The Daily - A Founder of Facebook Says It’s Time to Break It Up

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate, has written an Op-Ed in The New York Times saying that Mr. Zuckerberg has become too powerful and that Facebook should be broken up. Our colleague sits down with him to talk about why he’s speaking out. Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology writer for The Times who interviewed Mr. Hughes. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: “It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade,” Mr. Hughes writes in his Op-Ed. “But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.”

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate, has written a column in The Times saying Zuckerberg has become too powerful and that Facebook should be broken up. My colleague Kevin Roos sits down with Chris Hughes

to talk about why he's speaking out. It's Friday, May 10th. Hey. Hey. Come on in. Can I bug you or somebody for a coffee? Yeah, which coffee? This is one of them.

Michael, will you be our coffee boy? Yeah, tell me what you'd like. I can also do it. No, no, no. I don't need to ask. I'm really very happy to. I just did a cup of coffee. I just did it for this guy.

Yeah, you're the coffee guy now. No, no, no. Hi. Hey, I'm Kevin. How are you, Chris? Give me two seconds, okay? How's it going? How's your day been?

It has been nuts, to be totally honest. Well, certainly a story making headlines today is Facebook's co-founder Chris Hughes coming out and saying the government needs to hold Mark Zuckerberg, quote, accountable. Publish an op-ed in the New York Times where Hughes says Facebook is so powerful it threatens American democracy. In a scathing op-ed in the New York Times, Hughes calls Facebook's dominance a monopoly. Look at what he actually says. We are a nation with a tradition of reigning in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of those companies may be. He says Mark Zuckerberg's power is unprecedented and un-American. Un-American, guys. He's never been this outspoken about Facebook before.

And I'm pretty sure he ain't going to get an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at Mark Zuckerberg's house this year. That I'm sure of. Yeah, let's just start from the very beginning. Tell me about the first time you met Mark Zuckerberg. Gosh, I don't remember the first time, first time. We weren't fast friends freshman year, but we were paired sophomore year with Dustin Moskovitz, the third co-founder of Facebook, and Billy Olson. And so the four of us ended up in this tiny room in Kirkland House with a little common room.

And then Mark and I had an even tinier little bedroom that we shared and Billy and Dustin had the third. So you guys actually shared a bedroom like you were physically roommates. Indeed. Sophomore year. Yes. Yeah. I think when a lot of people think about that period in Facebook's life, they think about the movie, The Social Network. Right. And they see Mark as being the person that he's portrayed as. And that movie kind of a cold, calculating, emotionless, very ambitious, very smart college student. Yeah, I don't think that's fair.

What do you think? Like, what's the real Mark from that time? I mean, my experience of him wasn't that he was cold or calculating then or now. I mean, he sort of speaks and talks like an engineer sometimes, so I think that puts some folks off. But I don't know. He was like you or me in college.

He was more interested in engineering than we were, but he still, you know, he had crushes. He got angry when, you know, a date didn't show up. He had class. He had to clean. I don't know. It's sort of hard to explain, but the idea that he or we were hatching some grand plot for world domination, listen, that's what people like to say now about Facebook, but that was not my experience. Did he understand what he was building? Did he understand the potential impact if this thing worked out of what it might become? You know, it's hard to say for all of us because the goalposts kept moving.

So if you would have said, did we understand that we were creating a network to help Harvard students keep up with one another? Definitely. And then two weeks later than that, Ivy League students? Yeah, definitely. And then a few months after that, college students in general, etc. You get my point. So I think that there was a sense that we were onto something, that we had tapped into a real desire for people to share information, content stories about who they were, to learn what their friends were up to. But I don't think the scale of what Facebook has become was foreseeable to anyone, to me, to him, to anyone in that phase.

