Facebook exec says Zuckerberg is TOO POWERFUL and Facebook should be BROKEN UP, in undercover interview
Thomas is not the first person to demand greater government regulation of the Silicon Valley tech giants. Republicans have long accused these companies of discriminating against conservatives, and former president Trump repeatedly called for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives social media platforms immunity from being sued over the content posted on their sites, and allows them to decide what content to host and what to remove from their sites at will.
On the other side of the aisle, Massachusetts senator and failed presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren revealed plans in 2019 to break up tech monopolies like Amazon and Facebook. Multiple US states launched their own investigations into Facebook’s alleged anti-competitive behavior, but the firm has not yet suffered any consequences.
Thomas’ beef with Facebook did not involve its business practices, however. In the snippets of speech included in the Project Veritas video, he lent weight to the conservative argument that Facebook’s algorithms are biased. “There’s always built-in [algorithmic] bias,” he said. “Guess what? Human beings wrote that code,” he added, according to Project Veritas.
The riot was coordinated largely on Facebook, according to a Washington Post report.
Ironically, even as Facebook works to help bring about its desired policies, executives admitted that the company has excessive power. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, conceded that politicians from such countries as Germany and Mexico have expressed “disquiet” about the power of Big Tech to control public discussion. He said Facebook agrees with the argument that private companies should be making decisions in a way that is framed by democratically agreed rules and principles.READ MOREBig Tech giants want to prove they are ‘American gods’. Anyone watching the watchers?
“At the moment, those democratically agreed rules don’t exist,” Clegg said, apparently overlooking such frameworks as the US Constitution.
Guy Rosen, vice president for integrity, said Facebook has a program to “freeze commenting” on threads when its systems detect “hate speech” or violence. New censorship tools are among advances that Facebook has made in the past three or four years in “the integrity space, our efforts to protect elections,” he said.
Facebook Vice president for civil rights Roy Austin suggested using Oculus virtual-reality technology “to help a white police officer understand what it feels like to be a young black man who’s stopped and searched and arrested by the police.” He added, “I want every major decision to run through a civil rights lens.”
