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'What's Facebook?', Elon Musk Asks, As He Deletes SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages
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.
The move comes months after Musk said Zuckerberg's understanding of AI was limited.
After years of resisting joining Facebook, I caved after publishing my first novel. I figured that it was a potential place to spread the word of my book and I couldn't ignore it. As a method of spreading the word, it's pretty bad, though. If you post something, everyone who follows you won't see it. Not unless you pay Facebook to spread it to more people than the people they deem will see your message. If a group of people follow me, I'd think they should ALL see my message, but apparently Facebook disagrees.
I'd be interested in any alternatives to Facebook that people can recommend. (And, no, "get off all social media" is not a valid alternative.) Are there up and coming social media sites that are viable alternatives to Facebook? Obviously, they might not have the number of users that Facebook has, but if you set the page to be public, it doesn't matter if the person is a subscribed member or not.
At this point, I'm thinking of going back to my blog and maybe using IFTTT to auto-post links on Facebook about my blog posts.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.