Yahoo Finance Zuckerberg's control of Facebook is near absolute – who will hold him accountable?
With 2.2 billion members, Facebook is larger than any single nation, language or even religion. And as founder, chief executive, chairman of the board of directors and controller of 60% of the company’s voting shares, Mark Zuckerberg’s power is near absolute.
Which is why it was almost reassuring that when CNN’s Laurie Segall asked Zuckerberg in an interview aired Tuesday, “Shouldn’t your power be checked?”
The executive appeared to agree.
“Yes, I think that ultimately the issues that we’re working on here, things like preventing interference on elections from other countries, finding the balance between giving people voice and keeping people safe – these are not issues that any one company can address,” Zuckerberg said.
That Zuckerberg is acknowledging that his power needs checks is surely welcome to Facebook’s critics. The CNN interview followed a damning expose by the New York Times that revealed new details of how the 34-year-old Zuckerberg and his loyal lieutenants failed to address his creation’s deleterious effect on democracy while simultaneously employing a PR firm to attack the company’s critics using antisemitic tropes. In the wake of the report, a longshot campaign to install an independent chairman of Facebook’s board has gained momentum.
“Good corporate governance is a set of checks and balances,” said Jonas Kron, director of shareholder activism at Trillium Asset Management, which filed the shareholder proposal to appoint an independent board chair. Kron referenced Zuckerberg’s oft-repeated talking-point-qua-apology, “We did not take a broad enough view of our responsibility.”
“That’s what an independent board chair does,” said Kron. “They take the broader view.”
But pressed by CNN on whether he would take the step to limit his own power, Zuckerberg demurred – “That’s not the plan,” he said – and instead talked up his proposal for an “independent body” to serve as a kind of appeals court for Facebook users who want to appeal content takedowns on Facebook.
“That independent body will have real teeth and power and will be transparent in the decisions that they’re making, and if I want to overrule that independent body, then I won’t be able to,” he said.
The “independent body” was first announced Thursday, on a conference call with reporters and in a 4,500-word “note” describing Zuckerberg’s Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement. On the conference call, Zuckerberg responded enthusiastically to the idea that this pseudo-supreme court would start establishing “case law” and accept cases that might set important precedent in the interpretation of Facebook’s laws, i.e. its “community standards”.
If this all sounds like the fever dream of a college dropout who watched the West Wing and is now cosplaying “government”, well, here’s the reaction of Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy: “It’s a laughable proposal and just reinforces the idea that Mark Zuckerberg has no idea what he’s doing and no idea what he’s done.”
“To this day, Facebook has no employees in Myanmar,” Vaidhyanathan said, referencing the country where Facebook fueled ethnic cleansing and failed to respond to civil society group’s requests for action for years. “They’re not even taking seriously the most brutal and bloody results of Facebook’s malfeasance, and yet they’re trying to dodge these life and death issues by saying there’s going to be some weird judicial board that might have some theoretical say over content, weeks or months after it is either distributed or taken down.”
Indeed, it’s hard not to apply the same word to Zuckerberg’s vision of a Potemkin judicial branch that he reportedly used to describe the Times’ reporting: “Bullshit”.
No matter what he says to CNN, if Zuckerberg wants to overrule “that independent body”, he will be able to. He can do whatever he wants. Despite owning about 10% of Facebook, he controls about 60% of its voting shares, thanks to a dual-class stock structure that makes his shares count more than those of normal investors. While normal corporate structures require company founders to relinquish control of their creations in exchange for raising outside investment, Zuckerberg has been able to have his cake and eat it too.
Of that structure, Kron was scathing: “The way Facebook is set up right now, Mark Zuckerberg’s grandchildren could control 60% of the company. The United States does not abide royalty, and we shouldn’t abide corporate royalty.”
Meanwhile, the very idea that content takedowns are the aspect of Facebook that most require independent governance is questionable at best. Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement that some issues – such as free expression and fair elections – are too big for it to determine on its own elides the basic truth that Facebook has utterly failed to take responsibility for the “issues” that it does control: its own business. The company’s core business practices of capturing its users’ attention by feeding them the web content version of carcinogenic candy, surveilling those customers in extraordinarily intrusive ways, and allowing advertisers self-serve access to those users’ brains is entirely under its control, and could be reformed unilaterally.
That’s not going to happen voluntarily. Which means that until the real democratic governments take action, we’ll be stuck living in Zuckerberg’s “community”, under an autocrat pretending to be president.
