Facebook is the new cigarettes, says Marc Benioff

Marc
Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.
Reuters/Mike Blake

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff renewed his astonishing
  attack on Facebook in an interview with NBC News, saying the
  social network is the “new cigarettes.”
• He said the government needs to regulate big tech in
  the same way it regulated the cigarette industry because people
  don’t really understand the products they’re using.
• Benioff was not specific about how the government
  should regulate tech, but praised senators like Mark Warner for
  scrutinizing the industry.

Tech billionaire Marc Benioff has previously compared Facebook to
cigarettes, and on Wednesday renewed his attack on the social
network
in an interview with Kara Swisher for NBC News.

“I’ve been saying this now for a while… You look at what’s
going on with brands like Facebook. Facebook is the new
cigarettes. It’s addictive, it’s not good for you, there’s people
trying to get you to use that even you don’t understand what’s
going on,” the Salesforce CEO said.

Benioff called for tighter regulation of the social network,
saying: “The government needs to step in, the government needs to
really regulate what’s happening.” He said this was particularly
urgent because Facebook targets children as users.

Benioff was not specific about how exactly the government should
regulate tech, but returned to the comparison with cigarettes.
“This is the role of government, to protect us… at times of
severe change, and you know they did that with the cigarette
industry, they need to do that with the technology industry,” he
said.

Read more:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff seems to have had a big change of
heart on Apple CEO Tim Cook, and thanked him publicly for his
activism

“Facebook can have very serious effects on society the same way
that cigarettes can,” he reiterated, and voiced his support for

senators like Mark Warner who have honed in on regulating
tech.

Benioff has got form in speaking his mind about his tech
contemporaries. He
publicly admonished Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in October for
his opposition to San Francsico’s Proposition C, a tax on tech
companies to raise funds for the city’s homelessness crisis.

Business Insider has contacted Facebook for comment.