The Atlantic, the magazine and multi-platform publisher run by a company owned by Steve Jobs' widow, is heaping brutal criticism on Facebook, making a rough week for the social media giant even worse.
Columnist Adrienne LaFrance referred to Facebook as a 'hostile foreign power' and was heavily critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a column titled The Biggest Autocracy on Earth published Monday.
LaFrance cited 'its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.'
'Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse,' she adds. 'It is designed for blunt-force emotional reaction, reducing human interaction to the clicking of buttons. The algorithm guides users inexorably toward less nuanced, more extreme material, because that’s what most efficiently elicits a reaction. Users are implicitly trained to seek reactions to what they post, which perpetuates the cycle.'
'Facebook executives have tolerated the promotion on their platform of propaganda, terrorist recruitment, and genocide. They point to democratic virtues like free speech to defend themselves, while dismantling democracy itself.'
Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs who inherited his $21billion fortune, owns The Atlantic via her company The Emerson Collective. Emerson acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic in 2017.
LaFrance adds in the piece that as it develops a currency system based off blockchain payments, Facebook is close to achieving all of the things that represent nationhood: land, currency, a philosophy of governance, and people.
'Regulators and banks have feared' that Diem, the currency system Facebook is developing, 'could throw off the global economy and decimate the dollar.
The Atlantic, the magazine and multi-platform publisher run by Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, is heaping the criticism on Facebook after a rough week for the social media giant
Columnist Adrienne LaFrance referred to Facebook as a 'hostile foreign power' and was heavily critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a column titled The Biggest Autocracy on Earth published Monday
LaFrance refers to Facebook users across the globe as 'a gigantic population of individuals
