People are jumping on Twitter to announce their breakup with Facebook.
The hashtag #DeleteFacebook is trending on Monday after the New York Times reported this weekend that the data of 50 million users had been unknowingly leaked and purchased to aid President Trump’s successful 2016 bid for the presidency.
Twitter was littered with users sharing the hashtag:
Facebook is under fire after data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica received $15 million from Republican donor Robert Mercer ahead of the 2014 midterm elections to pay Cambridge Professor Aleksandr Kogan for data on millions of users. Kogan had paid about 270,000 people to fill out a survey built on Facebook’s developer tools — allowing him to pull information on “liked” pages, as well as look at the “friends” of users that opted into his app. The data was leveraged by Cambridge Analytica to target voters with specific personality profiles.
Pulling that information was kosher, but selling it to a third-party, like Cambridge Analytica, violated Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook has since tightened its agreement, barring app developers from looking at friends’ profiles. Facebook said on Saturday that “Kogan lied to us” by passing data collected from his app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said that when it learned of the violation in 2015, it removed Kogan’s app.
But for many users, the news highlighted the danger of Facebook housing the personal information of billions of users. Several app developers told TheWrap there is still little stopping them from violating Facebook’s terms of service and selling its data.
And even before the Cambridge Analytica news, Facebook has been grappling with its waning popularity in the U.S. The company lost 1 million domestic users last quarter — its first quarterly drop in daily users.
TheWrap isn’t telling you what to do, but if you were looking to #DeleteFacebook as well, here’s what you need to know. First off, there’s a difference between deleting and deactivating your Facebook. Deactivating essentially takes your Facebook profile off the map, but if you head back over to the social network and login, your profile will pop back up.
Still, if you’re going all-out, there’s a simple three-step “delete” process once you’re logged into Facebook:
Then click “Request account deletion” and follow the steps
That’s all you need to know — but there’s a holdup. Facebook says it “may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you’ve posted, like your photos, status updates, or other data stored in backup systems.”
6 Tech Giants Shaking Up News, From Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs (Photos)
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
Jeff Bezos – Washington Post
The Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. President Trump has called the paper the “Amazon Washington Post.”
The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."
The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”
The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.
OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.
Tech is increasingly intertwined with news, for better or worse
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.