14 DAY TRIAL // The growing tension that social networking service Facebook has to deal with these days has prompted many to delete their accounts, and it looks like one of those who believe this is the right move is none other than WhatsApp founder Brian Acton.
WhatsApp itself, which at this point is without a doubt the top mobile messaging platform, is owned by Facebook, so seeing the founder of the company talking about deleting Facebook accounts is surprising to say the least.
In a very short tweet earlier today, Acton said “it is time #deletefacebook,” a message that all of its 25,000+ followers obviously considered to be a recommendation to abandon the social network. No other follow-up posts were published and no extra info was offered, but by the looks of things, Brian Acton isn’t the biggest fan of Facebook’s new direction these days.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp back in 2014 for $16 billion, but while co-founder Jan Koum is still part of the company, Acton decided to retire last year and invest in messaging platform Signal.
The Facebook decline
As for the reasons he tweets against Facebook, it’s most likely related to the recent findings that the social network played a very important role in the 2016 US election.
London-based analytics firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of violating Facebook’s terms of service by collecting and sharing the information of up to 50 million users without their consent. The data was then used to support Donald Trump’s campaign with very specific ads for each individual.
Due to this new scandal, Facebook’s shares dropped 2.6 percent on Tuesday due to concerns of data mining, and a growing number of users decided to delete their accounts following these revelations.
It’ll be interesting to see if more key figures in the tech field do the same thing, but if WhatsApp founder himself waves goodbye to Facebook, it’s pretty clear the social network is in the middle of a major crisis nowadays.