Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook "won't help" – TechCrunch
With the appearance of someone betrayed, Facebook's CEO has kicked back to co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed, and calls regulators to split Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. "When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he suggests we do is not going to do anything to solve these problems. So I think if you care about democracy and choice, you want a company As we will be able to invest billions of dollars a year as we are in building up truly advanced tools to fight election interference. "Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet French President Emmanuel Macron.
Zuckerberg's argument goes down on the idea that Facebook's specific problems with privacy, security, misinformation, and speech are not addressed directly by breaking up the company, and instead would hinder their efforts to secure their social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically get fewer economies of scale when investing in security technology as artificial intelligence to spot the spread of voting suppression content.
Facebook's co-founders (from the left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Mark Zuckerberg [19659004] Hughes claims that "Mark's power is unsurpassed and non-American" and that Facebook's violent acquisition and copying has made it so dominant that it prevents competition. The conversation echoes other early execs such as Facebook's first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya who have raised alarms on how the social network they built affects the community.
But Zuckerberg claims that Facebook's size is distributing the audience. "Our budget for security this year is bigger than the entire income of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. Part of it is because we have been able to build a successful business that can now support it. You know that we invest more in safety than anyone in social media. "Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.
The Facebook group's comments were largely missed by the media, partly because the TV interview was heavily called to French without a transcript. But printed here for the first time, his quotes give a window into how deeply Zuckerberg rejects Hughes' claims. "Well [Hughes] talked about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social problems we are facing." Zuckerberg says before trying to loosen solutions from antitrust regulation. "The way I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issues about malicious content and finding the right balance between expression and security, to prevent election involvement, on privacy."
Claim a breakup not to do Something to help is a more unambiguous recall of Hughes' claims than Facebook VP of Communications and former British Deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NEWS op-ed today that "what matters is not size, but rather consumer rights and interests, and our accountability to governments and regulators who monitor trade and communication … Big in itself is not Poor. Success should not be punished. "
Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes
Something must definitely be done to protect consumers. Maybe it's a break on Facebook. At least, provided that it was not getting enough social networks of sufficient scale, so that it could not sneak another Instagram from its crib, it would be an appropriate and achievable means.
But the sharpest point of Hughes' up-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. "Competition alone would not necessarily affect privacy protection – regulation is needed to ensure responsibility – but Facebook's lock on the market guarantees that users cannot protest by moving to alternative platforms," he writes. After Cambridge Analytica "people didn't go far from the company's platforms. After all, where do they go?"
Therefore, critics called for competition and Zuckerberg's own support for interoperability. A central regulatory regime must make it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I would like to explore in the near future, users can easily bring friends' connections or "social charts" somewhere else, so there's little to force Facebook to treat them better.