So Mark famously drops out of school, moves to Silicon Valley, pursues Facebook. You stayed at Harvard and graduated. I did. I was on financial aid, and I was the first in my family to go to really any kind of college like Harvard. My mom's a public school teacher, dad was a paper salesman, and the opportunity to be at Harvard was not one that I took lightly. And I liked what we were doing at Facebook. It was interesting, fun, impactful. But it wasn't, even for me then, a mission like it was for Mark. You know, there was always this almost missionary zeal that Mark had to connect the world, to make it more open and connected. And it was a little bit harder for me to see why connection itself was necessarily good. What does that even mean? So it never occurred to me that

this would be my life's work in the way that I think early on from Mark, it was more evident that this was something he really wanted to devote himself to. Right. So after college, you graduate, you move out to Silicon Valley and you join Facebook. Did you feel at that point like you and Mark were basically on the same page, that his vision and mission were aligned with yours? Yeah, yeah. I was still skeptical that connection in and of itself was a good thing, and he and I debated that. I can remember him continuing to debate that in long emails and things,

if I remember correctly, in 2007 and 2008. Where did you disagree with him? Like, what was the debate over? I think it was around the sense of whether or not it was a good thing to be connected in and of itself. A lot of times Facebook or other technologies get compared to tools, you know, like a hammer. The tool isn't good or bad. It's just how it's used. I don't know. I've always been a little skeptical of that. I think some tools are not as good as other tools. You know, a gun is different than a hammer. So just it feels like

a little bit of a squishy argument to me that more tools is always better. Maybe, maybe not. So I guess the nature of the disagreement was just more skepticism on my part that we could be quite as clear about the virtue or drawback of any tool, including what Facebook was doing at the time. Right, and I guess if you're skeptical of a tool's sort of inherent goodness, you're seeing that it might be misused or that

it could have implications beyond just being used for its intended purpose. Do you feel like you saw some of the risks back then? It's hard to know. I mean, yes, you could see some of the risks, but I cannot say that I foresaw all the things that happened today. So, I mean, you can see that people were dressing up their profiles and spending immense amount of time curating their favorite movies. So that's indicative. Like, people want to look good, just as like a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about what they're wearing on a given day

or makeup or whatever. And so you see that and it's like, okay, is this exacerbating the vanity gene in human nature? Or is this just another way for people to be themselves? It wasn't clear at that time. So it was sort of hard to imagine a lot of the problems. Like is this tool allowing people to express who they are or is it actually like changing? Changing who they are.

Who they are. And at that time it seemed that it was more of just the expression. I think that's a much harder case to make now. That's interesting. So you left Facebook in 2007. February of 07, yeah. What was your relationship with Mark like during that time? Were you guys in contact?

Yeah, we were. I went to his wedding. He came to ours. You know, not particularly tight. I wouldn't even say we were close friends. Friends, yeah. Your college roommate who's massively successful, who you're still friends with, you still care about.

And I think you would say the same thing back in my direction, that kind of thing. When did you feel like sort of things started to go wrong? You know, I don't know. There's not a single moment. There was a drive for growth, which is natural in some sense. Every company wants to grow. That became dominant, I think, in 2008 and 9 and 10 in particular. And I worry that that obsession is partially what influenced the culture over there to emphasize growth over civility, security, thinking through some of the ethical implications or how this might actually play out afterwards. But we'll figure that out after everybody can use it.

I mean, I've heard stories from that time in the company's history and people always say, well, you know, Mark didn't care about making money. He cared about growth. I think that's true. You think that's true? Oh, yeah. So this growth was not about increasing the value of the company. What was it about?

I think it was a drive to domination. I think it was a drive to be the best. Sometimes I think the best entrepreneurs are the ones who just are so driven that they want to make their company better and money is a piece of it, make more money, but to invest it in to their work to have it be better and bigger and more powerful. So I think that that was and is the drive more so than wealth. I don't think it's about the money, is what I'm saying. And but you do think that that drive to sort of domination comes from him. It's not people around him. It's part of... Yeah, drive to greatness, a drive to domination. Yeah.

Let's fast forward a little bit. 2016, we have an election. And I've talked to a number of people sort of at Facebook at the time who saw that as a turning point, who, you know, the day after the election, they woke up, they went into the office and they thought, OK, people are going to take this out on us. We are going to be seen as having played some role in Donald Trump's election. Did you recognize that as a moment of change for you personally? Well, I think at first you don't know if the extreme statements and the outrage on Facebook was just a natural expression of something that had always existed and Facebook was just giving it air, so to speak, or if Facebook was actually changing the social and cultural and political interactions by being out there, by being Facebook. And it was only really in the summer of 2016, in the fall of 2016, that I myself really became convinced that it wasn't just giving air to pre-existing beliefs,

but was actually giving cover to hateful statements and the people who were making them. And did you bring that up with anyone at the company or with Mark? I did not. Why not? I should have. It wasn't clear to me what the solution was at the time. And I wasn't seeing some, you know, Mark or other people at the company frequently enough to just sort of express it as a percolating concern. It would have needed to be something like, hey, I need you to pay attention to this thing. And, you know, I wish I had. I wish I had had both the foresight and the courage to do that. I don't know if it really would have changed anything, but I'd feel better about myself if I had.

