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Could Facebook Have Stopped January 6? With Frances Haugen · The Oath and The Office

0:09
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Oath in the Office podcast. I'm John Fegelsang.
0:11
Speaker 1: We have a great show planned today, including the woman
0:15
Speaker 1: who is the inspiration for the new film, The Social Reckoning.
0:18
Speaker 1: Please let me turn it over to the star of
0:20
Speaker 1: our show, the author of The Oath in the Office,
0:23
Speaker 1: the pride of the Brown University Poli Sci Department, where
0:26
Speaker 1: they call him the Mac People of Earth. Let me
0:28
Speaker 1: welcome Corey Bretschneider. Hello, Professor.
0:31
Speaker 2: Hi, John.
0:32
Speaker 3: Of course, this is a podcast about the threat to democracy,
0:35
Speaker 3: and we're going to talk about stories of the week.
0:37
Speaker 3: But we're also going to have an amazing guest. I mean,
0:40
Speaker 3: I've been talking about the Facebook movie. We'll talk about
0:43
Speaker 3: it today as well. But when you see it, you'll
0:45
Speaker 3: see the movie centers, although Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting
0:49
Speaker 3: character played by Jeremy Strong, it really focuses on a hero.
0:53
Speaker 3: And that hero is Francis Haugen. And Francis is our
0:56
Speaker 3: guest today. It's an amazing conversation. We taped it earlier.
1:00
Speaker 3: And as you'll hear, it's a story about how Facebook
1:04
Speaker 3: really did threaten our democracy on January 6th. in its
1:09
Speaker 3: rise of extremist groups, how it's enabled that. And we
1:12
Speaker 3: spoke to the person, too, though, who John and I
1:15
Speaker 3: really regard as a hero, the person who blew the
1:17
Speaker 3: whistle on what was happening, and who also has ideas
1:20
Speaker 3: about how to stop these social media companies, including Facebook,
1:24
Speaker 3: from continuing to threaten our democracy.
1:26
Speaker 2: Quite a show today.
1:27
Speaker 1: Yes, and she's played by Mikey Madison. And I must say,
1:30
Speaker 1: her character has a bit more of a uplifting arc
1:33
Speaker 1: than a Nora, but check it out. Corey, I want
1:36
Speaker 1: to begin by, by asking you about Vivek as a
1:39
Speaker 1: comedy fan. He means a lot to me, Vivek, for
1:41
Speaker 1: those who don't know, I've always thought he was kind
1:43
Speaker 1: of like, uh, he was kind of like if Eddie
1:45
Speaker 1: Haskell from leave it to beaver had been up doing
1:48
Speaker 1: tainted cocaine in the basement with James Woods all night.
1:51
Speaker 1: That's sort of where Vivek is for me. And of course,
1:54
Speaker 1: he made the headlines this week by having this campaign
1:57
Speaker 1: ad starring Amy Acton's estranged mother, Ms. Donna Arthur, who was,
2:02
Speaker 1: of course, married to the man who allegedly abused her
2:06
Speaker 1: for years until the authorities took her away at age
2:10
Speaker 1: 12 and her brother as well. Donna Arthur chose to
2:12
Speaker 1: stay with her husband and the man who had abused
2:16
Speaker 1: her children, stayed with them until his death. And, you know,
2:19
Speaker 1: Amy Acton's talked about their childhood and how they lived
2:21
Speaker 1: in a tent and their family history and and her
2:24
Speaker 1: mother's husband's criminal indictment for rape. This ad was, of course,
2:28
Speaker 1: this woman, Donna Arthur, calling her estranged daughter a liar.
2:31
Speaker 1: She hasn't seen this child in almost 50 years. And
2:35
Speaker 1: it's really turned into a moral Rorschach test, I think,
2:38
Speaker 1: for a lot of people on the right. We've seen
2:40
Speaker 1: some Republicans, including Governor DeWine, decry it. Ramaswamy has doubled
2:44
Speaker 1: down on this, spent more money. The initial ad didn't
2:47
Speaker 1: have the disclaimer in the end, Corey, saying, I'm Vivek
2:49
Speaker 1: and I approve this message. which means it wasn't really
2:52
Speaker 1: a political ad. It was just a smear designed to
2:55
Speaker 1: hurt someone. But now that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance
2:59
Speaker 1: have expressed their huge fans for having a sex abuser's
3:03
Speaker 1: enabler scorn and ridicule her own flesh and blood who
3:07
Speaker 1: was an abuse victim, we're going to see more of
3:09
Speaker 1: this ad. What does this tell you, Professor, about the
3:11
Speaker 1: standards of political conduct in America right now?
3:14
Speaker 2: It just shows us how far we've fallen.
