Mark Zuckerberg controls the spread of information

The argument

Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the internet. He controls what information people access, when they access it, and how many people see it. The claim concerns the position he occupies rather than decisions he personally takes: a platform that orders what its users see is exercising editorial control whether or not any individual item is chosen by hand, and whoever controls the platform controls that ordering. Facebook has 2.45 billion monthly users, around a third of the world's population. A quarter of all time spent on the internet is spent on Facebook. Those two figures measure different things, and together they establish the scale of the claim — the first the breadth of the audience reached, the second the depth of its attention. A service can be widely installed without being widely used, but a quarter of all time spent online is not incidental use; it describes where a substantial part of collective attention actually goes. For many of these users, Facebook isn't just a place to share information, it is the primary place of accessing information. It is the primary place many people get their news and stay up to date with current affairs. This is what converts scale into power. Where a platform is one source among many, its ordering of material is a suggestion; where it is the source, that ordering determines what a person encounters at all, and what is not surfaced is not merely ranked lower but effectively absent. No media organisation in history has had a circulation of 2.45 billion. Therefore, Mark Zuckerberg is more powerful than any media conglomerate and has far more control over the global dissemination of information than any government. The comparison with governments rests on reach that does not stop at borders: a state's authority over what its citizens read ends at its frontier, while a platform of this size operates across all of them at once.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Controlling the spread of information is influence, not power. Zuckerberg enjoys a vast amount of influence but he has no power in the conventional definition of the word. He can help influence an election, for example, but he cannot write new laws, amend existing laws, or exert direct political control over a population.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This is influence, not power.

Framing

Controlling the spread of information is power. Mark Zuckerberg has more influence on the spread of information than anyone else in history.