WaEx: Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is urging the federal government to break up Facebook and reverse its purchases of encrypted messaging service WhatsApp and photo-sharing platform Instagram.
“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of these companies may be,” Hughes wrote in a Thursday op-ed for the New York Times that criticized one-time partner Mark Zuckerberg, who’s now CEO. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.”
Hughes, who helped Zuckerberg start Facebook from their Harvard dorm room in 2004, provided a road map through the company’s history and explosive growth, and lamented the influence Zuckerberg amassed through his control of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
“Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithm to determine what people see in their News Feed, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered,” Hughes wrote. “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.”
But he’s a fellow traveler, so it doesn’t matter what he does.
Hughes must have some morals and love of the USA. Keep talking Mr. Hughes.
I will not vote for anybody who doesn’t make breaking up these social platform monopolies a priority. I will prefer those who have shown that they are serious about this.
Just legally define those who censor political speech as publishers and make them civilly liable for every word posted if they keep it up. The problem will take care of itself.
People don’t understand that as well as swallowing up competitors they also suppress new technology that could threaten their business.
If some new little start up comes up with the new killer app that could be a competitor to Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet inc (Google, Facebook, Chrome etc) or an Amazon they’ll send in some experts who’ll stroke the egos of the inventors, give them bags of cash for their work and have them sign tight non-competes and non-disclosures with a promise that they can continue their work at headquarters. Well, the promised resources never appear and any talk of continuing on their own is stopped by lawyers waving those non-competes and non-disclosures they signed. That new tech is put into a warehouse that likely looks like the governments secrets warehouse seen at the in of the first Indiana Jones and the old tech Plantation Masters remain the same.
He IS right but it sounds like a soy fight.