Mark Zuckerberg has made a grave mistake (well, another one, if you’re counting Russian hackers’ unmitigated interference in the 2016 election). In leaked audio obtained by the Verge, the usually measured cofounder and CEO of Facebook vows to “fight” Senator Elizabeth Warren, who declared earlier this year that, if elected president in 2020, she would seek to break up tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies...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,” Zuckerberg said in the audio, reportedly taken during meetings at Facebook in July. “Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government...it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
The operative words here are, “We care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But.” Particularly after Facebook’s failure to contain Russian interference and the flow of fake news in 2016—and the company’s behind-the-scenes efforts to deny and downplay that failure—Zuckerberg’s declaration of war on Warren would seem ill-advised. Still smarting from the 2016 fallout (on top of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and calls that the social network doesn’t do enough to contain hate speech around the globe), Facebook should be pledging to fight hackers and hate speech, not the U.S. government.
But it appears that Zuckerberg won’t have to wait for 2020 to “go to the mat” with Warren. She seized on his comments from the Verge transcript on Twitter on Tuesday: “What would really ‘suck,’” she wrote, quoting Zuckerberg, “is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”
Warren has alleged that companies like Facebook have become monopolistic—a claim Zuckerberg denies in the audio: “It’s just that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues. And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”
But Warren isn’t backing down. She went on to re-share her original plan for breaking up Big Tech, including “unwinding” Facebook from Instagram and WhatsApp: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” the plan says. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”
Does it “suck” for Warren to already have Zuckerberg anticipating a legal battle with her hypothetical administration? Yes, but at the end of the day, if someone’s going to threaten one of your many sweeping plans, you go to the mat and you fight.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
