John Oliver Tears Into Facebook Over Apology Ads (Watch)

By Janko Roettgers

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – John Oliver used the occasion of  Facebook’s recent stock crash to devote a segment of Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” to the company. “$120 billion is clearly a lot of money,” Oliver said. “For context, it is more than the size of the global cheese market.”

Oliver tied the company’s losses to its recent privacy scandals, which prompted the company to run apology ads — one of which Oliver decided to air in its entirety. “F*** you,” Oliver retorted after the ad concluded.

“Facebook was doing literally exactly what it was built for,” he continued. “You didn’t build the world’s most profitable data harvesting machine by accident.” Oliver went on to call Facebook “a surveillance system disguised as a high school reunion,” and ultimately premiered his own version of Facebook’s apology ad, which wasn’t quite as apologetic. Take a look:

Facebook suffered a dramatic stock price crash last week after reporting lower-than-expected revenue and user growth numbers for its second quarter, as well as forecasting significantly lower profit margins. And while some of that had to do with privacy concerns, as well as new regulations like Europe’s GDRP, it’s also worth noting that executives had warned of lower margins in response to a shift to video for a long time.