Warren blasts Zuckerberg over leaked audio
During an internal meeting at Facebook this summer, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed to “fight” any efforts to break up his company, according to audio leaked by The Verge.
When an employee asked Zuckerberg about the rise of presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has proposed breaking up Big Tech, the tech executive said he was not afraid of a “legal challenge,” according to a transcript of the leaked audio.
“I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” Zuckerberg said.
“And does that still suck for us?” he added. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
In the two hours of leaked audio from a pair of employee meetings obtained by The Verge, Zuckerberg also spoke candidly about the complications around Facebook’s new digital currency, Libra, as well as why he believes it’s important for the company to work with the U.S. government to put in place some regulations.
“I at least believe, I think, there are real issues,” Zuckerberg said, according to the transcript. “I don’t think that the antitrust remedies are going to solve them. But I understand that if we don’t help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability, and the government can govern our sector, then yeah, people are just going to keep on getting angrier and angrier.”
Zuckerberg made the comments as Facebook has been working with congressional offices to develop a federal privacy law, but those efforts have stalled over the past several months.
“And they’re going to demand more extreme measures, and, eventually, people just say, ‘Screw it, take a hammer to the whole thing,'” Zuckerberg said.
Timing: The leaked audio was recorded more than a month before Zuckerberg visited lawmakers on Capitol Hill in August, his first visit to the nation’s capital since he testified in a pair of confrontational public hearings in 2018. During the visit, Zuckerberg declined to answer questions from reporters but met privately with a number of his top critics in Congress.
The audio offers some insight into what Zuckerberg has been telling critics and fellow Facebook executives behind closed doors.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) fired back at Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday after the Facebook chief executive expressed anxiety that his company would face a legal challenge if she is elected president in 2020.
“What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy,” Warren tweeted, referencing Zuckerberg’s remark that a legal challenge would “suck for us” even if the social media giant prevailed.
“I’m not afraid to hold Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon accountable. It’s time to #BreakUpBigTech,” Warren said in a follow-up tweet, linking to her presidential campaign’s proposal to break up major tech platforms.
