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That is exactly the process I went through a few years ago and the manipulative messaging assured me that I was making the correct decision to get as far away from FB as possible.

Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, closed off Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion with the following paragraph about organizations that manipulate us and I completely believe Facebook is one of these organizations:

"I don’t consider myself pugnacious by nature, but I actively advocate such belligerent actions because in a way I am at war with the exploiters—we all are. It is important to recognize, however, that their motive for profit is not the cause for hostilities; that motive, after all, is something we each share to an extent. The real treachery, and the thing we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make their profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts. The blitz of modern daily life demands that we have faithful shortcuts, sound rules of thumb to handle it all. These are not luxuries any longer; they are out-and-out necessities that figure to become increasingly vital as the pulse of daily life quickens. That is why we should want to retaliate whenever we see someone betraying one of our rules of thumb for profit. We want that rule to be as effective as possible. But to the degree that its fitness for duty is regularly undercut by the tricks of a profiteer, we naturally will use it less and will be less able to cope efficiently with the decisional burdens of our day. We cannot allow that without a fight. The stakes have gotten too high."




Thank you for that quote. The book has been high on my to-read list for a while now and this is a good motivation get started on it.


I think I gifted that book to at least a dozen people by now, it's an absolute must read. I still paraphrase stories from it regularly.


I’ve had hat book for years but don’t recall that quote. Looks like I’ll have to reread it.

It’s very astute.




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