Playboy said Wednesday that it will deactivate its Facebook pages to protest the social media company’s exploitation of user data for commercial profit, according to CNBC.
But taking things a step further, Cooper Hefner, Playboy’s chief creative officer and son of the late Hugh Hefner, accused Facebook of being “sexually repressive” (we know) and said Facebook’s policy guidelines “continue contradicting our values.”
We are stepping away from Facebook pic.twitter.com/4yFIdk2eDE
— Cooper Hefner (@cooperhefner) March 28, 2018
In a statement on Wednesday, Playboy 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.”
The firm said it has “always stood for personal freedom and the celebration of sex,” and that its move to deactivate platforms on Facebook was “another step in that ongoing fight.”
Playboy, of course, isn’t the first company to shutter its Facebook page. Longtime Mark Zuckerberg rival Elon Musk said earlier this week that he’d deactivate Tesla’s and SpaceX’s Facebook pages.
Meanwhile, Mozilla and Commerzbank have suspended advertising campaigns.
In an effort to assuage users’ fears following revelations about the vast trove of data that Facebook (and its tech behemoth peers) collect and leverage for commercial purposes, Facebook is allowing users to see all the data that Facebook has collected – and, as one twitter pointed out, the full extent of the company’s data collection is much larger than one might expect.
