{"id":5744,"date":"2021-11-04T15:42:08","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T22:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedaily.ca\/news\/?p=5744"},"modified":"2021-11-04T15:51:42","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T22:51:42","slug":"investor-calls-for-criminal-charges-and-prison-for-facebook-execs-for-fake-whistleblowers-remarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedaily.ca\/news\/2021\/11\/04\/investor-calls-for-criminal-charges-and-prison-for-facebook-execs-for-fake-whistleblowers-remarks\/","title":{"rendered":"Investor calls for criminal charges and prison for Facebook execs for fake whistleblowers remarks."},"content":{"rendered":"

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When longtime Facebook investor Roger McNamee took the stage and called for six different criminal investigations into Facebook, and prison sentences for any executive found responsible, it became obvious that this year’s Web Summit would be different from previous iterations of the annual Lisbon-based tech conference.<\/p>\n

Normally, Web Summit is a largely apolitical gathering of tech startup founders, software nerds, hackers, and the venture capitalists who want to give them money.<\/p>\n

The conference is huge \u2014 80,000 people in some years \u2014 and it sprawls across four days on the shoreline of the Portuguese capital. Usually, the chatter is of initial public offerings, “scaling,” valuations, and “exits”.<\/p>\n

Not this time. The tech world is now in open revolt against its own big platforms. This year, Facebook is public enemy no.1. Social media is now the devil. Much of the chatter among attendees is about how to kill social media, regulate Google, or detour around them both.<\/p>\n

The conference was officially opened by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who told the 20,000-capacity audience at the centre stage that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should step down.<\/p>\n

“They were putting lives in jeopardy \u2026 Facebook is currently prioritising content in the news feed that has a side effect of prioritising and amplifying the most extreme and divisive content,” she said.<\/p>\n

She cited Ethiopia as an example. It is currently enduring a civil war that may topple its government.<\/p>\n

The “most fragile” countries don’t have artificially intelligent moderation that can remove toxic content automatically, because Facebook prioritizes English and its American users over everyone else, she said.<\/p>\n

In Ethiopia, “where ethnic violence is happening right now,” there are 100 million people who speak six languages and 95 dialects. Content moderation “doesn’t scale to the most fragile places in the world.”<\/p>\n

Attendees gave her a huge round of applause.<\/p>\n

The next day, McNamee did a fireside chat with Guardian journalist Jane Martinson in front of an audience of about 1,000. McNamee has been complaining about Facebook for years, of course.<\/p>\n

But Haugen’s leak of thousands of internal Facebook documents to The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets has given McNamee a new moment in the spotlight. McNamee’s Elevation Partners invested $210 million in Facebook before it went public in 2011. McNamee only began to sell his stake in 2019, according to the New Yorker.<\/p>\n

Between those two times, the value of Facebook roughly quadrupled. At one time, he was Zuckerberg’s mentor.<\/p>\n

“I think there are at least six areas where felony investigations are warranted,” he told the audience:<\/p>\n