Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

by Roger McNamee

What I did not know when I met him but would eventually discover was that his idealism was unbuffered by realism

or empathy. He seems to have assumed that everyone would view and use Facebook the way he did, not imagining how easily the platform could be exploited to cause harm. He did not believe in data privacy and did everything he could to maximize disclosure and sharing. He operated the

company as if every problem could be solved with more or better code. He embraced invasive surveillance, careless sharing of private data, and behavior modification in pursuit of unprecedented scale and influence. Surveillance, the sharing...

Facebook’s success. Users are fuel for Facebook’s growth and, in some cas...

While it had not inflicted harm directly, Facebook was being used as a weapon, and users had a right to expect the company to protect

My goal was to fix the problems at Facebook,

not embarrass anyone. I did

he asserted that Facebook was technically a platform, not a media company, which meant it was not responsible for the actions of third parties. He said it like that should have been enough to settle

the matter.

Facebook did not want me to go public with my concerns, and I thought that

by keeping the conversation private, I was far more likely to persuade them to investigate the issues that concerned me. When I spoke to Dan the day after the election, it was obvious to me that he was not truly open to my perspective; he seemed to be treating the issue as a public relations problem. His

job was to calm me down and make my con...

it from brand damage. The company was risking everything. I suggested that Facebook had a window of opportunity. It could follow the example of Johnson & Johnson when someone put poison in a few bottles of Tylenol on retail shelves in Chicago in 1982. J&J immediately withdrew

every bottle of Tylenol from every retail location and did not reintroduce the product until it had perfected tamperproof packaging. The company absorbed a short-term hit to earnings but was rewarded with a huge increase in consumer trust. J&J had not put the poison in those bottles. It might

have chosen to dismiss the problem as the work of a madman. Instead, it accepted responsibility for protecting its customers and took the safest possible course of action. I thought Facebook could convert a po...

Groups on Facebook do not emerge full grown overnight. I hypothesized that somebody had to be spending money on advertising to get the people I knew to join the Facebook Groups that were

spreading the images. Who would do that? I had no answer. The flood of inappropriate images continued, and it gnawed at me.

More troubling phenomena caught my attention. In March 2016, for example, I saw a news report about a gro...

tool on Facebook to gather data on users expressing an interest in Black Lives Matter, data that they then sold to police departments, which struck me as evil. Facebook banned the group, but not until after irreparable harm had been done. ...

vic...

proposal. The stunning outcome of Brexit triggered a hypothesis: in an election context, Facebook may confer advantages to campaign messages based on fear or anger over those based on neutral or positive emotions. It does this because Facebook’s advertising business model depends on engagement, which can best be triggered through appeals to our most basic emotions.

“Lizard brain” emotions such as fear and anger produce a more uniform reaction and are more viral in a mass audience. When users are riled up, they consume and share more content. Dispassionate users have relatively little value to Facebook, which does

everything in its power to activate the lizard brain. Facebook has used surveillance to build giant profiles on every user and provides each user with a customized Truman Show, similar to the Jim Carrey film about a person who lives his entire life as the star of his own television show. It starts out giving

users “what they want,” but the algorithms are trained to nudge user attention in directions that Facebook wants. The algorithms choose posts calculated to press emotional buttons because scaring users or pissing them off inc...

it engagement, but the goal is behavior modification that makes advertising more valuable. I wish I had understood this in 2016. At this writing, Facebook is the fourth most valuable company in America, despite being only fifteen years old, and its value...

The most successful tech products gradually integrate themselves into our lives. Before long, we

forget what life was like before them. Most of us have that relationship today with smartphones and internet platforms like Facebook and Google. Their benefits are so obvious we can’t imagine foregoing them. Not so obvious are the ways that technology products change us. The process

has repeated itself in every generation since the telephone, including radio, television, and personal computers. On the plus side, technology has opened up the world, providing access to knowledge that was inaccessible in prior generat...

all that va...

cost. Beginning with television, technology has changed the way we engage with society, substituting passive consumption of content and ideas for civic engagement, digital communication for conversation. Subtl...

from citizens to c...

But Facebook is more than just a forum. It is a profit-maximizing business controlled by one person. It is a massive artificial intelligence that influences every aspect of

user activity, whether political or otherwise. Even the smallest decisions at Facebook reverberate through the public square the company has created with implications for every person it touches.

Facebook’s advertising tools enabled property owners to discriminate based on race, in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Facebook remained a clear and present danger to democracy. The very same tools that made Facebook a compelling platform for advertisers could also be exploited to inflict harm.

Facebook was getting

more powerful by the day. Its artificial intelligence engine learned more about every user. Its algorithms got better at ...

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It’s all about how people choose to use it. —DAVID WONG

U2 singer Bono and I had formed Elevation in 2004, along with former Apple CFO Fred Anderson,

former Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello, and two career investors, Bret Pearlman and Marc Bodnick.

Since this was our first meeting, I wanted to say something before Zuck told me about the existential crisis. “If it has not already happened, Mark, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer one billion

dollars for Facebook. Your parents, your board of directors, your management team, and your employees are going to tell you to take the offer. They will tell you that with your share of the proceeds—six hundred and fifty million dollars—you will be able to change the world. Your lead venture investor will

promise to back your next company so that you can do it again. “It’s your company, but I don’t think you should sell. A big company will screw up Facebook. I believe you are building the most important company since Google and ...

have two huge advantages over previous social media platforms: you insist on real identity and give consumers control over their privacy settings. “In the long run, I believe Facebook will be far more valuable to parents and gran...

don’t have much time will love Facebook, especially when families have the opportunity to share p...

So began a mentorship that lasted three years. In a success story with at least a thousand fathers, I played a tiny role, but I contributed on two occasions that mattered to

Facebook’s early success: the Yahoo deal and the hiring of Sheryl. Zuck had other mentors, but he called on me when he thought I could help, which happened often enough that for a few years I was a regular visitor to Facebook’s headquarters.

Many tech founders swagger through life, but the

best ones—including the founders of Google and Amazon—are reserved, thoughtful, serious.

For me, it was a