The co-founder of Facebook has joined Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up Facebook.
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, is calling for the breakup of the social media juggernaut, citing the threat of the platform’s unchecked power and that of founder Mark Zuckerberg.
In an op-ed published Thursday in the New York Times, Chris Hughes, who helped form Facebook in a Harvard dorm, joined the growing chorus of lawmakers and advocates demanding the U.S. government rein in Facebook. Despite its myriad scandals — Russian propagandists exploiting the platform to spread misinformation and sway U.S. elections, the sharing of millions of users’ personal data with the political data firm Cambridge Analytica and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix — Facebook’s reach continues to grow.
“For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure Americans are protected and markets are competitive,” Hughes wrote. “It is time to break up Facebook.”
WaPo: Facebook’s co-founder: ‘It’s time to break up Facebook’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s condemnation of economic royalists fits Zuckerberg and Facebook:
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Re-Nomination Acceptance Speech (1936)
Economic royalists in the internet age.
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