Zucked in: why Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor has turned on Facebook
He was an early tech investor and Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor. Now Roger McNamee is warning the world about the evils of Facebook.
A few months into his comfortable retirement Roger McNamee embarked on a mission that promised to alienate many of his friends, held little prospect of immediate success and could eventually cost him a fortune. He set out to convince a complacent world to defend itself against Facebook. Others had already sounded a similar alarm but McNamee, 62, brought unusual credibility and first-hand insight to the cause. One of the most illustrious investors in the history of Silicon Valley, he was also an early funder of Facebook, a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and a pivotal figure in the recruitment of the company’s second in command, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of the feminist manifesto Lean In.
Soon it wasn’t just Facebook that troubled McNamee. The more he investigated, the more he came to think that Google, which he knew less well, was at least as damaging as its fellow internet platform to democracy, public health, privacy and the wider economy, and the more he suspected that both of them were exploiting the “weakest aspects of human psychology” for profit in ways that were only going to get more frightening.
These conclusions, which he and a close-knit group of allies have spent the past two years sharing with politicians, prosecutors, television audiences and technology leaders, are now laid out in McNamee’s new book, Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. And they have filled him with despair. “Some of the things that I’ve discovered have broken my heart,” he says, sitting in a large wood-panelled living room half an hour south of San Francisco. “Every aspect of this thing has been crushing. I spent my entire career building up companies like this. And now I am having to challenge two companies that I held in the highest regard for the longest time. With a lot of people, I really cared about working at them.”
McNamee made a lot of money through early investments in Facebook and Google and remains “incredibly proud” of work he did with both companies. He retains significant stock in Facebook on principle to show that he is not acting out of financial self-interest now. Until recently he considered Zuckerberg — “Zuck” to his inner circle — and Sandberg to be friends. So when proof began to appear that Facebook was actually “causing massive harm”, McNamee was appalled by their reluctance to shoulder responsibility.
In 2017, the company admitted that 126 million Americans had been exposed to Russian interference in the US presidential election. In February 2018, the special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians and three organisations in filings that exposed the ease with which Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had been used to spread disinformation, sow discord and suppress votes in the 2016 election. The following month, the United Nations reported that in Myanmar, unchecked hate speech on Facebook had enabled “ethnic cleansing”. Days later, news broke that British voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which had worked with both the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit Leave team, had improperly harvested the data of up to 87 million people from Facebook accounts and that Facebook had covered this up for two years.
Since then the bad news has kept coming for Facebook. And for Google, which last month was fined a record 50 million euros ($80 million) by the French government over its handling of user data.
Today, the situation has escalated past the point where “there’s a soft landing for anybody”, McNamee says. “The internet platforms have harvested 50 years of trust and goodwill built up by their predecessors,” he writes. “They have taken advantage of that trust to surveil our every action online and to monetise personal data. In the process they have fostered hate speech, conspiracy theories and disinformation, and enabled interference in elections. They have artificially inflated their profits by shirking civic responsibility. The platforms have damaged public health, undermined democracy, violated user privacy and, in the case of Facebook and Google, gained monopoly power, all in the name of profits. No one working inside the internet platforms objected to these outcomes enough to take a public stand against them.”
McNamee is a lifelong technology evangelist. He is also a committed capitalist, albeit with a self-described “hippie value system” that reflects his other main interest: playing guitar in a psychedelic rock band. He never sought an activist role. “You’ve seen those comedy movies where they have all those guys in the army lined up, and they’re looking for a volunteer and everybody takes a step back but one guy? That was pretty much how this worked. I was looking at this thing and wondering, ‘Well, who’s going to step up and do something about this?’ And I realised that my biography would be really helpful.
“I’d been an analyst my whole life. I’m really good at pattern recognition. I trust instincts. I trust people. I’m willing to accept that I only know a small fraction of what I need to know to do this.”
Facebook was only two years old when McNamee met Zuckerberg for the first time. He liked this “intense” young man and for the next three years he counselled him several times a month. He acknowledges there were other mentors, “several of whom played a much larger role than I did”, but between 2006 and 2009 Zuckerberg acted on his advice more often than not.
By October 2016, McNamee had not been involved directly with Facebook for seven years but remained “a huge fan”. During the tumultuous presidential campaign of that year, however, he had become increasingly concerned by how the platform’s algorithms seemed to be accentuating the political polarisation in the country.
He was also alarmed by reports of suspected Russian efforts to interfere in the election and wondered if they might be among the bad actors abusing Facebook to spread fake news and sow division. Facebook’s hierarchy appeared to be ignoring the problem. He drafted an essay outlining his fears. Before he submitted it to a technology blog for publication he emailed it, on the advice of his wife, Ann, to Zuckerberg and Sandberg. The memo, which he never published, told the two executives, “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed.” He urged them to “be more socially responsible”. Zuckerberg and Sandberg each responded to his email within hours. They directed him towards the company’s head of media partnerships, who listened patiently to his case over the subsequent weeks but “never budged”. In February 2017, McNamee concluded Facebook was “a clear and present danger to democracy” run by a leadership that appeared to be in denial.
Almost two years later, I’m sitting by the largestwood-burning stove I’ve ever seen in that living room in a guest wing of McNamee’s home. It’s on a leafy hill in one of the Silicon Valley enclaves that has yet to be overrun by tech offices or suburban sprawl. He sits down, cracks open a Diet Coke and lays out the core of his argument to me. “The problem with Facebook and Google is the business model, which requires them to manipulate attention.” He looks me hard in the eye. “And in order to manipulate attention they need data, which forces them into the surveillance business. When you manipulate people’s attention in an advertising-based business, the way that Facebook and Google have done, you essentially give the advertisers access to the innermost secrets and emotions of more than two billion people.”
