Myspace co-founder trolls Facebook’s data breach
Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson bashes Facebook by re-tweeting a cartoon that piles onto the #DeleteFacebook movement
By Chloe Aiello
Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson, or “Myspace Tom” as he is best known, is taking full advantage of his early retirement. Anderson enjoys travel, photography, burning man — and trolling Facebook .
Anderson bashed Facebook by re-tweeting a cartoon by the online digital publication Futurism. The image features Anderson looking saintly as Star Wars Jedi-Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, and piles onto the #DeleteFacebook movement.
“Help us, @myspacetom. You’re our only hope. #DeleteFacebook,” Futurism wrote in a tweet.
While Futurism was almost certainly joking, disillusioned Facebook users would be wise to remember what happened to Myspace’s user data after Anderson exited the social media game in 2009.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought Myspace and its parent company, Intermix, in 2009 for US$580 million. Just a few years later, Murdoch sold the obsolete platform to media company Viant for US$35 million. Myspace changed hands one last time in 2011, when Time purchased Viant’s assets for an undisclosed amount.
At the time of the acquisition, Viant boasted it could provide marketers access to data on 1.2 billion users that, when combined with Time’s subscriber database,”creates a first party dataset that rivals industry leaders Facebook and Google.”