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'What's Facebook?', Elon Musk Asks, As He Deletes SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages

Posted by msmash on from the musk:1,zuck:0 dept.

It is unlikely that Facebook will see a significant drop in its mammoth userbase following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But on Friday, the #DeleteFacebook campaign, which is seeing an increasingly growing number of people call it quits on the world's largest social network, found its biggest backer: Elon Musk. Responding to WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton's "#DeleteFacebook" tweet, Musk asked "What's Facebook?" That was the beginning of a tweetstorm, which saw journalists asking Musk why his companies -- SpaceX and Tesla -- maintained their Facebook pages. Shouldn't Musk, they asked, delete them? Musk agreed. As of this writing, the official Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla, both of which had more than two million followers, are nowhere to be found. The Facebook page of SolarCity is gone too, if you were wondering.

The move comes months after Musk said Zuckerberg's understanding of AI was limited.

15 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Just a Start. by Zorro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now delete Twitter too.

    1. Re: Just a Start. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And also delete Instagram accounts, platform wich same owner than Facebook

    2. Re:Just a Start. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm starting to wonder if Twitter is pushing this, because it's being done as a "Twitter hashtag."

      I mean, yes, Facebook is evil, but why delete Facebook specifically NOW? Because they've done anything they haven't done in the past? No, they did the exact same thing for Obama's campaign, and no one batted an eyelash.

      But now all of a sudden everyone is talking about "#DeleteFacebook." Not "Delete Facebook," specifically "#DeleteFacebook."

      Twitter does the same damned things Facebook does. There are Twitter trackers on every page. (Even this one.) They collect user data without consent. They sell it to advertisers. They run facial recognition on every image uploaded. They have "shadow profiles" of non-Twitter users.

      So why just Facebook?

      I think we all know the real reason.

    3. Re:Just a Start. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Slashdot is not 'social media' by a longshot. The only thing they know about me...

      So the difference between /. and social media is the use of an alias?

      Bullshit. /. is social media just as much as Facebook is. You just don't want to admit that you use social media.

    4. Re:Just a Start. by i286NiNJA · · Score: 4, Insightful

      #metoo happened because it's such a common experience to be shit on by some other human being and just have to eat it because of the circumstance. So all of these people had been walking around for decades with these little demons waiting to be aired.

      This was engineered by the outrage-media industry but really the whole fucking thing was beautiful because not only did a lot of creeps get totally exposed but the whole thing backfired and came back to fuck over so many important media and hollywood types. The same assholes who smugly lectured the rest of America and stirred to pot for power and profit over the smallest of social transgressions when in reality they're the slimest fuckers outside of Washington DC.

    5. Re:Just a Start. by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, they did the exact same thing for Obama's campaign, and no one batted an eyelash.

      No, they didn't. This has been debunked multiple times. The Obama campaign did use Facebook, but not in the dishonest underhanded way CA did.

      Twitter does the same damned things Facebook does

      Not really. Twitter doesn't keep track of my age, employment history, address, club memberships, or the same information about my friends. At best, someone trying to find information about "squiggleslash" will figure out what city in Florida I live in and my approximate age, and might be able to guess algorithmically my politics, but would have a hard time finding out anything more specific. My schools? Names of employers? Forget it. You would find out the same information as you would on Slashdot, and nobody's arguing we should delete Slashdot. Well, not over privacy concerns anyway. I mean, it's pretty awful these days, a den of entitled misogynist jackwagons for the most part that rarely discusses anything interesting to do with tech, but, well, that's a different argument.

      Facebook collects massive amounts of personal data, not just about you but about your friends. Even your friends who aren't on Facebook. It links this data to you personally, not a pseudonymous ID. And then it makes all that information available via the Graph API to anyone who's able to persuade you to use FB as a login method or something else unrelated to privacy.

      Facebook can fix this in an instant - shut down the APIs. Introduce replacements that only allow for basic authentication and specific actions the user has to confirm. Users addresses and other information they've entered should never be shared with anyone via the API and there should be very limited access to that information via other means. There is no reason to share that information via APIs, it should not be shared via APIs. They should block that kind of information from being shared via APIs.

      They choose not to. Shut the fuckers down.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    6. Re:Just a Start. by HornWumpus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You forgot: a great sense of humor and perception.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    7. Re:Just a Start. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No, they didn't. This has been debunked multiple times. The Obama campaign did use Facebook, but not in the dishonest underhanded way CA did.

      You are splitting hairs. Obama used Facebook in literally the same way CA did. The only difference was that Facebook knew they were using the data and didn't care. (Although there's pretty strong evidence they knew CA was, too.)

      Beyond that the data accessed and the data mining done with it were practically identical.

    8. Re:Just a Start. by Quantum+gravity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not only all of that, they also download the photos with location data from your mobile, and run face recognition software on them. There is something in the US called BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act) though, and an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook's face recognition violates BIPA. They don't this in EU probably due to the tougher GDPR regulations.

      Note that you can configure the app and shut off the face recognition if you want.

  2. Why we can't have nice things by DeplorableCodeMonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Generic Relative/Friend: What Facebook did is horrible! Someone should go to jail. Muh privacy!
    You: Hey, I heard about this other social media site with different business model. You want to try it out together to see if we like it better than FB?
    Generic Relative/Friend: No! I have no time for that! *Posts more crappy memes on Facebook*

    In terms of reputation, if Comcast is the bottom of the barrel, Facebook's rep is now buried 6 ft under the barrel and Generic Relative/Friend cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.

    This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.

  3. Facebook by no-body · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At it's beginning, I checked their User Agreement and whatever content I would post there pictures etc., it would become Facebooks property and that was not to my liking, never looked back to there. Proofed me just right in doing so by not participating on this circus.

  4. Why? by ooloorie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked. And the TOS make it pretty clear that data can be used for such purposes. All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?

  5. #DeleteAllSocialMedia by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Take your lives back, people.

  6. Destruction by Mandrel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What disturbs me about such deletion is the casual destruction of all the information and entertainment in the posts and comments. I know Facebook is renowned for the ephemeral and lightweight nature of its content, and almost all wouldn't have been worth preserving. But worthwhile stuff and history has also been lost.

    I felt the same way when IMDB deleted its fora.

    1. Re:Destruction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Don't worry, FB will just hide it. They are not the type of company to offer an honest delete option.