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Investor Says He Tried to Warn Facebook About 'Bad Actors' Harming Innocent People

Mar 2018 🇺🇸 PBS NewsHour

In this PBS NewsHour interview, Roger McNamee — Facebook's early investor and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg — describes warning the company's leadership in 2016 that 'bad actors were taking the tools created for advertisers' and using them to target people in politics, housing, and civil rights. He says Facebook's response treated the concern as a public-relations issue rather than a business one, and he associates the platform's advertising-driven design with use patterns he characterizes as compulsive — features he argues are built to keep people scrolling and reacting longer than they intend. McNamee calls on Facebook to cooperate with investigators and to notify the roughly 126 million U.S. users whose feeds may have carried Russian-linked content ahead of the 2016 election. TechKids Foundation includes this interview as an early, on-record statement of McNamee's insider warning about engagement-driven platform design.

~126 million U.S. users

In the interview, McNamee said Facebook should inform the roughly 126 million U.S. users whose feeds may have carried Russian-linked content ahead of the 2016 election.

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"Investor Says He Tried to Warn Facebook About 'Bad Actors' Harming Innocent People." PBS NewsHour, March 20, 2018. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/investor-says-he-tried-to-warn-facebook-about-bad-actors-harming-innocent-people

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