The Mozilla Foundation isn’t holding back its disdain for Big Tech leaders.
This week, it’s hanging up posters around New York calling out tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and hyping up its own class of technology fellows as part of a new ad campaign.
The campaign is meant to juxtapose the work of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos with lesser-known projects from technologists like Rose Njeri Tunguru, a member of Mozilla’s fellowship program who is building infrastructure to help Kenyans independently verify election results.
“What we really wanted to do was poke a hole in the mythology that tech innovation happens in one particular way,” said Ziyaad Bhorat, Mozilla’s vice president of imagination and strategic growth.
Society is “hyper-focused on one idea of tech genius” and “a lot of people are working on better things and alternatives,” he said.
The goal is to build awareness of the work of Mozilla’s fellow class and, hopefully, drive additional online attention as passersby spot the posters and share them on social media.
The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit that owns Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit subsidiary that makes the web browser Firefox and other products. It works with techies, researchers, and others to fund projects that support an open internet, ethical data practices, and trustworthy AI tools.
Mozilla doesn’t pull its punches in the ads when attacking tech’s billionaire class.
Its poster of Zuckerberg, for example, references troubles his company, Meta, has run into with its camera glasses, which some wearers have used to harass strangers and prank store workers.
“Mark gets into eyewear” and “makes creepers, peepers,” it reads.
Meta executives have acknowledged bad behavior tied to their glasses, with Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, writing in July that the company would take down footage if users were “surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform.”
A Meta spokesperson said the company disables the cameras on any glasses where a user has removed the LED light that indicates a photo or video is being taken. The company said it ran an awareness campaign to help educate people about how the glasses work in communities where they are prevalent.
Mozilla has done other anti-establishment ad campaigns to promote its work, enlisting an anonymous creative collective called Basement Freaks to make videos for its annual tech report in January.
Its latest campaign arrives at a moment when many Americans are wary of Big Tech and its leaders. Americans worry about potential job losses tied to artificial intelligence, and the arrival of new surveillance technologies like Flock cameras. Half of US adults said they were more “concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, according to a June survey from the Pew Research Center.
Billionaires are also unpopular among US adults. In a March poll by the University of Massachusetts Lowell and YouGov, Musk’s net favorability was -16%, while Zuckerberg’s was -43%.
“The general population feels a little bit of a loss of what they can do personally, and they feel as though they’re resigned to this future that is dictated by Silicon Valley or the most powerful in these Big Tech companies,” said Emma Bates, a fractional CMO at Mozilla who served as a strategic advisor and collaborator on the campaign. “They don’t just have to resign to the fact that AI and robots are going to take over the world. It’s not the only way.”
Mozilla is running what’s called a “wild postings” campaign, a street-level advertising tactic where posters are slapped onto the sides of buildings or barricades rather than placed at traditional billboard sites.
The organization is strategically placing its posters. It’s putting some near the United Nations building that is currently hosting its General Assembly, as well as in tech-worker hubs like Hudson Yards, NoHo, and Dumbo. It’s also hiring influencers to visit the poster sites and make content about them for social media.
“We know that this campaign will be a little bit provocative, and we’re hoping that then leads to more people sharing it and getting the message out,” Bates said.
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