Chris Hughes: It's Time to Break Up Facebook
Source: New York Times
Its Time to Break Up Facebook
By Chris Hughes May 9, 2019
The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebooks Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. I hugged his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark.
Since then, Marks personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The companys mistakes the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users data into a political consulting firms lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention dominate the headlines. Its been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I havent worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.
Mark is still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorms common room at the beginning of our sophomore year. He is the same person who procrastinated studying for tests, fell in love with his future wife while in line for the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor in a small apartment years after he could have afforded much more. In other words, hes human. But its his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.
Marks influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that billions of people use every day. Facebooks board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebooks 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.
Mark is a good, kind person. But Im angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. ...
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html