Five reasons why you can't quite bring yourself to delete Facebook

YOU know Facebook is a cynical corporation partly responsible for the f**ked up state of the world and yet you can’t bring yourself to delete it. Here are your lame reasons why not.

You might miss something important

Like what? 37 targeted ads for Nutribullets because you happened to Google it three weeks ago? Pictures of an ex-colleague’s children who you’ve never met? There is nothing important on Facebook, ever. If you want to know how your friends are, send them a text. If you haven’t got their number, they aren’t your friend.

It’s the only way you can legitimately spy on your secondary school crush

You never got over Clare who you sat next to in maths, and Facebook allows you to stoke your creepy longing by showing you photos of her doing parkruns and selling unwanted handbags. If you deleted Facebook you might never see her again, which you don’t want, despite the fact that it might allow you to save your own slowly-failing marriage.

There are treasured photos on there

Are there really? Yes, you went through a lengthy phase of uploading 100 pictures taken on a digital camera after every night out circa 2009, but blurry snaps of you shitfaced in a club are not treasured. If you wouldn’t have it printed and framed, it should vanish forever into a digital black hole.

It means you remember friends’ birthdays

If the only way you wish your friends ‘happy birthday’ is a hastily written Facebook message after it pops up on your timeline, you don’t deserve them. It takes little effort to buy a birthday calendar and write them all down, and you might find that people actually bother to invite you to their parties because it seems like you care.

You can’t be arsed

The ultimate reason you can’t bring yourself to delete Facebook is because it’s a hassle. They don’t make it easy and if you have to do anything more taxing than click a button that says ‘Delete profile’ you fall at the first hurdle. Therefore you deserve to have your data harvested by Mark Zuckerberg and his sinister cronies forever.

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I'm a low-income pensioner and I'm terrified of university cancel culture this winter

By Mary Fisher

I’M 72 years old. I live on the basic state pension. And I don’t know how I’m going to cope come the winter. I’ve never been so worried in all my life. But here we are.

Cancel culture. No platforming. Campus speakers with traditional views on transgender and immigration shut out in the cold. Keeps me awake at night, it does.

The government say they’re taking action but I’m frightened that if Julie Bindel isn’t allowed to debate gender neutral toilets she might lose the will to live and just fade away into obscure political websites.

Yes, those with conservative views have got the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, Spectator and the Sun if people want to advocate sending Windrush migrants to Rwanda in leaky boats, but if they’re denied the platform of the University of East Anglia you’re literally cutting their tongues out.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. The thought of Kelvin Mackenzie not being allowed to address students at Sheffield Hallam University and make a joke about eating a hamster in case it offends the Save The Lesbian One-Legged Hamster League fills me with dread.

I don’t ask for much. Food and shelter, clothes, a hot bath now and again and the right to open my newspaper and learn that sports commentators are lesbians or traitors. And of course tell people ‘Hitler had the right idea about a lot of things’ without fear of being branded a Nazi.

Just the basics. But it seems that come the winter I’m going to be deprived even of those. I don’t think I’ll make it through the woker months, to be honest.

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