Roger McNamee ’s Facebook Critique

In a recentTimemagazine article,Roger McNamee offers an agitated criticism of Facebook, adapted from his bookZucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.  Facebook “has a huge impact on politics and social welfare,” he claims, and “has done things that are truly horrible.”  Facebook, he says, is “terrible for America. ”McNamee suggests his “history with the company made me a credible voice.” From 2005 to 2015, McNamee was one of a half dozen managing directors of Elevation Partners, an $1.9 billion private equity firm that bought and sold  shares in eight companies, including such oldies asForbes and Palm.   U2 singer Bono was a co-founder. Other partners included two former executives from Apple and one from Yahoo.  Another is married to the sister of Facebook’s COO.  Such investors are not necessarily disinterested observers, much less policy experts.BetweenNovember 2009 and June 2010 Elevation Partners invested $210 million for 1% of Facebook.   That was early, but two years after Microsoft made a larger investment.  Back then, McNamee and other investors had facetime with Zuckerberg. McNamee supposedly became alarmed while perusing “Bay Area for Bernie” on Facebook and finding suspicious memes critical of Hillary.  Later, he imagined the Brexit vote must be due to misleading Facebook posts (as if British tabloids and TV were silent).  “Brexit happens in June,”he says, “and then I think, Oh my god, what if it’s possible that in a ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs