Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Playboy appears to be the first big U.S. publisher to leave (U.S.) Facebook, the company announced Tuesday in a press release and in an Instagram post. (Instagram, as you know, is owned by Facebook.) Playboy said in its statement that it’s only “deactivating the Playboy accounts that Playboy Enterprises manages directly,” which means that almost all of its country-specific pages are still up as well as its radio page, condoms page, and so on.
Playboy attributed its decision to Facebook’s “alleged mismanagement of users’ data” in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though it said that it had also had trouble “express[ing] on Facebook due to its strict content and policy guidelines,” so who knows.
Playboy would appear to be the first big U.S. publisher to leave Facebook based on any sort of stated principle. Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, left after the announced algorithm changes, and a Danish TV station took a break.
