Roger McNamee, a former adviser to Mark Zuckerberg and early investor in Facebook, published an op-ed at the Washington Monthly today (How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us). He recounts his experiences with Facebook and its founder over more than a decade and the belief he had that social media would not only be a solid investment financially but would revolutionize information sharing at the personal level.
Although still invested in Facebook, McNamee has observed that the revolution has gone off the rails, letting bad actors leverage disproportionate influence over its members in negative and covert ways. Even when Facebook discovered that others were gaming their system for purposes contrary to both policy and the founders’ original vision, the company took minimal action — mild punishment and no changes to policies and procedures to curb abuses in the future.
Here was a bad actor violating Facebook’s terms of service, doing a lot of harm, and then being slapped on the wrist. Facebook wasn’t paying attention until after the damage was done.
McNamee continued to grow more and more concerned as he noticed escalating incidents of misuse and abuse of the social media platform over a couple of years, especially when they involved “big ticket” social and political matters like Brexit, the DNC server hacking, and Black Lives Matters. He voiced his opinions to Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), and other highly placed people in the business that he knew well. His concerns were rather breezily dismissed.
They each responded the next day. The gist of their messages was the same: We appreciate you reaching out; we think you’re misinterpreting the news; we’re doing great things that you can’t see.
When the 2016 election happened and Trump won, he warned them that systemic abuses were in danger of rendering Facebook toxic as a brand, that the business model is flawed, and that the platform was being exploited by extremists as well as agents of the Russian government. Using algorithms to provide both feeds and advertising makes it too easy to lock people into an information bubble that feels comfortable to them but lacks diversity of ideas, reinforces existing beliefs, and increases the risk that they will accept false or misleading information as true. In regard to the election, he writes:
It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election. We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost.
Nothing has really changed since McNamee began urging his Facebook contacts to fix their broken system. Facebook mumbles about effecting what might be nibbling-around-the-edges changes but the potential for manipulating the public remains. So, McNamee recommends eight actions that could make a difference going forward.
- Acknowledge past malignant intrusions and make each affected Facebook member aware of exactly what happened and now
- Open hearings in Congress with Zuckerberg and other tech leaders about the issues, incidents, and problems, so that both the American people as well as our legislators are made aware of the scope and reality of what has happened
- Full transparency to Facebook users about who is behind all political and issue-advocacy advertising they see
- Transparency about the algorithms used by Facebook et al. to target users based on attributes and characteristics gathered about them
- An end to updating EULAs (End User License Agreements) in a way that essentially coerces users to agree to new objectionable terms and conditions on pain of losing access to the platform and their personal social network that goes along with it
- Drastically limit the ability of social media platforms to use members’ personal data without explicit permission or to let third parties use that data
- Personal ownership of their own data by members. That means they can “take it with them” if they leave a platform, wiping it from the platform’s stored archives
- Revisit pre-Reagan policies about monopolies, potentially breaking up the giant tech conglomerates. Facebook is not only huge itself but it also has gobbled up huge subsidiaries like Whatsapp; Google owns Youtube, Adsense, and others. The biggest companies have swallowed up competitors and operate diverse but interrelated businesses such that they can largely prevent competition from arising.
The article is a very, very long read but well worth it. With an insider’s perspective, McNamee has opinions that should at least be duly considered.