FACEBOOK users say they are deleting their accounts following a string of recent controversies that have hit the embattled US tech firm.
Repeated outages and recent shocking revelations made by a former staff member appear to be pushing users to bin the app for good.
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That former employee, Frances Haugen, claimed that Facebook’s news feed encourages hate speech in order to boost profits.
She also leaked internal Facebook research appearing to show that the firm knew that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is harmful to children.
In response, users have taken to Twitter to announce that they are at the end of their tethers following weeks of controversy.
One person tweeted: “So their [sic] telling us FB intentionally puts harmful content up to keep us locked in.. are we canceling FB or nah?”
Another responded to that tweet: “I don’t have Facebook anymore yet Ik IG still owned by them now and I’m def willing to delete my account again like I did 4 yrs ago.”
A third said: “I badly want to delete my Facebook account”.
Messages of users considering jumping ship are being echoed by voices in the media.
In a recent blog for MSNBC, writer Ja’han Jones argued that Facebook executives’ inaction on the site’s harms is reason enough to pack your bags.
“Now is as good a time as any to leave your Facebook accounts by the wayside,” he wrote.
“The company’s executives are seemingly well aware of the site’s harmful impacts on society – they’re just hoping a few ads and pro-Facebook fluff pieces will distract you.”
It’s been a tricky few weeks for Facebook.
The company was hit last Monday by a huge outage that knocked its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, offline for seven hours.
As if that wasn’t enough, its suite of platforms went down yet again on Friday. The faults were blamed on technological errors.
The downtime followed weeks of leaks and revelations by Hougen working with the Wall Street Journal.
She provided documents used in a WSJ investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s harm to teenage girls.
Haugen, a former product manager at the company, will give evidence to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill on Monday 25 October.
This follows her testimony to the US Congress on 5 October.
It will be the first public evidence she has given in Europe regarding her experiences at the company and her ideas to regulate social media.
Facebook has said that Haugen’s stories of her time at Facebook contain inconsistencies and falsehoods.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gives evidence at Senate hearing
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
