Kara Swisher Dishes Dirt on The View, Rips Mark Zuckerberg For Facebook’s Years of ‘Toxic Waste’

Renowned tech journalist Kara Swisher joined The View on Tuesday to discuss her new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.

During the lengthy discussion, co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin notes that Swisher dishes a lot of dirt on the tech giants she once praised in the book and asked:

Now you’re really highlighting the dangers as well. When did sort of that shift happen, of being a little bit more concerned about the dangers that could be coming?

“You know, I covered the Microsoft trial way back, you know, and so I was concerned then about monopolistic practices and a lack of accountability and things like that. I wrote a lot about Google getting too big in the search business. I had talked about Mark Zuckerberg, his famous interview where he sweat a lot about privacy. That’s what I was arguing with him about. He and I had a huge argument about Holocaust deniers who he thought didn’t mean to lie, and I thought that was the very definition of a Holocaust denier.” Swisher replied, adding:

We were always pushing on people, whether it was Travis Kalanick at Uber and that behavior there. But as they became more powerful and unaccountable and then regulators did nothing about it, there’s no rules governing the internet. And these are the most powerful, richest people in the history of the planet.

So the only law that really covers the internet specifically gives them complete immunity from liability, which is, you know, you know, they could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people. You know, and they do that every day with, around young girls and things like that, like self-esteem. And they’re not liable.

“Seemingly this is a world filled with no women,” noted Whoopi Goldberg.

“Yes. Correct,” replied Swisher.

“Because they seem to have no understanding of how anything works,” Goldberg added.

“Right. Well, that’s one of the assertions I make in the book. Is that the reason that a lot of stuff isn’t safe is because most of the people designing it have never felt unsafe a day in their lives,” Swisher replies, adding:

And they look at it, you know, if you look at the way tech is in general and a lot of industries are like this, you have to imagine, I guess straight white men are the only people who are intelligent in this world.

Like that can’t be. And it isn’t true. And so what they tend to do is they think they tout a meritocracy when it’s a mirrortocracy. Right. And they feel comfortable with themselves. And oh, and they need diversity. So one of the part of the issues about it is there also a lot of them and I don’t mean some of them are innocuous and some of them don’t mean to do, but it doesn’t really matter in the end at all.

Joy Behar praised Swisher for coming up with the term “mirror-tocracy” and added, “Well, let’s talk about some of the good guys, because you trace the villainous ones like Zuckerberg.”

Swisher pushed back, saying, “I don’t think Mark is villainous. But go ahead.”

“You don’t?” asked Behar.

“It’s too easy to call them villains,” Swisher replied.

“What would you call them?” Behar followed up.

“I think he’s, I think he is callous, ill-equipped to deal with issues when we have that argument about Holocaust deniers. I was talking about Alex Jones and a bunch, I think, like you need to take them down. They’re breaking your rule. Right? And he said, everyone needs to speak. And I said, two years, three years of this over your transom. All this toxic waste is going to have an effect down the line. And he said, no they they won’t. And two years later he threw them off. So in that two years that’s how much toxic waste went through,” Swisher concluded.

Watch the clip above via ABC News.

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