Social media companies have increasingly played major roles in political discourse around the world and according to one expert, the fallout has been significant.

"We've had extraordinary damage done to democracy, public health, public safety, and people's ability to make their own choices," Roger McNamee, managing director at Elevation Partners and an early Facebook investor, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "Yet policymakers have done nothing, absolutely nothing."

Companies like Facebook-parent Meta (META) and Twitter (TWTR) have garnered criticism over the past decade, largely due to their dissemination of misinformation/disinformation as it relates to elections.

In recent years, Twitter in particular has been lambasted for elevating the platforms of former President Donald Trump, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA),and, most recently, rapper Kanye West.

Earlier this week, West utilized Twitter and Instagram to share anti-Semitic comments before his accounts were eventually locked due to hate speech.

"I think that the whole situation with Kanye West, with Elon Musk attempting to buy Twitter, really highlights the extraordinary inaction and, frankly, in my mind, really unpardonable inaction by Congress, by the president, to do something about what is clearly a threat ... especially to national security," McNamee said. "Twitter has a whistleblower who showed that there are people inside Twitter who're working for foreign governments. For a platform that has as much influence on politics and democracy as Twitter has, that's extraordinarily dangerous."

'Not at all confident we can fix this problem'

McNamee — who authored "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe" — laid out three key factors to the ongoing problems with social media: the scale of the platforms, the latency, and the incentives.

"Facebook, for example, where the worst offenses have taken place, has literally billions of posts every day," he said. "So the notion that you're going to somehow effectively monitor that number of posts is a big stretch."