There’s no easy way to say this; I’m leaving Facebook. (Actually, that was pretty easy to say. Forget what I said in the opening sentence.)

There are several reasons for my departure but the biggest is I’m tired of Facebook scamming me. If you use Facebook, you’re being scammed too. Would you like to know how?

Facebook offers us a convenient way to stay in touch with important people in our lives. We don’t pay a dime to chat, post pictures, send files, play games, and even broadcast videos. So we believe we’re getting all this great stuff for free. But nothing is “free.”

Facebook is monitoring everything we do while we’re using their wonderful services. They collect personal data every time we click our mouse. Every time we comment or post, Facebook records the information. So Facebook knows our address, our cell phone number, our political view, our religious views, our buying habits, AND all our interpersonal relationships.

That information is worth a lot of money to various businesses and political organizations. It’s worth BILLIONS of dollars in fact. Facebook didn’t tell us it was selling our information and that’s kind of shady and dishonest. But that’s not the scam part.

We encouraged our friends and family to join Facebook so that we could communicate with them. Facebook payed us nothing to promote their service to our neighbors, friends, co-workers, and family. Facebook didn’t need to buy advertising. We built their user base FOR them.

Then, without telling us, Facebook changed the way we communicate with each other. They started prioritizing certain posts over others. They created calculations to put the “most relevant” information in front of us and hide the “less relevant” information from us. And they completely removed information that “violates community standards.”

Facebook is censoring ideas they don’t like. They’re removing posts that don’t align with Facebook’s political agenda. They are within their rights to limit the conversations on their platform, but doing so goes against the principle reason we joined Facebook in the first place.

In other words, the service that was supposed to help us communicate with each other is preventing us from communicating with each other. And they did it without TELLING US they were doing it.

I brought 12,000 people to my fan page on Facebook. These are people who decided, of their own free will, that they wanted to see what I posted on Facebook. The Facebook Scam is this: less than 5% of my fans ever see my posts in their Facebook stream. If I want to reach more of my audience, I have to pay.

Yep. Facebook charges me money to talk to the people who are already in my audience. This would be like making a deal with a theater to perform a show in their space and bringing in 12,000 people. At showtime, the theater owner lets 500 people into the show and tells me that if I want to talk to the rest of the audience, I need to pay him one dollar per person.

At the same time, the theater owner sold the audience’s personal info to a hundred businesses for a couple of million dollars.

So, I’m leaving Facebook. If you’re reading my blog from a Facebook link, it’s time to subscribe on my website. (Or this could be goodbye…)

There’s a massive movement toward alternative social media platforms. Literally millions of people have joined Parler and MeWe in the past few days. I’m inviting you to join me (and millions of other people) in breaking away from the Facebook Scam.

MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/johnbranyan

Parler: https://parler.com/profile/JohnBranyan/posts