Playboy deletes its Facebook accounts

Playboy issued a press release late Tuesday night to announce its withdrawal from Facebook. It has deactivated the Playboy accounts that Playboy Enterprises manages, directly affecting some 25 million fans, according to the company. Playboy becomes the latest company to join the call to #DeleteFacebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, punctuated on Friday by Elon Musk’s order to remove Tesla and SpaceX pages from Zuckerberg’s social media juggernaut.

”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,” reads the statement. “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.”

While Playboy certainly doesn’t hold the immense cultural influence it once did, the brand still holds a certain cachet with an older generation of humans. You know, the ones that still use Facebook. In 2014, Playboy said that Facebook was its largest audience. Of course, that was back when the magazine stopped posting nudes (a practice it restarted last year) in order to court a larger following on social media.

It’s worth noting that Playboy, SpaceX, and Telsa are, however, still active on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook; a fact that many Facebook deleters seem happy to ignore.