By KELVIN CHAN
LONDON (AP) — Should I stay or should I go — from Meta’s social media platforms?
That’s what some Facebook, Instagram and Threads users are wondering after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this month that the company is relaxing rules on harmful content such as hate speech and abandoning its fact checking program and replacing it with crowdsourced notes.
The changes have renewed interest among some users about deleting their Meta social media accounts. If you want to stop using platforms owned by Meta, here are some pointers:
Save your data
Before deleting your Facebook account, you should download a copy of all your personal information, which includes details about your activity on the platform, things you’ve shared and data that the company has collected about you.
You’ll have to go to your settings or the accounts center — the master control panel for all your Meta accounts — where you can choose to download everything or just items such as your profile, posts, messages, comments and reactions, and list of friends, even the ads you’ve clicked on and IP addresses you’ve used to connect to Facebook.
You can download information from a certain date range, such as the past month or six months, or for all the time you’ve had an account. If you’re downloading photos, you can select their quality level: low, medium, high.
For security purposes, you’ll only have four days to download your file. The process is similar for Instagram and Threads users.
Instagram users will need a password to download and access files and it could take up to 30 days to receive a download link by email, the platform says on its help page.
Maybe you don’t want to download all your personal information but instead want to get any photos and videos you’ve posted. Facebook provides a separate option to transfer these files to another online service, with options including Google Photos, Dropbox or Photobucket.
Staying in touch
A tip for Facebook users: before you pull the plug, check if you have friends or connections you don’t want to lose complete contact with.
Send them a message asking for their phone, email or other non-Meta contact details. You could also make a final post telling people that you’re leaving, though there’s a chance not everyone will 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 just want to take a break from social media.
You can do this through the account center, where you can click on the Personal details section, and then the Account ownership and control setting.
Temporarily deactivating an account means other users won’t see it anymore, but your posts, photos and videos won’t be deleted and you can still use Facebook Messenger. You can reactivate the account at any time.
Don’t change your mind too often: Instagram and Threads users can only temporarily deactivate their accounts once a week.
Deletion
Ready to take the plunge and delete your account permanently?
After tying up any loose ends, head back to the accounts center, click the Personal details section, and then Account ownership and control, where you can choose to delete it.
Once you’ve triggered the deletion process, you’ve got 30 days to change your mind, which you can do by logging back into your account and clicking the Cancel Deletion button.
“After 30 days, your account and all your information will be permanently deleted, and you won’t be able to retrieve your information,” Facebook warns on its help center.
Take note: Deleting a Threads account won’t have any effect on your corresponding Instagram account. But deleting an Instagram account will also result in the deletion of the linked Threads account because Instagram accounts are used to manage Threads accounts.
What about WhatsApp?
Meta also owns WhatsApp, although Zuckerberg’s content policy changes aren’t likely to affect the chat app.
Similar to Meta’s social platforms, WhatsApp users can export a copy of their chat history or ask for information on their settings or channels.
If you decide you want to get rid of WhatsApp and perhaps switch to competing chat services like iMessage or Signal, it’s easy to do through the app’s settings.
Deleting WhatsApp will erase your account info, your chat history backup and your presence from any chat groups as well as any channels you set up where you’re the only admin.
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