Facebook’s temporary deletion of the popular Banting 7 Day Meal Plans earlier this month has resulted in a huge backlash from one of the biggest brands in the fitness space. Yesterday, CrossFit, which had a collective audience of more than 10 million followers on its Facebook and Instagram pages, announced that it would be indefinitely suspending all activity on its Facebook and Instagram accounts and any other associated properties.
In a post about its decision, CrossFit said that it has many concerns about the way Facebook operates its services which include concerns over the way Facebook acted when removing and restoring the popular Banting 7 Day Meal Plans group. As a result of these concerns, CrossFit suspended its activities on Facebook and Instagram on May 22 and then made this public on May 23.
CrossFit added that some of the concerns that led to it suspending activity on its Facebook and Instagram accounts include:
- The unexplained deletion and subsequent reinstatement of the Banting 7 Day Meal Plans group which made it concerned about Facebook’s actions and how they relate to people engaged in activities that go against the prevailing opinion
- Facebook not living up to its responsibilities as a de facto authority over the public square
- Facebook’s handling of user data having an adverse impact on the security and privacy of the global CrossFit community
- Facebook collaborating and sharing data with various third parties which include government agencies, authorities, and security organizations
- Facebook censoring and removing user accounts based on unknown criteria and at the request of third parties
- Facebook’s news feeds being censored and reflecting the political leanings of “Facebook’s utopian socialists”
- Facebook’s weak intellectual property protections
- Facebook’s poor security protocols which have led to some of the largest security breaches of user data in history
- Facebook deleting accounts and groups calling out what they see as “the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease”
Archived stats from the pages before they were shut down show that CrossFit had a huge presence on Facebook and Instagram, with a collective audience of 10.6 million followers.
Here’s the full breakdown of the followers CrossFit had across it’s four main Facebook and Instagram pages:
- CrossFit – Facebook: 3.1 million followers (archive link)
- The CrossFit Games – Facebook: 2.3 million followers (archive link)
- CrossFit – Instagram: 2.8 million followers (archive link)
- The CrossFit Games – Instagram: 2.4 million followers (archive link)
This isn’t the first time that pages with a large audience have been deleted from Facebook as a result of the page owner having concerns over the way Facebook operates. Last year, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk deleted the Facebook pages of both companies saying that he made the decision because he doesn’t like Facebook.