3:16
Speaker 3: And part of the story is about Vivek and how
3:18
Speaker 3: reprehensible this individual is And thankfully, there is pushback.
3:22
Speaker 2: You know, that's part of the hope.
3:23
Speaker 3: There are venues that are canceling on him. The Republican
3:26
Speaker 3: governor of Ohio has condemned this ad and said that
3:29
Speaker 3: he should pull it down. But yet the fact that
3:32
Speaker 3: it continues tells us that there's some reason.
3:34
Speaker 2: Why he's running it.
3:35
Speaker 3: Now, one reason is that this is the mentee of
3:37
Speaker 3: Donald Trump and he's emulating him and something that celebrates,
3:41
Speaker 3: that brushes aside sex abuse and boosts actually this person,
3:46
Speaker 3: the mother who was complicit, it looks like, in the
3:48
Speaker 3: sex abuse of her child, at least allegedly. And not
3:53
Speaker 3: just allegedly, there was an indictment in that case of
3:56
Speaker 3: the husband who committed this abuse. So this is a
4:00
Speaker 3: craving character who's taking a playbook from his mentor, but
4:03
Speaker 3: it's even more than that. And that's what I wanted
4:05
Speaker 3: to say, because it really deals with our theme for today.
4:08
Speaker 3: We have an ideal in democracy of deliberation and discussion
4:13
Speaker 3: and back and.
4:14
Speaker 2: Forth and argument.
4:15
Speaker 3: And that's not what's going on in this story or
4:17
Speaker 3: in our politics or with Donald Trump or with Vivek.
4:21
Speaker 3: What's going on instead is doing things that appear perverse
4:25
Speaker 3: to observers that have some point to them. And as
4:29
Speaker 3: horrible as this ad is, it works for some segment
4:32
Speaker 3: of the base. And that must be why they continue
4:35
Speaker 3: to run it, that they must have data that shows
4:37
Speaker 3: this is going to help them with a certain segment of.
4:39
Speaker 2: The American people.
4:40
Speaker 3: And that is a sickness of our politics. And the
4:43
Speaker 3: fact that you can have an ad as reprehensible as
4:46
Speaker 3: this serving any purpose is a sign of how things
4:50
Speaker 3: have fallen, that a world that's really run by algorithms
4:53
Speaker 3: and by outrage and by stimulation of people based on, well,
4:58
Speaker 3: the opposite of facts is really a sign of the times.
5:02
Speaker 1: We also must remember, however, Professor, that they are stupid.
5:07
Speaker 1: And what we're seeing here is not unlike this desperate
5:10
Speaker 1: attempt to humiliate Ilhan Omar and or the president just
5:15
Speaker 1: melting into Islamophobic bigotry, alleging that this American-born doctor who
5:21
Speaker 1: wants to give everybody health care is on the side
5:24
Speaker 1: of the 9-11 terrorists. I mean, Trump didn't just lie
5:26
Speaker 1: about Dr. Al-Sayed. He exploited the deaths of 9-11 to
5:31
Speaker 1: lie about someone else. And when looking at this, I
5:35
Speaker 1: think the larger story, I don't know if it's the
5:37
Speaker 1: advertisement itself, the decision by the president and vice president
5:42
Speaker 1: to turn any criticism of it into this partisan loyalty test.
5:46
Speaker 1: But I think you might be right. The worst part
5:48
Speaker 1: about it might be that all this controversy is going
5:50
Speaker 1: to shift all the attention away from policy issues like healthcare,
5:54
Speaker 1: the economy, public services, the cost of gas, and we'll
5:58
Speaker 1: be normalizing these tactics while at the same time not
6:02
Speaker 1: talking about the issues that we really should be talking
6:04
Speaker 1: about before election day.
6:06
Speaker 2: That's right.
6:06
Speaker 3: I mean, so much of what's going on in politics
6:08
Speaker 3: right now Well, it's a kind of classic idea, I
6:11
Speaker 3: should say, in political science, like who sets the agenda,
6:14
Speaker 3: what's on the agenda, and just what the questions are
6:18
Speaker 3: that we're focused on.
6:19
Speaker 2: People don't think of it this way, but attention gets focused.
6:23
Speaker 3: And, you know, if you're focused on the issues that
6:25
Speaker 3: help your party, this is a traditional idea, you're in
6:28
Speaker 3: better shape. For instance, symbolic issues often helped Republican candidates.
6:33
Speaker 2: In the 1970s and 80s as opposed to economic issues. Well,
6:37
Speaker 2: look at what's happening now.
6:38
Speaker 3: It's a similar idea that if we're focused on this
6:41
Speaker 3: controversy over sexual assault, there shouldn't be any controversy. But
6:45
Speaker 3: of course, Donald Trump and Vivek and J.D. Vance are
6:48
Speaker 3: creating it. What are we not talking about? We're not
6:50
Speaker 3: talking about the fact that inflation is through the roof.
