Joe Scarborough Equates Facebook to ‘Big Tobacco’ and Calls for Immediate Regulation: ‘This. Is. Not. Hard!’
The set of Morning Joe barley contained its apparent outrage at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday morning and likened the pernicious effects of the social media giant to the famed Big Tobacco lawsuit of the early aughts.
In 2006, plaintiffs, including the American Cancer Society, won a significant court case against companies who produced and marketed tobacco products. A judge found tobacco companies guilty of lying to the American public about the deadly effects of cigarettes and secondhand smoke.
“Zuckerberg really has become Big Tobacco,” Joe Scarborough noted after viewers saw a chart that compared the Facebook founder’s popularity to be less than that of former President Donald Trump. The Washington Posts’ David Ignatius followed by simply noting that if Facebook is willing to publish dangerous misinformation, they should be held accountable as any publisher would.
At issue is a stunning 60 Minutes interview with former Facebook employer Frances Haugen, who outed herself as the whistleblower behind a Wall Street Journal report from earlier in the week that revealed Facebook’s private acknowledgment their product was damaging young users.
But the social media giant chose profits over the public good, so says the report. “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands,” is the central finding of the WSJ expose.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again,” Haugen told Scott Pelley, “was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
As the segment wrapped, Scarborough recalled “talking about the radical, reckless experience with our teenage girls because of Instagram, because of what Facebook was doing, and talking suicidal ideations, depressions, and anxiety. You go to any college; they’ll tell you that’s a problem they have. You go to any high school counselors, and the same with middle school.
“This is not hard. I will go back to smoking in the 1950s. Nobody is surprised.
As the segment wrapped, Axios’s Jonathan Swan said, “You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. These products were designed to be addictive; they were designed to generate outrage. You can see it. You look at the top people who are getting the top things; it’s like Dan Bongino and people who are revving people up and throwing red meat, that’s what they reward, and that has been their model all along.”
Longtime viewers of the MSNBC morning show know that Facebook’s ill effects on society have long been an issue for Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. This latest news only confirmed what they have been saying for years.
Watch above via MSNBC.
