While we only talk about quitting Facebook in protest but AirAsia Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes did it. Fernandes, who had 670,000 followers, closed his Facebook account, saying the live streaming of the mass shooting in New Zealand on the platform was too much for him.
In a series of tweets on Sunday, Fernandes accused Facebook of not cleaning up the videos of the New Zealand mosque attacks that were uploaded to the platform. "The amount of hate that goes on in social media sometimes outweighs the good," he said in a tweet on Sunday.
"It is a great platform to communicate," he tweeted after closing his Facebook account. "Strong engagement and very useful but New Zealand was too much for me to take along with all the other issues."
Fernandes' Twitter account has about 1.29 million followers and he has tweeted more than 20,300 times since joining in 2008, often commenting on the performance of his companies, including one of Asia's biggest discount carriers, and sports teams including a soccer team he owns a stake in.
Fernandes is the co-owner of English soccer club Queens Park Rangers and is among business executives well known for having a social media presence. In 2014, he took to tweeting after an AirAsia flight crashed in Indonesia with 162 people on board, seeking to communicate to the public about the incident.
Among Fernandes Twitter posts about shutting his Facebook account, he included a comment suggesting he'll remain on Twitter: "But on Twitter, I think the battle for me goes on."
(Inputs from agencies)
