Standing in front of a packed Georgetown auditorium last October, Mark Zuckerberg took his TikTok criticism to a crescendo. Activists around the world, he said, were organizing on Facebook-owned WhatsApp, while TikTok — “the Chinese app” — was censoring them.
Zuckerberg, in his comparison, drew a line between two competing visions for the internet. One, his preference, would foreground free speech while allowing for the problems that come with it. The other would hew closely to a political party’s values (like the Chinese Communist Party’s), and while it might be ‘safer,’ it would also be rife with censorship.
“Is that the internet we want?” Zuckerberg asked of the China model.
Zuckerberg’s convenient attack — broadsiding a competitor while making the case for Facebook to operate relatively undisturbed — is one he and his company already seem to regret. His remarks, delivered a few miles from the White House, didn’t seek a TikTok ban from its occupant, but they did contribute to an environment of uncertainty that led President Trump to order its sale. Zuckerberg and his lieutenants now fear a backlash, one that could lead to repercussions for their company outside the U.S.
“It’s a classic Facebook move to naively wind up someone like Trump,” one former Facebook employee told me. “Facebook ruins things for the whole tech industry.”
Coming into Georgetown, Zuckerberg needed a bogeyman. After years of scrutiny over Facebook’s laissez-faire approach to political speech, he entered the talk with a new motto: “It’s better to be understood than liked,” and prepared to defend Facebook’s philosophy as the 2020 election season neared. In TikTok, Zuckerberg found a useful foil. The app’s China link could help him stoke fear of state-sponsored censorship while positioning Facebook as the preferred alternative, and he’d kneecap his fiercest competitor since Snapchat in the process.
Privately, Zuckerberg took his message directly to the country’s most powerful politicians. He met with Trump and argued he should be worried about Chinese technology more than Facebook, and he held meetings with senators where he discussed TikTok specifically. Some of these senators would later ask intelligence officials to investigate TikTok.
#technology #facebook #big-technology #business #big-data
