In March 2025, after a couple of years of mulling it over and several false starts, I finally deleted my Facebook account after fifteen years on the platform. Oddly enough, deciding to do it was the easy part; deciding to close a channel that was also my only remaining link to certain people in my life, deciding to cut myself off from the potential of groups, Marketplace, Messenger. Saying “enough” was easier than actually getting out.
This was partly because I’ve grown used to making deliberate choices about the digital spaces I inhabit. I value these decisions, so I set aside a little time for them every year and quarter during my planning. And partly because the Meta Leviathan has grown so haphazardly, with so little strategy, that it’s now a tangled sediment of rules and connections that I doubt even the people inside the company fully control.
That is why I decided to write this post: to share the ethical reasoning that brought me here, and to walk you through the practical process that allowed me put actions behind the words.
Values and decisions
Over the last four years I’ve made several choices about social media based on my values, and how I wanted to honor them in practice.
In 2021 I closed my Instagram business profile, and in 2022 my personal one.
In 2024 I deleted my X account (active since 2009).
And in 2025 I left Facebook.
I’ve decided to stay on LinkedIn for now. Though perhaps only Pinterest will survive, for as long as it exists.
My relationship with Meta
If I’m honest, it all started with a severe burnout in 2017 that kept me largely off every social channel for over a year. The experience left me convinced that, however relevant and useful they can be in life and work, a presence on social networks is never indispensable. It’s always a choice.
Whatever questionable reasons it was born for, Facebook served a real purpose for me over the years: it allowed me to reconnect with people I love dearly, to show my work and get hired by Mondadori (Italy’s largest publisher) to run the digital marketing for one of their flagship magazines, and to build and tend relationships. I was glad to be there.
But more and more, the platform became an unhealthy place, run by clueless tech bros, where it’s easier to make room for fascism than for feminism. Over the last three years, I found myself spending less and less time there, and on those rare visits, I mostly encountered propaganda, shouting, meaningless photos, tonnes of advertising disconnected from anything I care about, and an unsettling majority of fake news.
Grounded in direct experience and reassured by experts everywhere (I’ll name only Alexandra Franzen, who has promoted her work for years without any social channels), after the pandemic I evaluated the marketing, creative, fun, and social upsides Meta offers on one side of the scale, and the company’s misalignment with my values on the other.
It didn’t take long to make a decision.
What do you do with my data?
Of all the Meta policies I disapprove of, the one that has unsettled me most over the years is its handling of personal data. Seeing it from the inside, through my work, and growing ever more aware of how profiling and the monetization of attention can shape public life often leaves a bad taste in my mouth while I’m doing it.
Let me be clear: I see the irony, and the contradiction, of working in marketing, drawing up strategies that also rely on Meta’s channels, and then speaking ill of it here. But on a personal level, I feel the gap between the real value these platforms offer me and the value I gave up by accepting the terms of service. I can’t truly control what Meta does with my photos, my opinions, my choices, but I can control the access I grant in the first place.
Digital decluttering as a practice of care
The open door onto my data that I leave by being present on a platform, even when dormant, costs precious energy. The energy of periodically checking that my profile hasn’t been hacked, say, or that someone I know hasn’t had theirs hacked by people who then post on my Wall (it happened). Answering messages I receive there. Making sure the information I uploaded, and want visible to others because it’s useful, is still up to date.
Staying dormant on a platform like this, one radically out of step with my values, is simply inefficient. For years, I advised people to hold accounts on all the main channels under their own name or brand so no one else could grab them, but I no longer recommend that practice to individuals. It’s no longer worth it in a world where social traffic shifts every week, and with increasingly less predictability.
Above all, we don’t always realize how much mental space the digital space we occupy takes up. The decisions about being there (when and how), about what to post and what to consume, our relationship with metrics and comments, the gatekeeping we’re asked to do over who enters a space we experience as an extension of ourselves (through messages, comments and ads): all of it draws on enormous reserves of cognitive energy.
In 2025, I decided to run my work according to a philosophy of conscious growth, which meant working out what to remove to cultivate and tend it. In the digital realm too. Early in the year, I’d cut a lot of digital services and done a heavy declutter of documents and photos. My Facebook account was the last piece.
A pragmatic approach, always
Even though it was a choice consciously rooted in my values, deleting my Facebook profile is hardly the start of a moral crusade. I’m not here to preach that we should all abandon Mark Zuckerberg’s ecosystem to its fate (much as it might deserve it). If anything, I usually think it’s useful to keep an eye on the more dangerous and unhealthy social spaces with a presence that acts as a kind of antibody. It simply no longer fits my life, and I think people should be free to choose these things for themselves.
There are still plenty of contexts where Facebook is an almost essential tool. It lets public institutions, for instance, open up channels of dialogue with a large slice of the population (boomers and senior Gen X, if I’m honest) that’s otherwise hard to reach digitally. Groups are still a valuable gathering space when they’re moderated. And of course, Meta’s advertising programs let you promote a business with some flexibility, which keeps it accessible even to those working with smaller budgets.
