Breaking up Facebook won’t solve issues: Mark Zuckerberg responds amid growing backlash
Mark Zuckerberg responded to calls to break up Facebook on accounts of its staggering influence. Co-founder Chris Hughes called Zuckerberg’s power “unprecedented and un-American”.
Amid a growing backlash and clamour to break up Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Co-founder of the social networking giant, opened up to share his take. In his opinion, breaking up the company is not exactly going to fix their problems. If anything, the antitrust remedies will make it even harder to curb issues related to user privacy, election interference, hate speech, and more.
The 34-year-old tech billionaire shared these ideas during a conference call on Thursday, outlining Facebook’s attempts to moderate harmful content.
Media reports quoted him as saying,
“If the problems you are most worried about are the ones about…harmful content, making sure that we prevent election interference, making sure that we have the right privacy control, I don't think that the remedy of breaking up the company is going to address those. I actually think it's going to make it a lot harder."
Zuckerberg’s arguments were based on the premise of Facebook’s massive scale and competition. According to him, the social network, because of its sheer size, is able to spend on aspects of safety and security in a way none of its competitors can do.
“The amount of our budget that goes toward our safety systems is greater than Twitter’s whole revenue this year,” said Zuckerberg, “We’re able to do things that I think are just not possible for other folks to do.”
Incidentally, his remarks come on the heels of a recent New York Times op-ed penned by Chris Hughes, a Co-founder of Facebook.
Also Read: Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes calls for company breakup, says the original team is disappointing
Hughes highlighted the many concerns surrounding the growing power of Zuckerberg and the staggering influence of Facebook. He implored that the US government needs to hold the CEO “accountable”.
“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes added.
Also Read: Facebook removes a record 2.2 billion fake accounts in major crackdown on spammers and hate speech