Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, has challenged Mark Zuckerberg to tackle the growing criticism aimed at Facebook by regulators and users around the world, and to “really take it seriously.”
Asked at the Boao Forum about the Facebook furor, the richest man in China and chairman of Alibaba Group told his fellow internet pioneer to “fix” the social network that had grown exponentially over the past decade. The billionaire started dismissing questions at first but then couldn’t help opening up on the crisis facing the biggest social network of the world.
Jack Ma said at the annual conference on the sunny island of Hainan,
“The senior management should take responsibility, say, hey, from now we start to work on it, it is the time to fix it. It is the time for the CEO to really take it seriously. I think the problems will be solved, We should not kill the company because of these problems. I will say, Facebook 15 years ago, they never expected this, to grow like that. All the problems they could not realize came up.”
Jack Ma didn’t give out a comprehensive argument, but he did say the social network was valuable and that its issues may have arisen simply because of its phenomenal exponential growth.
Facebook’s shares have been going down since the company has admitted that it may have shared the personal data of 87 million users with Cambridge Analytica, a research firm that helped elect President Donald Trump. Many campaigns have also been launched against the company including #deletefacebook campaign and users around the world are now investigating the company’s handling of sensitive personal information.
Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear before the U.S. Congress this week. The CEO plans to say that the company’s problems are his mistake. According to his prepared testimony, he plans to say that the social-media company didn’t do enough to prevent its tools from being used for harm, especially hate speech, foreign interference in elections, in terms of fake news, developer policies and data privacy.
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