Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

by Roger McNamee

to anticipate that many users would not respect the culture and norms of the early internet. At global scale, the dynamics have changed to the detriment of civil discourse. Bullies and bad actors take advantage. The platforms have made little effort to protect users from harassment, presumably

due to some combination of libertarian values and a reluctance to enforce restrictions that might reduce engagement and economic value. They have not created internal systems to limit the damage from bad actors. They have not built in ci...

instead is ban hate speech and harassment in their terms of service, covering their legal liability, and then apologiz...

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all have a bully problem, each reflecting the unique architecture and culture o...

platforms also favors bad actors. They can incubate pranks, conspiracy theories, and disinformation in fringe sites like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, which are home to some of the most extreme voices on the internet, jump to Twitter to ...

for maximum impact. The slavish tracking of Twitter by journalists, in combination with their willingness to report on things that trend there, has made news organizations c...

IN AN ESSAY in the MIT Technology Review, UNC professor Zeynep Tufekci explained why the impact of internet platforms on public discourse is so damaging and hard to fix. “The problem is that when we encounter opposing views

in the age and

context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our com...

bond with our team by yelling at the fans of...

Zuck’s vision of connecting the world and bringing it together may be laudable in intent, but the company’s

execution leaves much to be desired.

if it wants to be viewed as a socially responsible company, it may have to abandon its current policy of openness to all voices, no matter how damaging.

For all intents and purposes, we have allowed these people to have a profound influence on the course for our country and the world with no

input from the outside.

— THERE ARE SO MANY obvious benefits to social networks that we find it hard to accept that the platforms have poisoned political disc...

To make their advertising business model work, internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube have inverted the traditional relationship of technology to humans. Instead of technology being

a tool in service to humanity, it is humans who are in service to technology.

Google, already a dominant company worth more than one hundred billion dollars. Google derived

almost all its profit from advertising on its search engine. When users searched for products, Google helpfully served up an ad relevant to that search. Google focused maniacally on shrinking the amount of time necessary to find what the user desired, with keyword-based ads in the sidebar. In

short, Google’s advertising model did not depend on maximizing attention. At least, not then. (That would change a few years later, when ...

the technology entrepreneurs who gave birth to social media enjoyed the benefits of perfect timing. They did not face the constraints on processing power, memory, storage and bandwidth that had defined the first fifty years of Silicon Valley. Simultaneously, there

was an unprecedented surplus in venture capital funding. As we’ve seen, it had never been less costly to launch a startup, and the consumer-facing opportunities enabled by software stacks, cloud computing, and pervasive 4G wireless were larger than the industry had ever seen.

At a time when technology could do practically anything, entrepreneurs chose to exploit weaknesses in human psychology.

Everyone else monetized with advertising.

When the iPhone shipped in 2007, it looked like no mobile phone before it—a

The iPhone’s main functions were phone, email, music, and web. Users went crazy. So compelling was the experience

of using an iPhone that it altered the relationship between device and human.

Within a few years, mobile would dominate the social media industry.

Products today use every psychological trick to gain and hold user attention,

and kids are

particularly vul...

People of all ages

spend a huge portion of their waking hours on technology platforms.

children between the ages of eight and eighteen spend nine and a half hours a day on screens and phones.

Overconsumption of media is not a new problem, but social apps on smartphones have taken the consequences to new levels.

Apps created by Fogg’s students were particularly adept at monopolizing user attention. Nearly all of Fogg’s students embraced that mission. Tristan Harris did not.

Tristan left Stanford’s master’s program in computer science to launch a startup called Apture after he completed the term in Fogg’s class. His idea for Apture was to enhance text-based news

with relevant multimedia, specifically video that explained concepts in the news story to which it was tied. My friend Steve Vassallo, a venture capitalist who had mentored Tristan in a program at Stanford, asked me to take a meeting with Aptu...

the team at Forbes, I l...

During that time, Apture found customers but never took off. Google acquired the company in late 2011. The deal was what Silicon Valley calls an “acqui-hire,” where the acquiring company pays enough to cover t...

exchange for a complete team of engineers. All the Apture team got out of the d...

From that moment, Tristan became an evangelist for humane design principles. In Tristan’s mind, the design of technology products should prioritize the users’ well-being.

Humane design focuses on reducing the addictive power of technology, which is really important but is not a complete answer, even for Tristan.

humane design is a subset of human-driven technology, which also incorporates things like

privacy, data security, and applications functionality.

Steve Jobs’s description of computers as a “bicycle for the mind,” a tool that creates value through exercise as we...

should make humans more capable, not displace ...

Facebook and Google seem to have

discarded the bicycle for the mind metaphor.