Tech leaders lament the mess they've created

In the wake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional grilling in April over the platform’s role in disseminating political propaganda during the 2016 presidential election, the company rolled out a series of changes to its privacy and information-sharing policies, backed up with ads that essentially apologized to its users.

As the spread of misinformation has proliferated with the rise of social media, Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley powerhouse whose business model has landed it in hot water with government and the general public.

Adam Fisher, the author of “Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)”, says this is a moment of reckoning at many tech companies. But he is skeptical that much will change because “there’s too much money involved.”

“I talked to over 200 people in the valley — I’m talking about CEOs, billionaires — for this book,” Fisher told Grant Burningham, host of the Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots,” adding, “Almost to a person, they all expressed a kind of disappointment or fear or trepidation about what it was that they had created with the best of intentions — almost in every case.”

Fisher said Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams liked the chapter in his book in which he concluded that the site has morphed from a “platform where everyone was free to say anything to this platform where really scary kinds of mob rule-type politics could foment and gain power.”

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