Zucked- A warning about Facebook

[Bob Kuczewski]

From Penguin Random House:

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Zucked
WAKING UP TO THE FACEBOOK CATASTROPHE
By ROGER MCNAMEE

Hardcover
Feb 05, 2019 | 352 Pages

ABOUT ZUCKED

The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society – and sets out to try to stop it. 

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund’s bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn’t. 

ZUCKED is McNamee’s intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world’s most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It’s a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author’s dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face. 

And then comes the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence of one horrific piece of news after another about the malign ends to which the Facebook platform has been put. To McNamee’s shock, even still Facebook’s leaders duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue, and fortuitously meets up with some fellow travelers who share his concern, and help him sharpen its focus. Soon he and a dream team of Silicon Valley technologists are charging into the fray, to raise consciousness about the existential threat of Facebook, and the persuasion architecture of the attention economy more broadly — to our public health and to our political order. 

Zucked is both an enthralling personal narrative and a masterful explication of the forces that have conspired to place us all on the horns of this dilemma. This is the story of a company and its leadership, but it’s also a larger tale of a business sector unmoored from normal constraints, just at a moment of political and cultural crisis, the worst possible time to be given new tools for summoning the darker angels of our nature and whipping them into a frenzy. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Roger McNamee happened to be in the right place to witness a crime, and it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing and what we ought to do about it. The result of that effort is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us.

ABOUT ROGER MCNAMEE

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He co-founded successful funds in venture, crossover and private equity. His most recent fund, Elevation, included U2’s Bono as a co-founder. He holds a B.A. from Yale University ...

Hardcover | $28.00 
Published by Penguin Press
Feb 05, 2019 | 352 Pages | 6 x 9 | ISBN 9780525561354

PRAISE

“A candid and highly entertaining explanation of how and why a man who spent decades picking tech winners and cheering his industry on has been carried to the shore of social activism.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A timely reckoning with Facebook’s growth and data-obsessed culture. . . [Zucked] is the first narrative tale of Facebook’s unravelling over the past two years . . . McNamee excels at grounding Facebook in the historical context of the technology industry.” — Financial Times
 
“[An] excellent new book . . . [McNamee] is one of the social network’s biggest critics. He’s a canny and persuasive one too. In “Zucked,” McNamee lays out an argument why it and other tech giants have grown into a monstrous threat to democracy. Better still he offers tangible solutions . . . What makes McNamee so credible is his status as a Silicon Valley insider. He also has a knack for distilling often complex or meandering TED Talks and Medium posts about the ills of social media into something comprehensible, not least for those inside the D.C. Beltway . . . McNamee doesn’t just scream fire, though. He also provides a reasonable framework for solving some of the issues . . . For anyone looking for a primer on what’s wrong with social media and what to do about it, the book is well worth the read.” —Reuters

“Think of Zucked as the story after Social Network’s credits roll. McNamee, an early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor, weaves together a story of failed leadership, bad actors and algorithms against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election.” — Hollywood Reporter 

“McNamee’s work is both a first-rate history of social media and a cautionary manifesto protesting their often overlooked and still growing dangers to human society.” — Booklist

 “Regardless of where you stand on the issue, you’ll want to see why one of Facebook’s biggest champions became one of its fiercest critics.” — Business Insider 
 
“A comprehensible primer on the political pitfalls of big tech.” — Publishers Weekly 

“Part memoir, part indictment, Zucked chronicles Facebook’s history to demonstrate that its practices of ‘invasive surveillance, careless sharing of private data, and behavior modification in pursuit of unprecedented scale and influence,’ far from being a series of accidental oversights, were in fact foundational to the company’s astronomical success. This historical approach allows McNamee to draw valuable connections between present-day troubles and the company’s philosophical source code.” — Bookforum 

“Roger McNamee’s Zucked fully captures the disastrous consequences that occur when people running companies wielding enormous power don’t listen deeply to their stakeholders, fail to exercise their ethical responsibilities and don’t make trust their number one value.”  — Marc Benioff, chariman and co-CEO of Salesforce

“McNamee puts his finger on serious problems in online environments, especially social networking platforms. I consider this book to be a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the societal impact of cyberspace.”  — Vint Cerf, internet pioneer 

“Roger McNamee is an investor with the nose of an investigator. This unafraid and unapologetic critique is enhanced by McNamee’s personal association with Facebook’s leaders and his long career in the industry. Whether you believe technology is the problem or the solution, one has no choice but to listen. It’s only democracy at stake.”  — Emily Chang, author of Brotopia

“Roger McNamee is truly the most interesting man in the world  — legendary investor, virtuoso guitarist, and damn lucid writer. He’s written a terrific book that is both soulful memoir and muckracking exposé of social media. Everyone who spends their day staring into screens needs to read his impassioned tale. — Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind

