I Just Don't Like Social Media That Much... PART ONE

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day social media.  The whole topic was brought up because they wanted to know why I didn’t have a Facebook or Instagram account.  My answer was short and simple:  I just don’t like social media that much.  If you want a more detailed answer, it’s a two-part story.   

Part One:  Until last year, I did have an account with just about every social media platform out there—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, Linkedin, Readit—I could go on.  As a creator, I was under the impression that the more accounts that I could blanket my work across, the more likely I was to make a sale.  (Here’s a tip, and this one’s for free, having multiple accounts does not help you sell content.)  After one crazy weekend, I decided to delete the bulk of my accounts and consolidate down to one account on Twitter.  What happened?  I was hacked.  Someone had managed to hack into my Facebook account, which was linked in one way or another to several of my other social media accounts. (I had linked my accounts for the convenience posting across all media at once, back then.)  After the hacker had access to my Facebook, they were able to infiltrate all of my other accounts, and in a snowballing kind of way, wreak havoc with my personal life.  My family and my social media “Friends” were being sent offers, and inappropriate solicitations of all sorts through my accounts—it was embarrassing to say the least.  To top it off, I had saved my credit card information on one or more of my accounts for quick purchases.  Big Mistake.  Thousands of dollars of small charges went unnoticed for a whole month.  The charges were small enough that they were under the radar of my notifications, and obscure enough that the credit card company didn’t seem to find them suspicious.  Imagine my shock when the credit card statement came in that month.  I was fortunate enough to have a credit card company that protected me from these charges, and they were able to be reversed.  But this process took some time, and it was still a very scary experience.  To ice the cake, when I tried to cancel some of the social media accounts, I had to jump through flaming hoops to prove my identity in order to log back in.  It was absurd.  Facebook actually wanted me to send them a copy of driver’s license, and my social security card in order to prove who I was.  The request made zero sense to me.  I didn’t need to show them any of this to create the account in the first place, why did I need to do it now?  Facebook also does not have a “Contact for Support” option.  I had no way to have direct contact with anyone to help me resolve the issues.  I had to send in messages, and then wait a day or two for a reply that simply directed me to help topics.  I did not share those personal documents with Facebook, by the way.  I was able to navigate my way through the help topics and prove my identity through information that was already saved on my hacked account, and the situation was slowly, but eventually resolved.  So, the principal argument for Part One is that social media makes me feel unsafe, and it makes my private information far more vulnerable than I want to be.  Furthermore, once my private information is intruded upon, no one at these large social media outfits give a damn about me enough to actually have a “Social” interaction with me.