Written by Kelvin Chan
LONDON (AP) — Should you stay on Meta’s social media platform or leave?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that the company would loosen its rules around hate speech and other harmful content and abandon its fact-checking program in favor of crowd-sourced notes. That’s what some Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users are wondering about.
This change has sparked renewed interest among some users about deleting their meta social media accounts. If you want to stop using the Meta-owned platform, here are some tips:
Save data
Before deleting your Facebook account, you should download a copy of all your personal information. This includes details about your activity on the platform, what you have shared, and the data the Company has collected about you.
You’ll need to go to Settings or Account Center (the master control panel for all meta accounts). Here you can choose to download the entire profile, posts, messages, comments and reactions, list of users, etc., or just the items. This includes your friends, even the ads you clicked and the IP address you used to connect to Facebook.
You can download information for a specific date range, such as the past month, six months, or all the time you’ve had your account. When downloading photos, you can choose between low, medium, and high quality levels.
For security reasons, files can only be downloaded for 4 days. The process is similar for Instagram and Threads users.
Instagram users will need a password to download and access the files, and it may take up to 30 days to receive the download link via email, the platform’s help page says.
Maybe you want to retrieve the photos and videos you posted instead of downloading all your personal information. Facebook offers other options for transferring these files to another online service, with options like Google Photos, Dropbox, and Photobucket.
keep in touch
Tip for Facebook users: Before you pull the plug, check to see if you have any friends or connections you don’t want to lose contact with completely.
Send a message asking for phone, email, or other non-meta contact details. You can also create a final post saying you’re leaving, although not everyone might see it.
take a break
If you’re not ready to go all the way, Facebook allows users to temporarily shut down their accounts in case they want to take a break from social media.
You can do this through your Account Center. In the Account Center, click on the (Personal Details) section and then click on (Account Ownership and Management) Settings.
Temporarily deactivating your account will make it invisible to other users, but your posts, photos, and videos will not be deleted and you can continue to use Facebook Messenger. You can reactivate your account at any time.
Don’t change your mind too often. Instagram and Threads users can only temporarily deactivate their accounts once a week.
delete
Are you ready to take the plunge and delete your account permanently?
Once you have resolved any outstanding issues, return to your Account Center, click the (Personal Details) section, click (Account Ownership and Management), and select Delete.
Once you start the removal process, you have 30 days to change your mind. To make changes, log back into your account and click the (Cancel deletion) button.
“After 30 days, your account and all information will be permanently deleted and you will not be able to retrieve your information,” Facebook warns in its Help Center.
Note: Deleting your Threads account will not affect the corresponding Instagram account. However, your Instagram account is used to manage your Threads account, so deleting your Instagram account will also delete your linked Threads account.
What about WhatsApp?
Meta also owns WhatsApp, but Zuckerberg’s content policy changes are unlikely to affect the chat app.
Similar to Meta’s social platform, WhatsApp users can export a copy of their chat history and request information about their settings and channels.
If you want to delete WhatsApp and switch to a competing chat service like iMessage or Signal, you can easily do so from the app’s settings.
Deleting WhatsApp will erase your account information, chat history backups, presence from chat groups, and presence from channels you set as the sole administrator.
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