Elon Musk has urged his 31 million Twitter followers to ‘unfriend’ Mark Zuckenberg and delete Facebook, calling the social network ‘lame.’
‘#DeleteFacebook’ It’s lame,’ tweeted the Tesla founder over the weekend.
The billionaire has been famously outspoken in his anti-facebook opinion for a while now, in 2018-after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he deleted his personal Facebook profile as well as the official Tesla and SpaceX pages.
‘It’s not a political statement and I didn’t do this because someone dared me to do it,’ he later tweeted regarding the decision.
‘Just don’t like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry.’
The tech-entrepreneur tweeted the #DeleteFacebook hashtag responding to a Twitter post by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, another vocal critic of Facebook.
Baron-Cohen, who has been publicly blasting the infamous social network for quite a while, asked in his post why is Zuckernber allowed to “control the information seen by 2.5 billion people,” when regulators would not permit one person to wield the same power over water or electricity supplies.
“Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor!” said the British comedian.
The two executives-Musk and Zuckerberg have disagreed about the future of artificial intelligence. While Facebook CEO has claimed AI could one day improve safety and health, Musk has called Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI “limited” and he believes that the potential capabilities of AI make it more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
‘I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic,’ said Facebook CEO in Live broadcast back in 2017. ‘And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios — I just, I don’t understand it.’
Musk tweeted in response,: ‘I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.’
Both billionaires and the companies they run have been at the center of many controversies. Zuckerberg has been criticized for the way Facebook has handled misinformation, hate speech, and user data. Musk has faced scrutiny over worker safety.
The entrepreneurs’ quarrel goes back to September 2016, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded and destroyed a Facebook satellite that it was carrying.
‘We did give them a free launch to make up for it and I think they had some insurance,’ Musk later said.
Earlier this month, Facebook had agreed to pay half a billion dollars privacy-related settlement in Illinois. The suit in question alleged that the site had broken the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act.