Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour will not be deleting its Facebook account in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The Labour leader said he relied on the platforms to bypass the newspapers and other media as “online is where it’s at”.
“Are we going to be closing down our Facebook accounts and twitter accounts and so on? No,” he said on Thursday morning.
Speaking to reporters in Manchester at the launch of Labour’s local election campaign, Corbyn added: “We are going to keep those active and we are very active on social media.
“Social media is a great way of communicating because our message then doesn’t have to be moderated by highly responsible journalists like yourselves.”
He added: “Or I was going to say or less responsible journalists from other publications but I don’t want to go there.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised following allegations that Cambridge Analytica harvested and exploited data from 50 million Facebook users, calling the incident a “major breach of trust”.
Since the scandal broke, some have called for people to delete Facebook, including Brian Acton, the co-founder of messaging platform WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
The Labour Party has one million ‘Likes’ on Facebook and 592,000 followers on Twitter.
Jeremy Corbyn himself has 1.4 million Facebook ‘Likes’ and 1.7 million Twitter followers.
Corbyn said while he would not be abandoning social media, there was a “serious issue” about data harvesting that had to be addressed with legislation.
He said people should all have “access freely to social media to reasonably express our opinions and communicate with each other”.
“I know newspaper journalist hate this kind of discussion but in reality many young people, partially younger people and those under 40, tend to communicate on social media rather than through newspapers. Online is where its at.”
The US Congress and British Parliament have both demanded Zuckerberg appear before them to explain how Cambridge Analytica secretly used its data.