For a while now, Burger King Holdings Incorporated has been conducting an advertising campaign targeted at Facebook users, asking members of the social networking website to give up on 10 of their friends in exchange for a free Whopper.

Nevertheless, Burger King has decided to bow out of the deal with Facebook, which was kicked off on January 5 under the name of “Whopper Sacrifice,” by virtue of the website’s concerns that the ad campaign was promoting breaking up friendships.

The ads, featuring taglines such as “friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger,” managed to get many people severing friendships to get their hands on the burger. Still, whenever a Facebook member decided to break it off with a friend for a Whopper via a special application, both users involved received an update on their profile pages, which was published by Burger King. Consequently, everyone got to learn which of their friends were more into burgers than into human relationships and connections, even if the latter were only  virtual ones.

A Facebook spokesman said in a statement that the updates posted by Burger King violated the social networking website’s protocol and that the latter had terminated the notification feature and asked Burger King to revise the application and the campaign.

Instead, the company decided to pull the plug on the advertising campaign, claiming that Facebook was asking changes to be made that would have completely altered Burger King’s approach to the campaign, as a company spokeswoman stated.

On a Burger King website, the company announced that Facebook had disabled the application after the Whopper had proven stronger than 233.906 friendships.