Thanks to everyone who wrote with warm wishes about jury duty. Sadly, I was not called upon to serve my democracy. The good news is that it left me with time to write todayâs emergency edition. Iâll be back to full strength on Monday.
I.
Of the four people
credited as co-founders as Facebook, Chris Hughesâ contributions are perhaps the most unusual for a startup employee. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, he did not write code. Unlike Eduardo Saverin, he did not contribute to business development or sales. Instead, as recounted by Ellen McGirt
in a 2009 profile, Hughes was known internally for what might be called his soft skills:
Hughes was the poet among the teenagers who created Facebook; unlike Zuckerberg and dorm mate and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, he didnât write software code and didnât want to. Instead, he tried to figure out ways that people would want to connect with one another and share stuff more easily. (His nickname among Facebook insiders is âthe Empath.â) Hughes began to make product suggestions, âscrewing around with the site,â as he puts it. When they decided to open Facebook to students outside of Harvard, he argued that different schools should have their own networks, to help maintain the siteâs feeling of safety and intimacy. He became the official Facebook explainer: part anthropologist, part customer-service rep, part media spokesperson.
Even while he was at Facebook, though, Hughes was a heretic. While the other founders wanted to build a unified network, Hughes argued each college should get its own network, to preserve a sense of close-knit community. He lost the argument in the moment, though Facebookâs recent embrace of groups suggests that he was on to something.
Hughes was charmed away from Facebook in 2007, three years after the companyâs founding, by another prominent empath: Barack Obama. He went on to have rocky careers in
politics and
magazine ownership. But today Hughes re-emerged, with
an op-ed in The New York Times, to renounce the company he helped to build. Facebook should be broken up, he says â it is simply too big and powerful for one person to run it:
Mark is a good, kind person. But Iâm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. Iâm disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And Iâm worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.
The government must hold Mark accountable.Â
Over 6,000 words, Hughes makes his case. The themes he touches on will be familiar to any reader of this newsletter: Facebookâs anti-competitive behavior toward its rivals; its steady rise toward near-total market dominance; its rapacious consumption of our data and our attention; its near-unchecked power to draw and maintain the lines of acceptable political speech around the world; and its negative externalities on the army of contractors that supports its work. (Hughes cites
my recent piece on Facebookâs moderators in Phoenix.)
Like many pro-regulation critics of Facebook, Hughesâ proposed remedies include forcing the company to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. He also (problematically) calls for the creation of a new government agency devoted to protecting consumer privacy and regulating internet speech.
Others saw the op-ed as a good dunking opportunity, and acted accordingly. Many tweets were in the vein of âoh looky here, the man who was made insanely wealthy by Facebook has belatedly found the courage to criticize it.â (Hereâs
one of those.) Techmemeâs Gabe Rivera looked at the op-ed as
an opportunistic effort to recast Hughesâ personal narrative away from failure.
Hughesâ precise motives may be a mystery. But set those aside for a moment. Whatâs most important here is the consensus that Hughesâ op-ed now reflects.
- Moskovitz is a top donor to Color of Change, which are campaigning to have Zuckerberg fired. (On Twitter, Moskovitz told me I had mischaracterized this donation, saying it was intended solely to aid Democrats. When I asked what his argument against a breakup was, he said: âIf the goal is to improve democracy we should break up Fox and Sinclair first.â He later deleted the tweet.)
- Justin Rosenstein, who led development of Facebookâs like button, warned about the negative effects of social networks on individual psychology. (Rosenstein co-founded the business collaboration company Asana with Moskovitz.)
- Sean Parker, Facebookâs first president, called himself a âconscientious objectorâ to the social network. âIt probably interferes with productivity in weird ways,â he said. âGod only knows what itâs doing to our childrenâs brains.â
- Chamath Palihapitiya, who led Facebookâs all-important growth team in its early days, told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business to take "a hard breakâ from social media. âI think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,â he said. He added that he felt âtremendous guiltâ over his time at the company, before walking those comments back after getting an angry phone call from Sheryl Sandberg.
- Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp, was not an early executive at Facebook. But he famously told people to delete Facebook upon leaving the campaign.
The executivesâ individual criticisms vary in kind and vehemence. But collectively they paint a view aligned with Hughesâ: that the company is too large, too powerful, and too deleterious to the health of our individual psyches and of our society.
