Psychology of social media profile deletion

The psychology of social media profile deletion deals with what goes on inside individuals’ heads as they contemplate the deletion of their social media profiles. What do people think about before deleting their Facebook account? Why do some people habitually deactivate their Facebook account? How do people feel before and after deleting their Quora account? And so on.

This topic is interesting from a content creation perspective for two reasons: (1) content that isn’t saved is content that people in the future won’t be able to see, so by saving information from social media profiles, it is possible to “create” content that people in the future can see; (2) if so many people delete their social media profiles, who is to say we aren’t among those people?—in other words, non-exceptionalism forces us to consider that our future selves might delete the content we work so hard today to create.

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History

There used to be a website called Profile Graveyard where people described the reasons for deleting profiles.

See also