Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently published a column in the New York Times where he criticised the company’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Subsequently, he called for Facebook to break-up. He had written an opinion editorial on the New York Times asking regulators to split up Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.
Zuckerberg recently responded to the backlash in the latest interview. He said,
“When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference.”
Facebook’s CEO’s present argument leaves the idea that the company’s problems with safety, misinformation and privacy will not be solved by breaking up the company. On the contrary, he believes it will hinder their efforts to safeguard social networks. It means that Facebook will essentially have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence for all social media networks.
Hughes initially claimed that his former colleague had too much power and had monopolised the social media space with constant acquisitions. This comes in line with the alarm already raised about how the social networking company impacts society. Even some executives of the company have raised such an alarm. They are Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya.
However, Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size is an advantage to the public. He told the journalist during the interview that the company’s 2019 budget for safety was bigger than the entire revenue of the company at the time they went public. He said,
“Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media.”
Zuckerberg also dismissed Hughes claims by saying,
“Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face. The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issues around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”
Hughes believes that something should be done to protect consumers, and a break up of Facebook will be ideal. In the least, he believes Facebook should be banned from acquiring more social networks as they did with Instagram.
In the op-ed, Hughes writes,
“Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability. But Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.”
Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007, added about the break-up in a tweet promoting the New York Times op-ed,
“FB has become too big and too powerful, and it’s part of a trend in our economy of an increasing concentration of corporate power. We can fix this: break the company up and regulate it.”
Former British deputy prime minister and head of global affairs at Facebook Nick Clegg has rejected calls for the company to be broken up. However, other American politicians think otherwise.
Senator Kamala Harris, a 2020 US presidential aspirant, told CNN that the social media site had prioritised growth over its users. She said,
“I think we have to seriously take a look at that (breaking up Facebook). Yes, so we have to recognise it for what it is. It is essentially a utility that has gone unregulated.”
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, also vying for the 2020 presidential position, voiced her support for Hughes on Twitter.
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
A US state Representative, Ro Khanna, also praised Hughes’ essay in a series of tweets. He agreed that Facebook shouldn’t have acquired WhatsApp and Instagram in 2012. He said neither of the two social media apps was generating good money, but they were popular.
.@chrishughes is a thoughtful voice for those left out of the digital economy. I agree with him that, in retrospect, the FTC should not have approved Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram & WhatsApp in 2012 1/
— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) May 9, 2019