Zucked : Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (9780525561361) by McNamee Roger

Author:McNamee, Roger [McNamee, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2019-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Goldman’s tweets provided a glimpse into the state of mind of Facebook executives. Apparently, they viewed the Mueller indictment as exoneration. They thought it was okay that the Russians had exploited Facebook and Instagram to “divide America,” so long as they did not intend to sway the election. It demonstrated a stunning lack of situational awareness by a member of Facebook’s inner circle. Journalists and the blogosphere mocked Goldman and Facebook for being clueless. Goldman’s tweet storm had effectively confirmed Tavis’s view of the mind-set inside Facebook.

A few days later, I met Tavis for the first time, in a coffeehouse on Market Street in San Francisco. He told me that he hailed from North Carolina and went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he discovered a talent for entrepreneurship, launching a business that rented refrigerators to students. After college, Tavis began his career in market research. He became an expert at creating and executing surveys, which eventually landed him at the insurance company GEICO, then at Google. Facebook pursued him several times at Google, but Tavis was not tempted until early 2017, when the opportunity arose to be the personal pollster for Zuck and Sheryl.

With the Mueller indictment and the subsequent Goldman tweet storm as context, Tavis and I shared insights for ninety minutes. After leaving Facebook, Tavis had launched a new market research business, Honest Data, but hoped to join our team on a part-time basis, with the goal of communicating his concerns about Facebook to regulators. He had done research on the NDA that every Facebook employee must sign and concluded that it could be pierced in the event of a legal case, such as an investigation by a state attorney general. While we were not actively working with a state attorney general, we had built a relationship with the attorney general of New York and members of his team. I offered to make an introduction. It made sense to initiate relationships with other attorneys general.

Two days later, on Wednesday, Tristan and I went to Seattle to meet the chief of staff to the attorney general of Washington, the adolescent mental health team at the Gates Foundation, and the CEO of Microsoft. The three had very different interests and no prior exposure to us, so the best we could hope for would be to plant seeds. We did that in the first two meetings, before going to Microsoft headquarters for a meeting with the CEO, Satya Nadella, and the head of business development, Peggy Johnson. Nadella’s book, Hit Refresh, had expressed a philosophy consistent with the values Tristan had set for the Center for Humane Technology, and we hoped to secure his support for our effort. Companies like Microsoft don’t commit in the first meeting, but Satya and Peggy engaged thoughtfully with us. Satya noted that while two Microsoft products, Xbox and LinkedIn, used techniques from the Fogg playbook, most of its products did not. There would be significant benefits to adopting Tristan’s notions of humane design in the core Windows line.

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