It is time to break up Facebook.”
That’s not from a privacy activist or politician.
It was written by Chris Hughes, who co-founded Facebook with his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg in the early 2000s.
In a very lengthy op-ed for the New York Times published on Thursday, Hughes officially joined the growing calls to break up the social network. While Hughes hasn’t worked at the company for a decade, the former Facebook spokesperson might now be the strongest voice to make the case.
Chris Hughes is right. Today’s big tech companies have too much power—over our economy, our society, & our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private info for profit, hurt small businesses & stifled innovation. It's time to #BreakUpBigTech. https://t.co/rZMftEwlkN
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 9, 2019
The Facebook co-founder laid out a convincing case to break up the company: his friend, former roommate, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg simply has too much power
“Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.”
Hughes says that Zuckerberg’s quest for “domination” back when MySpace was the leader in the space has brought us to a point where it’s impossible for any company to compete.
