Facebook Co-Founder Called For Breaking Up The Company For Fear Of Zuckerberg's Great Power

Aadhya Khatri - May 13, 2019


Facebook Co-Founder Called For Breaking Up The Company For Fear Of Zuckerberg's Great Power

Facebook acquisition of rival platforms has given Zuckerberg great power over speech

One of Facebook’s cofounders urged the government to break up the company behind the world’s largest social media site as he feared of the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is having an “unprecedented and un-American” power.

Chris Hughes, one of the people who helped building Facebook after meeting Zuckerberg at Harvard, said that the way he acquired other platforms of his competitors had made him a man of high power over speech.

Chris-Hughes-urged-the-government-to-break-up-Facebook
Chris Hughes urged the government to break up Facebook

Screenshot 6

Facebook has for itself over two billion users every month. Other platforms under Facebook, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, each has more than one billion. What Hughes is after are stricter laws as some politicians are proposing the idea of breaking up big tech companies.

Elizabeth Warren, the senator of Massachusetts, said that if she were the next president, she would break up Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Warren also showed support for Hughes’s proposal on Twitter as she wrote: “It’s time to break up big tech.”

Screenshot 7

Hughes no longer has shares in Facebook as he sold them for half a billion dollars when he left the company in 2007 to work for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. However, he said that he still felt a sense of responsivity and anger at the company’s current situation.

Screenshot 8

This is not the first time Facebook’s omnipotence was questioned in the past few years. Before Hughes, the public has criticized the company for the same reasons. Last year, it leaked a large amount of user data to Cambridge Analytica, a firm worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Fast forward to today, the company’s latest scandal was its unintentional leak of 1.5 million users’ address books without them knowing it.

Facebook also has its fair share of the public attention this year as it was accused of letting a genocide campaign spreads on its platform. In the US’s latest precedential campaign, the company also left Russian influence went rampant on its platform without any effective measures to cushion its impact.

Facebook-Myanmar-genocide
Facebook has its share of responsibility in Myanmar's genocide

Hughes’s proposal has the support of Majority Action and Color of Change, two activist groups. They have called for the company’s shareholders to go against Zuckerberg in the upcoming board meeting. They also wanted the government to set up an agency dedicated to data protection and restrict his power.

Screenshot 9

Hughes proposed that an agency to govern tech companies and come up with guidelines for free speech.

According to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications said that Zuckerberg agreed on the call to have regulations and he would meet with the government to discuss this matter.

Comments

Sort by Newest | Popular

Next Story