Book idea: Zucked — Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee

I’m currently reading the above book by famed Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee and I like it. Everyone has heard of social media these days and most of us are using it, may it be Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I’ve always been skeptical about social media, privacy and what ultimately happens to our data — this book confirms my suspicions.

The book is similar to an autobiography, McNamee reflects on his career as an investor and a musician. He started the private equity investment firm Elevation Partners with U2s Bono in 2004 and was one of the early mentors to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A huge fan of Facebook in its early years, McNamee grew more and more skeptical of the company’s ethics and business dealings in recent years.

McNamee has become a strong advocate for regulating social media because it is very easy to twist the message and influence users with simple, misleading soundbites. We’ve all heard of the controversial Brexit referendum and the US election in 2016 and McNamee appeared on Canadian media yesterday and today, warning about the unintended consequences that social media might have on election results that are affecting democracy negatively.

He recommends Canada freeze social media out of elections, especially the upcoming federal election in the fall of 2019. Such a step would certainly be very difficult to implement as all the major politicians use social media to convey and promote their messages. It almost seems impossible these days to have no political campaigning on Twitter and Facebook. I think that such a step could only be realized with some sort of new legislation backed by all the major political parties in Canada. The upcoming federal election is certainly going to be interesting! Hopefully proper political discourse and reasoning will prevail, as Canada is regarded a beacon of sanity in the world.

Best regards from Toronto,

Harald Seemann

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