‘I invested in Facebook … now I am ashamed’

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Roger McNamee was a Facebook fan and an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. Now he says he’s sad about the way the company is being run and the impact that it’s having on the world.

Zuckerberg first sought out his advice, McNamee says, in 2006, shortly after Yahoo was making a $1bn bid to buy the social media company. McNamee, a veteran Silicon Valley investor, says he saw Facebook’s potential and urged the young entrepreneur to stay independent. But a decade later, he saw hyper-partisan posts poisoning politics online, and during the late stages of the US presidential election in 2016 he turned from a Facebook booster to a Facebook critic.

Roger McNamee recently stopped into a studio to talk to us about his new book, Zucked, and he told us that Facebook, Google and other tech companies have serious flaws which require drastic and swift action.

Presenter: Mike Wendling Producer: Edward Main

(Photo: Roger McNamee. Credit: Rick Smolan)