• Home
• /
• Opinion

Why its co-founder has unfriended FB, wants it broken up

Chris Hughes has been advocating that the social media platform he once helped set up should now be dismantled.

With 2.41 billion active users as of June 2019, Facebook boasts of at least a billion more users than the population of China, the world's most populous country. Has it become too big to nail and should it now be dismantled to protect its users? A $5-billion penalty for violating consumers' privacy did not make a dent in the social media giant's share price, which in fact ended a fraction higher the day the Federal Trade Commission revealed the details of its settlement (last week, Wednesday). Make no mistake, the fine is the largest ever imposed for privacy violation and, as FTC maintained in its media statement, the amount is "almost 20 times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide."
But if anyone thought that that would teach FB a lesson, well they'll need to simply get a crash-course in reality a.k.a. FB's track-record in privacy violations and broken promises. FTC Chairman Joe Simons acknowledged as much when, as part of the official statement, he said:
"Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers' choices." And while founder Mark Zuckerberg will no doubt pay up, apologise, and promise to overhaul FB's privacy apparatus for the nth time, his progress report in defending user privacy and preventing the platform from misuse does not engender much confidence among users.
That includes Chris Hughes, one of the five Facebook co-founders, who has been advocating that the social media platform he once helped set up should now be dismantled in the larger interest of privacy and competition. In an NYT opinion piece in May this year, Hughes listed some of FB's biggest mistakes, including its "sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users' data into a political consulting firm's lap" and "the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news". Hughes said he feels "a sense of anger and responsibility" for the follies of the company he helped co-found 15 years ago even though he hasn't worked there in a decade. "I was on the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and that product now gets billions of hours of attention and pulls in unknowable amounts of data each year," he says. It is what FB does with that data - coupled with the lack of oversight - that worries most users.
Hughes has obviously unfriended Facebook, for it no longer resembles the platform he helped co-found. In fact, he is now collaborating with the other side - the regulators - in drumming up evidence and providing a framework for an anti-trust case against Facebook. In wanting to dismantle Facebook, he maintains that the platform should have never been allowed by the FTC to gobble up its competitors in the first place. "The FTC's biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook's heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the FTC approved." Now, he suggests it's time the FTC corrected its mistake.
To be fair, the FTC's new 20-year settlement order is aimed at introducing more transparency in FB's privacy decision-making and at holding it accountable for compliance. The order removes "unfettered control by Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg over decisions affecting user privacy" by establishing an independent privacy committee of FB's board of directors. The problem is that Zuckerberg controls the board via 60 per cent of the voting power and can override all other shareholders put together without batting an eyelid. That makes Facebook a monopoly as a company but if it were a country of 2.4 billion, it would be a totalitarian state. Reason enough for the FTC to fire the antitrust salvo?