Facebook suffers celebrity exodus as Zuckerberg acknowledges #DeleteFacebook trend
THEY’RE famous, they’re private, and they’re annoyed. More celebrities are leaving Facebook — and they’re not afraid to tell you why.
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CELEBRITIES and public figures continued to abandon Facebook during its biggest privacy scandal to date, even though founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg insisted there had been no “dramatic fall-off” in users.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined a growing list of high-profile figures to abandon the social network this week and to criticise its use of personal information for profit.
His announcement followed similar moves by singer Cher, actors Will Ferrell and Jim Carrey, former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, and entrepreneur Elon Musk, as well as companies including Playboy and Mozilla.
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Mr Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976, said he planned to delete his Facebook account following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal as a way to protest the social network’s exploitation of users’ personal information.
“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he said. “The profits are all based on the user’s info but the users get none of the profits back.
“As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”
Mr Wozniak said the practice was hypocritical of Mr Zuckerberg, who had purchased “all the houses around his … for his own privacy,” but would not look after the privacy of Facebook’s users.
Mr Wozniak’s bold denouncement follows similarly memorable criticism from Jim Carrey, who not only deleted his account but sold his shares in Facebook after he discovered it had profited from Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Cher left Facebook after the scandal broke last month, saying it was a “very hard” decision but “there are some things more important than money,” and Will Ferrell deleted his account, commenting that he was “very disturbed to hear about Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of millions of Facebook users’ information” and “appalled” at Facebook’s response.
The social network initially failed to publicly address revelations that data had been harvested from 87 million Facebook users and sold to the shadowy political data firm, though it has since rolled out changes to the way it shares information with third parties.
Despite the celebrity exodus, Mr Zuckerberg told US Congress there had been no “dramatic fall-off” in user numbers, though he confessed to seeing some evidence of a #DeleteFacebook trend.
“There was a movement where some people were encouraging their friends to delete their accounts,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “I think that got shared a bunch.”
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company had also seen “seen a few advertisers pause with us” over the scandal.
Mr Zuckerberg is due to answer questions before a second US congressional committee overnight.
Originally published as Facebook suffers celebrity exodus as Zuckerberg acknowledges #DeleteFacebook trend