It is worth noting once again how extraordinary it is to see so many early executives at a tech giant express such alarm about its consequences for the world. Certainly, employees of Google, Apple, and Amazon have left and complained about specific aspects of those companiesâ work. But no top executive there has left and called for them to be broken up â much less a whole parade of them.
Viewed in that light, Hughesâ specific arguments around breaking up Facebook are less significant than the new consensus that they reflect. As many Facebook co-founders now support radically changing the company as support maintaining the status quo. And anti-Facebook sentiment is now a mainstream view among the core of Facebookâs founding team.
II.
Of course, Facebookâs current executive team had a different take on the op-ed. Nick Clegg, the companyâs new head of policy and communications, issued an affronted
donât-worry-weâve-got-this:
âFacebook accepts that with success comes accountability. But you donât enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company,â Nick Clegg, Facebookâs vice president of global affairs and communication, writes in aÂ
statement given to The Verge. âAccountability of tech companies can only be achieved through the painstaking introduction of new rules for the internet. That is exactly what [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has called for. Indeed, he is meeting government leaders this week to further that work.â
It was up to journalists
Olivia Solon and
Steve Rhodes to point out that Clegg had been
for enforcing accountability by calling for the breakup of successful American companies before he was against it.
If there was a legitimate criticism of the Hughes op-ed, itâs that it includes some fairly radical anti-speech sentiment. Itâs part of his idea to create some sort of federal online speech monitor. âThis idea may seem un-American,â he writes. âWe would never stand for a government agency censoring speech. But we already have limits on yelling âfireâ in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices. We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.â
In the most charitable and coherent formulation, Hughes is simply asking for the police to enforce existing laws online. Police departments donât always understand web platforms well, and the internetâs scale makes it easy to spread harmful information and hard to hold people accountable. But in the US, we donât need new agencies and speech guidelines to get better at investigating violent hate groups or arresting people who make threats. The criminal justice system has huge problems, but they wonât be solved by deputizing private companies â especially because a lot of internet harassment and extremism takes place on independent sites or through private channels like email.
The internet is an ugly place, and discussing how to make it less ugly is a legitimate and urgent task. But simply calling to âcreate guidelinesâ for turning websites into content cops â while implying that existing laws somehow donât apply to the internet already â is a piece of glib handwaving thatâs not worthy of Hughesâ broader manifesto.
III.
A criticism of the op-ed that I find less compelling is that Facebook should not have to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram because doing so would not address every problem that Facebook had ever been implicated in, or would represent some kind of massive government overreach. Among those arguing the former are
Benedict Evans,
Mike Masnick,
Shira Ovide, and
Kevin Kelly. For the latter, see
Matt Rosoff. Ovideâs take is representative:
I donât have the answers. But I worry that âbreak up Facebookâ has become a catchall, soothing solution to the feeling that Facebook is bad and something should be done about it. A breakup may be the right approach. But I want advocates to start by uniting people around the root problems and working backward to possible fixes before we all back a Standard Oil-style dismantlement.
Surely there is truth in this â the âsomebody
do something!â sentiment is real and can have terrible consequences in politics, as we have seen with the
(Facebook-endorsed) FOSTA and SESTA. But the case made by Hughes and others seems clear enough to me: creating multiple large, economically viable social networks introduces valuable friction and competition into the economy. That friction will likely make ideas slower and just a bit harder to spread â giving humanity a bit more time to think before it reacts to the outrage of the day. And competition will provide better incentives for the new networks to untangle thorny problems around political speech, content moderation, platform integrity, and so on.
If you believe the United States has been generally well served by having 50 laboratories of democracy, you might expect to see similar benefits by having seven or so distinct, multi-hundred-million strong American social networks. Each of them will struggle with many of the issues that Facebookâs conglomerate struggles with today â but theyâll also have compelling new reasons to innovate, and many new rivals from which they can shamelessly copy.
Whether you support breaking up Facebook (or Google, or Amazon, or Apple) depends largely on what you think the problem is. If you believe that terrorists coordinating anonymously on WhatsApp is the primary issue here, then youâre right â breaking up Facebook wonât address your pet issue.
But if you believe that monopolies are inherently bad, and that serving a customer base in the billions creates problems that no single person or company can capably solve, it seems to me that you probably support breaking up Big Tech. And if you work in the United States government and youâre considering this issue, it seems worth noting that so many of the people who built Facebook are now practically begging you to.
