Playboy magazine, the lifestyle and adult entertainment publishing company on Wednesday announced that are "stepping away" from the social-media giant, Facebook. The step comes amidst the Facebook scandal in which Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to gain private information about its users. The platform was used to manipulate users with ads to influence political opinion before elections.
Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises and son of the magazine's founder, Cooper Hefner took to Twitter saying, "We are stepping away from Facebook." He tweeted saying that Facebook's "content guidelines and corporate policies continue contradicting our values."
Reportedly, Playboy Enterprises the parent company in a statement said, "The recent news about Facebook's alleged mismanagement of users' data has solidified our decision to suspend our activity on the platform at this time. There are more than 25 million fans who engage with Playboy via our various Facebook pages, and we do not want to be complicit in exposing them to the reported practices. That is why we have announced that we will be leaving Facebook's platform, deactivating the Playboy accounts that Playboy Enterprises manages directly."
Here is Cooper Hefner's tweet:
We are stepping away from Facebook pic.twitter.com/4yFIdk2eDE
— Cooper Hefner (@cooperhefner) March 28, 2018
With this development, Playboy has joined the list of brands who have joined #DeleteFacebook campaign in deactivating their accounts which had millions of fan following. Earlier, Elon Musk said he would delete the Facebook pages for his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It was WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton who stirred the debate of deleting Facebook accounts after he tweeted #DeleteFacebook. Musk also replied to Acton's tweet where he called for deleting Facebook asking "What’s Facebook?"
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 29, 2018 09:47 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).