The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
San Francisco, United States | THE INDEPENDENT | Tesla chief Elon Musk has deleted Tesla and SpaceX from the world’s most popular social media platform Facebook. He announced his decision on twitter.
“We’ve never advertised with FB. None of my companies buy advertising or pay famous people to fake endorse. Product lives or dies on its own merits,” he said soon after.
Asked about Instagram, he said “Instagram’s probably ok imo, so long as it stays fairly independent. I don’t use FB & 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.”
Facebook is fighting a snowballing scandal over the hijacking of personal data from millions of its users. It resulted in the harvesting of Facebook user data by a British firm linked to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The scandal erupted when a whistleblower revealed that British data consultant Cambridge Analytica had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.
The app was downloaded by 270,000 people, but also scooped up their friends’ data without consent — as was possible under Facebook’s rules at the time.
Facebook says it discovered last week that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as it certified.