But if you, like me, are an independent contractor, you have every freedom to choose which channels to communicate on. My advice is to do it realistically, and respecting your own individuality.
The deletion process
If you decide you want to delete your Facebook account, here’s how I did it, with a checklist further down for those who want to follow my lead.
The first attempts
I first downloaded my data ahead of deletion back in 2023. The procedure was straightforward, and I thought I’d wait before leaving for good, to give a couple of groups I belonged to time to migrate to other forms of community. The Freelancecamp group, for example, is now a Circle community. Or the group for rowdy evenings out with friends and colleagues (“digital types”) that I set up with Gianluca Diegoli now has a Telegram group (though the Facebook one still exists).
When I finally decided it was time and tried to delete my account, I got lost for the first time in Meta’s new user interface, which now manages accounts separately from Facebook. I’ll confess that at first I simply couldn’t find the right feature, and I kept going round in circles, bounced from one platform to another: Facebook, Business Manager, Privacy Centre, Accounts Centre.
When I eventually landed on the right feature and started working through the closing screens (seven of them, if I remember rightly, in which Meta does everything it can to offer you the chance to change your mind), I discovered all the account’s ties to pages I’d created in the past, some long inactive, and advertising accounts that Meta was asking me to make decisions about. I went back and deleted everything I found. Disconnected payment methods, removed pages that had been inactive for years, cut ties with Instagram accounts that no longer existed, and so on.
The obstacles I hit
It was while navigating these screens, in a way that was anything but immediate or intuitive, that I discovered my Facebook account was subject to restrictions, apparently for ads that had been rejected years earlier.
Since more than 90 days had passed since that rejection, Facebook wouldn’t let me find out which ads were involved or what the problem was. I tried to contact support, but the option wasn’t available. There was no button to do it, no direct contact. All I could reach were the generic pages explaining how restrictions work, with no insight into my own situation.
It’s pretty maddening to see an issue and have no tools to investigate it, or even to try to fix it. Reason told me that even under these conditions, Meta could hardly stop me from deleting the account (the famous Terms of Service essentially confirmed as much), so after a few days of frustration, I tried the deletion process again.
It seemed to be working until the page froze in processing mode, and when I reloaded it, I had to start the whole thing from scratch. Again and again. No end in sight. The feeling of being “trapped” on a platform you’ve decided to leave is pretty unpleasant, and it only strengthened my resolve to finish the job, if any strengthening were needed.
The turning point: I asked for help
Leadership maturity arrives the day you recognize when to delegate. Working for yourself demands a fair amount of entrepreneurial spirit, the kind that keeps pushing us to learn new tools, new concepts and rules, to protect ourselves from risks (obsolescence above all) and to become self-sufficient. Even inside companies, people talk about “intrapreneurship” as a quality that serves leadership.
But just as leadership is complete with the skill of delegation, freelance entrepreneurship is complete only when we weigh the costs and benefits of handling things ourselves, even when we’re not the experts. And choose instead to rely on someone who is.
All that to say that, at my sixth failed deletion attempt, I put out a call for help on LinkedIn and, gratefully and gladly, accepted the offer from Federica Ciccariello.
A practical checklist for anyone who wants to leave
Step 1: Export your data. It used to be very simple; now it takes at least three clicks and can only be done through Meta’s Accounts Center, where you select “Download your information.”
Step 2: Check linked accounts and pages. This too takes some exploring, but along the deletion path Meta tells you directly which they are, and you can go back and remove everything.
Step 3: Disconnect connected apps, especially the ones you didn’t know you had 😅. Here too, fortunately, Meta provides a reminder during the deletion flow. A shame it isn’t obvious that Meta won’t delete your account until you remove the connected apps. So remove them.
Step 4: Delete pages you’re an administrator of. See point 2. But it’s important, so it earned a repeat.
Step 5: Handle advertising accounts. Same as point 2. Bear in mind that an ad account with active restrictions can’t necessarily be deleted, but it’s worth investigating.
Step 6: Inform your network and transfer important connections. There are several ways to do this. I wrote personal messages to the few Facebook connections I hadn’t already swapped phone numbers with. But you could also post on your feed to announce your decision and ask anyone who wants to stay in touch to message you privately. Bear in mind that there may be very few people in your circle who are still actively using Facebook.
Step 7: Final deletion procedure. Still in the Accounts Center, you can go to “Account ownership and control” and continue to “Deactivation or deletion.”
Step 8: Grace period (30 days). Meta doesn’t delete your account immediately. It deactivates it for 30 days, during which you have time to reconsider, or to realize you can live perfectly well without it and carry on.