“A frightening view behind the scenes of how absolute power and panoptic technologies can corrupt our politics and civic commons in this age of increasing-returns monopolies. Complementing Jaron Lanier’s recent warnings with a clear-eyed view of politics, antitrust, and the law, this is essential reading for activists and policy makers as we work to preserve privacy and decency and a civil society in the internet age.” — Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems,creator of the Berkeley Unix operating system

“Zucked is the mesmerizing and often hilarious story of how Facebook went from young darling to adolescent menace, not to mention a serious danger to democracy. With revelations on every page, you won’t know whether to laugh or weep.” — Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness

“A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology.” — Kirkus

[Bill Cummings]

I’ve received two notifications by text that my Facebook account has been flagged for violations.
I have a limited time to answer before I’m banned.
I find this interesting because I’ve never opened a Facebook account.
Could someone that has an account let me know if I am the victim of
Identity theft?

[Bob Kuczewski]

Josh Hawley questions Mark Zuckerberg about the "Tasks" platform and "Centra" tool.

https://youtu.be/pOdrPruSnrw

[Bob Kuczewski]

Nearly a year ago (May 20, 2020), Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by Hugh Hewitt. You can find the full interview here:

    Hugh Hewitt's Interview of Mark Zuckerberg

Here's a focus on the part of that transcript related to Facebook's "Oversight Board" (I've highlighted the last part):

HH: Pleased to welcome now Mark Zuckerberg to the Hugh Hewitt Show. Hey, Mark, how are you?

MZ: Hey, thanks for having me.

HH: It is good. This is the third time we’ve had a chance to talk, the first two times off the record, and I respect that. Thank you for joining me on the record. I really appreciate it.

MZ: I’m happy to. There’s lot to go through.

     :

HH: What was the objective, Mark, what was the objective of the Oversight Board? When it comes to content moderation, for example, of China’s pushing disinformation on the origin of the virus, what is the objective of the Oversight Board with regards to that content? Does it get to them?

MZ: So the Oversight Board is kind of going at a different vein of what we work on. But basically, what we’ve found is that people want an independent organization that they can appeal to if they think that we’re getting something wrong on content, right? So if, you know, people obviously really care about having the ability to have a voice. And you know, I really care about that. That’s a big part of why I created the company. I don’t think you create a company like this that empowers individuals if you don’t believe that individual voices is really important. But then you get into all these very complex nuances like no matter what you think about free expression or giving people a voice, you obviously aren’t going to want to support terrorist content or child exploitation or some of these really terrible things. And you know, in U.S. tradition, which is the strongest free speech tradition in the world, we have principles like you can’t go into a movie theater and yell fire in the middle of a crowded theater, because it could put people in imminent risk of physical harm. So all the debates then flow downstream from that to well, what is, how do you define what is harmful and what isn’t, and how do you make it so that people can express as many possible things as they would like, but you just try to cut down on the things that are truly going to be dangerous. And those are, they’re philosophical questions, they’re political questions that are going to be debated forever. And frankly, I understand why a lot of people would be uncomfortable that a single private company would be making so many decisions about that. So we embarked on this process to create a self-regulatory body which we call the oversight board. And it’s made of, to start, 20, basically people from all walks of life – former judges, former prime ministers, you know, people who have run non-profits, academics. And they come from all different backgrounds. It’s a very diverse group. But the one thing that they all have in common and that we vetted them all for is a very strong commitment to giving people a voice and free expression. But the idea, Hugh, with the oversight board…

HH: Have you got a sense of how, have you got a sense of how the conservative or the center-right American political opinion makers have reacted to the Oversight Board, yet?

MZ: A little. It’s, and I think this, it’s a new thing, so I think that there’s, people have questions about how it’s going to play out. I think at this point, I think more people know where I stand on free expression. I mean, I gave this speech in Georgetown last years. I think at this point, I’ve made some very hard public decisions on coming down pretty strong on the side of giving people voice and free expression. So I think people kind of understand where I am on this. And now, we have established this new oversight board, and I think that there is, you know, people have questions across the political spectrum about how will this board influence the process? Is it going to be as strong on free expression as I am? On the other side of the spectrum, I think a lot of people worry is this really going to be an appropriate, is this going to get to good outcomes, because Mark and the team were so focused on appointing people who believe so strongly in free expression? So I think that there are questions about how this will play out. But the announcement of the oversight board was never meant to be the end of the process. I think this body will build its credibility over time by the rulings that it makes when people appeal decisions to it. And it will rule over time, I imagine, very thoughtfully and transparently, and I would imagine in a way that will be very protective of people’s free expression.

HH: The most piercing criticism I have heard is…

MZ: When it makes its decisions, I think it’ll establish its reputation that way.

