Christian Skaug 
Facebook og Google har altfor mye makt, og de er ikke selskaper lenger, men land – det sier Benny Thomas, en av Facebooks toppfolk, i et skjult videoopptak som mandag er blitt offentliggjort av Project Veritas.
Uten å vite at det er en journalist han snakker med før hun forteller ham det, kommer Thomas med en rekke uttalelser som man normalt ville ha ventet fra Facebooks skarpeste kritikere. Facebook må splittes opp av regjeringen, sier han om selskapet han selv arbeider for.
For å gi et bilde på selskapets makt, sammenligner han Facebook-sjef Mark Zuckerberg med en konge uten historisk sidestykke:
No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is – and he’s 36. That’s too much for a 36-year-old. You should not have power over two billion people. I just think that’s wrong.
Facebook-toppen, hvis dager i selskapet man må anta nokså raskt vil være talte, har ikke høye tanker om vanlige menneskers forståelse av saken:
Thomas said he was concerned by the lack of public awareness around Facebook’s excessive power. He specifically mentioned the influence Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg exerts over the company.
“Most people don’t understand these things and most people don’t think about them — which is why a lot of sh*t goes down because a lot of people aren’t paying attention,” Thomas said.
Både Facebooks og Googles grunnleggere har en uinnskrenket makt, konstaterer Thomas:
“He [Zuckerberg] owns a controlling stake in the company. So, you can’t do it the usual way that you do it in corporate, which is the board can just fire you, right? The board can’t do that to Zuck. The board can’t do that to Larry Page and Sergey Brin [Google] because they own too much of the company. They’re too powerful. So, these are not companies anymore. These are countries,” he said.
Thomas sier også at han er bekymret for at kunstig intelligens vil forvandle mennesker til noen slgs maur:
“AI [Artificial Intelligence] is essentially evolving to become like human intelligence. Then, it’s going to go beyond human intelligence and at that point, humans are expendable… If you ever went to a picnic — we would not spend one minute thinking about the ants that we stepped on the grass, right? From AI, we will become like those ants… So, I might be killing hundreds of ants when I walk in the park, I don’t know, and I don’t care. It’s not a thing that I care about. We will be like those ants,” he said.
Han er også nokså sikker på at Facebook hjalp Joe Biden med å vinne presidentvalget i USA:
“One of the things I worked on, which made me happy, was a voter registration drive. These are the kinds of things – this is the good side of Facebook. This is the kind of thing that you can only do with a company that has the sheer scale and reach of Facebook. We set ourselves a goal of registering four million new people and we went over that target, we did 4.5 [million]…”
Journalist: “Wow. Registering 4.5 million voters.”
Thomas: “It’s a lot.”
Journalist: “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he [Biden] won that way. What do you think?”
Thomas: “Exactly, I think so too.”
I den høyst beskjedne grad Project Veritas er blitt nevnt i norske hovedstrømsmedier, er det i negative vendinger. Noen anerkjennelse av arbeidet James O’Keefe og kompani har gjort for å kikke Big Tech i kortene, har aldri vært å se.
