BREAK UP FACEBOOK, SAYS CO-FOUNDER
Company accused of sacrificing security and civility for clicks
ONE of the co-founders of Facebook called on Thursday for the social media behemoth to be broken up, warning that the company’s head, Mark Zuckerberg, had become far too powerful.
“It’s time to break up Facebook,” said Chris Hughes, who along with Zuckerberg founded the network in their dorm room while both were students at Harvard University in 2004.
In an editorial published in The New
York Times, Hughes said Zuckerberg’s “focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks”, and warned that his global influence had become “staggering”.
Zuckerberg not only controls Facebook but also the widely used Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, and Hughes said Facebook’s board worked more like an advisory committee than a check on the chief executive’s power.
“Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability,” said vice-president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg.
“But you don’t enforce accountability by calling for the break-up of a successful American company.”
Clegg, a British former deputy prime minister, reasoned that carefully crafted regulation of the Internet is the way to hold technology companies accountable, and noted that Zuckerberg has been advocating for just that.
Hughes, who quit Facebook more than a decade ago, was pictured together with Zuckerberg, when both were fresh-faced students launching Facebook as a campus networking tool.
He accused Facebook of acquiring or copying all of its competitors to achieve dominance in the social media field, meaning that investors were reluctant to back any rivals because they know they cannot compete for long.
Zuckerberg “has created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice”, wrote Hughes, who is now a member of the Economic Security Project, which is pushing for a universal basic income in the United States.
After buying up its main competitors Instagram, where people can publish photos, and WhatsApp, a secure messaging service, Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users across its platforms and made a first quarter profit of US$2.43 billion (RM10 billion) this year.
It has been investing heavily in staff and artificial intelligence to fight misinformation and other abuses on its platform.
A whistleblower group in Washington filed an official complaint that Facebook was unwittingly autogenerating content for terrorlinked groups using its platform that its artificial intelligence systems do not recognise as extremist.
Facebook’s software was automatically “creating and promoting terror content”, the National Whistleblowers Center added in the complaint, by creating “celebration” and “memories” videos for extremist pages that had amassed views or “likes”.
In his editorial, Hughes urged the government to break Instagram and WhatsApp away from Facebook and prevent new acquisitions for several years.
He said the break-up, under existing anti-trust laws, would allow better privacy protection and cost US authorities nothing.
Hughes said that he remained friends with Zuckerberg, noting that “he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic”.