Even Facebook’s Own Audit Proves Its Business Model Is Toxic

WASHINGTON - The following is a statement from David Segal and Sarah Miller, co-chairs of Freedom From Facebook & Google in response to Facebook’s audit on Civil Rights, Hate Speech and Voter Suppression:

Facebook’s own audit shows what everyone already knew to be true, their business model relies on racism and hate to increase traffic and targeted ad profits and the platform ‘privileges’ some voices over others, allowing the powerful to willfully break the rules.

To underline these findings the audit also concluded that Facebook allowed Trump to share racist, xenophobic, and false posts even though they explicitly violated even the current set of weak rules.

It really can’t get any clearer that Zuckerberg and Facebook will never change their business model voluntarily, and the propagation of racism and hate speech, election meddling, and overall poisoning of discourse will never cease until they're broken up and targeted advertising is banned.

It is incumbent on Congress, the FTC, the DOJ, and State Attorneys General to act. Every week that Facebook is allowed to continue poisoning our discourse and democracy is exponentially more dangerous as the 2020 election rapidly approaches.

Freedom From Facebook, a diverse group of organizations sharing deep concerns about Facebook’s extraordinary power over our lives and democracy, is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to use its broad authority to break up Facebook’s monopoly and re-establish competition in the social networking space by spinning off WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger into independent businesses. Freedom From Facebook also calls on the FTC to develop interoperability standards, so users will have the freedom to communicate between competing social networks, as well as implement strong privacy rules to give users more control over the collection and utilization of personal information. Learn more at freedomfromFB.com.

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