I recently made the decision to deactivate my son’s Facebook account after we had one too many issues with his use and it’s been fascinating to see how many emotional strings they pull as you go through the process so that you’ll change your mind and stick around. Makes me wonder how many of those much-vaunted 750mil members are deactivated accounts or almost deactivated, ignored accounts.
Go through the account settings, click on “deactivate” and you’ll get this warning:

In case you can’t read it, the top says “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” and below it says “Deactivating your account will disable your profile and remove your name and picture from everything you’ve shared on Facebook.”
Below that are pictures (not profile pictures, but user photos) from some of your friends, with the headline “Jason will miss you”, “Alynne will miss you”, “Kim will miss you”, etc.
Under each photo is a convenient “Send Jason a Message”, but really, Facebook, this feels awfully manipulative on your part. Is it such a crisis for the business if someone deactivates their account that you need to have this sort of screen pop up to slow them down?
But we’re not done. After you finally deactivate the account, the account holder gets the following email message:

Forty words and two links to “reactivate” your account, one of which is a bright green “Sign In”, as if you’d never deactivated your account, let alone JUST gone through the steps to deactivate it.
I’ll keep my eyes open, I expect my son will get monthly and randomly scheduled messages from Facebook reminding him of all the people who are missing him because he’s not on the service and reminding him just how darn easy it is to reinstate the account.
Feels very sordid, Facebook, very manipulative. You really need to reconsider this entire sequence of communication.