Elizabeth Warren clapped back at Mark Zuckerberg after he vowed to “go to the mat” and “fight” if she won the presidency and tried to break up Facebook.
His comments came from leaked audio from a pair of meetings with employees that took place in July, obtained and transcribed by The Verge. While Zuckerberg addressed multiple topics in the meetings, from Libra to Facebook’s internal TikTok competitor, by far, his most interesting comments are about Warren, who has repeatedly promised to break up Big Tech.
When asked about the threat of regulators breaking up Facebook, Zuckerberg said:
“I mean, if [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. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … 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.”
Zuckerberg added that breaking up big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon would make election interference more likely “because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”
Besides expressing skepticism that antitrust investigations would actually solve anything, Zuckerberg did acknowledge the company’s need to “help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability.”
Warren responded on Tuesday morning via tweet.
What would really “suck” 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. https://twitter.com/JimPethokoukis/status/1179008259367284741 …48.3K6:50 PM – Oct 1, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy12.7K people are talking about this
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the leaked audio and Warren’s response. For his part, Zuckerberg responded to the publication of the transcripts but didn’t address Warren.
It’s important to remember that it’s not just Warren looking into antitrust issues. She gets name-checked because, yes, she’s been very vocal about it. But while a President Warren could ask her Department of Justice or Congressional committees to investigate Facebook, she couldn’t do it by herself.
What’s more pressing for Zuckerberg and his peers is that big tech companies are already facing a growing number of investigations from various government entities.
Since the recorded Facebook meetings took place in July, a group of seven state attorneys general launched an investigation into Facebook and Google and nearly every state in the country joined forces for a separate investigation into Google. Then there’s the probe being led by the House Judiciary Committee which has asked companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple for a trove of internal documents.
In fact, there are so many Big Tech investigations in play right now, the New York Times created a tracker just to help keep tabs on all of them.
Zuckerberg should probably be more worried about his competition rather than what the candidates are saying. Snapchat was apparently all too happy to spill some tea to federal investigators about allegedly anti-competitive practices from Facebook, and odds are there are plenty of other companies ready to do the same.
Warren has become a symbolic villain for Zuckerberg. But there is a much larger group of enemies pounding at Facebook’s gates right now.
