Facebook is confronting a crisis of public trust “that is going to destroy the company,” Mark Zuckerberg’s former mentor, the venture capitalist Roger McNamee,
“They haven’t even taken the first step of admitting there’s a problem,” he told Christiane Amanpour in an interview Tuesday. “If they don’t do something pretty soon, people are going to realize they can’t Facebook anymore.” That, he said, could “threaten them permanently.”
McNamee says that he confronted CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in 2016 about what he viewed as a “systemic issue in the product.”
“Their response was to treat it like a public relations problem, not a business problem,” he said.
McNamee joins a chorus of investors, tech workers, and executives who are questioning the power that tech platforms wield and their impact on society. He recently became an adviser to The Center for Humane Technology, an organization working to fix tech addiction by improving the design of apps and services.
