Pirate Bay Founder: No Democracy Online, Zuckerberg a ‘Dicatator’


The founder of The Pirate Bay has described Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a “dictator” of “the biggest nation in the world.”

Peter Sunde, who co-founded the digital index site, said in an interview with CNBC that as a result of Facebook’s overwhelming power and ability to influence online content, there is now “no democracy online.”

“People in the tech industry have a lot of responsibilities but they never really discuss these things,” he said, speaking at the The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. “Facebook is the biggest nation in the world and we have a dictator, if you look at it from a democracy standpoint, Mark Zuckerberg is a dictator. I did not elect him. He sets the rules.”

“And really you can’t opt out of Facebook. I’m not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you’re not on Facebook. So it has real life implications,” he explained.

Sunde, who is known for his left-wing views, stood for office in the European Parliament with the Pirate Party of Finland. The party’s main purpose is to promote freedom of information.

In 2014, he was found guilty of copyright infringement and faced 5 months in jail, along with all the other co-founders of the site.

Defending his claims, Sunde cited the example of Facebook teaming up with Angela Merkel to censor anti-immigration sentiment in Europe following the influx of millions of undocumented migrants.

“That’s kind of what it comes to. We send major leaders of Europe to ask him to stop interfering with our local culture. How did we end up in a situation like this?” Sunde said.

“If politicians were a little bit more hard-core and actually believe in this they would be able to fix it. If we say Facebook doesn’t agree with our rules in our country we are going to stop Facebook in our country. We censor a lot of things, why not censor Facebook?” he added.

The comments come after the row involving prominent conservative voices and Facebook over allegations of the site’s manipulation of their trending topics feature in order to suppress conservative news outlets and topics.

Zuckerburg consequently invited a range of establishment conservatives to discuss their concerns with him.
