groups.
On a related topic, does anyone know of a good Federated alternative to Facebook. Or at least an alternative that's less ad-riddled and more privacy-conscious)?
I looked around online last night and all the articles out there suggested things like Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter as Facebook alternatives, which are wrong on so many levels. I'm not that bothered about getting an alternative myself since I barely used FB anyway. But being my extended family's tech support, I keep getting asked about what good alternatives are out there. I'm finding nothing, but I'm likely missing a good Federated option.
- I haven’t used it in a long time but I think Diaspora is intended as a decentralized FB clone. https://diasporafoundation.org/
  I’m not sure if it uses ActivityPub or its own thing. It’s been around for awhile so it may predate ActivityPub.
- i deployed a Lemmy instance to use... not sure if there's anything better
I've barely used mine for years. Deleting it is feels much more satisfying and final.
Also Facebook Groups for obscure things, Facebook Marketplace, and even a lot of local political organizations primarily use Instagram
- i tried to avoid it and deny it forever but facebook marketplace has really destroyed craigslist. so lame

Unfortunately it has been demonstrated through whitehat research that simply deleting your old account is relatively useless. They have shadow profiles of users based on probabilistic data. For example, say your spouse with her decades old account keeps making posts about what you ate on date night, your trip to Cabo, or worse yet she posts a bunch of pictures of her, you, and the kids. Facebook makes a shell profile based on this conception of "you" and begins aggregating all the info it can about this person.

More over, every time an acquaintance of yours gives their FB app permissions to access their contacts (to suggest Friends or whatever) if your contact info is on the list, FB now has your real name, your email, your mobile phone number, etc. You never opted in, but it doesnt matter - other people are opting you into FB data collection all the time, unless you literally don't tell anyone your real phone number or email address.

Thanks, I Hate It

I don't think that most of the lemmy crowd needs this info to beginn with...

But we may have friends and family members asking about it
- And surely we would be happy to help if asked.

Deleted everything Meta related in 2022. I have no regrets. Zuck can Suck it

Has he contacted you yet to schedule a time to suck it?
- Sucky sucky

You need to block all their domains/IP ranges too otherwise they’re still profiting from profiling you across apps and websites.

Or install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ for the less tech savvy / lazy
- That feels like the opposite of deleting your account or blocking them
- Unfortunately, unscrupulous companies can build shadow profiles that bypass cookie and storage based isolation techniques like this.
  Your browser gives off a lot of information. See here for some of the information they can use: https://amiunique.org/
  You're best off blocking things with uBlock Origin vs something that just isolates.

Remember to hit the gym and lawyer up next.

This is a reference I haven't seen in YEARS.
Damn that takes me back.
- I had to look it up myself, but it appears to be divorce advice (hit the gym, lawyer up, delete facebook)
No, you hit the LAWYER and gym up.

Sadly I cant delete WhatsApp because eveyone in my country uses it :c

At the router. That is where I delete it.

Where's the article on how to profit off of racist idiots on Facebook?

Make a red bubble store and sell political slogan T shirts. You can easily make a couple hundred a month just doing that. “This is Trump Country” shirts have been doing insanely well since November.

Pffft! This is soooo 2015.

I turfed FB in 2015 as well (didn't bother with the other stuff).
But now I'm worried I deactivated it and didn't delete.... I cannot remember.
If it's just deactivated-- I wonder if it's better to just leave it a greyed out graveyard, than to reactivate it just to delete. I feel reactivating would give it more information even, as I would be on a different device. It's been dead a decade.
What do people suggest?
- Its deleted by now. However since you didnt request your data deleted complying with EU and California laws, its still very much there.

Do it! Delete it.

Unfortunately, I'm keeping mine to make a pipeline from there to actual content on Mastodon or BlueSky. But I basically put a URL in my bio and push a photo once a week.

accountkiller.com

fuck!

i made a filter with words "zuckerberg" and "meta" but not "facebook"

Good call.

I deleted my FB account years and years ago, and AFAIK it has never broken into my house and forced me to look at it. But of course Bonespurs takes office pretty soon so I guess nothing is certain.

Is the process different from it was in 2015?

Now you must sacrifice your first born.

Become a master hacker who can access their servers? Probably super illegal, though.

Is this @technology?

Oh hey, good reminder. The one upside to the fact that my FB account continually revived itself while I was using my Quest 2 is that now I can delete my account (for the last time, I hope) as part of a widespread protest instead of a one-off annoyance.

If it wasn’t for Marketplace, I would be off Facebook entirely.

But I am not on threads at all, and only get punted over to Instagram with reels that appear on my Facebook account.

Is it good to know that there ís still person in this world doesn't rely much more on social media even though that is the biggest mainstream in this world.

I did a year ago over their censorship. I don’t miss it.

How to "delete" them? Words really have no meaning anymore.

It's short for deleting your account, data, etc.. People ommit those words for a long time now, like "Do you have Lemmy?" or "What is your Mastodon?"

Supreme Commanders of a few nations have that proverbial red button to delete anything (customizable selection of what to delete, too). You just have to get in contact with one of them, call them for a cup of coffee. Ask them to rid you of that problem.

I only use it for messenger. And only then because it still has chat bubbles. There are many better messengers. But they don't have chat bubbles that draw over other apps.

I haven't posted on FB in years.

On Android, all messaging apps have bubbles.
Signal has chat bubbles

Anyone that still has these accounts hasn’t been paying attention the last few years and is part of the problem. I doubt many CURRENT Fb, Ig, Threads users will change their habits.

Dumb fucks
For those who need the context.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

I deleted mine many years ago, 10/10 would recommend!

Tldr: u cant

In the UE we have the GDPR.
- I often vpn into Europe to make gdpr request lol.
TL;DR Only if you misunderstand the intent of the word "delete".
In the sense of getting rid of the sites themselves, sure, that'll never happen.
And in the sense that once you're known to them you'll never be forgotten, at least not without a massive lawsuit that you've little chance of winning, yes.
But you can ask Meta to delete your account(s) and everything visibly associated with you to the point that you no longer have a presence on any of their sites, and that's what this article is about.
One of the reasons Meta has been creating fake AI-based accounts is because so many people are doing this and they don't like it and want to make it look like their site is still active. Which is an excellent reason to delete your accounts, even if they weren't also doing a bunch of other heinous things.
And you can delete the apps from your phone. You should delete your accounts first though.

If you’re still on those platforms, why would less censorship be the hill to die on?

It's always good to leave them. It's always good to remind and enable people to do so.
- Sure, but why would less interference from the CIA or Mossad executives at fb be an incentive?
Its less censorship AND an allowance of actual hate speech.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free
- Ehh. While I don’t support Meta’s real name policy, with it being paired with this, I somewhat support allowing these people to out themselves. Let them face the societal consequences of hate speech.

Virtue signaling 😁

Nah, Facebook and Instagram are the worst. Facebook is some ad riddled, AI slop, filled late stage capitalism hellscape. Worth not using just for mental health.
- I quit all social media except for Lemmy, and I have to say it's been great. Especially getting off of Twitter.