Step 9: Confirm it’s actually gone. To be safe, once the 30 days are up, try logging back in, or ask a relative or acquaintance to check that your account has really vanished.
An interview with Federica Ciccariello
A couple of lines on Federica, for context. She was introduced to me by Daniela Scapoli, whom I trust completely (and who is one-third of my Female Relief mastermind), and she has over 10 years of experience as a freelance social media manager. She runs the social channels for several major companies, and at the agency I work with, we brought her in to broaden our network of external collaborators. On that first call, she struck me immediately as very capable, open and approachable, and calmly assertive in her professionalism.
We stayed in touch on LinkedIn, and reading about her background (she has a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies) and her activism with ACTA (the Italian freelancers’ association) only firmed up my positive impression.
She’s so good that she not only sorted out my situation in a half-hour call, she also gamely answered my questions for this post:
What are the most common reasons a Facebook account gets stuck during deletion?
In the vast majority of cases they relate to profiles that hold some role in a Business Manager (not always set up properly). The case I see most often is profiles that administer ad accounts which have been blocked or restricted (for policy violations, unpaid balances, or accounts that haven’t completed all the verifications Meta requires). Often the user isn’t even aware of these restrictions or their causes because, let’s be honest, Business Manager could fairly be described as a Dantean circle of hell in the Millennials’ own Divine Comedy.
Take mine: the restrictions on my account apparently referred to ads rejected in November 2023, except that I’d created my last ones in 2020. Since, of course, I hadn’t noticed the problem within 90 days, by that point we couldn’t even trace which ads they were or what the underlying issue had been.
What did we do to resolve my specific case?
First we checked every Business Manager you held a role in, then the ad accounts, and we realized your account had restrictions whose origin you didn’t know. So we dug through all the business resources you had access to and deleted everything that could be closed, but we couldn’t get to the bottom of it until, trying again to delete the account, we noticed a small notice: in the past you’d created (unintentionally) three apps for three Pages you managed. Since you were the only developer with access, we had to delete the apps from the Developers platform first, and then we were finally able to complete the deletion request.
I’ll add that, with hindsight, I suspect those “apps” were the tabs in Pages back when they existed and could be customized into pseudo-landing pages. Yes, Facebook once had that too. But I could be completely wrong.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to delete their Facebook account?
Meta offers two options: deleting the account (permanent) and deactivating it. With deactivation, the profile disappears and, to all appearances, no longer exists, but you can reactivate it at any time. Given the reasons that pushed you to delete yours, there was no point considering deactivation, but it could be a useful option for anyone who wants to leave Facebook without being sure yet that they want to do it for good. Otherwise, the checklist you wrote above is already perfect. I’d add just one tip for anyone who administers a Page or Business Manager: if these aren’t activities you own and fully manage, always check, before walking away, that you’ve added a colleague and handed over the baton. That way you’ll save whoever comes after you hours of chat with Meta support 🙂
Life after Facebook
What happens next? Over a year has now passed since my Facebook account was actually deleted, and, for a start, nothing has changed in my convictions or in my working (or personal) life without this channel. If anything, I now have a sense (perhaps imaginary) of greater freedom of movement and of communicating online without the invisible dead weight of statuses written in the third person.
The truth is that my digital presence had already changed years ago. I’d decided to invest the bulk of my time and attention in this site, this blog, my newsletter, and the real relationships that sometimes begin on LinkedIn but just as often in everyday life. I still advise anyone who asks to take a careful look at the time they spend each day cultivating audiences owned by other platforms or producing content that benefits them only marginally.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient and effective to spend that time producing quality content on a site you own, where the content stays accessible to anyone exactly as you conceived it?
There’s no such thing as a “pure” platform
No platform, clearly, is perfect or free of issues. Not the ones we own, nor the ones we rent. In early 2025 the author Glennon Doyle tried joining Substack and lasted about a week, driven off by accusations of bringing her privilege to occupy space and visibility that ought to stay available for less celebrated writers. And yet Substack looks like a happy ecosystem of creators and artistic, cultured, “gentle” content.
On the other hand, building an audience from scratch on a platform you own takes years and enormous effort.
In short, there’s no “pure” platform above any drawbacks or contraindications. But it’s still possible to align your values with your digital presence, each in your own way. Everyone negotiates values and practices freely and daily, and I think it’s legitimate to decide, on a case-by-case basis, where to draw the line. Without claiming your decision to be the right one, or that there are absolutely right choices to be found.
That’s why I so often, so insistently, stress the theme of “awareness.” In an article on digital marketing strategy, I wrote that awareness takes time and vision, and that it’s what separates a strategic choice, broad and lasting in its reach, from in-the-moment decisions (which photo do I post today? Do I put it on my WhatsApp status?).
So, as well as a story and a guide, this post is above all an open invitation to reflect. Consider your own digital choices: how do you want to make them? In which directions do you want to take them? As always, the comments are open 😉
