‘They’re after your kids’: Tech billionaire Marc Benioff says Facebook is the ‘new cigarettes’ and must be broken up because the service is addictive and has undue influence
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke against Facebook in interview Wednesday
- Said that Facebook mus be broken up because company has undue influence
- Facebook faces multiple antitrust investigations and calls for its breakup
Salseforce CEO Marc Benioff has called for Facebook to be broken up, renewing his criticism of the social media giant.
‘Facebook is the new cigarettes. It’s addictive, it’s not good for you, they’re after your kids, they’re running political ads that aren’t true,’ Benioff said in an interview with CNN that aired on Wednesday.
‘They’re also acquiring other companies and commingling [other firms’ user data] into theirs,’ Benioff added, in reference to Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp and other companies.
‘And I think at that point, because they’re now doing that, that they probably should be broken up. Because they’re having an undue influence as the largest social media platform on the planet,’ he continued.
‘Facebook is the new cigarettes. It’s addictive, it’s not good for you, they’re after your kids, they’re running political ads that aren’t true,’ tech mogul Marc Benioff said
‘We’re in a world where very advanced technologies are at our fingertips, and where we can do magical things,’ Benioff told CNN.
‘But that also means that trust must be our highest value. And you have to ask yourself: Is trust your highest value? If it’s not your highest value, then what is it?’
Benioff, a billionaire who founded the enterprise cloud software company Salesforce, first likened Facebook to ‘cigarettes’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018.
Facebook did not response to a request for comment from DailyMail.com on Thursday.
Last month, reports emerged that the U.S. Justice Department will open an antitrust investigation of Facebook, marking the fourth recent antitrust probe of the social media company.
Facebook also faces probes by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a group of state attorneys general led by New York and the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook staff they would ‘go to the mat’ to defeat Warren’s expected effort to break up the company if she is elected president
The company has also become a frequent target of criticism of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the oddsmakers’ favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Warren went after big tech during the latest Democratic debate on Tuesday.
‘I’m not willing to give up and let a handful of monopolists dominate our economy and our democracy. It’s time to fight back,’ Warren said in the debate in Westerville, Ohio.
This month, leaked audio from an internal Facebook meeting in July disclosed CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling staff they would ‘go to the mat’ to defeat Warren’s expected effort to break up the company if she is elected president.
Large tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Google, have increasingly been on the defensive in recent years over lapses such as privacy breaches and outsized market influence.
Facebook has faced extra scrutiny tied to how it allowed its platforms to be used during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The company, which owns one-time rivals Instagram and WhatsApp and has 2.4 billion monthly users, recently paid a $5 billion settlement for sharing 87 million users’ data with defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.