The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to hurt Facebook as candidates turn down job offers from what was once considered one of the best employers in the tech sector.

Job offer acceptance rates at Facebook have significantly decreased, it has been reported, after the revelations last March that the data of up to 87m users of the social network had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

There has been a major decline in interest in Facebook jobs from potential new recruits among top US schools, such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ivy League universities, according to CNBC.

Facebook’s acceptance rate for full-time positions offered to new graduates has fallen from an average of 85% for the 2017-2018 school year to between 35% and 55% as of December, according to former Facebook recruiters. The biggest decline came from Carnegie Mellon University, where the acceptance rate for new recruits dropped to 35%.

There has also reportedly been a decline in acceptance rates at Facebook among software engineer candidates for its product teams. Acceptance rates among those teams have fallen from nearly 90% in late 2016 to almost 50% at the start of this year, according to the report.

A Facebook spokesman said the company’s total headcount grew 36% year-on-year for the 12 months to the end of the first quarter of 2019.

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Last July, $119bn was wiped off Facebook’s market value – the biggest ever one-day drop for a publicly listed company – after it admitted losing 3 million users in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, in a recent column in the New York Times, criticised the chair and chief executive of the company, Mark Zuckerberg. He also called for Facebook to be broken up after issues with data, privacy and election interference. The Massachusetts Democrat senator, Elizabeth Warren, has led such calls on the US presidential campaign trail.

The former UK deputy prime minister and Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, rejected the notion saying “chopping a great American success story into bits is not something that’s going to make those problems go away”.

Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison said: “The numbers in the CNBC article are not true. We hire the best engineers in the world to work at Facebook and we are hiring more engineers than ever before.

“This year, about two-thirds of our engineering recruits from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Ivy League schools have accepted their offers and overall, the percentage of offers accepted by engineers has gone up in 2019. We continue to meet our engineering recruiting goals and are confident that will continue.”