Compared to Zuckerberg, U.S. Robber Barons look like angels
WHEN asked some years ago about his vision for the future, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said with pious zeal: ‘the thing i really care about is the mission, making the world open and connected.’
last year he was even more evangelical, saying he wanted ‘to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together . . . to build a global community that works for all of us . . . make a lot of things in the world better’.
this week, we discovered in shocking detail precisely how Zuckerberg has been making the world better.
He turned a blind eye as ‘tens of thousands of app developers’ hoovered up and sold the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users, data Zuckerberg had pledged to protect. the web giant’s takings as this went on between 2009 and 2015 soared by nearly £13 billion.
Well, the world certainly got better for Zuckerberg — he became a multi-billionaire.
He did so by unscrupulously milking Facebook customers, turning it into an internet platform where rules don’t exist, where paedophiles ply their evil trade, terrorists recruit and instruct killers, fake news abounds, intimidation by trolls and malign forces is endemic, democracy is undermined and where, as we learned with growing horror this week, there’s an arrogant disdain for privacy.
Along with Zuckerberg’s unscrupulous greed, there’s his cowardice. Following the data-mining scandal, he disappeared for days. Only when the scale of the calamity it had caused Facebook became apparent — £35 billion wiped off the firm’s value in two days — did he make a statement.
He admitted there had been mistakes, that changes were needed — but still refused to apologise.
On top of greed and cowardice, we can add hypocrisy. Zuckerberg has relentlessly paraded his moral credentials, giving money to education projects, pledging billions to charities. He even called for a global tax on all workers to provide a universal basic income for all men and women.
Yet Facebook does all it can to shelter its billions from the taxman. in 2016 in the uK, it paid just £5.1 million corporation tax on a profit of £58.4 million, a rate of less than 10 per cent.
Zuckerberg makes the infamous u.S. Robber Barons of the 19th century, men such as oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, and transport king Cornelius Vanderbilt — who built fortunes often by questionable means — look like vicars at a tea party.
He is nothing more than a ruthless, money-grabbing, tax-avoiding impostor. there is only one weapon we have to fight back: Facebook customers can delete their accounts. use it!