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Even WhatsApp’s co-founder says it’s time to delete Facebook
June 12, 2025
Brian Acton, one of the co-founders ofWhatsApp, has taken to Twitter to call for people to abandon the world’s largest social media platform. In the tweet published yesterday—one of only five Acton has posted in the last eight years—he wrote: “It is time. #deletefacebook.”
The motivation behind the comment is unclear, though it arrives at a period when Facebook is under scrutiny regarding the allegedmisuse of 50 million users’ private data.
Data analytics firm Cambridge Audio Audio Analytica is at the center of the controversy and is alleged to have been responsible for mass data harvesting using Mark Zuckerberg’s platform—data which reports suggest may have been used to influence the 2016 US Presidential election and UK Brexit vote. Facebook’s sharesfell significantlyfollowing initial reports on the matter.
Facebook has been embroiled in a number of alleged data collection and distributioncontroversiesin the last few years, and its news feed is said to havecontributed significantlyto the recent spread of fake news.
Actoninvested$50 million in the Signal Foundation last month, a new venture that will help maintain the encrypted messaging serviceSignal. In ablog posthe penned at the time, Acton wrote:
Though WhatsApp is now owned by Facebook, and stands as a more direct competitor to Signal (a messaging app rather than a social media platform), Acton hasn’t urged users to drop that service.
Acton founded WhatsApp in 2009 with Jan Koum before Facebook purchased the company for $19 billion in 2014. Acton became a billionaire through the deal.
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