Mozilla calls out Zuckerberg, Musk in new NYC ad campaign
One-half of American adults feel more 'concerned than excited' about increasing automation in their lives
You don't need to read between the lines on this one. Mozilla Foundation posters are going up around New York this week, directly calling out tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and pointedly contrasting them with lesser-known technologists from its own fellowship programme.
Ziyaad Bhorat, Mozilla's vice president of imagination and strategic growth, said the goal was to "poke a hole in the mythology that tech innovation happens in one particular way."
One poster spotlights Rose Njeri Tunguru, a Mozilla fellow building infrastructure to help Kenyans independently verify election results, a deliberate contrast to the billionaire faces plastered elsewhere in the campaign.
The Zuckerberg ad references Meta's ongoing camera glasses controversy, where some wearers have used the devices to harass strangers and prank store employees. The poster reads "Mark gets into eyewear" and "makes creepers, peepers."
Meta confirmed the problem mentioned by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in July, where the firm would delete any content associated with covert filming and harassment, while a spokesman from Meta said that glasses can be disabled if the user deletes the LED marker indicating recording.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos makes an appearance in the campaign just after Amazon's space tourism project Blue Origin suspended operations in January. Mozilla is no stranger to this sort of thing, as it had previously used an anonymous group of creators called Basement Freaks for videos related to its annual technology report.
One-half of American adults feel more "concerned than excited" about increasing automation in their lives, based on the results of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June.
The fortunes of billionaires aren't much better either, as per a March 2018 survey by the University of Massachusetts Lowell and YouGov showing Musk with an unfavourability score of -16% and Zuckerberg of -43%.
Mozilla's "wild postings" project includes the placement of billboards on the sides of buildings and barricades instead of using conventional advertising channels.
Such placements are located not only near the United Nations, coinciding with its General Assembly, but also close to tech workers' neighbourhoods such as Hudson Yards, NoHo, and Dumbo. As a part of this campaign, Mozilla hires social media influencers to visit these locations and produce content.
