Elizabeth Warren And Mark Zuckerberg Are Spatting And I Am Kind Of Here For It.

It’s kind of fun to watch two detestable people go after each other.  I have no horse in this particular race, I don’t care which of them faces more backlash, they’re both horrible, and I’m just enjoying the show.

According to this, Mark Zuckerberg recently held a Q&A session with Facebook employees about the company’s direction, its new proposed currency, regulations, etc. It was meant to be a private session, but because there were humans in it, someone recorded it all and leaked it out. You can read the entire transcript of the two hour session right here.

One of the things Zuck talked about was Elizabeth Warren’s idea of breaking up Facebook and Google, etc. He said, “You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

Pocahontas didn’t take too kindly to hearing that, and then this happened.

What would really “suck” is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy. https://t.co/rI0v55KKAi

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 1, 2019

Zuck didn’t respond directly to Warren, but did confirm that the leaked audio was legit, even going so far as to share it on his personal FB page:

Here’s the thing – I loathe how Zuckerberg has managed FB ever since he decided to screw with the chronological timeline and decide that algorithms know what I want to see better than I know what I want to see.  He has singlehandedly created success for people who own small businesses and then ripped the rug right out from under those same business owners.  Believe us, we have firsthand experience.  I will ALWAYS maintain that Facebook was best when you saw, in chronological order, posts in your feed based on who you chose to follow and befriend.  If you missed something, that was ok, because you could go back as far as you wanted to catch up, or not.  It was up to you.  Now?  Now you’re shown content based on mindnumbingly complicated algorithms which constantly get it wrong, and destroy businesses in the process.

Yeah.  Way to go, Alien Creature.  Way to freaking go.

Then again, Elizabeth Warren is a company’s worst nightmare, because she hates big business.  “Economist” Paul Krugman famously predicted a stock market crash the day after Trump was elected, and we all know how wrong he was.  I am happy to go on the record right now, as a non-economist, and say with total certainty that if Warren is elected, the stock market will take a massive tumble.  Even in the weeks ahead of an election, if it looks like a crazy socialist Democrat is polling well in the presidential campaign, Wall Street is gonna get super squirrely.  And rightly so.  Democrats are TERRIBLE for business, because they fail to understand that our economy is driven by the confidence of business owners and leaders who employ, create, build, innovate.  That confidence spills over to consumers, who, knowing they’ll have jobs, spend more money, and the wheels go ’round and ’round.

Facebook is a necessary evil for us in many ways, because so much of our traffic continues to flow from it (when the algorithms have a blip and allow our followers to actually see our posts, which is still very very very very rare compared to days of yore).  And Zuckerberg is an evil alien.  But Elizabeth Warren is batsh*t, and terrible for the country.

Which is why I’m just going to enjoy the spat.