Italian banking giant stops advertising on Facebook

A multibillion-dollar Italian banking conglomerate has stopped advertising with Facebook until the social media company improves its ethical standards.

“Facebook is not acting in an ethical way,” Unicredit CEO Jean Pierre Mustier said during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

“We will not use it until it has proper ethical behavior,” he added.

{mosads}Mustier said that his company’s criticism is tied to the scandal in which British research firm Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested data from 87 million Facebook users.

Facebook initially told Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by President Trump’s campaign, to delete the data, but did not follow up until a Guardian report years later revealed that the research firm still had the data.

The social media firm has dealt with tremendous scrutiny over the data scandal and has been the target of criticism from other technology companies like Apple, as well as members of Congress who pressured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg into testifying last April.

Mustier is not the only member of the financial community to rail against Facebook.

On Tuesday, former Goldman Sachs chief operating officer Gary Cohn, also a former National Economic Council director, called Facebook ethically worse than banks in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

“In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens,” Cohn said, according to Bloomberg. “I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today.”

Unicredit’s criticism comes one day after The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is working with banks to try to obtain users’ financial information.

The company said it’s trying to get such data to make Facebook Messenger a better platform for online shopping.