WASHINGTON: Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told employees in July that the company would “go to the mat” to defeat Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren’s expected effort to break up the world’s largest social media company if she were elected president, according to audio of two internal company meetings from July published by The Verge.
“If she (Warren) 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. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,” he said, according to audio posted by The Verge. Warren, who in March called for breaking up Amazon.com Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc, quickly issued a retort on Twitter. “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights,” Warren tweeted.
In the audio, Zuckerberg said breaking up big tech companies would make election interference “more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.” Zuckerberg also drew laughter by saying Facebook’s investment on safety is bigger than Twitter’s entire revenue. Zuckerberg issued a statement on his Facebook page, linking to the transcript, though he said it was meant to be internal.
“You can check it out if you’re interested in seeing an unfiltered version of what I’m thinking and telling employees” he wrote in the post.
Another senior Facebook executive told Reuters this month the company is confident it would defeat an effort to break it up. With more than 2 billion monthly users, Facebook been under scrutiny from regulators around the world over data sharing practices.–Agencies
