Facebook would sue the government if Elizabeth Warren became president and carried out her pledge to break up large tech companies, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an audio leaked to The Verge.
“At the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential,” said Zuckerberg, “you go to the mat and you fight.”
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies,” said Zuckerberg. “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. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government.”
Zuckerberg said that breaking up the companies wouldn’t solve the problem.
“It doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”
Writing on Twitter in response to the Zuckerberg’s leaked comments, Warren said, “What would really ’suck' is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”
Zuckerberg responded to the leaked remarks on his Facebook page, explaining that it was from a weekly Q and A with staffers.
U.S. politicians of all stripes agree that the influence of big tech companies is a problem. But they do not agree on exactly what the problem is, even less the solution.
Many Republicans, including President Trump, complaining that big tech companies are censoring conservatives.
Writing after the meeting Hawley said he had a “frank conversation” with Zuckerberg.
Tech companies are currently protected by 1996 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which states “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Hawley says this effectively gives them a free pass.
“There’s a growing list of evidence that shows big tech companies making editorial decisions to censor viewpoints they disagree with. Even worse, the entire process is shrouded in secrecy because these companies refuse to make their protocols public.”
But some Republican and conservative lawmakers and commentators are queasy about the creation of more power levers that rest with the federal government and belive such measures could potentially undermine free speech.
The new state inquiries follow probes at the federal level by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, which are also investigating Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon for potential violations of antitrust law.
New York-based corporate attorney Manny Alicandro told The Epoch Times that the recent probes are “groundbreaking” in their nature and scope.
“This is historic scrutiny, because it’s bipartisan,” he said. “There’s a lot at stake in terms of how much these entities—these big tech companies—control and how they disseminate information. Fundamentally, this is about control and information.”