Those secrets and emotions are effectively for sale. In 2016, the Russians were among the buyers. “The line between manipulation of attention and manipulation of behaviour turns out to be very fine. I don’t believe either Facebook or Google consciously tries to manipulate your behaviour. I do believe they’ve created platforms that allow advertisers to do that.”
Facebook’s algorithms also favour disinformation over accuracy and extreme messages over neutral ones, because these generate more engagement and therefore greater advertising revenue. Users are largely unaware of the extent to which they have relinquished their privacy and their free will. Vast data-churning systems lie behind both platforms and follow users around the web, “so when you go on them, you think you’re going on there to look at puppies or to buy a hammer, when you’re in fact playing multidimensional chess against this massive artificial intelligence that not only knows everything about you, but can actually check your emotional state based on how you move the mouse”.
The threats to health and to democracy are inextricably linked, he says. “Facebook and Google harm public health by creating habits that can evolve into behavioural addictions.” These start with young children being able to find hyperstimulating, age-inappropriate videos. They progress through preteens and teens experiencing bullying over the internet and developing acute fear of missing out via social media. The process culminates with adults being channelled into “filter bubbles and preference bubbles”: a personalised Truman Show-style existence where they consume only news and views selected to reinforce their own prejudices, nudging them to “more and more extreme positions”, with catastrophic consequences for public discourse.
Both companies believed that their missions — “collecting all the world’s information for Google, connecting the whole world for Facebook” — were so important that they “justified whatever means were necessary”. Both companies did everything they could to eliminate “friction” — making their services free and as inviting to use as possible. But the process of “eliminating friction is essentially eliminating all the safeguards that would prevent you from doing harm. So you resist criticism when you get regulatory or legal things, you apologise, you promise to do better… You just keep ploughing ahead.”
In the case of Facebook, “These are not bad people. The problem here is that they failed to recognise that there was a scale above which you cannot escape responsibility for your actions. It doesn’t matter what the law says.” Up until the day after the US election, McNamee was “willing to give them a pass, because I don’t think it ever occurred to them that stuff going on their platforms was going to change outcomes of elections. I don’t think they had any idea they had that level of power. But once they knew, then the game changed really dramatically.”
By November 2017, “they could no longer plausibly claim ignorance” of their platform’s negative impact. That was when Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook vice-president, said in a speech at Stanford University, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Zuckerberg and Sandberg could have responded positively to that, McNamee writes. They could have said then, “ We screwed up! We will do everything possible to fix the problems and restore trust.” They did nothing of the sort. “By failing to exploit Palihapitiya’s regrets as a teachable moment, Facebook signalled a commitment to avoiding responsibility for the Russian election interference and all the other problems that had surfaced.”
McNamee’s activism began in early 2017. That April he joined forces with Tristan Harris, a computer scientist who had worked at Google and then left to build an organisation dedicated to advocating for a more humane approach to technology. In July, they went to Washington DC together and had their first meeting with Mark Warner, the co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the bodies looking into possible Russian election interference in 2016. Later that year, an old school friend of McNamee’s was added to the task force: Jim Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media. Steyer arranged a meeting between McNamee and Eric Schneiderman, the attorney-general of New York at the time. Within months, 37 state attorneys-general had begun investigations into Facebook.
By January 2018, it was clear that the trio’s efforts were beginning to attract attention in Silicon Valley. Andrew Bosworth, a member of Facebook’s management team, tweeted: “I’ve worked at Facebook for 12 years and I have to ask: who the f*** is Roger McNamee?” The target of the abuse was thrilled. “What a favour, right? They had ignored us for the prior year. Failing to ignore us at that particular moment in time couldn’t have been more helpful.”
McNamee sees no prospect of the tech giants taking upon themselves the responsibility to change and agrees that government intervention is the most likely path to success. His team has briefed “key players in the Trump administration” and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who now leads the House of Representatives. “You can’t solve the problem until you change the business model,” he says, adding that the two companies have reached a monopoly scale and breadth that is uncompetitive and bad for the economy. This argument resonates with both pro-business conservatives and socially conscious liberals.
“The reason Google and Facebook are two of the most profitable companies ever is because they are creating all this damage and not paying for it,” he says. “If I only get one message across, it’s that these platforms depend on us. Without users, they are nothing. We have the power to effect change. The question is, what are we willing to give up in order to make the world a better place?”
He too has had to wean himself off being “massively, massively addicted in a behavioural sense to the platforms”, re-engineering his own Facebook feed to strip out any politics and no longer using Google wherever possible (he uses DuckDuckGo as a search engine). He has continued to experience “waves” of personal attacks “from Facebook” over his campaign, and the company is now attempting to discredit his book. A spokesperson for Facebook said: “We take criticism seriously. Over the past two years, we’ve fundamentally changed how we operate to better protect the safety and security of people using Facebook. The reality is, Roger McNamee hasn’t been involved with Facebook for a decade.”
But Facebook is also scrambling to restore confidence after seeing its share price fall by a third since July. In Davos last month, Sandberg said the company “did not anticipate all of the risks from connecting so many people”. She acknowledged that “we need to earn back trust”.
McNamee has no regrets about taking a stand. And he is not finished yet. “Speaking truth to power is a brutal thing for anybody to do. Better for somebody in my position. I’m older. I’m in a better position to lose than most people and I have a personality that’s used to having everybody either not care or actively dislike me. Does that feel good? Nope. Never has. But somehow I have learnt to live with it.”
He smiles decisively. “Every day when I get up I ask myself, ‘Am I still doing this?’ Every day I think about it, usually not for very long, and go, ‘Yep, there’s more to be done.’ ”
Zucked — Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee (HarperCollins, $32.99), out now
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