Documentary

The Facebook Dilemma

Oct 2018 🇺🇸 PBS Frontline

The Facebook Dilemma is a two-part FRONTLINE documentary examining Facebook's growth from a Harvard dorm-room project into a global platform, and the company's handling of the data-privacy and misinformation problems that followed. Roger McNamee appears throughout as one of several early insiders and investors describing warnings they raised internally — in his case, about political manipulation and advertising-tool abuse — years before those issues became public controversies. The film traces the platform's role in events ranging from Egypt's 2011 uprising to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, associating the company's growth-first culture with a documented pattern of underinvestment in safety and content moderation. TechKids Foundation includes this documentary as a detailed, journalistically reported account of how platform design and business incentives are linked to real-world harms, with McNamee as one of its central on-camera voices.

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CITATION

"The Facebook Dilemma." FRONTLINE, PBS, aired October 29–30, 2018. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/facebook-dilemma/

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