After Facebook’s Co-Founder Chris called for breaking up FB, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have spoken against Facebook. Kamala claimed that Facebook’s power is unregulated and the govt needs to seriously consider breaking it. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook has replied to that suggestion.
During an interview, he said “If what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to invest billions of dollars a year, like we are, in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference.
Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that.”
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Head of Global Affairs said, “I don’t think dismantling companies is the way to deal with complex issues. Chopping a great American success story into bits isn’t suddenly going to make those problems go away.”
Facebook’s reliability over its security and transparency came into question after Cambridge Analytica App scandal and how it influenced the 2016 Presidential election.
Now, recently Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes gave his opinion via an editorial in The New York Times and called for the breaking up of Facebook or bringing it under the control stricter regulations. He also criticized Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
He argued that Facebook has prevented the growth of newer social media sites by being a roadblock to innovations in the said field. Facebook owned other social media giants such as Whatsapp and Instagram has the power to influence great number of people than one can possibly imagine. In fact Facebook has 2.3 Billion monthly users (BMU), Whatsapp has 1.6 BMU and Instagram has 1 BMU .
The platforms owned by the competitors of Facebook such as Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat, WeChat, TikTok has 330 Million Monthly User (MMU) , 1.9 BMU , 287 MMU, 1.1 BMU and 500 MMU respectively.
He also said that 84% of the spending made on Social Media advertisements is mostly on Facebook and it has positioned itself as an inevitable player in social media and advertisement region.
He also stressed that his call for breaking up of Facebook goes beyond economic and creative perspective. Chris said that what Facebook dictates will be the news article a user will see. For instance, what the algorithms written by Facebook authorities sees as Hate-Speech will only be termed as Hate-speech, giving the men behind power influence greater masses.
“Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. 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.”, Chris wrote in The New York Times.