Digital Migration — Part 1: Dropping Meta

Setting the Stage

The horror unfolding in Palestine is a global alarm bell, not merely a regional tragedy. Its echo reaches every conscience that values human life. In response, I have begun a digital migration—a journey away from corporations whose actions, whether overt or hidden, fuel this catastrophe.

Every click, every message, every piece of data handed over to these platforms becomes a thread in a tapestry that powers surveillance, profit‑driven profiling, and, ultimately, tools wielded against innocent civilians. Continuing to rely on them means we are, willingly or not, financing and enabling the machinery of oppression.

Why Meta Is the First Target

Meta’s suite—WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook—has become a conduit for state‑level AI weaponisation. Investigative reporting by +972 Magazine uncovered that Israeli military AI systems Lavender and Where’s Daddy? harvest metadata from WhatsApp groups to compile “target lists” for strikes in Gaza. The same article details how senior Meta officials, including the CEO and CISO, have close ties to Israeli leadership, effectively green‑lighting the flow of civilian data to a war‑machine.

The implication is stark: a platform marketed as “private” is, in practice, a surveillance pipeline that can decide who lives and who dies.

My Personal Break‑away

I shut down my Facebook account years ago, erased WhatsApp in 2019, and deleted my Instagram account too. Friends and some scholars argue that abandoning these tools hampers my ability to communicate and propagate Islam. Yet the prophetic lesson of Prophet Adam (peace be upon him)—who ate from the forbidden tree for a noble and sincere purpose but was led astray by the whispers of Satan—reminds us that means do not justify ends. The comfort of familiar apps is a siren that masks complicity.

The Ethical Imperative

Justifying the continued use of Meta as a “necessary evil” is perhaps as grave as the atrocities it helps facilitate. Our faith teaches us that honour and dignity belong to Allah alone, and that any compromise that aids oppression erodes the very moral foundation we claim to protect.

Practical Alternatives

Leaving Meta does not mean isolation. Below are vetted, privacy‑respecting substitutes that keep us connected without feeding the surveillance beast:

Looking Ahead

Having severed ties with Meta, the next phase of this series will examine Google’s ecosystem—search, email, cloud storage and more—something I’ve been told is “impossible,” “too hard,” or “can’t be done.”

Stay tuned, stay vigilant, and remember: our digital choices are extensions of our moral choices. By refusing to lend our data to platforms complicit in oppression, we reclaim a fragment of agency in a world that seeks to strip it away.

Post Edit

Although obvious to me and many others, it must be stated that many people unknowingly or knowingly fund these entities through the advertising that is played on the services provided on the platforms—whether you click on it or not. Likewise, a successful post on, for example, Instagram that has lots of likes and shares will feed into the system, which again increases the funding capacity—whether through the channel of the owner of the video or others.

That means every time we celebrate the success of a video we just uploaded because of the number of likes and shares, we could actually be celebrating the platform that uses your successful video to fund itself and… ultimately… the enemy.