HH: The most piercing criticism I’ve heard, and I’m not really much on content moderation, I’m much more libertarian than most, is that of the 20 members, 15 are not Americans. Of the 5, only one is an originalist. I know Judge McConnell, but he’ll get rolled by 19 people. And do we really want 15 foreigners moderating content about American political discourse? In other words, how in the world did we end up, it’s almost like a new Coke moment. How did you with your commitment at Georgetown, and even on Monday at the European speech, how did you end up with a group that most sort of free speech absolutists like me say "oh, my gosh, that’s not a free speech group, that’s a bureaucracy like the EU"?

MZ: Well, I think we’re going to have to see how it, and I think it’ll build its credibility over time through the decisions it makes.

So of the 20 members of Facebook's "Oversight Board", 15 are not Americans, and of the 5 Americans, only 1 might be considered an "originalist" (conservative). That doesn't sound like a group that wants to Make America Great Again. Is it any surprise that they've banned President Trump?

I have to say that makes me feel a lot better about being banned by Jack and Davis. After all, I've been working to Make Hang Gliding Great Again.

[Bob Kuczewski]

From the radio today ...

Dennis Prager said:

"They [corporations] are completely amoral institutions."

There's a lot of truth to that statement.

[Craig Muhonen]

This guy got ZUCKED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMUfkVsghrY&t=1112s


"How'd I get here"...zzzz...
OR
"how to get high on gasoline fumes and Carbon Monoxide, screw up my ears, and get sued for crashing into a park killing 1 and cutting a little kid almost in half.
But I'm O K, But I can make videos!
Tucker should GETT this book.
I think I have u$hpa insurance, have to check, and I'll circle back to you on that one".

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a post and dog attachment from Rick Masters and JBP on 12 rules.

Tell the truth.
Do not do things that you hate.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.
Pay attention.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.
Be careful who you share good news with.
Be careful who you share bad news with.
Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
Maintain your connections with people.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
Nothing well done is insignificant.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Dress like the person you want to be.
Be precise in your speech.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Don't avoid something frightening if it stands in your way -- and don't do unnecessarily dangerous things.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Do not transform your wife into a maid.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Read something written by someone great.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Don't let bullies get away with it.
Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing -- and propose a solution.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering.



.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Richard Stallman maintains a series of "What's bad about: ________" on various topics. Here's a link to his "What's bad about: Facebook" page:

       https://stallman.org/facebook.html

[Bob Kuczewski]

From Richard Stallman's personal site: https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html:

Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.

RMS's Bio | The GNU Project
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If you feel your organization needs a "presence" in Facebook

-- Richard Stallman

2016-12-11

French Translation

Facebook is a surveillance engine, accumulating lots of personal data which is also available to the state. For your privacy and freedom's sake, it is important not to have an active Facebook account; refusing blocks Facebook's main channel for collecting information about you and, through you, about your friends and relatives. (Whatsapp, a subsidiary of Facebook, is also important to avoid.) Explaining to them why you firmly insist on routing your communications with them through some other system will strengthen your will power to resist systems that use you to harm you and others.

Nowadays Facebook has gained so much power that it puts freedom and democracy in danger. Its rules for what can be published amount to censorship of society as a whole, leading to political disputes. But those disputes are a distraction from the bigger point that no company should have so much power.

Facebook has the power to manipulate elections through subtle policy changes. Whether or not it has intentionally done so, this state of affairs is dangerous.

Many organizations maintain a Facebook page to attract public support. Having the page does not directly harm the organization. However, if it's not careful, the page will add to Facebook's power.

Organizations typically manage Facebook pages to aim for the maximum possible visibility. Facebook's cunning engineers have designed the system so that the way to get maximum visibility is to boost Facebook's power as much as possible.

The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.

General principles

• Make the organization's own web site the go-to place for all information about the organization. Whatever people want to know, the web site should be the best place to look for it.
• Say in the Facebook page that the organization's own web site is the best place to look for information about the organization. Explicitly ask people to make links always to the web site, never to the Facebook page.
• Adopt this motto: "Facebook is a bad place for a person to be. When people find us on Facebook, we lead them away from Facebook and then talk with them elsewhere."

What to post on Facebook; what not to post

• Select what you post on the Facebook page so that the organization's own web site is clearly the best place to find information about the organization.
• Do post important new articles and announcements from the organization on Facebook, but only around half of them. Then say, in the Facebook page, "See our web site — we have a lot more there."
• When you announce an event in Facebook, don't put the full story there. Do state the place, date, time, and a brief description, enough for people to attend if they wish — but give a link to the page in the organization's web site about the event, and reserve part of the interesting information about the event for there.
• Post the same list of event summaries in the web site, so that people who want a summary don't think Facebook is the best place to look for it.
• Don't update all the fields of transitory information in the Facebook page. Instead, when you change your the organization's web site significantly, update the Facebook "status" with a few words to say so.
• On the organization's website, provide a way for people to ask for notifications of changes and new announcements, so that they don't depend on Facebook for this.
• Don't post on Facebook any information about the participants in your events — especially not their names. Respect their privacy! The only exception is names of speakers or teachers, as part of the advance description of events.
• In particular, don't post photos on Facebook that show any people. Remember that Facebook identifies people in photos from their faces, and even from the backs of their heads. Don't show anyone's head, viewed from any angle, to Facebook.

