Ever since Facebook was implicated in the whole Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal, Mark Zuckerberg has been catching a lot of heat for his company’s failure to protect their users’ private information. Coming in real hot with some harsh, albeit discrete, criticism, was Apple CEO Tim Cook. However, it appears that Zuckerberg is clapping back.
To recap, when asked what he would do if he were Zuckerberg, Cook sharply gave a mic drop of a reply: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Apple’s CEO went on to call out social media platforms for basically selling our souls to advertisers. As Mashable notes, Cook’s chief concern was to highlight the dubious trade-off between keeping Facebook free for its users and selling ad space based on user data. Not so surprisingly, Zuckerberg defended this business model in an interview on theEzra Klein Show podcast, published today by Vox.
“You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib,” said Zuckerberg in the interview. He then added, “The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.” Then went Zuckerberg went a step further, saying he thinks “it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you." Someone remind me, how much does the iPhone X cost again?
Mind you, Cook isn’t the only person trolling Zuckerberg and Co. Snapchat shaded Facebook with an April Fools’ Day, Russian bot themed Facebook-esque filter, complete with Cyrillic script-like text. Mind you, Snapchat has PR scandals of their own to deal with at the moment, so you know...glass houses.
