How to delete your Facebook account
118 comments
·January 9, 2025chikenf00t
I deleted my Facebook account back in 2015. I was in high school and going through a deep depression/mental break down. I remember feeling so much relief as the days went on. I don't think I was ever designed to handle social media properly. I doubt I'm the only one either.
dgfitz
I started college around 2005, when Facebook was still “exclusive to .edu college email addresses” and it was novel at the time, mostly because it was unfortunately exclusive.
My 3rd year I trimmed my friends list down from 10k to 1k, people I actually at least remembered having a conversation with. The next I took it down to about 300 people, and realized “I see or communicate with these people outside of this website already” and killed my account.
Best decision I ever made relative to the topic of social media.
eleveriven
Deleting my Instagram account has affected me in a similar way. I'm very grateful to myself for making that decision.
eccentric_bb
no one is designed to handle social media at scale. Our brains are calibrated to express empathy at different levels for finite numbers of people who are of a given proximity to us (emotionally and physically) — e.g. the smaller and closer the group, the more capable of empathy (and thus worthy of exposure to nuanced feelings and more frequent exposure) we are.
Being bombarded with the thoughts and takes (especially when distorted in content and exposure frequency by an ad platform disguised as a social media site) of thousands of people — only a few of whom you can possibly know closely — is a recipe for mass psychosis.
redeux
I deleted my FB account a long long time ago and then a few years later I wanted to make a new one for business reasons and they blocked me from doing so.
I’m not saying don’t delete your account - I still don’t have one, but be aware that it may not be as simple as just creating a new one if you change your mind in the future.
james_pm
Same. I have Instagram and Threads accounts, but I tried to get Facebook back about 5 years after deleting it and immediately got asked for ID and then was banned with no appeal possible. I guess they take deleting your account very personally.
krowfromthewall
similar thing happened to me, my recently opened Instagram account was suspended saying that it was being used for spam (even though there were no posts or comments, only liking and saving other people's posts), and allowed me to get it back only after adding a phone number.
redeux
> got asked for ID and then was banned with no appeal possible
This is exactly what happened to me as well.
amyames
Same. I had a deactivated account from 2015 I could no longer access .
Subsequent attempts to make new ones were instantly banned for “no reason.”
They did work with me to reinstate the 2015 account. And it’s never been banned or suspended since. I don’t really use it anyway.
But that’s how they are. They trust older accounts. New ones are treated like criminals.
mixmastamyk
Aren't most services demanding multifactor id these days? Ostensibly to defend against fraud, but nicely dovetails into their surveillance databases.
iszomer
I think it mainly affects users who opted into FB's SSO feature across their other services.
georgeecollins
Get a headset. You can get a FB account with one and better still there is actually some customer service.
wakawaka28
This might be a way to protect people who really don't want an account from having their identity stolen. If you deleted your account, one of your connections could see that and make another one in your name to mess you up.
iszomer
Akin to FOMO? Some services will retain your used account usernames post-deletion while others do not. IIRC, facebook does the former.
wakawaka28
I don't know what you mean. People are saying that Facebook wouldn't allow them to reuse their own old username. I think it's to prevent identity theft as someone could pick up any deleted username and pretend to be the old owner. They could even re-add the old owner's old connections to establish the scam. A few people might think "I thought I was already connected to this guy!" but most wouldn't think twice if they saw that the username and photo were the same.
I think it makes sense to allow reuse of usernames, but only after a sufficiently long period of time. I don't know if 20 years is enough, but something in that ballpark would be needed to reduce the risk of identity theft.
UncleOxidant
You couldn't use a secondary or business email account to sign up?
redeux
Probably, but I already didn't like FB. I was just doing it as a checkbox to say we were on FB too. Once they were actively hostile to me it was no longer worth it. As a matter of course, I try not to interact with hostile people or companies if I can help it.
TheNewsIsHere
In my experience, no.
For all the bots that clearly get through, they have some pretty onerous algorithms at work to figure out if you’ve ever had another account. It seems to matter not whether you use a different email or IP address. The same name alone seemed to be enough for them to lock a business account I was trying to create.
They’ve gotten a LOT more aggressive I think. About 12 years ago I created a second account in my own name for use exclusively with family, and never had issues with that one. I think that part of their risk analysis is that whatever risk analysis was performed at the time the account was created is somewhat sticky. Likely to prevent complaints about changing goalposts.
Of course I don’t use any Facebook/Meta property anymore.
spencerflem
I find it very easy to stay off their feed of algorithmic garbage, but unfortunately despite being (imo) less usable than Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace is what everyone around me uses.
jilles
This is the only thing keeping me from deleting my Facebook account. I recently moved and wanted to sell some things. Listed about 8 things on Craigslist and got some shady replies.