Avoid Facebook messages

• State in the Facebook page that those who wish to talk with the organization should use other systems, not through Facebook messages. State which systems you prefer, and give the account names or numbers to use.

Other communication systems may have other flaws. At the FSF we use mainly email and phone calls; we use SIP for audio/video communication over the internet, but never Skype because Skype requires proprietary client software. However, the crucial point here is that any communication method other than Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) will move people out of Facebook.

If someone sends you a Facebook message despite your request, respond by saying, "Please let's switch to system X, Y or Z to have this conversation. We do not want to give Facebook any more information about our organization or its participants, including you."

Avoid helping or boosting Facebook

• Don't mention the Facebook page in your web site or other postings. The Facebook page is for those that look for it on Facebook.
• Don't display a "Like" button on your web site. Facebook uses "Like" buttons in non-Facebook pages to track all visitors to those pages. The button tracks even visitors that don't have Facebook accounts.
• It is advisable on general principles to use a browser such as IceCat that blocks tracking systems in web pages, including the Facebook Like buttons and most advertisements.
• Another reason not to have a "Like" button in your own web site is that they encourage visitors to be more involved in Facebook.

How you can communicate safely with Facebook

Facebook uses many methods to get data about people. Some of them are rather tricky. If people in the organization have Facebook accounts and want to use those to manage the organization's page, the organization has no reason to object. But the organization must never urge a person to submit to Facebook's surveillance in order to manage the organization's page. That would be a gross wrong to the person in question.

Here is a guide for how people can manage the page using pseudonymous Facebook accounts. A few of them stretch Facebook's commands, but it is not wrong to do that — Facebook does not deserve obedience.

• Make an account under an alias for maintaining the organization's page. Give made-up plausible data which is not humorous and doesn't relate to you. Then never use the account for anything except to handle the organization's page. Facebook will never have a reason to doubt the data on the account.
• If several people manage the organization's page, give each one a separate alias account. Don't give any of the same data in two accounts.
• Make a couple more such accounts as backup.
• The only more-or-less safe way to connect to Facebook is through a browser. Never connect using Facebook's mobile app, because that requires giving Facebook access to other information on the mobile device, including personal contact information, text messages, calender events, and other confidential information. This can expose personal information — yours and others'. It can even expose sensitive information, harming you or others you know. This is no surprise, because the app is proprietary software (an injustice in itself; see here), and proprietary software commonly snoops on users (see proprietary surveillance).
• It is safest to connect to Facebook only from a computer that belongs to the organization and is in the organization's office.
• To make the site work without the need to run nonfree Javascript code, visit to m.facebook.com rather than facebook.com itself.
• If you ever connect to Facebook from your own computer (rather than the organization's computer in its office), do it this way: install the Tor Browser Bundle (available for Windows and OS X as well as GNU/Linux) and use it to visit https://m.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ rather than Facebook directly. This stops Facebook from determining your location or your IP address.
  
  Note: the site facebookcorewwwi.onion.to is a fake. Don't be fooled.
• Never "check in" at a location no matter how much Facebook nags you.
• Make a separate local account on the computer for each Facebook account, connect to it from that local account, and don't ever use that local account for anything else.
• If you don't make a special local user account to talk to Facebook from, delete cookies immediately after each connection with Facebook. Not just once a day! Facebook uses cookies to surveil other browsing done from the same account. Many browsers will allow you to specify a setting to treat all cookies as one-session cookies. That will delete them automatically, provided you shut down the browser after each connection with Facebook, which is advisable.
• Do not give Facebook access to any real account on any other site. If Facebook demands info about your other accounts, make real accounts that you don't really use, and tell Facebook about those. It is OK to give Facebook the email addresses that the organization publishes for contact from the public, but not the passwords of those email accounts.

Facebook harms people in many ways, and there is no way to completely avoid the harm. We hope this compromise approach to Facebook will provide benefit to the organization, while saving it from becoming Facebook's tool. Meanwhile, there are many other social networks one can use. Many well-known centralized social networks are less intrusive than Facebook; what's more, GNU Social and Diaspora respect users' rights through a decentralized architecture, based on free software — why not try them?

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Copyright (c) 2016 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Mark Zuckerberg admits ...
 
 

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