One of the men who co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that he’s surprised it has taken this long for the social network to face its current fundamental crisis.

The Financial Times reports that Chris Hughes said of the Cambridge Analytica fallout that “it’s shocking to me that they didn’t have to answer more of these questions earlier on”, adding: “The idea that this was unforeseeable seems like a stretch… The public reckoning now is very much overdue.”

Hughes was Facebook’s spokesperson until 2007 when he left to direct digital operations for the Barack Obama presidential campaign.

#deletefacebook

Another voice joining the throng is that of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who, as reported by The Independent, told USA Today that he’s leaving Facebook and won’t rejoin until he has the option of paying for an ad-free service.

“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook,” he said. “Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this. The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.

"I was surprised to see how many categories for ads and how many advertisers I had to get rid of, one at a time. I did not feel that this is what people want done to them. Ads and spam are bad things these days and there are no controls over them. Or transparency."

Other famous names who have adhered to the call to #deletefacebook include Elon Musk, Cher, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell and Rosie O’Donnell. Brands that have ditched the platform include Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla, Playboy, Mozilla and Sonos.