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'What's Facebook?', Elon Musk Asks, As He Deletes SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages 237

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.
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'What's Facebook?', Elon Musk Asks, As He Deletes SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages

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  • Just a Start. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zorro ( 15797 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:16PM (#56314015)

    Now delete Twitter too.

    • Re: Just a Start. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And also delete Instagram accounts, platform wich same owner than Facebook

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        He's talked about that:

        Yeah, it’s borderline. FB influence is slowly creeping in.

        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.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:21PM (#56314053) Journal

      #DeleteTwitter and #DeleteHashTags

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 )
        Delete /.
      • You must lower me into the steel.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm starting to wonder if Twitter is pushing this, because it's being done as a "Twitter hashtag."

      I mean, yes, Facebook is evil, but why delete Facebook specifically NOW? Because they've done anything they haven't done in the past? No, they did the exact same thing for Obama's campaign, and no one batted an eyelash.

      But now all of a sudden everyone is talking about "#DeleteFacebook." Not "Delete Facebook," specifically "#DeleteFacebook."

      Twitter does the same damned things Facebook does. There are Twitter tra

      • It's called "jump on the bandwagon". People like to (visibly) join popular movements. Pretty much everyone already agreed that sexual abuse is bad, yet it took a schandal and a subsequent movement to get the #metoo ball rolling and have everyone publicly speak out against it. Same for the FB schandal.
        • You got to hand it to Elon Musk, though. He has the tech press turning his every word into a front page headline.

          It reminds me of the constant Steve Jobs posts we used to see here 10 years ago.

        • Re:Just a Start. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by i286NiNJA ( 2558547 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @01:36PM (#56314601) Journal

          #metoo happened because it's such a common experience to be shit on by some other human being and just have to eat it because of the circumstance. So all of these people had been walking around for decades with these little demons waiting to be aired.

          This was engineered by the outrage-media industry but really the whole fucking thing was beautiful because not only did a lot of creeps get totally exposed but the whole thing backfired and came back to fuck over so many important media and hollywood types. The same assholes who smugly lectured the rest of America and stirred to pot for power and profit over the smallest of social transgressions when in reality they're the slimest fuckers outside of Washington DC.

          • by mentil ( 1748130 )

            Pretty sure it started in Hollywood in the first place, with the Harvey Weinstein allegations. Although it just continued the recent practice of a bunch of women coming forward at once with allegations, as happened with Trump (among many other politicians, remember Schwarzenegger?), and earlier with Cosby.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @01:41PM (#56314639)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re:Just a Start. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Quantum gravity ( 2576857 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @03:08PM (#56315249)
          Not only all of that, they also download the photos with location data from your mobile, and run face recognition software on them. There is something in the US called BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act) though, and an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook's face recognition violates BIPA. They don't this in EU probably due to the tougher GDPR regulations [wikipedia.org].

          Note that you can configure the app and shut off the face recognition if you want.
      • Twitter does the same damned things Facebook does. There are Twitter trackers on every page. (Even this one.) They collect user data without consent. They sell it to advertisers. They run facial recognition on every image uploaded. They have "shadow profiles" of non-Twitter users.

        So why just Facebook?

        I think we all know the real reason.

        It's strategery.

        Had you started with twitter #DeleteFacebook wouldn't work.

      • Re:Just a Start. (Score:5, Informative)

        by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @04:10PM (#56315645)

        I think we all know the real reason.

        Yes, Obama was supremely boring. We can all agree about that. It's not just the fact that he won two elections quite decisively, so no one took a close look at the results and at what could have made the difference.

        It's the fact that the American public has the attention span of a fruit fly. If Obama had stories that included the use of Ukrainian hookers for political blackmail, nepotism up the wazzoo, Russian money mules like the Mercers trying to influence the elections, and Russian hackers and trolls, you can bet that the American public would have tuned in.

        What kind of political intrigue and sex scandals did Obama give us? Really? Can you even remember anything? The Weiner guy. That's about it. That was funny for five minutes, and then that was funny when he did the same thing again and again, but after a certain point, it got boring. Plus, I don't think you can credit Obama for that one.

