After taking down SpaceX, Tesla and his own official pages from Facebook, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has now justified his action.
“It’s not a political statement and I didn’t do this because someone dared me to do it. Just don’t like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry,” Musk tweeted on Saturday night.
The Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla disappeared minutes after Musk responded to a comment on Twitter calling for him to take down the official pages in support of the #DeleteFacebook movement.
“What’s Facebook?” Musk on Friday morning, sarcastically replied to a tweet from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton urging his followers to delete Facebook by tweeting: “It is time.”
Prior to the deletion, both the two pages had over 2.6 million Likes and Follows, and super high engagement rates.
The boycott “#DeleteFacebook” started after the US and British media reported that the data of more than 50 million Facebook users were inappropriately used by Cambridge Analytica, in activities allegedly connected with US President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
When it comes to Facebook-owned Instagram, Musk is a bit considerate.
“Instagram’s probably ok imo, so long as it stays fairly independent. I don’t use FB and never have, so don’t think I’m some kind of martyr or my companies are taking a huge blow. Also, we don’t advertise or pay for endorsements, so ... don’t care,” he tweeted.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that his company had made mistakes in a data leak that caused grave concern about user privacy possibly abused for political purposes.
