Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not silently sitting by this 2020 campaign season despite all the candidates giving his company quite a bit of money for internet advertising. The Verge got their hands on audio and transcripts of Zuckerberg's latest employee Q&A session, and they are a doozy. The Zuck has declared war on one candidate in particular, and given the power that Facebook commands, that alone is an argument the candidate, Liz Warren, is correct: the company should be broken up.
Question: With the recent FCC fine, investigation, and with the rise of politicians like Sen. Warren, I was wondering how personally worried you are about regulators coming in and breaking up Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I think you want to separate out a couple of things. I’m certainly more worried that someone is going to try to break up our company. Now, there’s a separate question about, at the end of the day, there is the rule of law — which, for all of the concern about the direction the country is going in, as someone running a company that operates in a lot of different countries, I have to say one of the things that I love and appreciate about our country the most is that we have a really solid rule of law, which is very different from a lot of other places around the world.
So there might be a political movement where people are angry at the tech companies or are worried about concentration or worried about different issues and worried that they’re not being handled well. That doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.
And I just think the case is not particularly strong on this … It’s just that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues. And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together. It doesn’t make any of the hate speech or issues like that less likely. It makes it more likely because now ... all the processes that we’re putting in place and investing in, now we’re more fragmented.
It’s why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face, qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment. Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company. [laughter] And yeah, we’re operating on a bigger scale, but it’s not like they face qualitatively different questions. They have all the same types of issues that we do.
So yes, I think that the direction of the discussion is concerning. I at least believe, I think, there are real issues. I don’t think that the antitrust remedies are going to solve them. But I understand that if we don’t help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability, and the government can govern our sector, then yeah, people are just going to keep on getting angrier and angrier. And they’re going to demand more extreme measures, and, eventually, people just say, “Screw it, take a hammer to the whole thing.” And that’s when the rule of law comes in, and I’m very grateful that we have it.
Zuck's position is that if there's not a framework in place to keep America from getting pissed off at tech companies, he'll be forced to fight legal battles that he's sure he'll win, but the expense means it'll be bad for the company's bottom line. My immediate next question here is summed up by Matt Yglesias:
As Zuckerberg said, Warren winning would cost him a lot in legal fees.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 1, 2019
Trump, by contrast, boosts profits with corporate tax cuts.
Does he have an obligation to shareholders to help spread fake news that helps him beat her?
And there we have it. Zuckerberg is either unaware of the power his company has in shaping the 2020 election, or he does, and doesn't care. Hard to say which is worse.
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