The High Cost of Leaving: why Meta is harder to quit than ever

Two billion people checked Facebook this morning. Not social media in general, checked Facebook specifically, the actual blue app or website, along with Instagram (2 billion) and WhatsApp (another 2 billion, with some overlap obviously, but still). If you’re reading this, you probably contributed to at least one of those numbers. I certainly did. I opened WhatsApp before I was fully awake, the way you might once have checked if it was raining, it’s just what you do now, part of the morning sequence of small automatic gestures that get you from bed to coffee to the actual start of your day.

Meta’s platforms aren’t just popular; they are, in much of the world, what people mean when they say “the internet.” In parts of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Facebook IS how you get online, the first and sometimes only digital space people encounter. WhatsApp is how families coordinate, how small businesses operate, how communities organize during emergencies. For a generation of creators and small business owners, Instagram is infrastructure the same way electricity is infrastructure: you can’t really opt out and still do your job.

This isn’t a preamble to a rant about Big Tech. It’s context for a harder question.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation, of course. It’s not even the fifth or tenth. The pattern is familiar by now: revelation, outrage, some people delete their accounts (or claim they will), and then most of us, including, let’s be honest, me, just keep scrolling.

In March 2018, we learned about Cambridge Analytica, how Meta had allowed a political consulting firm to harvest data from 87 million users without their knowledge or meaningful consent, data that was then used to target voters. In October 2021, Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook with tens of thousands of internal documents showing that the company knew Instagram was harmful to teenage girls’ mental health but prioritized engagement over safety. We’ve seen how Meta’s platforms amplified hate speech that UN investigators said directly contributed to genocide in Myanmar. We’ve seen how content moderation failed to prevent the spread of disinformation during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, how the company’s own research showed its algorithms pushed people toward extremist content because extreme content kept people scrolling. (And yes, I realize that summarizing a decade of Facebook scandals in a single paragraph makes them sound almost boring, which is itself part of the problem, these should be shocking, and instead they’re just… the news.)

So when TIME published yet another investigation into Meta this month, the revelation felt both shocking and entirely predictable. Internal documents allegedly show Meta knew about, and minimized, the scale of predatory interactions between adults and minors on its platforms, delayed implementing safety measures that would reduce engagement, and misled Congress about what it knew and when.

Alongside this, Reuters reported that Meta earned billions from fraudulent advertisements, despite having the technology to detect and remove them.

I asked four colleagues what they thought. I was partly hoping their answers would resolve something I hadn’t been able to resolve for myself. Not “what do you think about Meta as a company” in the abstract, but two specific questions: Had they read about the allegations? And knowing what Meta allegedly did, assuming these claims are accurate, would they consider deleting Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp? Their answers were more interesting than I expected, mostly because of how familiar the discomfort in their responses felt. The first thing that struck me was that nobody was surprised. One colleague mentioned she’d followed the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” years earlier. Another noted that these revelations get “published but not publicized”, information that exists but doesn’t circulate widely enough to matter. A third pointed out that we’ve heard these concerns before, just “one aspect at a time”, the impact on self-esteem, on social skills, on exposure to harmful content. Seeing it all compiled in one place still stirs something, but the overall picture? We already knew.

The second thing was that everyone had already tried some version of opting out. One colleague deleted Facebook years ago and now “polices” her Instagram use, limiting it to staying in touch with friends. Another uses Facebook and Instagram only “partially,” for specific information. A third would “seriously consider” reducing use further. We’re all already negotiating with these platforms, drawing little lines for ourselves, trying to use them without being used.

But when I asked if they would consider deleting their accounts entirely, the answers converged on the same problem. “I cannot fully delete apps as WhatsApp and Instagram as they are essential to my social life nowadays,” one wrote. “WhatsApp is fully incorporated in my daily communication and I am dependable on it to reach my friends and my family.” Another put it more starkly: stopping would mean “risking feeling excluded or disoriented”. In a world where digital sharing of experiences, memories, and messages has transformed how we communicate, leaving isn’t just inconvenient. It’s socially costly. A third colleague explained why she hasn’t deleted entirely despite minimal use: ” there are no significantly valid alternatives, and especially none that are shared”. That word, shared, is the crux of it. The problem isn’t that better apps don’t exist. Signal exists. Telegram exists. Mastodon exists. The problem is that your family isn’t there. Your work group chat isn’t there. The school parents’ WhatsApp group, the neighborhood coordination channel, the friends you’d lose touch with if you left, none of them have moved.

The writer Cory Doctorow has a term for this: “switching costs.” Not the hassle of learning new software, but everything you sacrifice when you leave, the communities, the relationships, the accumulated social fabric of years. And these costs aren’t accidental. They’re designed.

Doctorow argues that Facebook doesn’t stay dominant because it’s good. It stays dominant because it has made leaving expensive. The platform deliberately blocks “interoperability”, the technical ability to stay connected with your Facebook friends without being a Facebook user yourself. You can switch phone carriers without losing your contacts. You can change email providers without abandoning your correspondents. But you cannot leave WhatsApp and still message your WhatsApp groups. The connections are held hostage. This reframes the moral question entirely. When we ask “should I delete my account?”, we treat the problem as one of individual conscience, as if staying is a failure of willpower or values. But my colleagues aren’t describing a lack of conviction. They’re describing a structural trap. They’ve already deleted what they can, reduced what they can reduce, drawn whatever boundaries feel possible. And still they stay, because leaving means losing people.

So consider, for a moment, actually deleting everything. Not as something you’ll do tomorrow, but as a thought experiment, to sit with the discomfort of what we’d rather not examine. What would you lose? Your family group chat. The only reliable way to reach certain friends. The professional networks that run on Instagram DMs. In much of the world, your connection to essential services, businesses, schools, government offices that communicate only through WhatsApp. Photos and memories you never backed up. The casual, ambient awareness of what’s happening in the lives of people you care about.

A mass exodus would send shockwaves, yes. If millions left simultaneously, it would matter. But we’re not leaving simultaneously. We’re each alone with the calculation: what am I willing to sacrifice to make a point that nobody else is making with me?

This is what one colleague meant when she observed that society is expected “to adapt to the technology and make it work, and not the other way around.” We’ve accepted a situation where the platforms set the terms, and our only choices are to accept those terms or accept isolation. That’s not a market. That’s not even a choice. It’s a hostage negotiation dressed up as a service agreement.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion, and neither did my colleagues. One asked whether “ethical and responsible use” of these platforms is still possible, and left the question open. Another shifted entirely to regulatory responses, as if individual action had already been ruled out. The discomfort we all feel, knowing what we know, staying anyway, trying to minimize our complicity without being able to exit, isn’t moral failure. It’s a rational response to a system designed to make leaving irrational.

Maybe naming that is where something begins. Not a call to delete your accounts, though if you can, consider it. But a recognition that the question was never really “should I stay or go?” The question is why we’ve allowed essential social infrastructure to be owned by companies whose business model requires making it impossible to leave.

We built these platforms to connect us. Somewhere along the way, they learned to use those connections against us. And now we scroll through the wreckage of another revelation, feel the familiar discomfort, and open WhatsApp to tell someone about it, because how else would we reach them?