Criticising Big Tech can feel redundant at a time when many chief executives in Silicon Valley are doing such a good job of making the public sceptical about their business models and their executive competence all by themselves.
现在批评科技巨头似乎是多此一举，毕竟许多硅谷首席执行官单纯凭借自己的行为，就已经很成功地让公众怀疑他们的商业模式和他们的管理能力。
Even so, Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University and his testimony on Capitol Hill last week are worthy of note. Facebook insists it does not want to be responsible for false political advertising. So I’d like to help Mr Zuckerberg out by fact checking a few of the points of disinformation in his own communications.
即便如此，马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)在乔治城大学(Georgetown University)的演讲，以及他上周在国会的作证也值得关注。Facebook坚称无意为虚假政治广告负责任。所以我想帮帮扎克伯格，对他自己讲话中的一些“假消息”做事实核查。
Let’s put aside the total non-starters — like the fact that a man who has become a billionaire via surveillance capital— the industrial-scale monetisation of personal data — invokes the civil rights leaders Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King in his efforts to avoid appropriate regulation. Instead let’s start with Mr Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is part of the “fifth estate”.
且不说那些完全不靠谱的言论，例如，为了避免受到恰当的监管，一个通过监控资本——利用个人数据获利的具有产业规模的生意——成为亿万富翁的人，引用了民权领袖弗雷德里克•道格拉斯(Frederick Douglass)和马丁•路德•金(Martin Luther King)的话来证明自己的观点。我们还是从扎克伯格声称Facebook是“第五权力”(fifth estate)的一部分这番话说起吧。
