Stand up to Facebook's tyranny

From Demand Progress:

This may be the moment when we finally take back control of the internet from big corporate monopolies.

After nearly a year of scandal, Facebook is on the ropes. The Federal Trade Commission is considering serious penalties for Facebook’s violations of federal laws and court orders regarding our privacy and our data.

The FTC is considering fining Facebook as much as $1 billion.1 That may sound like a lot. But it's not. It's barely a few days' revenue for the company. And it won't produce lasting change.

We can't trust Facebook to regulate itself. There's too much at stake, and they've proven themselves to be bad faith actors over and over again.

This is a critical moment. Add your name: Tell the FTC to break up Facebook. We’ll immediately send your message to all five FTC commissioners.

Facebook owns many other social media apps -- including Instagram and WhatsApp. As long as Facebook has a near monopoly on the way we connect with each other, they will be able to get away with privacy violations, because we’d have nowhere else to go.

Facebook's monopoly led the British Parliament this week to call the company "digital gangsters" for their repeated violations of the law and of users' rights. They also pointed out that Facebook's dominant market position is a serious problem and has to be addressed.2

Facebook has repeatedly sold out users' privacy for shareholder profit, and will keep doing so until they’re broken up.

Sign the petition: It's time to tell the FTC to break up Facebook.

Parliament concluded that the Cambridge Analytica scandal could have been prevented, but Facebook's own internal policies allowed the massive personal data breach to continue unchecked.3 Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook users' personal data without their permission, in order to build psychological profiles to target users with political disinformation.

Their report also found that Facebook's monopoly on online ads is destroying the media and leading to mass layoffs of journalists.4

That's just the tip of the iceberg. The damage Facebook has done is massive. They even knowingly did things like let kids run up huge credit card bills and refused to issue refunds to parents.5

The FTC is debating what to do about Facebook right now. They can't let Facebook off with a fine. Even a big fine won't be enough to change their behavior. As long as Facebook has a near-monopoly on social media, they won’t have any incentive to change.

Tell the FTC that Facebook is too big to regulate itself. It's time to break it up.

Thanks for taking action,

Robert and the team at Demand Progress

1. Washington Post, "The U.S. government and Facebook are negotiating a record, multibillion-dollar fine for the company’s privacy lapses,"
2.The Guardian, "Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news,"
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid.
5.The Guardian, "Facebook let children run up huge bills, court papers show,"