Have you ever been permanently banned from a club you didn’t belong to?

Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, I had the distinct privilege of teaching Calculus I and II to evening science and math majors at Essex County College, a two-year college in Newark, NJ. At that time, Essex enrolled 10,000 to 12,000 students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including a segment of highly prepared and mostly foreign students, as well as many poorly prepared students from the greater Newark metropolitan area. 

What they all were after was a better life and what bound them together was that they were almost all exclusively economically poor. Also, at about 27 years of age, they were generally older than typical entering college students. Many were seeking a second chance at higher education with a measure of adult seriousness that can be lacking in younger lives. The students were diverse in the extreme. For example, it was typical that in the fall of 2006, we had 37 different countries represented within the student body. Largely, many of them were goal-oriented, especially so among the evening students.

In particular, my evening math students were composed of mostly highly motivated adults working technical day jobs in local businesses and enrolled in various of our transfer programs. Many were seeking four-year degrees from Rutgers and New Jersey Institute of Technology (both a few blocks down the street). I was most fortunate, because for a variety of reasons, they attended with a desire to know. In all the years of improper integrals or infinite series, never was I asked, “Why do we have to know this?” It was usually more like, “Tell me what I need to know to be successful.” And I did and they often were.

After one particularly successful semester, several students suggested that I join Facebook and “friend” them. I knew little about such things, and so I did as they suggested.  In those early days of social media, I soon found myself “drowning” in friends, 98 percent of whom I did not know. Hundreds of photos and selfies of absolute strangers poured in. It was not popularity; I felt a target of mayhem. Within a few weeks, I left the site and decided I could somehow survive without all the noise of Facebook.

That summer, I entered an internet café in Stuttgart, Germany and purchased web time using a café computer. On a hunch, I tried my old site on Facebook and was told I could not log on. They did not recognize the computer or my location. After a few tries, I gave up.   

In the 20 years since then, I never tried to go back to Facebook. “Who needs that?” was my reaction. And I never did go back—until about a month ago, while viewing how-to videos on YouTube, I accidentally wandered onto Facebook and found a notice that I faced a “lifetime ban” from the site! 

Surprised and perplexed, I checked AI sources on Google and immediately found the following.

“Facebook's record on securing its sites is poor, marked by numerous breaches and privacy failures, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and massive leaks of user data to unsecured servers and public dark web forums. Despite implementing security features and responding to incidents, the company has faced significant criticism and regulatory action, such as a $5 billion fine from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, due to repeated security vulnerabilities and the accidental exposure of user information.”

Nonetheless, all you “Facebookers” are safe from me!

So, why is anybody on Facebook? Why not go out in the world and make a real friend?

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA. He is not on Facebook, but shares his thoughts at John in the Woods on Substack.