NEW YORK / PALO ALTO USA – Just five years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a 20-minute speech in Mandarin at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, where he praised “big Chinese companies” like Alibaba Group Holding and Xiaomi, like China’s. hitale as “a history of innovation.”
But on Wednesday, in testimony before a court hearing of the House Judicial Subcommittee on corporations dubbed Big Tech, his tone was different, adjusted for a world that had absolutely changed.
“Facebook represents a set of fundamental principles,” adding “ensuring people’s safety, protecting democratic traditions like freedom of expression,” he said. Zuckerberg added that “these are core values for most of us, but for everyone in the world, for all the corporations we compete with or for the countries they represent.”
“If you look at where the avant-garde generation came to ten years ago, the vast majority were Americans. Today, almost a part are Chinese,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg’s message is clear: Facebook is an American company that defends U.S. values that oppose a developing Chinese threat.
The Congressional hearing also included testimony from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple frontman Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. With the inaugural presence of Bezos, it is the first joint appearance in the Congress of the leaders of the top 4 U.S. generation companies, at least virtually.
While the four warned that new regulations in the United States may allow China to dominate innovation, Zuckerberg went further and condemned China’s theft of intellectual property.
“It is well documented that the Chinese government is stealing generation from American companies,” he said, when asked about the practice.
Cook and Bezos, on the other hand, stated that they were aware of reports of theft of intellectual assets, but had never witnessed them in their businesses. Pichai, first, said he was unaware that this was happening on Google, but then added that the company had suffered a cyberattack in 2009 that gave the impression of being from China.
Zuckerberg’s testimony was based on his prompt statement, which took on a more assertive tone and warned that “China is building its own Internet edition based on many other ideas, and is exporting its vision to other countries.”
Hours before the United States gave its tight testimony, TikTok’s new CEO Kevin Mayer introduced a public attack on Facebook.
The dispute comes amid a higher festival between Facebook and the laggard of social media, and amid broader tensions between the United States and China. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
“At TikTok, we salute the competition,” Mayer said in a statement issued Wednesday morning, protesting against the “Array defamatory attacks… disguised as patriotism and designed to end our presence even in America.”
In his first public comments since joining the Disney company, Mayer also accused Facebook of launching “imitating products”, first Lasso and now Reels Instagram, on the TikTok model.
Zuckerberg’s testimony on Wednesday is not the first time China has been used to appeal to the Capitol. In October, he directly named TikTok while presenting similar problems in a perceived defense opposed to Facebook’s mishandling of incorrect information on its platform, adding political classified ads appearing on the site.
“While our services, such as WhatsApp, are used through protesters and activists because of strong encryption and privacy, in TikTok, the fast-growing Chinese app around the world, mentions of those protests are censored, even in the United States,” he said. Georgetown University in a speech addressed to freedom of expression.
But Zuckerberg’s line of defense on Wednesday is confusing due to complaints from President Donald Trump’s management and the Republican Party’s management of content moderation regulations for Facebook and businesses.
Regulations led to the removal of posts from right-wing editors, such as the brief suspension this week from the Twitter account of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, for providing false data on the coronavirus.
Zuckerberg’s attacks on China and corporations of his generation also mark a turnaround from several years ago, when Facebook still hoped to generate hope for entering the Chinese market.
As relations between Beijing and Washington have deteriorated over the years, friendship with China in Silicon Valley is unsustainable.
TikTok has been Washington’s scrutiny issue, adding the Foreign Investment Committee in the United States, which has the strength to ask ByteDance to de-eever TikTok’s operations in the United States if it determines that the presence of the application in the country represents a problem for national security.
At a White House press conference with President Donald Trump wednesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin showed that TikTok is under review through the committee. “We will give the president some advice on this this week. We have many alternatives,” Mnuchin said.
TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, acquired Musical.ly in 2017, a later component of TikTok, and CFIUS reportedly revised the agreement to see if it posed a threat to national security.
TikTok also added U.S. public policy personnel. And he hired outdoor lobbyists to deal with Washington’s developing tension.
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