Mark Zuckerberg is the most dangerous man in the world
Wait, what?!? Yeah, click bait headline, but it’s true! Or at least it’s my working hypothesis which I’ll continue to reevaluate it as new information comes out. However, I’ve had this hypothesis for manyyears and it’s only become stronger over time so it would take a lot to change course.
Why am I so adamant that the Boy King is a malevolent ruler? Let’s start with some of my core beliefs about the world:
- Humans generally want to be good, but are hard wired for tribalism and other psychological traits which helped our ancestors survive on a tough planet and out compete every other species for world domination.
- Climate change is real. Humans significantly contribute to climate change. It is accelerating and will bring further destabilization of natural ecosystems; erratic weather which will continue (on average) to get warmer; widespread devastation from hurricanes, fires, monsoons; extinction of more species; irreversible changes to the planet.
- Capitalist liberal democracies have been critical in advancing human well being for nearly two centuries. And more so, over the past 70+ years, these democracies have formed a global world order which has avoided world wars, stopped the advance of communism, and created multicultural pluralistic societies which respect religious freedom and reinforce liberty.
- The elite political class in most countries has been captured by wealthy interests who seek to advance their own agenda creating mind numbing wealth disparities at the expense of everyone else and the environment.
- A reaction to this has been the rise of authoritarian populist “strong man” leaders (Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duda, and yes, Trump) who claim to represent “the people” — those people notable excluding ethnic and religious minorities, foreigners, and the “other”. These authoritarians undermine the democratic institutions in their countries, such as independent courts, in order to consolidate their own power. By demonizing their opponents, they make it impossible to cooperate with others both within and outside their countries to solve big problems — economic growth, wealth inequality, protecting the environment, lifting people out of poverty, surviving a global pandemic, and potential military conflicts.
Hmm, yeah, OK, but what does that have to do with Facebook? Excellent question. It may be possible that all these trends would have played out over time without the current destructive social media landscape. Unfortunately, Facebook actively encouraged partisan divisions, spread misinformation, and created self reinforcing filter bubbles which displaced legitimate news and informed public discussion. Why did they do this? To feed Zuckerberg’s insatiable quest for user attention & growth at any cost.
Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users and over 1.8 billion daily active users — it touches more people every day than any company in history. Facebook also owns Instagram and What’s App . It’s very difficult to escape Zuckerberg’s monopoly — you have to actively make an effort to opt out.
Facebook isn’t simply a monopoly which makes an obscene amount of money, although they certainly do that — generating over $3M of profit every hour of every day during the most recent quarter. This is a tech monopoly which encourages the manipulation of entire populations by spreading misinformation, stoking racism, and empowering authoritarian rulers across the entire planet. Tearing apart the social fabric of our communities and threatening liberal democracies is terrible but unfortunately humans are very bad at addressing such invisible long term threats. A very real and visible problem is the people killed due to Zuckerberg’s policies. We’ve seen this for many years in the developing world both on Facebook itself and on apps it owns. These problems are now cropping up in the United States with far right extremist hate groups.
Zuckerberg is fully capable of stopping all of this destructive behavior but he chooses Profit over Hate every single time. Indeed, he made a very explicit decision to allow politicians to mislead and disseminate outright lies throughout the platform including doctored videos. This has nothing to do with First Amendment protections and everything to do with 1) selling ads to highly targeted micro-groups susceptible to misinformation; and 2) avoiding antitrust action from Donald Trump. The power of Facebook’s ad machine and the vast information it (and their partners) have on billions of humans is truly frightening as a tool for manipulation.
There have been many campaigns to boycott Facebook advertising, the most recent one in the summer had wide participation from large advertisers but no significant impact on Facebook. Like employees at other tech companies, many Facebook employees have protested Zuckerberg’s policies. He basically told them to “I pay you a ton of money so shut the f*** up and do your job”. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows that Facebook does pay people a sh** load — both cash comp and stock options. Given that very few employees will chose their conscience over their wallet and decide to quit, change will not come from inside the company.
To be fair, Twitter and Google/YouTube are not innocent bystanders in this problem. However, each of those companies has at least tried to do a better job of weeding out misinformation, clamping down on hate speech, refusing to run misleading election ads, and labeling false or violent posts. I choose the crazy hermit dude over the humanoid robot overlord.
Where does that leave us? I wish that I had an answer but outside of regulatory changes and new laws (looking at you Josh Hawley & Elizabeth Warren!) Zuckerberg will continue to do whatever he wants regardless of the harm to society. {UPDATE: Bi-partisan antitrust suit, woohoo!}For my part, I’ve been reducing my use of Facebook for many years. This accelerated after Zuckerberg denied that enabling Russian interference had any effect on the 2016 election; and more so now after the 2020 election of double standards of the 2020 election. I’ll continue my lonely protest to boycott Facebook. It’s not easy. I enjoyed getting updates from friends & family, connecting with various groups and businesses, and using all the tools which Facebook created (or stole from others). I relented a little during the early days of the pandemic to watch some Instagram workout videos. And as everyone with foreign family does, I still use WhatsApp occasionally. I keep hoping that someone will create a new decent social network with the ability to suck out all of our data + social graph and start over. Until then, there’s email, text, video chats, phone calls (!), and even Twitter. After all, no man is an island 🤷🏽♂️
P.S. Here’s a similar take on Facebook’s danger if you’d like to read an article from an actual journalist at a real publication. YMMV.
P.P.S. From Oct 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s interview with 60 Minutes corroborates what I wrote above but she has actual internal documents to back it up!
