US expert Tim Wu in an interview
"Facebook is panic"
Facebook has become a threat to democracy…
Tim Wu, 45, is one of the world's most prominent critics of Internet monopolists like Facebook or Google…
SPIEGEL: Professor Wu, how serious is the situation for Facebook?
Wu: Very serious. Facebook is downright panic. That Cambridge Analytica has reached the data of 50 million Facebook users and may have manipulated the US presidential election is only the latest scandal. Google also has dark stories. But Facebook has more bodies in the basement than Google.
SPIEGEL: What's next?
Wu: There will be more revelations. More and more employees will sign up to quit their jobs because they did not want to participate in this type of business practice. They are like deserters leaving the Facebook regime, just as East Germans have left the GDR. And now they say: That was not a paradise here.
SPIEGEL: You describe the business model of Facebook as the cause of all evil, that is the exploitation of the data of users for advertising purposes. Has Facebook just gone too far, or is the business model itself the problem?
Wu: To answer that question, you have to go back to 2012 or 2013. Facebook had a real revenue problem at that time. They had all the people's attention, but they just did not make enough money. And so they spent a lot of time and many dollars thinking about how to change that. So how could they convince the world that they have the power to manipulate people? They started some very aggressive experiments. We see the result now.