I wouldn't go quite as far as saying people "have to" use Facebook, but there are fairly significant social costs to someone who chooses not to.

Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it.

And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice.

Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?

When I was in a band, the people promoting and organizing the shows didn't have email or phone numbers. Seriously. I'd ask. It was all college kids who couldn't afford a phone plan, so they just used public wifi + facebook messenger. Email was apparently not cool enough for them, or too difficult to use.

So to get gigs, I had to make a Facebook account. Granted, I tried to put as little as possible on it.

Until very recently, a few friends had me trapped their too. They couldn't pay their phone bill. So no texts or calls. Would just steal wifi from some store, use Facebook messenger. I harassed them to get email, IRC, anything else. But they couldn't be bothered to learn those things.

I know this sounds like the stupidest thing ever. It reminds me of people taking out payday loans or going to check cashing places, because they're too poor to go to the bank.

Anyway, two of them finally got phone numbers, so Facebook is deleted now.

You really read my comment in the worst possible light. No one has to use facebook but so many people connect through it that there are social costs to not using it. If people want to connect with you, you can't use messenger or groups, bam, that cuts off a lot of your connection with others.

I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.