I listed the same 8 things on Facebook Marketplace and sold everything within days...
Lord-Jobo
Made a very fake account filled with very fake info, using a blurry profile picture of a random person on LinkedIn who looks very vaguely like me.
Might as well poison the well if I'm going to have the account for marketplace
rozap
I applaud the tutorial, but even so it's easier said than done. I deleted mine maybe 10 years ago, before they offered a hard delete option, so all you had to do to un-delete it was log in. Then, Comcast email (yes I used a Comcast email when i created my FB account in like 2008, whatever) got owned and so too did my facebook account. I started getting texts from friends the other week saying my account was alive and posting crypto scams. No way to recover it, since the email was gone. All the account recovery options (even though they have my current email) led to the same void, so now I'm permanently locked out. Facebook is scum of the earth.
baobun
I can't delete my account because they blocked any access until I upload a passport scan (despite never IDing previously). Guessing it got triggered by switching IPs/proxies. Any appeal attempts went unanaswered. It does suck that I lost a bunch of personal connections and that they (illegally in the EU I guess) deny me rights to access and delete my data for years now.
amyames
When it’s in a status where they’re demanding ID it “should be” deactivated.
Now they will delete the account after some time if if you refuse to give them ID. But they didn’t always do that, which meant they had your data and refuse to give it up. Basically forever.
They’re not a great company and they don’t care about anything. You might be better off claiming you live in California USA and demanding they delete it under CCPA, than to try as EU Right to be forgotten or EU privacy. And that’s dismal too because your laws are supposed to be better than ours.
You should be able to get a UPS store Mail Drop for a month or two while you correspond with them and or the California attorney generals office and raise some hell. Yes it’s garbage to suggest this but it works. They take ID and all that over the web to open a mailbox and “voila I live in California now.” If you have any friends online there , just ask if you can “live there” and get some mail there while you write letters to the AG and or meta
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
They *have to* comply with the California request. I had to resort to this to get Kinto Share to stop accessing my background and credit every year. (Another trash fire company that doesn’t care how much you beg threaten or cry.)
srameshc
My instant thought was this was an article from the past and why is it reposted now !! Almost after a decade we are back to this headline again. Probably we will read something like this after another 10 years.
dustingetz
group fitness scheduling platforms use facebook login and disseminate information through their business page, if you hard delete your account you’re hard blocking yourself from local small businesses. what’s so hard about just not using it?
gazchop
Deleted mine after they refused to let me make a comment on an unrelated group that Gatwick Airport is horrible on a Monday morning. Figured the algorithmic moderation was terrible and likely to waste my time conforming to some narrow and undefined form of speech. Not allowed to make a rational criticism.
Then two days later, rather than fix that, they announce the change to moderation methodology which has benefits to the highest bidder rather than the community.
Smells like another cesspit like X in the making.
Gone! Both are bad. The problem is the platform existing at this point.
ChocolateGod
> Smells like another cesspit like X in the making.
You act like Facebook isn't already a cesspit. Anyone who claims any mainstream social network site isn't a cesspit is being fruitful with the truth, they're the sum of humanity and humanity sucks.
gazchop
Oh there’s cesspits and there’s cesspits.
Facebook at least had some small community groups and market place utility.
bibligabye
I deleted my Facebook account years ago and recently tried to re-create a new one. I had to use a different email address but even after doing so and sending them a picture of me as requested, they won't let me re-create an account. Apparently my brand new account that I never used doesn't adhere to their community standards about the integrity of accounts.
I asked them to review their decision and it was a NO... and there are no other remedies.
physicsguy
I kept it and Instagram around for years for older relatives and Marketplace and then by coincidence I’m trying to cut back on internet use and read more so I deleted it over NY this year. It’s surprisingly annoying to do, but the worst thing is having to recover access to anything I logged in with Facebook for.
ruthmarx
Before Facebook introduced the option to unsend or delete sent messages, you could only remove them from your view.
Does anyone know if there is an option to restore them, so you can then remove them from the people you've sent them to?
Before I delete my account, I'd like to make sure I delete as many messages I sent to people also.
elforce002
I deleted my FB account six years ago, and I don't miss it. I use Twitter, Reddit, and occasionally IG (I don't post anything there).
I did after yesterday’s story. It’s only a matter of time before you don’t even have to interact with their AI tools to kick off them showing you yourself in generated content. No thanks! They make it damn obscure to find too. I had to click a direct link to the option from their help pages.