Mark Zuckerberg's mentor: "Facebook - a threat to democracy"

- When I met Mark Zuckerberg, he was 22 years old, I became his advisor for three years. I helped bring in Sheryl Sandberg as CEO, I really believed in the company. I'm not here because I don't like technology, I'm here because I don't like technology that harms people.

Roger McNamee is an old fox in Silicon Valley. He saw the tech industry grow up to what it is today. From the first Mac to today's app economy. Or "surveillance capitalism," as he calls it. Because he thinks it has derailed. The big tech companies like Facebook and Youtube are designing their services to make them as addictive as possible. They also highlight content automatically, he says, which is detrimental to democracy:

- The most engaging content is not the good content. It is the hatred, the disinformation and the conspiracy theories. It's not like they sit there and say "wow, a good conspiracy theory, we'll spread it". They take what interests people the most, and it just happens to be hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories. And it's not because people like it, but because they don't mind looking at it.

Studies have shown that disinformation spreads more and faster than facts, and that there is a connection between the use of social media and the number of hate crimes that take place.

- You may think nethat is worthy, but it is engaging. To get your attention and keep it, there is nothing better than that. Therefore, you should never believe in network companies when they say they have a program to get rid of it. It has such an attraction, it's what gives the business model life, it's the essence of it.

In his book, Zucked: Waking up to The Facebook Catastrophe, he writes that Facebook is a threat to democracy, since a well-functioning one requires "shared facts and values". He also points out Google (mainly because of its subsidiary Youtube) and Twitter, to also disseminate information and contribute to polarization in society.

Is it possible to keep only the coolest content, and avoid the bad?

- Absolutely! It's about the business model. The argument that you have to sacrifice what's good about the internet to fix this is not true. All of these companies offered some form of these services before adopting this business model, they were only much less profitable then.

McNamee proposes a change of power from the companies to the users, by giving people the right to their own data. And so he believes in breaking up the monopoly. He thinks that today's big companies are too big, for the good of society:

- We have four companies today: Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft - worth between half to more than a trillion dollars each. They dominate everything in the digital world. They have business plans that will basically repackage almost every industry, and suck out any profits that can be made. In my world, where we have more competition and thus more innovation, there will probably not be any more companies of that size. But we will get thousands of companies worth one or tens of billions of dollars each. It will be more diverse and more interesting. By the way, not everyone would be in Silicon Valley. They might as well be in Stockholm.

Cut down the big trees so that new ones can grow?

- Or, just put the fence around the big trees so there is room for new ones to grow up!

Roger McNamee is also concerned about how health is affected by apps and services created by the world's leading behavioral design experts, with the goal of getting users to spend as much time as possible in the app. Not least how young people are affected by social media addictions.

- We have a whole generation of kids who didn't have to be children, because they thought they would be influencers, some kind of brand.

Roger McNamee still owns shares in Facebook, although he has sold most of it by now. SVT News has searched Facebook for a comment.