You can enable subtitles (captions) in the video player
I wrote a column recently fact-checking some of the claims that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made in a recent speech at Georgetown University and some subsequent testimony on Capitol Hill, in which he was trying to defend the social media giant against accusations of incorrect political advertising, election manipulation, monopoly power, et cetera.
We at another crossroads. We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great. And I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.
Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook is part of the fifth estate. That's a term that's generally used in the US to explain members of the counterculture - bloggers, journalists, who are outsiders. It's also associated with a Detroit magazine, an anarchist magazine that actually was protesting, amongst other things, capitalism.
This is quite an irony for a man who has become a billionaire by the industrial-level monetisation of personal data. That's another issue in Zuckerberg's speech that I took exception to. Facebook's business model - the targeted advertising business model - has always been incredibly powerful.
In fact, if you go back to the original paper that the inventors of surveillance capitalism, Google, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, did in 1998 on search. They actually talked about potential ways that search and targeted advertising could be misused by both companies, but also potentially, public actors. So it's very interesting that Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg are claiming that they didn't know how big and powerful Facebook could get.
The other thing that I take exception to in Zuckerberg's speech is the idea that Facebook is, in some way, a national champion for the US. This is a line that you're hearing a lot more of in Washington. Big tech executives like to say that if they're broken up, then China will move ahead of the US.
But the idea of a large multinational company like Facebook being some kind of patriotic champion of America's national interests is just patently false. Facebook, like many other companies, would love to be in China, but can't be because of the ring-fenced digital ecosystem there. So that's my fact check of Mark Zuckerberg.
