The hypocrisy of Mark Fuckerberg
Mark Fuckerberg is one of the most disgusting people living today. A true hypocrite. Here’s from “Tech Monopolies Are the Reason the US Now Has a TikTok Problem” (August 7th 2020):
If you’re amused by the irony of Big Tech protecting us from an app that could be used for election meddling, given Facebook’s role in the 2016 election, the irony doesn’t stop there. Because TikTok, the app getting all the attention right now, owes its existence in large part to Facebook.
Once upon a time, America had a popular video-sharing app similar to TikTok. It was called Vine and, like TikTok, all the kids used to share silly videos on it. Facebook didn’t like the competition and flexed its monopoly power to strangle it. As revealed in leaked e-mails, Mark Zuckerberg pulled the trigger himself, denying Vine access to Facebook and eliminating its ability to access users.
Curiously, Facebook didn’t do that with TikTok. In fact, it did the opposite. During the spring and summer of 2018, when Facebook was still pushing to access China and trying to open a subsidiary office in Hangzhou, Facebook allowed the Chinese app to blitzkrieg its site with advertising. The ad buys were so overwhelming—more than a billion dollars—that between 15 percent and 22 percent of all ads shown through Facebook on IOS during this time were TikTok ads.
In 2019, however, things changed, and it had nothing to do with patriotism or protecting the West from a Chinese app. Zuckerberg appeared to finally realize that he would never get into China, political scrutiny on Facebook’s outsized power intensified on both sides of the aisle, and TikTok stopped pouring $3 million a day into big ad buys on Facebook.
In short, Facebook claims its size should be preserved in order to serve as a line of defense against adversarial companies and that it needs to be big to innovate. Yet the evidence indicates that the latest adversarial app owes its existence, in part, to Facebook’s pursuit of corporate goals like expanding into China and increasing ad revenue. The Vine story clearly illustrates how the large tech platforms are structurally unable to defend American interests and should never be trusted with that task.
I blogged before about Fuckerberg sucking up to the criminal Chinese government in the most disgusting ways, hoping to be able to get into the Chinese market with his products, but failing miserably. And Fuckerberg is certainly in good company in Silicon Valley, seeing as how Google tried the same tactics many years ago and also failed miserably, after which they decided to take a more “principled approach” towards censorship:
In 2007 I blogged about Google censoring information in China. Its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, admitted back then that Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, but not for the reasons you’d hope for. They only admitted that what they did was bad when they saw that they couldn’t get the business opportunities they were hoping for by censoring information for the Chinese government. In Brin’s words, “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative. […] perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense.”
This is how these people operate. When it’s in their (financial) interests, they close their eyes for all kinds of immoral behavior and even actively take part in it; it’s only when they can’t benefit anymore that they become more ‘patriotic’ or ‘principled’.
And as for TikTok, stay away from that spyware if you know what’s good for you.
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