One of the fiercest opponents to ongoing efforts of regulating big tech is Mark Zuckerberg. In leaked audio of an internal Facebook Q&A session, when the topic of Elizabeth Warren’s plans of breaking up big tech came up, Zuckerberg vowed to “go to the mat” and fight it. This might sound benign upon first listen, but it is the core of what Mark Zuckerberg has come to represent in Silicon Valley’s faux appeal to progressive values. Instead of perceiving the long-lasting damage it’s done to global democracy as deeply abhorrent and working to fix it, Facebook would rather continue to hide behind free speech platitudes and the faint promise of betterment with nothing concrete to bear it out.
On Thursday, in an effort to make his values more clearly known, Zuckerberg delivered an address on free expression at Georgetown University in Washington DC. What had become quickly apparent, is that this was nothing more than a PR stunt for Facebook to promote the idea that Zuckerberg hadn’t completely lost the script while promoting the unconditional growth of his quasi-monopolistic social media empire. To start, the following Q&A had only featured questions submitted by students beforehand, and therefore pertains in small terms to the contents of…
