The case for breaking up Facebook

Matthew Schmitz:
It’s time to break up Facebook. This is the stunning argument made in a recent op-ed by Chris Hughes, who roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and co-founded Facebook.

Hughes argues that Facebook now has too much power over public life. I don’t share his panic about Russian manipulation of social media in the runup to 2016. (Did Vladimir Putin prevent Hillary Clinton from campaigning in Wisconsin?) Even so, I think Hughes is right. No CEO should be in the business of deciding who gets free speech.

Hughes has added his voice to a growing chorus calling for action against Facebook. Sen. Liz Warren has led the way among Democrats, followed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has begun to revive the trust-busting spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. In September, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a meeting with state attorneys general to discuss whether tech companies were in violation of antitrust law. In November, President Trump said his administration was “looking into” antitrust violations at Amazon, Google and Facebook.

Republican politicians with impeccable conservative credentials support these moves. “The giant tech companies today are larger and more powerful than Standard Oil when it was broken up,” Sen. Ted Cruz has said. “They’re larger and more powerful than AT&T was when it was broken up. If we have tech companies using the powers of monopoly to censor political speech, I think that raises real antitrust issues.”
...
There is more.

Facebook has gone from a platform open to all to one that discriminates against conservative speech.  One of the ways it does so is by allowing anonymous individuals to label any speech they disagree with as "abusive" which leads to blocking content.  The person accuses of abuse is given no opportunity to challenge the anonymous charge.  In fact, Facebook will not even tell the person what aspect of their content they deemed abusive.

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