So when he went in front of Congress last year to testify about sort of what had happened on Facebook and Russian interference and everything like that, I was in the room. I'm sure you were paying attention. Like, there was this sort of story that he told about being a guy who had built something in his dorm room that had kind of accidentally become

this tremendously important platform that sort of spiraled out of control, that they never planned to become this dominant. They just wanted to connect people with their friends. And it sounds like you don't think that that was an accurate characterization of what he was actually thinking at the time. Well, I think that's an accurate characterization of the early days. But I think that Facebook is now worth nearly $600 billion, and there are 2.4 billion people

on the platform. And what's happening now is not what happened 15 years ago. So the scale of what Facebook has become now, I mean, it's incomparable to what it was back then. And so once you're that big, once you're connecting that many people, and once there are elections on the line, lives on the line, you know, threatened genocide in some countries on the line, that comes with a different level of responsibility. And the idea is like, oh, well, it's just a few kids in a dorm room trying to figure it out. No, that was true early on. But the world has changed. Facebook has changed. And there's a different set of expectations. And do you feel like the version of the story that Mark told was intended to kind of like deflect responsibility or say like, you know, look, I'm just I'm just a guy.

This wasn't my fault. I don't know. I think he's taken some responsibility. But I think that Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix this problem. cannot fix this problem. And we are so trained to look every time that Facebook fails to the next apology and the next prescription for what to do that we forget that we have the institutions and the tools to solve this problem, I think. This is on government to pick up the mantle and to solve. So tell me about how you got to the place where you decided to publish an guaranteed income in the United States. And I started having more and more conversations with economists and with policymakers, folks in D.C.

And what I heard a lot of the time was, yes, this sounds like a good idea, as long as markets are competitive, dynamic, and fair. Because if they're not, then what will happen is that a lot of this income will get eaten up in housing or healthcare. So in other words, if you look at the evidence, there's been a massive increase in the concentration of corporate power in the United States. And if we don't solve that problem, you can provide people money all day, but it's not actually going to help people make ends meet. So in that period, I started reading and talking to a lot of people about antitrust, just more broadly, and the concentration of power in corporate America.

And read every paper I could get my hand on, read every book I could find. And the more I read on it, the more, I mean, it was impossible to ignore that Facebook is a monopoly. I mean, we can talk about monopolies in everything from pharmaceuticals to beer to rental cars, but in social networking, there is one company that has a lockdown on the space, both from a revenue and from an attention perspective. And so, as I began to think about that, I felt like, gosh, I can't and don't want to talk about antitrust and how to hold corporations accountable unless I tell my own story and talk about how we must hold Facebook accountable. So fast forward to a lot more writing and research, and then I just began writing for myself in January

and got in contact with the editors of the New York Times and then, you know, announced it on The World Today. Did you talk to Mark before you published this? I didn't. The last time I saw him was in the summer of 2017, and then we had a few messages last year, but I didn't. That's interesting. So I heard that you had shown a version of this to someone at Facebook before you published it.

No? No. Totally out of the blue? Well, for them, it was totally out of the blue, yeah. And I want to talk about, like, let's get to the actual meat of your ideas here. There are a lot of them in there, and I know we don't have unlimited time. What you're actually proposing in this column is not just criticism and regulation and scrutiny of Facebook. You're actually calling for the company to be broken up. Like, explain what that means. So we have a long tradition in the United

States of breaking up companies when they get too large and also of freezing mergers or putting a temporary ban on mergers. So it's been some time since we've done this. AT&T was the last in the early 1980s. But this can be done. And specifically in Facebook's case, WhatsApp and Instagram have been administered and run independently. They have independent teams inside the company. They're all overseen by the same corporate executive team.