    • by gnick ( 1211984 )

      Now delete Twitter too.

      Twitter's where I get raw, unfiltered messages from my president. That's the only reason I have it installed and the only reason I'm keeping it. I'm a big DJT critic, but I don't know why every American isn't following him on Twitter.

      • Twitter's where I get raw, unfiltered messages from my president. That's the only reason I have it installed and the only reason I'm keeping it. I'm a big DJT critic, but I don't know why every American isn't following him on Twitter.

        I actually did start following Trump when he got elected. I stopped after a month because all he ever posted was negative stuff and attacks against anyone that was critical of him. Nothing he ever posts is relevant to anything, and most of it is false,

        • by gnick ( 1211984 )

          Irrelevant, often false, but a raw view into the unusual mind of a very powerful man.

      • I still don't want to have a twitter account, so https://twitrss.me/ [twitrss.me] lets me live the dream of reading poorly worded tweets without the burden of actually having an account.
        • by gnick ( 1211984 )

          I did say "following him on Twitter". I misspoke. I just meant "paying attention to his Tweets". Using the app just saves a step while adding nothing useful.

    • Now delete Twitter too.

      Elon can't delete Twitter. He's had a neural lace implant that streams his consciousness directly to his Twitter feed.

      Without Twitter, he'd die!

    • Now delete Twitter too.

      Why? Twitter at least gets a message spread fast without the retardedness of Facebook.

    • Now delete Twitter too.

      Seconded.

    • So... after doing #DeleteFacebook we start a Facebook page about deleting Twitter accounts?

    • Just delete the whole internet while you at it.
    • by jbn-o ( 555068 )

      And quit littering your language with branding too: "podcast"? I'd rather not celebrate an abusive organization or their products.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:19PM (#56314029)

    Generic Relative/Friend: What Facebook did is horrible! Someone should go to jail. Muh privacy!
    You: Hey, I heard about this other social media site with different business model. You want to try it out together to see if we like it better than FB?
    Generic Relative/Friend: No! I have no time for that! *Posts more crappy memes on Facebook*

    In terms of reputation, if Comcast is the bottom of the barrel, Facebook's rep is now buried 6 ft under the barrel and Generic Relative/Friend cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.

    This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.

    • by gnick ( 1211984 )

      ...cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.

      Adoption rate is more important to social media than features. Google+ may be terrific, and I even signed up, but I know very little about it because the people I want to talk with are on FB. The egg predates the chicken, but they continue their cycle.

    • I don't know of any real competing networks. It isn't real competition if everyone isn't already on it, it uses a bunch of handles instead of names (ala instagram) you can't create groups/events to organize friends around, and/or they all contain the same bugs with regard to the messaging (no proper searchable archive of messages) component. Hell most of the so called alternatives are nothing more than the latest IM, usually with a bunch of anonymity cloaked features that are really just aids for people che
      • It isn't real competition if everyone isn't already on it,

        So you're saying that for Facebook to have competition, they already need to be Facebook?

        Good luck with that.

        • "So you're saying that for Facebook to have competition, they already need to be Facebook?

          Good luck with that."

          You can say good luck with that all day it doesn't change the reality. Why would anyone want to use a platform that is entirely about connecting and keeping up with all their infrequently contacted friends and family when none of those people use it? This is a chicken and egg type scenario that is pretty characteristic of monopolies like Facebook and is hardly new. We see the same thing with Micros
    • I guess I'm shocked that people are just now coming to the revelation that anything they post on the Internet can be found and used by other people.

      If the financial bureaus can't even keep your shit secure, why would a company that literally makes their money by productizing other people's information?

      So much undue rage over the most obvious shit.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.

      The real problem for democracy is that those same politicians are selected from those same masses.

      • This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.

        The real problem for democracy is that those same politicians are selected from those same masses.

        Oh, a stitch in time
        Just about saved me
        From going through the same old moves
        And this cat is nine
        He still suffers
        He's going through the same old grooves

        But that stone just keeps on rolling
        Bringing me some real bad news
        Takers get the honey
        Givers sing the blues

        -- "Too Rolling Stoned" -- Robin Trower

        Strat

  • > on the world's biggest social^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommercial sellout network,

    FTFY.

  • Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)

    by no-body ( 127863 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:26PM (#56314091)
    At it's beginning, I checked their User Agreement and whatever content I would post there pictures etc., it would become Facebooks property and that was not to my liking, never looked back to there. Proofed me just right in doing so by not participating on this circus.
    • by gnick ( 1211984 )

      ...it would become Facebooks property and that was not to my liking...

      When I signed up in 2008, their stated position was otherwise. There's a clip from a 2009 interview (CNN I think) where Zuck specifically says that the data is owned by the user, will only be shared with the people the user selects, and will never be sold. I don't know when they made the "fuck users; get money" decision. I'd link to the clip, but I can't hunt for it at work.

      • When I signed up in 2008, their stated position was otherwise. There's a clip from a 2009 interview (CNN I think) where Zuck specifically says that the data is owned by the user, will only be shared with the people the user selects, and will never be sold

        <voice=Mark Zuckerberg doing a bad Darth Vader impression>
        I have altered the agreement. Pray I do not alter it further.
        </voice>

    • You would be surprised how many companies do this with content you upload to them. If you want to get really large images made up, and the shops (let's say Black's Photography) can't do it in house. They ask you to upload it to their website and it will be done and shipped to the closest location. Upon reading the fine print in website user agreement, they then own that image and can use it however they like.

      I don't remember the last time I uploaded an image to any website (social or otherwise) because they

      • by no-body ( 127863 )
        <quote><p>You would be surprised how many companies do this with content you upload to them. If you want to get really large images made up, and the shops (let's say Black's Photography) can't do it in house. They ask you to upload it to their website and it will be done and shipped to the closest location. Upon reading the fine print in website user agreement, they then own that image and can use it however they like.</p><p>I don't remember the last time I uploaded an image to any w
  • by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:31PM (#56314131) Homepage

    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.

  • Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ooloorie ( 4394035 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:37PM (#56314189)

    Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked. And the TOS make it pretty clear that data can be used for such purposes. All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?

    • Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked.

      No people don't regard this as a positive. People are indifferent to it the vast majority of the time if they are aware at all. I doubt you would find many people that think "gee Facebook being used for market research is a good thing for me". But it usually doesn't hurt them so they don't worry about it.

      All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?

      Because sometimes it takes the masses a while to realize something is bad. Sometimes it takes a company doing something unsavory at a moment when people are sensitive to it for the problem to get fully

    • If the campaigns were going to use this to figure out what people wanted and liked (higher minimum wages, better consumer protection, stricter gun laws, accepting more refugees) and implement those things, nobody would be upset. In fact they would be happy. People are upset because the data was used in a way that affected the integrity or our elections. Even somebody who read the ToS did not fathom the data being used in this way.
      • If the campaigns were going to use this to figure out what people wanted and liked (higher minimum wages, better consumer protection, stricter gun laws, accepting more refugees) and implement those things, nobody would be upset.

        So you are saying that Trump used this data, figured out what people didn't like, and then deliberately made that his platform? How in the world is that a winning strategy?

        People are upset because the data was used in a way that affected the integrity or our elections.

        How does marke

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?

      Sausages. Everybody eats them, nobody wants to know how they're made. It's a "free" service, nobody wants to know why it's free. You think people read the ToS? I think there was a story about someone who made a metric to see how many had scrolled through the EULA in their installer before agreeing to it, it was like 99.9% no. Even if you give people the benefit of the doubt that some may be reinstalls or installs on multiple computers, people don't care at all.

      It should not be very difficult to create a dec

      • Sausages. Everybody eats them, nobody wants to know how they're made.

        My point is that Obama's 2008 campaign was run by Chris Hughes, a Facebook founder, and his 2012 campaign also made massive use of social media. The digirati and national media had no problem with billionaire money scraping Facebook for Obama. It seems hypocritical to complain when a (largely useless) firm associated with the Trump campaign gets a bit of anonymized data in the face of that history.

