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Facing Up to Facebook

Podcasts Mar 26, 2019 Elmira Bayrasli and Roger McNamee

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, his creation was supposed “to make the world more open and connected.” After massive privacy breaches and the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech, that mission lies in ruins. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the platform, joins our podcast to discuss what went wrong.

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Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

Roger McNamee

Writing for PS since 2018
3 Commentaries

Roger McNamee is a co-founder of Elevation Partners and an early investor in Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

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Petey Bee Mar 29, 2019

Besides regulating, one would need to somehow completely demonetize uses of user-generated content/metadata like the ones described. Cracking this nut is gonna involve going at some pretty sacred beliefs about capitalism.

There are maybe some ways to mitigate. In theory, moore's law type effects rapidly drive down the cost of creating parallel payment systems and comm networks to do all the same things as VISA/mastercard/google/facebook - but with licensing terms that are essentially reversed (a copyleft of sorts). Not that it will ever happen, most people are perfectly happy to sign away their life in exchange for a better selfie, or whatever tomorrow's equivalent of that will be. The appeal of this is it would preserve the actual value of social media - enabling lots of people to rapidly cooperate to crowdsource and verify information with higher reliability than traditional centralized media. China's government is terrified about this possibility, and to be honest, so is the US, for reasons that span the spectrum of defensibility. An international open-architecture system would be perhaps a way to avoid the negatives, but of course anything like that would invite sabotage.

Nor can Congress as a whole really be expected to do much without being forced to by a crisis. If this podcast's interview guest thinks the 2016 election can serve as that crisis, I would point out that the reaction has been to actively encourage further development of the spying and social control apparatus - with the facile excuse of national security, but of course the benefits will go to the contractors first.

Probably awareness is the main thing that can be done.
- Elmira Bayrasli Apr 1, 2019
  
  Thanks Petey. You make excellent points. It will be interesting to see how Congress takes up this issue and moves it forward. One thing is for sure, this is going to be a major focus in 2020.
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Elmira Bayrasli Mar 26, 2019

*NB at 14:47: It was Michael Cohen's Rockefeller Center office that was raided by the FBI in April 2018. Paul Manafort's home was searched in August 2017.
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