Brian Acton, founder of the popular messaging app WhatsApp - which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion - tweeted today (Wednesday) calling on people to abandon the social network Facebook.
""The time has come: deletefacebook#," he wrote in a tweet.
According to Channel Ten, the hashtag deletefacebook# is indeed gaining popularity, while at the same time it turns out that Acton himself kept his word - and deleted his Facebook account.
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This event comes in the wake of the public outcry in the US, following an investigation by the New York Times newspaper, conducted through interviews with former employees of Cambridge Analytica. According to the investigation, the company illegally obtained information on 50 million Facebook users, through an American-Russian scientist named Aleksandr Kogan, who developed an application capable of collecting information on users answering a questionnaire.
President Donald Trump's election campaign used information obtained by the company.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded for the first time tonight about the scandal and admitted: "We made mistakes regarding the information we had.".
In a post he published on his personal account, Zuckerberg wrote: "The affair constitutes a breach of trust between Facebook and the users of the social network who share information with it, and expect it to protect it. We need to fix this.".
He added: "We have a responsibility to our users' information and we are working to understand what happened. We made mistakes and we admit it. We only learned over the weekend that Cambridge Analytica did not delete the information as requested in 2015.".
He claimed that steps had been taken to prevent this from happening again. "We will introduce a new tool that will allow users to know which apps have access to the user account, and how to limit access to prevent information leakage. I take full responsibility for what happened and am working to prevent this from happening again," he promised.
Kan reported that an investigation published yesterday in Britain featured recordings of senior figures in the company bragging about its ability to influence elections in countries around the world. Among other things, a senior figure in the company claimed in the investigation that it routinely uses the services of Israeli companies and former Israeli intelligence personnel for its activities.
