The writing has been on the wall for many years with Facebook – they have a long and ignoble history of misusing people’s data and failing to moderate hateful or willfully inaccurate information posted on their platform. In 2025 with the re-election of Trump they’re hitching themselves to his wagon and moving even further to the right.
And Twitter / X under Elon Musk is just as bad. His promotion of ‘free speech’ really just means giving carte blanche to the racists, climate change deniers and extreme right wing nutjobs who subscribe to his world view. He’s wealthy and powerful enough to circumvent entire democratic systems and to exert his authority over elections and government policies.
We know this already. These aren’t community platforms or social networks, they are businesses owned by billionaire oligarchs whose only motivation is to make more money. Unfortunately they are also woven into the fabric of our digital lives and how charities communicate with their supporters and service users.
So what can be done?
The obvious answer is to just leave them. Close down your Facebook page and your Twitter account. Maybe move over to Mastodon or Blue Sky instead. In reality though, it’s not that easy. Facebook and Twitter have a huge network effect – everyone uses them because everyone else does. That’s where your audience is and you’ve spent years building up a community on them.
I know many charities run support groups via Facebook channels/groups because it’s a free way of reaching the maximum number of people you can potentially help. Shutting that down now ultimately does more harm than good.
Stop giving them your money
This is something that we can, and I think we should, all do. Paying to advertise or to promote posts on Facebook and Twitter is just giving the billionaire oligarchs even more money.
It of course won’t make the slightest bit of difference to their bottom line but it’s more of an ethical stance and I think it will increasingly become an element of charities’ ethical policies. We’re not there yet but I do think it will be something that your supporters will start asking about and it will become more of a reputational risk to give your (often your donors’) money to companies that not just turn a blind eye to extreme and hate-speech, but who actively amplify it.
Advertising revenue is the life-blood of Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is losing millions of dollars a month as it is, and the only thing that Musk cares about is monetising it by adverts and paid subscriptions (the blue ticks). Maybe the EU will stand up to him and Zuckerberg, but I won’t hold my breath. The only leverage we have is if enough companies stop paying to advertise on these platforms.
I hope there will be a growing movement for people to name and shame, and ultimately boycott companies who advertise on Facebook and Twitter. The #StopHateForProfit campaign in 2020 only lasted a month or so and ultimately failed because companies want a ROI on their advertising, and the consumer backlash was less costly than the revenue they missed out on.
We’ve turned a blind eye to it because it’s easier to just tut and wait for a critical mass of other users and advertisers to take action first. But in 2025 that’s becoming increasingly impossible to do.
What about the Facebook pixel?
If you have it on your site, I would remove it. They’ll tell you it’s there to help you analyse your Facebook ads/promotions, but it’s part of their huge data-harvesting ecosystem and you really don’t know what sensitive information it is collecting.
I’ve said it before – but imagine a scenario whereby your charity is supporting people who are living with HIV. You have the Facebook pixel on your site and now Facebook has a pretty good idea of which of its users are HIV+ because they’re looking at your web pages about the symptoms, treatment, side-effects (and it will already know a staggering and granular amount of detail about where they live, who their friends are etc). Then imagine that a group with a nefarious agenda wants to get their hate-filled speech directly into these people’s feeds. Or a health insurance company wants to target or to increase the premiums of people it suspects of living with HIV.
This is a pretty dystopian vision but the only thing really standing in its way is Facebook saying ‘Trust us, we wouldn’t do that’. History has already demonstrated that they can’t be trusted and in the future they’re deliberately heading down this path. They aren’t a social network, they are a billion dollar data-harvesting and advertising monopoly! We aren’t users, the advertisers are. Our lives and our personal data are the product.
The Facebook pixel is a way for you to help Facebook to freely gather huge swathes of data about its users. In return they will tell you the click-through rate of some of your ads. It’s free to you, it’s free data for Facebook. But it is your users who ultimately bear the cost because it’s their data you are allowing to be harvested.
What can we do as individuals?
Again – it’s not easy to just leave these platforms because that’s where our lives and friends and hobbies are. But I believe we should all aim to slowly transition away from them wherever we can.
Check your Facebook privacy settings – there’s no one-click option to lock everything down, but go into the ‘Your information and permissions’ and ‘Ad preferences’ sections and untick all the boxes you can find! You can do a similar thing on Twitter / X
Use an Ad Blocker. They’re good for privacy and also they make the internet a bit nicer and faster. Occasionally I visit a recipe website or blog whilst my ad blocker is disabled – and I’m shocked at how awful and unusable they are with all those video adverts popping up all over the place!
Is it hypocritical to complain about Twitter and Facebook whilst still using them?
Yes, maybe a bit. But the whole point is that it’s actually really hard to divest from something we’ve come to rely on. You’re allowed to campaign against climate change whilst you’re still driving a petrol car – because for many people there isn’t a viable and affordable alternative right now.