    • has been revealed to be B.S.. It's not about giving people what they want, it's about manipulating them into doing as told. The CEO got caught on tape saying as much. [youtube.com].

      I'm not opposed to advertising. Advertising can be a positive good. It can make people aware of things they never knew they wanted. But this wasn't advertising. This wasn't about convincing people they wanted Trump. And it certainly wasn't about Trump finding out what people wanted so he could give it to them. These people had long since d
      • has been revealed to be B.S.. It's not about giving people what they want, it's about manipulating them into doing as told. The CEO got caught on tape saying as much.

        Of course it is. Facebook is a manipulative, privacy-invading company. However, back when Chris Hughes ran Obama's online campaign, people hailed the use and analysis of social networks as the dawn of a new democracy, yet now that the other side is doing it, all of a sudden the same people are up in arms.

        These people had long since decided on t

  • by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:39PM (#56314203)
    It makes no sense to quit Facebook and still use Instagram [instagram.com].

    It's the same damn company collecting the same damn data.
  • Musk doesn't like Zuck, and Zuck returns the favor. Not surprised Musk taking opportunity to dog-pile on the kid when he's down (his version of 'down' anyways).

    I've noticed the cattiness between these two for a couple years. They've been chippy in public regarding diverging views on AI. And probably didn't help that SpaceX blew up Facebook's pet-project satellite - which I thought was totally worth the firework but Faceboy not so thrilled about it if I remember correctly.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @12:49PM (#56314289) Journal
    Take your lives back, people.
  • Look Google has a script that goes something like this

    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
    (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
    m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

    I put that on the website and both the website and the visitors get tracked. It's

    • No just run uMatrix with default settings, which
      ** Blocks 1st party frames, and
      ** Blocks 3rd party:
      ** ** Cookies
      ** ** Media
      ** ** Scripts
      ** ** XHR
      ** ** Other

      I also remove most all of the uMatrix subscription lists, which are mostly redundant with the above settings. Although it will necessitate tweaking to get some sites to work -- mostly enabling CDN's.

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @01:50PM (#56314715)
    That's what Facebook is good for. You use it to create accounts for sites in the web in which you want to make comments. All the resulting trash will go to your Facebook account. I haven't checked out mine in years, but I am sure that it must be brimming with garbage. Let the Facebook minions deal with that. You see? Facebook is good for something.
    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      That Facebook ID is used to track everything you do online. It's tied to your phone, if you use it there, or your home, via your ISP. Interacting with anything from Facebook, in any way, gets you tracked.
      • What phone? The number that I gave, corresponding to a SIM card that I threw away years ago? I only use Fecebook (that's a more appropriate name for it) in my desktop, and in the way I described; I have no Fecebook app in my phone - they can't track me there. Fecebook does not have a phone number or email address associated with me that can reach me, for the email address I gave them is a garbage can one that I also never check. Apart from this, like I said, I haven't looked in my account for years, so any
  • I have my own RSS aggregator for news. However, I primarily use my Facebook account to like companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and other interesting companies I like to find out about new products, watch cool videos they may publish, and sometimes see news they publish I may miss in my RSS feed. So, without this, I'm not less likely to know what SpaceX and Tesla are doing excpept negative news stories now posting how behind Tesla is on Model3 orders. Overall this will be bad for the company in terms of exposure,

  • Destruction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mandrel ( 765308 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @02:58PM (#56315203)

    What disturbs me about such deletion is the casual destruction of all the information and entertainment in the posts and comments. I know Facebook is renowned for the ephemeral and lightweight nature of its content, and almost all wouldn't have been worth preserving. But worthwhile stuff and history has also been lost.

    I felt the same way when IMDB deleted its fora.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Don't worry, FB will just hide it. They are not the type of company to offer an honest delete option.

  • Nothing can be really deleted at Facebook. Those things are forever once posted there!

  • The move comes months after Musk said Zuckerberg's understanding of AI was limited.

    But Mark Zuckerberg was Time magazine's "Person of the Year" [fsf.org]!

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