Is it time to #deletefacebook? Well, the message is loud and clear and the campaign is definitely gathering momentum - but just how big is this campaign? And what will its impact be?
As you can see from Twitter data collected by Social SafeGuard, the campaign is gathering significant momentum. The graph shows that #deletefacebook hashtag peaked above the #boycottnfl hashtag, which was trending around 62,000 mentions in September 2017 after the “take a knee” controversy. The theoretical impression rate of tweets with the #deletefacebook hashtag was 572,504,202 users, but there’s a significant amount of overlap in that figure.
As we can see from the graph below, #deletefacebook did not have significant trending on any other platform except Twitter. Most notably, it did not trend on Facebook itself.
Is the hashtag being exploited?
Popular hashtags often get hijacked by spammers and botnets. This has happened with #deletefacebook too. The Social SafeGuard team has so far identified that malicious posts had received 286,252 impressions (0.05% of the total number of impressions) There’s everything here, all the way from porn to scammers to racial based politics using the tag, as well lawyers offering to sue Facebook and the impact of those posts could be bigger than the initial impact of the Cambridge Analytica breach.
Potential loss for Facebook
While the discussion on #deletefacebook is prominent there is no method to determine who actually does delete their account. However it is worth noting that each Facebook account that is in fact deleted will have a financial impact on Facebook. According to CNBC[i] each account generates an average of $22.70 revenue per year per user, when the user is in the US & Canada. The global average is $6.18 per year per user.
[i] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html