How we all got ZUCKERED
Facebook is a digital wrecking ball that undermines democracy, fuels extremism, endangers children and grows rich on Orwellian surveillance. Who says so? One of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s former top advisers in this devastating critique ...
BACK in 2006, just two years after the launch of Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg came to see me. He was, I’d been told, facing an existential crisis and wanted unbiased advice.
I kicked off the conversation by predicting that web giants Yahoo and Microsoft would offer to buy his fledgling start-up for $1billion. As a venture capitalist with long experience of investing in high-tech firms, I could see Facebook had enormous potential.
Initially established by Zuckerberg as a social networking site for students at the Ivy League institutions of Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Yale, its userfriendly characteristics and its unlimited capacity for expansion ensured rapid growth. It was already beginning to supplant all other social media sites such as MySpace and Friendster.
I told him: ‘Believe in your vision. Keep the company independent.’
There then followed an extraordinary scene during which Zuckerberg, who was just 22 years old, lapsed into a painful silence for at least five minutes as he contemplated my view.
I waited. The absence of any response signalled both his lack of social skills (not unusual in a technology founder, I’d discovered), and his smart, reflective caution.
Finally, he made up his mind to trust me. He admitted that what I had predicted had happened — a $1bn offer from Yahoo that his associates were urging him to accept.
He didn’t want to disappoint them — but he also wanted to remain independent. What should he do? Zuckerberg did not sell. By 2008, Facebook had passed the milestone of 100 million users. Within four years, it had reached one billion monthly users and become a global phenomenon. In 2017, the company was valued at over $40 billion.
AFTEr that initial meeting, I continued to give advice to Zuckerberg for several years. Ours was a purely business relationship, but I found that, in addition to his entrepreneurial brilliance, he was thoughtful, serious, intense and reserved, without the egotistical swagger that often characterises successful leaders.
Apart from my counselling not to accept Yahoo’s offer, perhaps the most important advice I gave him was to appoint Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer in 2008.
A dynamic Google executive and a former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers under President Clinton, she had subtle political instincts as well as business brilliance. I felt the pair would make a powerful team, as proved to be the case.
Today, it has over 2.2billion users, a monumental total that makes Facebook bigger than any country or religion. With his unique reach across the planet, Mark Zuckerberg now wields more influence than any elected president or government.
But, and it pains me to say, this unprecedented dominance can hardly be described as a force for good.
Facebook’s advocates idealistically claim that, by connecting the world, the site promotes friendship and communication across boundaries. Yet such assertions show a wilful blindness to the dark side of social media.
In reality, Facebook’s nearmonopoly power has been a wrecking ball targeting the fabric of our society.
Far from spreading harmony and understanding, it has undermined democracy, fuelled extremism, damaged public health, destroyed childhood innocence, fostered disinformation, obliterated privacy and introduced mass surveillance of the citizenry on a scale that belongs to George Orwell’s terrifying novel 1984.
The web was once hailed as an instrument for freedom. In the hands of Facebook, it is becoming a tool for authoritarianism and oppression.
The negative impact of irresponsible social media has been felt in Britain all too keenly in recent months, through the tragic catalogue of cases where vulnerable teenagers, like Molly russell, have committed suicide after accessing webpages devoted to self-harm.
Obsessed with revenue, oblivious to civic duty, sites like Facebook and Instagram, one of its subsidiaries, too often serve as a conduit for poison.
We don’t allow companies to dump toxic waste in the rivers and sea, so why should we tolerate the tech giants hosting lethal imagery?
The same destructive process can be seen in the political realm, where Facebook’s insecure user data has been cynically exploited by foreign agents and dubious campaigners to manipulate voters.
Such abuses were, in my view, undoubtedly factors in the narrow victories for Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016, as highlighted by the role of Cambridge Analytica, the tech firm which harvested millions of Facebook profiles to send out a flood of targeted adverts.
FrOM the turn of the decade, doubts about Facebook began to arise. I still did not dispute Zuckerberg’s idealism, but I started to have concerns about the consequences of his company’s business practices, especially the cavalier disregard for user privacy, the misuse of data and the fixation with growth.
Some of those worries were crystallised for me in 2011 when I listened to a talk by the internet activist Eli Pariser. He warned of the deepening risks caused by the absence of any real civic responsibility from social media platforms.
It was Pariser who coined the compelling phrase ‘filter bubbles’ to describe those online echo chambers created by the algorithms of personalised searches, where users receive news and information that only accords with their expressed preferences.
In a world in which computer users continually have their own views reinforced rather than challenged, filter bubbles are an instrument for polarisation and prejudice — which is exactly what we have seen.
Increasingly alarmed, I began to uncover other evidence of Facebook’s problematic influence, particularly the damage to public health caused by online addiction and the exploitation of impressionable children before their brains have fully developed.
At times, it seemed that Facebook had inverted the traditional relationship of technology to humans.
Instead of technology being a tool in service of humanity, it is humans who are now in service of technology. We have placed social media on a pedestal,
and now worship it blindly, regardless of the damage it is causing our society.
