Speaking at a dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, billionaire George Soros, delivered a speech in which he called Facebook and Google a ‘menace to society’ and urged for increased government regulation of both companies.
According to a post on his website, "The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them."
The billionaire compared the companies to ‘exploitative monopolies’ and the ‘gambling industry’. He said, “Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes. They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide. There is a similarity between internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have."
Soros is one among the many who’ve raised their voice against the social media site. Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, had compared Facebook's addictive qualities to cigarettes and called for more regulation just a few days back.
Soros also went on to say, "There could be an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined."