6:54
Speaker 3: We're not talking about the fact that this president promised
6:56
Speaker 3: to bring prices down and got people to vote for
6:59
Speaker 3: him based on that. And the reason we're not talking
7:01
Speaker 3: about it is because they don't want us to talk
7:03
Speaker 3: about it.
7:03
Speaker 2: The more we talk about that, we're going to.
7:05
Speaker 3: See why this regime, this president and his allies like
7:09
Speaker 3: Vivek are really harming us economically. And they can distract
7:13
Speaker 3: us with this really horrific nonsense. But it is also
7:17
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that people are clicking on social media,
7:19
Speaker 3: as we'll talk about with Francis.
7:21
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, this whole thing is Streisand affected so
7:24
Speaker 1: hard against Vivek. I mean, it's going to marry James Brolin,
7:27
Speaker 1: I think. I mean, you know, I think when Vivek
7:29
Speaker 1: finally shuffles off this mortal coil, having never achieved the
7:33
Speaker 1: office he sought, this will be mentioned in the first
7:35
Speaker 1: paragraph of his future obituary, which I hope he lives
7:38
Speaker 1: a very long life and has plenty of chances to
7:40
Speaker 1: repent for all this. But, you know, Corey, I got
7:43
Speaker 1: to say, they're doing this. It just reeks of panic
7:47
Speaker 1: because you don't do this to try to convince those
7:50
Speaker 1: Democrats to cross over for your side. You don't do
7:53
Speaker 1: this to try to convince all those moderates and independents
7:56
Speaker 1: to come over to your side. You do this because
7:58
Speaker 1: you're desperate to try to get your own core base
8:02
Speaker 1: to show up. And in many cases, the racists, I mean,
8:06
Speaker 1: the Ilhan Omar raid was a Hail Mary pass to
8:09
Speaker 1: get the racists excited to come vote for a guy
8:11
Speaker 1: who just jacked up their gas prices and lied about everything.
8:13
Speaker 1: And I sort of view this as the same thing.
8:15
Speaker 1: It wreaks more of their desperation than of any kind
8:19
Speaker 1: of shrewdness. No doubt it'll test well with some people,
8:22
Speaker 1: But I have to believe the majority of Americans are
8:25
Speaker 1: repelled by this once they learn the facts.
8:28
Speaker 2: You know, I hope that's true, John, of course.
8:30
Speaker 3: And we've had moments of overreach before that resulted not
8:33
Speaker 3: just in the end of a candidate, but of a
8:35
Speaker 3: political party. I think of the Federalist Party that literally
8:38
Speaker 3: shut down the opposition.
8:39
Speaker 2: And of course, they don't exist anymore because they overreached.
8:42
Speaker 3: But what scares me at the same time that I
8:44
Speaker 3: want to share your hope is that this stuff works.
8:47
Speaker 3: You know, let's not forget that Donald Trump learned to
8:50
Speaker 3: use social media in his first election.
8:53
Speaker 2: His racist lies about Obama.
8:55
Speaker 1: The racist lies about the birth certificate or why he's
8:57
Speaker 1: in power now.
8:58
Speaker 3: And when he came down the escalator that first time
9:01
Speaker 3: and talked about Mexico sending us, you know, rapists and
9:04
Speaker 3: not their finest people.
9:05
Speaker 2: How outrageous was that? And yet it worked.
9:07
Speaker 3: And so that's what they're relying on, that there's a
9:09
Speaker 3: segment of the American people that will come to the
9:11
Speaker 3: polls as a result of this. But absolutely, you know,
9:14
Speaker 3: and I should say Vivek's polls should be in the
9:17
Speaker 3: 30s or 20s, and they're not.
9:18
Speaker 2: They're going down.
9:19
Speaker 3: But It is still a competitive race in Ohio. And
9:22
Speaker 3: that tells us how damaging and how damaged our politics are.
9:27
Speaker 3: And we have to start to think not just about
9:29
Speaker 3: the particular actors, but about the infrastructure that's doing all
9:32
Speaker 3: of this and the algorithms and the social media that's
9:36
Speaker 3: enabling it.
9:37
Speaker 1: Yes, sir. Well, this whole story is so ugly and
9:39
Speaker 1: libelous and vulgar that it really it makes me happy
9:42
Speaker 1: that we're still watching Republicans cheat the old fashioned wholesome
9:45
Speaker 1: ways by exploiting a compromised Department of Justice. Todd Blanch, DOJ,
9:50
Speaker 1: announced criminal charges, Professor, against 28 California residents who are
9:55
Speaker 1: all lawful permanent residents alleging violations of federal voting laws. Now,
9:59
Speaker 1: this is completely... poppycock, but they've got cases of fraudulent
10:02
Speaker 1: voter registration, meaning someone accidentally got registered to vote but
10:06
Speaker 1: never actually went to do it. That happened with a
10:09
Speaker 1: 61-year-old woman. False statements and naturalization applications. They've said 11
10:14
Speaker 1: defendants were arrested as part of Operation Protect the Vote.
