Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

by Roger McNamee

charged with increasing the number of users, time on site, and engagement with ads. They have been very successful. When we humans interact with internet platforms, we think we are looking at cat videos and posts from friends in a simple news feed. What few people know is that behind the news feed is a large and advanced artificial intelligence. When we check a news feed, we are playing multidimensional chess against massive artificial intelligences that have nearly perfect information about us. The goal of the AI is to figure out which content will keep each of us highly engaged and monetizable. Success leads the AI to show us more content like whatever engaged us in the past. For the 1.47 billion users who check Facebook every day, reinforcement of beliefs, every day for a year or two, will have an effect. Not on every user in every case, but on enough users in enough situations to be both effective for advertising and harmful to democracy.