As Seen From Afar 04/10/2018

DUTCH COMEDIAN ARJEN LUBACH URGES US TO FOLLOW HIM IN SAYING ‘BYE BYE FACEBOOK’

Perhaps you remember Arjen Lubach from an an earlier As Seen From Afar 2/4/2017, in which I described how his parody skit on President Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, called “The Netherlands Second,” went viral, ending up with more than 26 million views on YouTube, and triggered dozens of copycat videos in other countries.

This time Lubach is going international again with this season’s last episode of his satirical television show “Sunday with Lubach,” which has more than 400,000 followers on Facebook. Lubach announced his program would delete its account on the popular social media site coming Wednesday, 04/11/2018, at 20:00 hours local time, joining a string of high-profile entertainers and tech executives who have urged users to do the same.

Although it’s impossible to know how many will follow through, 14,000 of Lubach’s Facebook followers said on the Facebook-event which Lubach has created for it that they would join him by deleting their accounts.

Watch the video of Lubach’s call below:

Facebook is under fire because of a privacy scandal. Recently, the company announced that the private data of possibly 87 million people (90,000 in the Netherlands) have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica – a political consultancy that worked on U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. With this data profiles were created to send targeted information.

The #deletefacebook hashtag that resulted from this disclosure has gained prominence, and many celebrities have shut their Facebook pages, but the company itself maintains #deletefacebook has not had any meaningful impact on users to date and financial analysts say the controversy has had little impact on advertising or user engagement on the Facebook platform so far.

Lubach’s call may not have a massive impact either, but his skit explains rather well and in detail how Facebook, and others, works by gathering personal information to allow their advertising customers to send targeted ads and this and the event seem to have scared Facebook a little. Lubach has written on Twitter that the Bye-Bye-Facebook event is hard to find using Facebook’s search engines. Facebook has declined to comment on either the event or on the search engine problems.