Book

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Feb 2019 🇺🇸 Penguin Press

Zucked is early Facebook investor and Mark Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee's 2019 book describing his shift from company champion to public critic. McNamee traces how Facebook's engagement-driven advertising model rewards content that captures attention regardless of accuracy, and he associates this design choice with the platform's vulnerability to manipulation during the 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit referendum. He argues that products built to maximize time-on-app can foster compulsive, hard-to-moderate use patterns among people of all ages, and calls for outside regulation — data-portability rules, algorithmic transparency, and antitrust scrutiny — rather than voluntary industry reform. TechKids Foundation includes Zucked as a widely read insider account connecting attention-economy business models to problematic use patterns, presented as McNamee's own argument rather than a clinical finding.

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CITATION

McNamee, Roger. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Penguin Press, February 5, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/598206/zucked-by-roger-mcnamee/

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