Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNammee
In Zucked, Roger McNammee tells a great story about how things can go wrong when power and money come together in an environment where there is no accountability or public understanding.
Roger McNammee is a big name in Silicon Valley, an analyst and professional investor and a mucisian. He met Mark Zuckerberg in 2006, when Zuck (as apparently he is called in the calley had a serious business problem and he wanted to talk to someone who was knowledgeable on the inner workings of Silicon Valley, objective, and can keep a secret.
In 2006 Facebook was two years old and only for college students, but Roger McNammee was already convinced that it would be more important than Google was at that time. Mark Zuckerberg was 22 years old, he has been at Facebook for only two years and he had already raised a pile of venture money. Roger McNammee told him what he thought about Facebook, and he advised him not to sell it, even if a big company like Microsoft or Yahoo, offered him one billion dollars. As it happened, one of these two companies offered him one billion dollars, but, as we already know, Zuckerberg didn’t sell.
The rest, as they say, is history. For three years after that Roger McNammee was an adviser to Zuckerberg and later an investor on Facebook. The relation of Roger McNammee with Mark Zuckerberg ended in 2009, and the problems that happened in Facebook later, the seeds were already planted by then. It has to do with its business model and the culture which is really dangerous. And it’s not just about Facebook, it’s about Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Twitter. It got us to 2016, when Facebook had 2 billion people before the damage showed up. There is no doubt that the people on Facebook and Google are really smart and capable people, they developed products that we love (or used to love and they got us completely addicted to them.
Now we know the truth. Facebook in one of the most influential business in history Its failures have a profound impact. The virality of inflammatory messages and fake adverts affected the 2016 election in the U.S. and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. The algorithms of Facebook were allowing bad people to hurt innocent people and were undermining our democracies. Hate speech can have fatal consequences, as has been in the case of Myamar and Sri Lanka. Facebook is enabling people to do harm. It has the power to stop the harm. What’s is currently lacking is an incentive to do so.
Despite of what they say, Facebook and Google are media companies, not just platforms. They argue that you choose what you click on, but they control the menu. They argue that you have conceded. Conceded to what? How many of you have read the Terms of Service on Facebook or Google? I tried before I close my Facebook account and it is dozens of pages. It takes hours to actually read it carefully and they don’t even tell you when it changes. You just give up all your rights by using the product.
There is no easy solution to the problem posed by Facebook and the other internet platforms, says Roger McNammee. “Users trust them, despite an abusive relationship. To contain the problem somewhere near current levels, the first step should be a combination of antitrust enforcement and new regulations to protect privacy and to limit the scope of data collection and artificial intelligence.” Users should always own all their own data and metadata. No one should be able to use a user’s data in any way without explicit, prior consent. And people need to understand what means to give their consent to a company to use their data.
Zucked is not perhaps the comprehensive account about Facebook and the other big internet companies, but it is an honest book from someone who understands the business model from the inside.