Verified Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla disappeared on Friday, minutes after Elon Musk responded to a comment on Twitter calling for him to take down his rocket company SpaceX, electric carmaker Tesla and his own official pages in support of the #DeleteFacebook movement.
"What's Facebook?" Musk on Friday morning sarcastically replied to a tweet from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton urging his followers to delete Facebook by tweeting "It is time."
Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, Inc, replied to a comment on Twitter calling for him to take down the SpaceX, Tesla and Musk official pages in support of the #DeleteFacebook movement by saying "I didn't realize there was one. Will do."
Less than half an hour, the verified Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc are no longer accessible, Xinhua reported.
Prior to the deletion, both the two pages had over 2.6 million Likes and Follows, and very high engagement rates.
After news of the pages being deleted got out, he tweeted saying his companies never advertised with Facebook.
“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 in a tweet.
And when asked about his presence on Facebook-owned Instagram, he said “Instagram’s probably ok imo (in my opinion), 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.”
This comes after singer Cher removed her Facebook page and Mozilla announced on Wednesday that it will no longer advertise on Facebook.
The boycott "#DeleteFacebook" started after the US and British media reported that the data of more than 50 million Facebook users were inappropriately used by a British data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, in activities allegedly connected with US President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Wednesday that his company had made mistakes in a data leak that caused grave concern about user privacy possibly abused for political purposes.
(With IANS inputs)