Between its biggest, longest outage in years and the damning testimony of whistleblower Frances Haugen, it’s been a less than stellar week for Facebook.
So, naturally, Late Night with Seth Meyers piled on, unpacking Haugen’s revelations and the huge ripple effects of an outage that affected literally billions of people.
“No one company should have this much power— and not just one company, one person,” Meyers went on. “Because as whistleblower Francis Haugen explained at yesterday’s hearing, there is one person who very much calls the shots at Facebook.”
That “weird little dude”, obviously, is founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who posted a long, pissy, and disingenuous defense of the company’s values late on Tuesday, dismissing Haugen’s assertion that the Facebook algorithm promotes angry posts for greater engagement as “illogical.”
“You don’t know a tech company that sets out to build a product that makes people angry or depressed? What about Adobe Flash Player?” Meyers joked, briefly diving into a rant about the now-defunct plugin that set off a stress response I had buried deep in my high school-era internet memory hole. “Or how about Twitter? Angry and depressed is their whole business model. I have a Klonopin set aside every night for my pre-bed doom scrolling.”
“It is, to say the least, not good that what amounts to a global public utility is controlled by one massive, secretive international conglomerate,” Meyers deadpanned. “It’s like finding out that all the drinking water in the world is controlled by some company called Aquabuds and it’s run by one weird little dude who created the company out of revenge because none of the cute girls at his college would give him a glass of water.”