At the heart of Facebook’s malignancy is its business model, which is designed to grow advertising revenues constantly by increasing both the number of users and the time they spend on the site. It is a profoundly manipulative approach, very different to the normal commercial transaction, where a product is sold to a customer.
The product being sold by Facebook is not its own service to clients, but its users’ data to advertisers. The more detailed the data, the more lucrative it is to Facebook because advertisers can be lured with the promise of information about the tastes and habits of potential target audiences.
That is why Facebook puts such efforts into tracking its users. Facebook Connect, for instance, is a tool that allows users to access other websites with their Facebook login credentials. This might appear to make life easier but it also means that Facebook can track users as they move through cyberspace. Once again, convenience is the sweetener that encourages Facebook members to swallow the poison of permanent surveillance and lost privacy.
The same is true of one of Facebook’s most celebrated features, the ‘Like’ button — another incentive for users to stay on the site. After all, everyone wants to be liked.
But by acting as a barometer of social validation, the Like button further encourages online addiction and personal exposure, leaving users prey to the attentions of manipulators, bullies and abusers.
But most of this was unknown to me when, in early 2016, I first saw and heard evidence of people exploiting Facebook advertising tools for their own ends. This included credible rumours that Russian agents had harvested profiles from Facebook to intervene in the eU referendum campaign, and in the U.S. Republican primaries.
In my despondency, I sent a memo to Zuckerberg and Sandberg that October, shortly before the U.S. Presidential election.
‘I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,’ I wrote, adding that: ‘Facebook has done some things which are truly horrible and I can no longer excuse its behaviour.’
I went further: ‘Facebook is enabling people to do harm. It has the power to stop the harm. What it currently lacks is the incentive to do so.’
But neither of them were willing to acknowledge the problem or accept the need for serious change in practices.
even after Trump’s victory, when more evidence of Facebook-enabled Russian interference emerged, it was business as usual at the company’s hQ. This inflexibility was epitomised by two performances that Zuckerberg gave in front of the U.S. Congress in 2018 in response to the public outcry about the British firm Cambridge Analytica that assisted the Trump election campaign. Instead of any contrition or transparency, there was stonewalling and obfuscation. When called to give evidence to a an inquiry in London into fake news and disinformation last year, he didn’t even show up. Zuckerberg sees no reason to alter his methods, which have served him well until now, even if they have weakened the civic order. After 15 years in charge, he has acquired the status of a rock star and a cult leader. For all Facebook’s global reach, his is a highly centralised, lean company of only 30,000 employees, headed by a inner core of just ten people, with himself and Sandberg the final arbiters of all policy. And like Zuckerberg, she is not receptive to criticism, yet is a cool political operator. Soon after those Congress hearings, Facebook was forced to admit that 126 million of its users had been exposed to Russian interference, along with another 20 million Instagram users. But still there was no sign of change.
Given the scale of the threat — not only in America — to our public health and our democracy, this intransigence is no longer acceptable. Facebook has been given long enough to act, and has continually ducked its civic duty. The company should be forced to face up to its responsibilities by Government regulation.
I am a passionate believer in free market capitalism, which has brought unprecedented prosperity to the world. But what we are facing in the Facebook scandal is a chronic market failure, which can only be addressed by tough action.
After all, every business operating in the physical world has to abide by basic rules, whether it be car manufacturers upholding safety, or food retailers limiting adulteration of the products. Why should online providers be any different?
As part of this regulatory drive, there should be a raft of measures such as: heavy fines for privacy violations; tougher competition and the break-up of monopolies; and new rights that require companies
always to seek the consent of users before accessing data.
But beyond official regulation, two other changes need to happen. First, technology has to become more humane, more geared to the needs of users rather than commerce and advertising.
Second, users should change their behaviour so they are no longer in thrall to the tech giants. We don’t have play Facebook’s game all the time.
We dOn’T have to remain glued to our screens, the slaves to Zuckerberg’s emotional buttons. We can ignore the ‘likes’ and tagged photos, the fake news and the insidious adverts. Instead, we can switch off our devices and connect to the real world, giving handshakes and making eye contact with people who live differently and hold different views.
I conclude by recounting an incident in Zuckerberg’s second year at harvard. It was, I believe, an early indication of his ruthless ambition, gift for innovation and disdain for privacy.
Before Facebook, he had devised a computer programme called Facemash which allowed users to compare photos — taken from the online university directories — of two students and select which one was ‘hotter’.
It was an immediate success, gaining 22,000 views in the first four hours of its operation. But harvard authorities were, understandably, outraged. They not only shut down the programme but also threatened to expel its creator for violations of security, copyright and privacy.
The charges against Zuckerberg were subsequently dropped, and he was undaunted by that first clash with officialdom.
Shortly after the launch of Facebook, he was asked by a friend at harvard how he managed to get people to submit their personal information. ‘I don’t know why. They trust me, dumb f**ks,’ he reportedly said.
The trust has been broken. We have all been dumb for far too long.
Adapted from ZUCKED: WAKING UP TO THE FACEBOOK CATASTROPHE by Roger McNamee, published by HarperCollins at £16.99. © Roger McNamee 2019. To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid to February 24, 2019; p&p free on orders over £15), visit www. mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.