Playboy magazine is deleting Facebook. It’s not just for privacy concerns, however, because the fabled men’s magazine says the internet behemoth’s “content guidelines and corporate policies continue contradicting our values.”
As the New York Daily News reported Wednesday, the magazine’s chief creative officer, Cooper Hefner, turned to another leading social media engine to tweet out the announcement.
Hefner, whose father Hugh Hefner created not just a soft-core pornographic journal but a hedonistic ethos, called Facebook “sexually repressive” and also objected to the recent invasion of privacy scandal that is threatening to cripple the social medium’s profits. Hefner says the corporate decision to walk away from Facebook was also a result of “learning of the recent meddling in a free U.S. election further [which] demonstrates another concern we have of how they handle users’ data – more than 25 million of which are Playboy fans – making it clear to us that we must leave the platform.”
Playboy deleted its Facebook in the early hours of Wednesday morning, though some foreign profiles still remain up.
Ongoing suspicions that Facebook is actively censoring the news combined with testimony over the last week about personnel data being used for political purposes, has led to an exodus of advertiser and users. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg was slow to respond to criticism and has seen Facebook’s stock decline by 20 percent over he last two weeks.