A Facebook executive says his company has too much power, and it needs to be broken up to reduce the damage it is inflicting.
The comments by Benny Thomas, Facebook’s global planning lead, were captured in a hidden-camera interview by Project Veritas.
“No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of 2 billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is,” he said.
“You should not have power over 2 billion people. I just think that’s wrong.”
Thomas said he works for a company “that is doing a lot of damage in the world.”
“It’s doing a lot of good, but it’s doing a lot of damage,” he said.
“I would break up Facebook, which means I would make less money probably – but I don’t care. Like that’s what needs to be done. Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp — they all need to be separate companies. It’s too much power when they’re all one together,” he said.
Thomas acknowledged there is bias built into the company’s software.
“There’s always built-in [algorithmic] bias. … Guess what? Human beings wrote that code,” he said. “We’re re-looking at the algorithms, but it’s such a massive and complicated thing that it takes time to fix it. Honestly, I think we need to bite the bullet and do it quicker, but you lose a lot of money as well if you do that.”
His predicted a dire future.
“AI [Artificial Intelligence] is essentially evolving to become like human intelligence. Then, it’s going to go beyond human intelligence and at that point, humans are expendable,” he said.
But he was happy with his work on the 2020 election.
“One of the things I worked on, which made me happy, was a voter registration drive. … This is the kind of thing that you can only do with a company that has the sheer scale and reach of Facebook. We set ourselves a goal of registering four million new people and we went over that target.”
He said Facebook-owned platforms such as Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp “need to be separate companies” because it’s “too much power when they’re all one together.”
“I would break it up and I would remove Zuck as the CEO,” he said.
Thomas noted that Zuckerberg owns a controlling stake in the company.
“So, you can’t do it the usual way that you do it in corporate, which is the board can just fire you, right? The board can’t do that to Zuck. The board can’t do that to Larry Page and Sergey Brin [Google] because they own too much of the company. They’re too powerful. So, these are not companies anymore. These are countries,” he said.
James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to expose “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”
A previous Project Veritas videos investigation documented Zuckerberg’s opposition to President Trump and his hope that he can work with Joe Biden.
“The president [Trump] intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power,” Zuckerberg said before Biden’s inauguration.
He accused Trump of subverting the nation’s interests: “It’s so important that our political leaders lead by example, make sure we put the nation first here, and what we’ve seen is that the president has been doing the opposite of that.”
But when Biden launched into a record-setting series of executive actions to undo Trump’s policies, Zuckerberg said: “I think that these were all important and positive steps. And I am looking forward to opportunities where Facebook is going to be able to work together with this new administration on some of their top priorities starting with the COVID response.”
Zuckerberg said Biden, on his first day, “issued a number of executive orders on areas that we as a company really care quite deeply about and have for some time.”
“Areas like immigration, preserving DACA, ending restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, as well as other executive orders on climate and advancing racial justice and equity. I think these were all important and positive steps,” he said.
See the videos:
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