Some activist groups want Facebook broken up

A coalition of progressive groups is planning to launch an advertising campaign to get the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to split Facebook into several companies and break up its monopoly. The group want the FTC to break off Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger into their own separate and discrete companies so users can be free to make use of these very useful services without necessarily being tied back to Facebook.

The ads will run on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and will contain things like “Facebook keeps violating your privacy. Break it up.” and “Mark Zuckerberg has a scary amount of power. We need to take it back.”

The coalition comes at a time when Facebook is also under fire in the USA for a myriad of scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, fake news, among others.

“The average person uses eight different apps to communicate and stay connected,” Said a Facebook spokesperson to Axios.

“We support smart privacy regulation and efforts that make it easier for people to take their data to competing services,” the spokesman added. “But rather than wait, we’ve simplified our privacy controls and introduced new ways for people to access and delete their data, or to take their data with them.

Via Axios.