Skip to main content

Elon Musk advises people to ditch Facebook and use Signal

Tech CEO Elon Musk has urged his almost 42 million Twitter followers to use secure messaging app Signal instead of Facebook products. In a series of tweets, Musk shared a meme referencing Facebook’s role in the spread of misinformation leading to the attack on Congress this week and suggested people should use the Signal app.

Use Signal

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

The tweets seem to have been prompted by a recent change to Facebook’s privacy policy. As reported by The Hacker News, the new updates allow more sharing of data between Facebook and its partner company WhatsApp, including the sharing of phone numbers, interactions on the platform, information about mobile devices used to access the service, and IP addresses. If WhatsApp users do not agree to the data sharing, their accounts are disabled.

Recommended Videos

Musk has been vocally critical of Facebook in the past, saying that he chose to delete Facebook accounts for SpaceX and Tesla in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. He has also had spats with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally, the two of them having sniped at each other over Twitter and other social media platforms several times in the past.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Facebook’s series of privacy issues has lead to increasing criticism of the company, including from prominent figures in the tech sphere. The app Musk suggested people use instead, Signal, is an encrypted messaging app that is more of an alternative to WhatsApp than to Facebook. It is for sharing messages securely between users or groups rather than a public social network.

As messages sent on Signal are encrypted, they remain private even if someone’s phone is stolen or confiscated by the police. This has made it popular among those organizing demonstrations such as the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd by police last summer.

However, Signal has not been without its security issues. A vulnerability in the app discovered last year could have allowed hackers to track users’ locations just by calling their Signal phone number, even if the hacker didn’t have the user’s contact information. The vulnerability was patched but did lead to concerns over how much users could trust the app to be secure.

If you want to learn more about Signal, we have details on what it is and how to use it, and we named it one of the best encrypted messaging apps for iOS and Android.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Elon Musk says if his tweets lose his firms money, then so be it
A digital image of Elon Musk in front of a stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating.

Elon Musk spoke to CNBC’s David Faber in a wide-ranging interview that was shared by the media outlet on Tuesday, May 16.

Toward the end of the lengthy exchange, Faber asked Musk why he bothers tweeting stuff to his 140 million followers that he knows will be controversial -- the most recent of which he posted on Monday accusing the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros of hating humanity and comparing him to Magneto, Marvel’s Jewish supervillain from the X-Men series -- especially as such opinions have the potential to impact the three companies that he leads: Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX.

Read more
Elon Musk says he’s appointed a new Twitter CEO
A digital image of Elon Musk in front of a stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has found someone to replace him as the company’s CEO, but he hasn't revealed who it is.

Musk tweeted on Thursday that the new CEO will step into the role at some point over the next six weeks.

Read more
Elon Musk: Owning Twitter has been a ‘roller coaster’ and ‘quite painful’
Elon Musk.

UPDATE: After more than an hour of Musk taking questions and with around 3 million people listening live, the interview came to a close at 10:10 p.m. PT.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk agreed to an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night. It took place at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco with BBC journalist James Clayton and was streamed live on Twitter Spaces, the platform's audio chatroom feature.

Read more