'Roger McNamee, the former mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, has hit out at Facebook and demanded that the company change its ways.
In an essay for the Washington Monthly, McNamee outlined the problems he saw with the social network, saying that 'third parties' had been exploiting the 'unguarded' platform.
He says discriminatory advertisers, firms selling data of Black Lives Matter activists and Russian hackers had all helped warp the minds of its users.
'It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery,' he writes in his essay, describing what happened during the 2016 US election.
McNamee says that, along with journalists, he began noticing problems on Facebook's platform prior to the election.
He said he first went to Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, both of whom he calls friends and whom he says he greatly admired.
But he says they told them: 'We appreciate you reaching out; we think you're misinterpreting the news; we're doing great things that you can't see.'
He says they connected him to Facebook executive Dan Rose who told him that Facebook 'was not a media company and therefore was not responsible for the actions of third parties'.
Although he tried to ignore, McNamee says that after the election he started actively campaigning in Washington to address the platform's 'detrimental' role in society.'
Read more: Mark Zuckerberg's ex-mentor blasts Facebook for letting 'third parties' who want to 'drive people apart' exploit the network
