#Breaking: Facebook is in trouble for secretly breaking Apple’s rules. But what it’s doing out in the open is way worse

Facebook is in the doghouse with Apple for abusing its role in Apple’s enterprise program to distribute research apps that suck up even more of users’ data. But on the latest episode of Pivot, NYU’s Scott Galloway said that’s a sideshow that mostly reflects personal animosity between Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook; the really suspiciousthing Facebook is doing, he explained, is its plan to merge the infrastructure of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

“‘I would like to give Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg broader reach and a more robust platform,’ said no person ever,” Galloway said. “And that’s what’s going on here.”

Starting in 2016 and continuing to the present day, Facebook demonstrated that it was susceptible to foreign powers, and he suggested that allowing those apps to message each other more easily would be another powerful avenue for media manipulators looking to gin up outrage.

“We have figured out a way to create these giant dials that, if you put a hand on it, you can create rage from one community to another,” Galloway said. “And I think that Russians have been able to get their hands on these dials and are literally breaking us apart as Western democracy … What we’ve done here is we’ve decided to let Facebook create bigger, bigger dials.

“The most important move, I think long term, for the health of the commonwealth right now would be for either Senators Bennet or Warner or someone from the FTC to basically fire a shot across Facebook’s bow and say, ‘Look, if you integrate these three things, be careful. We can still break your ass up.’”