We kept at this for a while and then, kaboom, the Observer and Carole Cadwalladr come out with the story about Cambridge Analytica and that changed everything. Is this book the culmination of th ose efforts? Like a stroke of lightning, it made me see what it was that had potentially influenced the election in the US, and had potentially influenced Brexit. Those habits evolve into addictions, and that situation makes vulnerable to manipulation. I met Tristan Harris, a design ethicist from Google, who talked about what he called “brain hacking”, a term that he invented to describe the persuasive technologies used by internet platforms that enable them to develop habits in the minds of the people who use the products. So that’s when I decided I’d better figure out exactly what happened. They very politely replied to me, but suggested that in their view what I’d seen was isolated and they had taken care of it. That was a massive violation of civil rights and just completely horrible.įinally, I reached out to Mark and Sheryl with an opinion piece I’d written, in which I suggested that there was a systemic problem with the algorithms and the business model that was allowing bad actors to harm innocent people.

The stuff they were spreading was uniformly inappropriate, it was misogynistic, it was disinformation.Īnd then a month later, I saw a report that Facebook had expelled a company that was using its advertising tools to gather information about people interested in Black Lives Matter and selling that data to police departments. In January 2016 I saw things coming out of Facebook groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

When did you first realise that things had taken a turn for the worse? He sold her on the company and they became a team. He wanted a chief operating officer and I suggested Sheryl Sandberg, and persuaded her to meet with Mark. It turned out that the reason he was coming to see me was that a company had offered a billion dollars for Facebook and everyone had told him to accept it. And I said, look, if you believe in your dream, I hope you’ll tell them no. So I met him, and before he said anything I told him that I was afraid somebody was going to try to buy the company, they were going to pay a billion dollars and everybody was going to tell him to take the money. I thought that represented a staggering success.

Zucked by Roger McNamee