The more I read about Mark Zuckerberg the more I realize he is a villain. Today, for example, “Facebook Stopped Employees From Reading An Internal Report About Its Role In The Insurrection. You Can Read It Here” on BUZZFEED. The title really says it all.
He’s an authoritarian control freak who may or may not have any political affiliation beyond being a money grubbing, arrogant, self-glorifying billionaire who won’t be happy until he doubles his $40 billion net worth.
Watch the six “best” moments of his Congressional testimony if you need any further proof. It’s enough to make me wish one of the committee members could have gotten up and slapped him in his smug face.
He also keeps making me reevaluate just how useful I find Facebook. I’d really like to get off it. Why should I have anything to do with something that benefits Zuckerberg?
It would mean not being able to see or post on the private and secret Facebook groups I’m a member of including a secret group composed of 81 people who live in the senior community where I live.
By way of example, my most recent post was a series of photos I took of an eagle which perched on the tall pine tree across from my house. 32 members of the group I’m a member of have seen them so far. Until I posted them here only people who live where I do could see this magnificent bird.
Click to enlarge image
I also belong to a private group only for those who have been vetted to be sure they are psychotherapists with 112 members. Only members can see what we post. I am a co-moderator. We have been discussing the psychological aspect of politics since Trump was nominated.
Anyone can read anything on a public Facebook page without their own Facebook account. (This explanation of the types of groups since it was posted last year.)
Facebook is basically a monopoly offering a service no other company comes close to providing to a widely used communication service. It had 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020. It is the biggest social network worldwide. Reference
The old AT&T (aka the Bell System) was broken up by the government in 1984, coincidentally an interestingly symbolic year. NPR asked the question last year in “Could The Old AT&T Break-Up Offer Lessons For Big Tech Today?”
The conclusion:
(Brian) NAYLOR: Local phone service was taken over by a number of regional companies, which over the years have merged together, forming many of the carriers we know today, including Verizon and, ironically, a company called AT&T, a descendant of the original Ma Bell.
There were some hiccups, complaints that the quality of local phone service was diminished, but Steve Coll, now a staff writer at The New Yorker and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, says, for the most part, the breakup of the Bell System worked as planned.
(Steve) COLL: It was necessary to get AT&T out of the way to create the space for the great renaissance in technology that has driven a lot of the U.S. economy since the 1980s.
NAYLOR: Now the Department of Justice, along with the Federal Trade Commission, is exploring whether to charge some of the big tech platforms with antitrust violations, possibly leading to their breakup. In a way, it sounds far-fetched to think that government would take such dramatic action against these rich and powerful corporations, but it's been done before.
It is interesting to note that I gave up trying to find the name of the CEO of AT&T at the time the government broke it up.
I think the only viable solution to the stranglehold that Facebook has on this widely relied on form of communication which is under the draconian control of its CEO is to break it up into smaller entities. I’m not sure what these new companies would look like. Perhaps it would work by separating it into five companies: friends and family, businesses, news, government, and politics.