Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook at Harvard, ran online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and in 2019 published an argument that the company he helped start should be broken up.

My.BarackObama.com

Hughes spent two years as the Obama campaign’s director of online organizing. The tool he is identified with is My.BarackObama.com — MyBO — which let supporters create groups, plan events, raise funds and find each other.

The end-of-campaign numbers, as reported in a contemporaneous profile, were: more than 2 million profiles, 200,000 offline events, 35,000 groups, 400,000 blog posts, and $30 million raised across 70,000 personal fundraising pages. Campaign manager David Plouffe’s assessment was brief: “We were very lucky that Chris gravitated to the campaign early.”

MyBO is an early example of a campaign building its own social platform rather than relying on outside ones.

”It’s Time to Break Up Facebook”

On 9 May 2019 Hughes published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that Facebook should be broken up, disclosing his own former stake in the company as he made the argument.

He states his position plainly: “It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade,” and “I liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012, and I don’t invest directly in any social media companies.”

His argument is structural rather than about content. Facebook is “a powerful monopoly” holding, by his estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue; Zuckerberg controls around 60 percent of voting shares, so “Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer”; and one person therefore decides algorithmic configuration, privacy settings, message delivery and the line between violent and merely offensive speech. He wrote it while the FTC’s $5 billion penalty was pending, and said explicitly that the fine “is not enough”.

Economic Security Project

Hughes is associated with the Economic Security Project, a New York 501(c)(3) with an IRS ruling date of September 2021, whose revenue was between $9.6 million and$11.2 million in the tax years 2021 to 2023. A related entity, Economic Security Project Action Inc, is separately registered.

Digital Political Impact

• Built an early campaign-owned social platform for digital organizing, with figures the campaign itself published
• Argued in public, at length and in a major newspaper, for Facebook’s breakup, having disclosed that he no longer held its stock
• His 2019 argument was about corporate control and voting shares rather than about moderation, which distinguishes it from most contemporaneous criticism

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: his birth year; a Twitter follower count; the claim that he was Facebook’s spokesman and left in 2007 (his own 2019 account says only that he had not worked there “in a decade”); the 2012 purchase of a majority stake in The New Republic, the reported $20 million invested, the 2014 staff departures and the 2016 sale; and the founding date and description of the Economic Security Project’s work, which the IRS record does not supply.