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Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Should Abandon Facebook Altogether
The senator is trolling Facebook, but would she send a louder message by abandoning the platform altogether?
Over the weekend, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign paid for an ad that falsely claimed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Donald Trump for reelection. The idea was to show how easily candidates can spread misinformation on the platform. But the candidate might send a stronger message by laying off the ads and abandoning Facebook altogether.
While Warren’s tactic worked to generate viral attention on social networks and broadcast media coverage, it does not change the larger political economy or the rules of the platform. Rather, it enforces them. That’s why Facebook tweeted at Warren that, like FCC-approved political ads that air on television, the platform prefers to let people, and not companies, determine the truth of political advertisements for themselves. As long as politicians pay for advertisements on Facebook, the company is happy to absolve itself of responsibility for everything that happens as a result. People are not at the center of Facebook’s value system — profits are.
This is why Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees that he’d go to the mat and fight Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up big tech companies if she is elected president. Warren’s plan would “suck” for Facebook, as Zuckerberg himself said. It would mean designating Facebook and all technology companies with greater than $25 billion in global revenue as platform utilities. That means Facebook would no longer be allowed to own both the marketplace and the users. Further, it would not be allowed to share user data with third parties. Facebook’s ad revenue exceeded $55 billion in 2018. Warren’s plan would make the platform much less attractive to advertisers and threaten Facebook’s bottom line.
More daunting for Facebook is Warren’s plan to appoint federal regulators who would break up technology mergers…
