Those who live to incite violence and fear and to spread lies have had a field day on the platform. And those who run Facebook — bringing in $86 billion in revenue in 2020 — along with Instagram (which I'm not on), haven't taken enough steps to make it a safer, less hostile environment. Some accuse Facebook of undermining democracy with its failures. I agree. Many Facebook users get much of their news through the platform — I'm not talking links to legitimate journalism that I and others post — and much of it is false or misleading content from dubious sources. Facebook has made various changes to its content policies and has banned inflammatory public figures including Alex Jones, David Duke and Louis Farrakhan over their hate speech. But the moves haven't worked to rid the network of its most destructive elements and scrub it clean so the original intent will be all that's left. Like in the Alien film series, getting this monster under control seems almost impossible. There have been numerous lawsuits against Facebook as well as security breaches, one of the largest involving Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that illegally obtained the information of millions of users in 2018, which Facebook failed to disclose. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections was linked in part to Facebook ads and accounts created to carry out the meddling. Facebook posts have played a role in political uprisings and violence globally, and U.N. investigators blamed the platform for spreading hate speech that incited the Myanmar military's genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Two years ago, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for violations of user privacy, a record fine for a tech company. Chillingly, Facebook Live has been used to broadcast murders, suicides and other acts of violence. More recently, Facebook has been criticized for its role in perpetuating COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. These are just a fraction of the reasons I've finally made this decision. The prospect of losing immediate contact with so many loved ones and not being able to keep up with what and how they and their families are doing saddens me. But this is about doing the right thing. My wife, who had a Facebook account a couple of times briefly but closed it for the same reasons I'm shutting down mine, has pleaded with me for years to give it up. I've explained that while I get why I should, I simply can't because I'd lose touch with so many people.