Facebook has been playing dirty for years, and each week seems to bring with it a new, damning indictment of how the social media giant has sold us all down the river.

Last week we covered the almost cult-like atmosphere amongst its employees, who feel pressured to place the company above all else in their lives, fall in line with their manager’s orders, and force cordiality with their colleagues.

Many of the company’s employees have jumped ship as a result of this, and now we’re hearing from Roger McNamee (pictured above), an early adviser to Zuckerberg and an early investor in Facebook.

He became very disillusioned with the company in the weeks leading up to America’s 2016 elections, emailing Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to voice his frustrations.

Now, in a scathing excerpt from his new book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, which was published on TIME, he has opened up about some of what he saw going on.

Let’s dive in:

To feed its AI and algorithms, Facebook gathered data anywhere it could. Before long, Facebook was spying on everyone, including people who do not use Facebook. Unfortunately for users, Facebook failed to safeguard that data. Facebook sometimes traded the data to get better business deals. These things increased user count and time on-site, but it took another innovation to make Facebook’s advertising business a giant success.

From late 2012 to 2017, Facebook perfected a new idea–growth hacking–where it experimented constantly with algorithms, new data types and small changes in design, measuring everything. Growth hacking enabled Facebook to monetize its oceans of data so effectively that growth-hacking metrics blocked out all other considerations. In the world of growth hacking, users are a metric, not people. Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user–and of that user’s friends–enabling the company to make tiny “improvements” in the user experience every day, which is to say it got better at manipulating the attention of users. Any advertiser could buy access to that attention. The Russians took full advantage. If civic responsibility ever came up in Facebook’s internal conversations, I can see no evidence of it…

Zuck [above with Sheryl Sandberg] and his employees seem to listen to criticism without changing their behavior. They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes. They do not do this because they are bad people. They do this because success has warped their perception of reality. They cannot imagine that the recent problems could be in any way linked to their designs or business decisions…

Facebook has leveraged our trust of family and friends to build one of the most valuable businesses in the world, but in the process, it has been careless with user data and aggravated the flaws in our democracy while leaving citizens ever less capable of thinking for themselves, knowing whom to trust or acting in their own interest.

Bad actors have had a field day exploiting Facebook and Google, leveraging user trust to spread disinformation and hate speech, to suppress voting and to polarize citizens in many countries. They will continue to do so until we, in our role as citizens, reclaim our right to self-determination.

McNamee goes on to name seven key areas  where we need to reform Facebook and Big Tech:

• Democracy
• Privacy
• Control your data
• Regulate
• Make it human
• Addiction
• Protect Children

If you want to read each of those, you can read the excerpt in full here.

Good luck trying to make Zuck appear human.

[source:time]