The decision by the veteran comedian to join the #DeleteFacebook movement is another blow to the besieged Social Media giant.
Will Ferrell has announced that he has had enough of Facebook.
In a post on the same platform, he has announced his decision to delete his Facebook account by Friday. Currently, his page has over 10.1 million fans.
Just like Playboy magazine before him, it was the mishandling of user’s data by Facebook which forced Ferrell to pull the plug on Facebook.
Due to the lax privacy policies of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, a U.K. based data analytics firm, was able to gain unauthorized access to data of over 50 million users with the latter’s knowledge or access.
While Facebook initially remained adamant that it had done nothing wrong, stories in NY Times, Guardian, and the Observer Newspapers have forced it to take notice.
The social media giant has pledged that it would make changes to how users control their privacy settings at the platform and restrict the use of data by apps on the same.
However, as is evident by the decision of Ferrell, those measures weren’t able to quite satisfy the American actor.
Ferrell is not alone to #DeleteFacebook
While he might be the latest celebrity to join the #DeleteFacebook movement, Ferrell is not alone in piling misery on the social media platform.
For, it was only days ago that Elon Musk, billionaire tech entrepreneur and founder of SpaceX and Tesla, announced in a series of tweets that neither he nor any of his companies have ever advertised on Facebook.
Before Musk, Cher, the 71-year-old singer, and actress, also announced on Twitter that she deleted her Facebook account after the coming up of the Cambridge Analytica story.
In addition to celebrities, publications like Playboy are also joining the #DeleteFacebook movement. Cooper Hefner, the chief creative officer of Playboy, announced on his Twitter account his company’s decision to leave Facebook.
Due to such strong headwinds – and questions relating to the security of the platform, Facebook has lost over $80 billion USD in stock value since the Cambridge Analytica story broke.