So what I am calling for is for the FTC to say that they made a mistake. Made a mistake by approving those acquisitions. They made a mistake when they approved those acquisitions, and they should be unwound. That Instagram and WhatsApp should become publicly traded companies alongside Facebook. Mark and other executives at Facebook now would have to divest their shares. So that's step one. Step two is I do think that we need a regulatory agency that is actively involved in protecting users' privacy and setting guidelines around bullying, violence, speech. And I think that we need both of these things together because competition will help bring accountability, but you need some

kind of floor. And this is what we have with the FAA, with airlines. We have it with pharmaceutical companies, with the FDA. So I'm putting forward the idea of doing something similar for digital. All right. So let's take these two pieces really quickly. One is the competition part. I mean, the traditional notion of breaking up companies and why you do it is because it harms consumers. Well, I don't know if that's traditional. That's a somewhat recent invention. Right. That's the sort of the late 20th century version of antitrust is you break companies up like

AT&T and Standard Oil because they're price fixing or they're in some way making things harder for consumers. The argument that you hear back from people who are defending Facebook is, well, what's the harm here? I mean, people love these services. They're free to use. They're getting more users every day. You know, you may or may not agree with that, but that is an argument that people make. It is. I think that argument is getting harder and harder to make. I think that, you know, it is true that Facebook users and Instagram users don't pay to use the service economically. But I think we pay quite a lot with our data and with our attention. I mean, that is the business model of these companies.

They absorb as much of that as they can, and they sell ads based on that. Now, the model itself, some people would say is fine. Some people would say it isn't. I personally don't love it. But the point is, there's no other Facebook I can pay to use to have no ads or to not collect data on me or to erase data. There's no competition. So there's no ability for a new company to emerge. And to the argument that there's so much competition that Facebook is innovating and innovating, I think last year in particular, we didn't see that. When there was a huge outcry, the delete Facebook movement was everywhere. According to Pew, one in four Facebook users

deleted the app from their phone. And then mysteriously, when Facebook reports user numbers, they're just the same as they were before. And so you look at that and you're like, what? Was that not real? Like everybody in my world was outraged by it. No, it was real. People just had nowhere else to go. Or they went to Instagram, which is also- Which is owned by Facebook. Right, right. Let's look at the other piece because you're not just recommending that Facebook be broken up. You're also saying in your op-ed that there should be some sort of government role in creating speech standards for the Internet. Yeah, this is a tricky one.

Yeah, I think a lot of people who are sympathetic to the first part of your argument might sort of bristle at the second part where you say, okay, break up Facebook. That's fine. But do we really want the government making rules on what people can and can't say on social media? I bristle at it too. And I don't want the government making rules about what people can or can't say on social media. Right now, these decisions are made by private corporations with zero public accountability. I think guidelines should be developed through a participatory democratic process that a regulatory agency would engage. They should be enforced by that agency and I think be appealed and ultimately decided in the courts. You know, in the United States,

there are very few limits on free speech, thank God. They are things like yelling fire in a crowded theater. There are very few limits, but there are some limits. And it's the courts who have decided that. I think that's the way it should be, not corporate executives in Menlo Park. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg himself has talked about feeling like he has too much power, like he shouldn't have all this power to determine what people can or can't say on the internet. Like, do you think that's genuine? Why do you think he's saying that? I do think that's genuine. Yeah, I do. I think he genuinely feels and knows that

he does have too much power. And his life would be easier if there were some government regulations. Now, I think he would likely prefer light government regulations that are generally friendly to what Facebook is trying to do. But I don't think that he's saying any of that in bad faith. Are you sort of saying that in a certain way, if the government did take these actions to break up Facebook, to take over some of the power to determine the speech rules of the internet, that it actually might sort of come as a relief to him? I think so. But he's not saying that. I mean, Facebook has come out with a statement today in direct opposition to your op-ed. They've said, this is not the right way to go about this. Yes, we need new rules for the internet, but no, you don't need to break up a,

I think they call it a successful American company to accomplish that. Even their statement though, you know, they take issue with the breakup, but even there they say we need rules for the internet. So I think that they're genuine. I mean, Mark actually could do this if he wanted to. He could say tomorrow, look, we're going to split this company up. We're not going to make any more rules. He could say we're shutting pieces of this down or we're shutting the whole thing down. I mean, is your argument that he can't fix it, as you said, or that he doesn't want to, that there's still this motivation inside him for growth, for dominance, and that actually he just won't do this of his own accord? I mean, he could.

