Waking Up Zucked

Guest Post by Kathleen Murphey.

That the 2020 Presidential Election was close depressed me and made me search for higher education jobs in Canada, but then I read the Mother Jones article, “How Facebook Screwed Us All.” If Facebook and other social media platforms are enabling bad actors to undermine democracy across the globe, they could be forced to adhere to better regulation standards.

To learn more, I am reading Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee. McNamee outlines Facebook’s rise and its failure to imagine its persuasion architecture being used for nefarious purposes—even though evidence of bad actors using its platform keeps piling up from Brexit to the 2016 U.S. election to incidents in Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee. Penguin Books, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kathleen Murphey is an associate professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.  She does both academic writing and creative writing (www.kathleenmurphey.com).

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