Sorry to play fast and loose with Betteridge's law – which says the answer to any headline question is no – but of course it is. Of course Facebook is draining your iPhone battery. Everything you have and everything you use on your iPhone drains it, that's what the battery is there for. But a new and very persuasive article says it is draining it a lot. Far more than you'd expect and actually far more than it really needs to.

Apps that can make or receive calls, like Skype, Viber, Tango, Whatsapp, and Facebook are able to check for incoming calls without notifying you. I believe these types of apps sometimes abuse this exception and could have possibly influenced Apple to add Background App Refresh as the sanctioned method for this type of behavior.

I think this is why disabling Facebook's background services is so influential on battery life: I speculate they are abusing the fact that they have VOIP call features to run in the background more than they should. It would provide a better experience for people using Facebook, sure, but people would never know Facebook was the cause of their battery life issues, and would definitely blame the device or iOS itself.
The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain – Overthought.org

The piece is very persuasive. I don't know the writer Scotty Loveless and hadn't heard of Overthought.org before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I've immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

He's more of the school where he says what something is for so you can decide whether you need that feature or not.

With the two Facebook ones, I don't need either. You don't need either. The location service lets Facebook say your post is from New York City or wherever – and if is were there, I'd be writing that in the update. Background refresh has nothing to do with you getting notifications of messages and comments: they work completely separately. So there is no reason to have it on. None. Not for you or me – but seemingly there's an advantage for Facebook. I am okay with denying them this.

That's the thing that makes me pause: it's oddly appealing to think a genuine problem I'm having is somehow Facebook's fault. But I'm trying all the things the article says and we'll see.