It looks like you don't think that's very plausible. It's really hard to imagine. And I think the reason that that sort of rubs me the wrong way is it falls back into this frame of like private sector can just figure it out on themselves. Let's not worry about government. Government's bureaucratic. Government's difficult. Government's hard. Let's just hope that the leaders in the private sector do the right thing. And we don't need to take that approach. Like, government can be and has historically been a force for good in creating competitive markets and in protecting Americans from harm. So, yeah, I mean, we can talk about that kind of fantasy scenario, but I think every minute that we continue to even push the envelope on that is a minute that we're not talking about what government very plausibly,

legally can and should do. So, what has been the reaction to, your op-ed came out earlier this morning. What kind of feedback have you gotten, both from people that you worked with at Facebook So what has been the reaction to your op-ed came out earlier this morning? What kind of feedback have you gotten both from people that you worked with at Facebook? Have you heard from Mark? I have not. I haven't heard from Mark. I doubt I will. I haven't heard from anyone over at Facebook.

So the reaction has been generally positive. I think people are reading, thinking, asking questions and trying to understand. So far, it's been positive. It's been good. I talked to a couple people at Facebook today. Oh, yeah. And I was just sort of curious what they thought. And they had sort of two basic thoughts.

One, people said, oh, well, he hasn't been here in over a decade. He doesn't know anything about how this place runs. You know, he wasn't a technologist anyway. True, true. And there are other people who say, well, this is a political maneuver. It's sort of beating up on Facebook has become politically popular among especially Democrats. And that this might be you trying to jump on that bandwagon in a way that would be helpful for you. How so?

I mean, I don't know. You tell me. I mean, I, well, I have no interest in running for political office or doing anything politically with this argument. I do work on economic justice and political issues every day. I do think this is ultimately a political kind of question where I'm calling on government to step up. So to the extent that politics are a part of it, yes, they are. I think that the role of government is something that we often don't like to talk about, but we have to on this. But I have no political, as in the narrow sense of that term, agenda on the issue. You're not running for president. I am not running for anything, anytime. But your husband has run for Congress and ostensibly may have political ambitions in the future.

Is this something that you've talked about with him? Oh, well, we talk about every, I mean, we talk about all kinds of things. We talk about everything that's important to us in our lives. I don't think he's, he has no plans to run for office anytime soon. This is not part of a political campaign of mine, of anybody I know, of any group. There's no nefarious interest here. I do feel a sense of responsibility and I feel a sense of anger. And this is a big thing for me to write about, talk about. I don't do it lightly. But I'm very grateful to Facebook and to Mark for the positive ways that Facebook has made my life so different than I

could have ever expected. It's hard to overstate. I also think he has too much power. And I think the company should be broken up and I think it should be regulated. So I'm going to say my piece because I feel like I need to and I want to. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I happen to think that tariffs for our country are very powerful. You know, we're the piggy bank that everybody steals from, including China. In the latest escalation of a year-long trade war with China,

President Trump on Thursday said that the U.S. would raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. We've been paying China $500 billion a year for many, many years. China rebuilt their country because of us. The U.S. and China appeared to be on the verge of a major trade deal until last weekend, when China demanded significant last-minute changes, prompting an angry reaction from the Trump administration. I don't blame them. I blame our past leadership for allowing this to happen. The new tariffs reflect what President Trump believes is a strong U.S. economy that can withstand the continuation of a trade war if it means eventually winning a better deal from China. And... Item 131, missile suspension released.

Item 132, launcher closure open. On Thursday, North Korea resumed its testing of short-range missiles in a provocation designed to capture the attention of the U.S., which shortly afterward tested its own missiles and seized a North Korean cargo ship. The U.S. said that that ship had been used to sell North Korean coal in violation of international sanctions. Its seizure and the missile tests suggest that diplomacy between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, who have met twice in the past year, has once again broken down.

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