How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond. The level of political discourse, already in the gutter, was going to get even worse.

Our final hypothesis was that 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections. But we’ve seen where self-regulation leads, and it isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

[Roger McNamee is the managing director and a cofounder of Elevation Partners, an investment partnership focused on media and consumer technology.]