Zuckerberg comes out swinging in face of break-up tension

Via a leaked audio-recording of a Facebook townhall meeting with employees, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a combative position in the face of increasing pressure.

Taking questions from Facebook employees, Zuckerberg has taken a much more forthright and confident stance than he generally does when in the shiny lights of the public domain. The leaked audio files, courtesy of the Verge, paint a picture of a man who is prepared to go to war to protect the gargantuan company he has built over the last decade.

“So, there might be a political movement where people are angry at the tech companies or are worried about concentration or worried about different issues and worried that they’re not being handled well,” Zuckerberg said.

“That doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … 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.”

Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat Senator representing Massachusetts, is looking like the biggest political opponent of Silicon Valley. And it is becoming increasingly clear Facebook is enemy number one.

But perhaps these comments indicate just why Washington and its political leadership is acting so aggressively towards the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon. These are companies who no-longer fear the political establishment. They are arguably more influential, and as you can see from the comments above, they believe they have the upper-hand when it comes to legal arsenals.

As we have mentioned before, this is one of the reasons we suspect politicians are taking such a firm stance against Silicon Valley in 2019. Not only are the actions and business models of these firms’ easy pickings for PR points, Washington DC seemingly does not like it is not the most influential neighbourhood in North America anymore.

On the other side of the debate, Warren has not kept her opinions about Facebook to herself or even attempted to disguise that some of the tweets have been directed towards Zuckerberg.

“We have to 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 said in one tweet.

“Zuckerberg himself said Facebook is ‘more like a government than a traditional company’. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, undermined our democracy, and tilted the playing field against everyone else,” she said in another.

“Facebook’s anti-competitive mergers mean they face no real pressure to tackle disinformation. They won’t even do the bare minimum to improve transparency. Tech giants shouldn’t be able to wield enough power to undermine our democracy,” a final one read.

Facebook seems to be the focal point of Warren’s anger, though this might be down to the leaked audio, as well as the concentration of power at Facebook. Zuckerberg himself has admitted that his voting power at the company has made him a target for the politically ambitious, though this is not the only company which is facing pressure.

All of the major players in the Big Tech fraternity are becoming targets and it the raising temperature might hit boiling point before too long. Some of these companies might be willing to accept fines simply because they don’t make that much of a dent in the spreadsheets, but it would not be a surprise to see some aggression coming back the other direction before too long.

Silicon Valley and Washington DC both have ambitions to be the most prominent voice in the ears of the US consumer, but only one can secure that mantle.