Marc Benioff sees a common thread in what ails America today, from the climate crisis to Covid: deception that is allowed to spread like wildfire on Facebook.
“This digital revolution really kind of has the world in its grip. And in that grip, you can see the amount of mistrust and misinformation that is happening,” Benioff told CNN.
I own Time and I am held accountable for what is produced on my platform… In regards to Facebook, they are not held accountable.”
The CEO of Salesforce and the owner of Time Magazine, Marc Benioff, warned that deceiving social media users is making it more difficult to solve society’s most pressing issues.
The CEO of Salesforce and the owner of Time Magazine, Marc Benioff, warned that deceiving social media users is making it more difficult to solve society’s most pressing issues.
“Look at how it is affecting the world. You can talk about the political process. You can talk about climate. You can talk about the pandemic,” Benioff said. “In each and every major topic, it gets connected back to the mistrust that is happening and especially the amount of it being seeded by the social networks. It must stop now.”
Benioff has been a vocal critic of Facebook (FB) and has called for Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, which is now worth nearly $1 trillion, to be broken up.
Following a Wall Street Journal investigation that used internal documents to show the company is not only well aware of its platforms’ negative effects on users, but also how it has repeatedly failed to address them, Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff is ramping up his criticism of Facebook.
The White House pressed tech companies, including Facebook, to combat vaccine misinformation over the summer. A month later, Facebook took action against the “disinformation dozen.”
“Some of these social media companies, especially Facebook, you can see that they don’t really care that their platform is filled with all of this disinformation,” Benioff said.
The tech mogul demanded that Congress take action against Facebook’s disinformation problem.
“I own Time and I am held accountable for what is produced on my platform,” Benioff said, adding that CNN and other media outlets are also held accountable. “In regards to Facebook, they are not held accountable. So they do not have an incentive from the government. That has to change.”
Benioff urged Congress to revisit existing laws in order to address the “level of deception” on social media.
Requests for comment on Benioff’s criticism went unanswered by Facebook.
Last weekend, however, the company issued a seven-paragraph blog post defending itself and criticizing the Journal investigation.
