Roger McNamee on Mark Zuckerberg and ‘the Facebook catastrophe’

‘I could not have imagined the damage to democracy, public health, privacy, and competition,’ says a key Facebook investor.

Right, the cover illustration from Roger McNamee’s book, Zucked

Roger McNamee was an early investor in Facebook. But that has not stopped him from attacking the giant in articles, interviews and more recently a book. Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe, was published by Penguin in February. As he notes in the book, almost three years “have passed since I first observed bad actors exploiting Facebook’s algorithms and business model to harm innocent people. I could not have imagined then the damage to democracy, public health, privacy, and competition that would be enabled by internet platforms I loved to use.”

McNamee argues that the politics of countries including the United States and Brazil “have been transformed in ways that may persist for generations”. If you live in Myanmar or Sri Lanka, he claims, “your life may have been threatened”.

He writes: “We are running an uncontrolled evolutionary experiment, and the results are terrifying. We were not prepared for the social turmoil and political tumult unleashed by internet platforms. They emerged so quickly, and their influence over both person and commerce spread so rapidly, that they overwhelmed cultural, political, and legal institutions. Some will be tempted to relax now that the (US) 2018 midterm elections have come and gone without obvious foreign interference. Instead, I hope they will see that foreign meddling in campaigns is merely one symptom of a much larger problem ... for which the internet platforms themselves must be called to account.”

The 62-year-old founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners has had a long career backing tech. But in an interview in The Observer in February he said of the genesis of his book: “My thought process was that this isn’t a tech story. It’s not a business story. This is an everybody story. This is a catastrophe we’re all facing, and we don’t have a vocabulary for it, because the business model that Facebook and Google have created is something we’ve never seen before.”

In Zucked, McNamee refers to the work of Yale professor Timothy Snyder and his book, The Road to Unfreedom. He says Snyder “makes a convincing case that the world is sleepwalking into an authoritarian age ... liberal democracies and emerging countries alike are surrendering to autocratic appeals to fear and anger. Facebook, Google, and Twitter did not cause the current transformation of global politics, but ... design choices they made in the pursuit of influence and massive profits have undermined democracy and civil rights.”

McNamee does not blame those who built Google, Facebook and Twitter: he concedes that the tech giants never believed they would harm democracy. “But the systems they built are doing just that,” he writes. “By manipulating attention, isolating users in filter and preference bubbles, and leaving them vulnerable to invasions of privacy, loss of agency, and even behaviour modification, internet platforms inadvertently created a weapon for those who would impose their will on the powerless.”