Enough is Enough: The Criminal Case Against Mark Zuckerberg
The rule of law does not apply to the powerful. It should. And Facebook is a good place to start.
Matt Stoller
mattstoller.substack.com
Civil cases achieve nothing:
In the early 2010s, the Antitrust Division had Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt dead to rights in a straightforward criminal wage-fixing case, with emails showing a conspiracy to lower their own employees wages by preventing cross-firm hiring. That’s crime, a form of theft from employees of both their money and their ability to pursue their trade in a way they might wish.
But the Antitrust Division pursued civil charges, so nothing meaningful changed, except some Silicon Valley lawyer got to buy a new boat. There is already plenty of evidence of willful fraud:
The second example is also a case of fraud in advertising metrics, in which Facebook insiders knowingly misled advertisers by overestimating how many people Facebook advertisements reached. Facebook exaggerated its reach by counting duplicate or fake accounts as distinct people that advertisers could touch through Facebook, at one point telling advertisers it reached more teenagers in the United States than the census counted in the United States. Again, this caused advertisers to spend more than they otherwise would have.
Company officials frequently discussed what to do about this deception, which means they knew how deep the problem went. In one email, Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz said these errors were not a “a metrics bug” but instead a “deliberate product decision … since launch [in the late 2000s].” In another email, Facebook executive Ami Vora wrote, “I think there is a real chance this is a bad moment for us – ‘Facebook lies about its user #s to get record profits’ … the target on our back just gets bigger.”
There are so many internal quotes showing malfeasance it’s pointless to list them all, but here are few. Facebook Vice President for Ads Rob Goldman said that Facebook’s handling of duplicate accounts was “pretty indefensible.” Sheryl Sandberg wrote in one email, “We spoke about this a long time ago many times. I thought we knew about this but we also recognized that when the self-reporting data was so different than the census we knew we had to address it. I believe we still do.”
Once again, the deception was intentional. When one employee presented a plan to fix the problem, noting that the revenue impact is “indeed significant,” higher ups turned him down. “This is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” he wrote.
Politically, this is unrealistic. The GOP would never threaten big business because the GOP only exists to collect money from donors. The Dems would only use such prosecution as leverage to encourage Facebook to politically weaponize its monopoly power.
Tom |
