Anything about Facebook has to become news. It upgrades its privacy policy and the news is all over global media, it downgrades it and lo media has another update to discuss for weeks. Its user bases increase phenomenally, it becomes a talk of the town and now when few people have decided to quit Facebook, it’s yet again a hot topic for discussion! That’s the brand power which Facebook has which makes any update about it a piece of news globally!
May 31st 2010 is Quit Facebook Day. Fed up of Facebook’s privacy issues, a couple of users (@mmilan and @josephdee) founded a website called Quit Facebook Day and urging users to delete their Facebook accounts in mass on May 31.. The opening message on the website reads – “If you agree that Facebook does not respect you, your personal data, or the future of the web, you may want to join us”. As I’m writing this post, some 29,907 users on this website have taken the pledge to quit Facebook and this statistics was approximately 26,844 two-three hours back. Yes, it is increasing and today being the D-day the count has definitely grown faster but is it sufficient enough considering the overall population of Facebook users and the whole hoopla on the privacy issues raised in recent past? Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. If we taken into account the approximate user base, it’ hardly 0.0075 per cent of active users who seem to be frustrated enough by the privacy policy to take this call.
Trust social media experts and e-marketers to come up with interesting terms like digital suicide, e-death or f-suicide but the fact remains that despite an uproar over privacy concerns, not many seem to have jumped on to join this memorial day! On contrary, Facebook is a hot topic of discussion across all social media platforms today and “quit facebook” is already a trending topic worldwide on twitter. And the best part is that even decision to quit Facebook is being discussed by most of the people on Facebook itself. Such is the addiction and involvement of users in this networking site. Would be interesting to see how many users actually quit Facebook today but from the current data, it definitely does not seem to be a number which will cause any dent to the social networking giant, rather all this negative PR only seem to be adding up to the buzz of this already buzzing brand.