10:17
Speaker 1: This from the White House that, of course, had cops
10:20
Speaker 1: beaten for a lie to steal the vote. So we
10:23
Speaker 1: know they don't mean it. I mean, before we even
10:26
Speaker 1: get into the politics, can you separate the legal issues here?
10:29
Speaker 1: Because we know why they're doing this. They're trying to
10:31
Speaker 1: create a pretense that there's widespread voter fraud, which only
10:34
Speaker 1: happens when Trump is president. Didn't happen under Obama. Didn't
10:37
Speaker 1: happen under Biden. But when Trump's in the White House,
10:39
Speaker 1: they have to have you believe it's chaos. Federal law
10:43
Speaker 1: prohibits fraud. non-citizens voting. We know that. But there's a
10:46
Speaker 1: huge difference between being registered to vote, being issued a ballot,
10:50
Speaker 1: and actually casting a ballot. Has Todd Blanch accused anyone
10:53
Speaker 1: in California of voting illegally? Not even in numbers that
10:56
Speaker 1: would affect an election, just anyone of illegally being able
10:59
Speaker 1: to vote?
11:01
Speaker 3: Well, we're a long way from seeing if any of
11:03
Speaker 3: these people who supposedly have committed election fraud actually did
11:06
Speaker 3: commit election fraud. It could be that there were clerical errors,
11:09
Speaker 3: for instance, happened. And as we find out, and as
11:12
Speaker 3: we go through the criminal process, which will be after
11:15
Speaker 3: the election, of course, and after they've had the chance
11:17
Speaker 3: to try to suppress the vote and to cause chaos
11:21
Speaker 3: in our system by bringing up these accusations, we'll see
11:23
Speaker 3: if any of it's true. But to my mind, what
11:26
Speaker 3: it's really doing is actually linked to another story. So
11:29
Speaker 3: they're using these threats of prosecutions in order to try
11:33
Speaker 3: to force California to commandeer, and I'll talk about what
11:37
Speaker 3: that means, in order to look into about 20,000 instances of,
11:42
Speaker 3: they claim, suspicious voter registrations. And it's a way to
11:46
Speaker 3: try to, again, throw a wrench into our electoral system
11:50
Speaker 3: and to lead us to have no faith in it
11:52
Speaker 3: and to try to co-opt California into helping them.
11:55
Speaker 1: The permission structure for stealing an election, the permission structure
11:58
Speaker 1: for throwing out a lawful vote.
12:00
Speaker 2: Right.
12:01
Speaker 3: That's what all of this is. It's not actually, of course,
12:03
Speaker 3: looking into election fraud. But now here's the irony, John,
12:05
Speaker 3: and this is going to surprise listeners, and maybe it
12:08
Speaker 3: will surprise you. In an odd way, the hero of
12:11
Speaker 3: this story is William Rehnquist, who I don't think of
12:14
Speaker 3: as the person who is really concerned to protect our democracy.
12:20
Speaker 2: That's not the spirit.
12:21
Speaker 3: The Nixon employee turned Supreme Court justice No.
12:25
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Segregationist.
12:27
Speaker 2: Segregationist.
12:29
Speaker 1: People forget we had a segregationist running the Supreme Court
12:32
Speaker 1: in this century. Go ahead.
12:34
Speaker 3: Yes. If you look at some of his memos and
12:37
Speaker 3: opinions about civil rights, this isn't somebody who would be
12:40
Speaker 3: on the side of democracy.
12:41
Speaker 2: But now here's the big but.
12:43
Speaker 3: Rehnquist was, I would say, the primary proponent of an
12:47
Speaker 3: idea that's sometimes called the new federalism. Our Constitution gives
12:51
Speaker 3: limited powers to the federal government. And the Tenth Amendment
12:54
Speaker 3: reinforced the idea that those powers are limited and those
12:57
Speaker 3: that are not granted to the federal government, the national government,
13:01
Speaker 3: are left over and reserved to the states and local government. Now,
13:05
Speaker 3: why does this constitutional law lesson about the topic of
13:09
Speaker 3: the new federalism and the Tenth Amendment matter so much?
13:12
Speaker 2: I'll add one more.
13:14
Speaker 3: Wonky idea, the idea of dual federalism. that the sovereignty
13:18
Speaker 3: of the people lies both in the federal government, but
13:20
Speaker 3: also in the states. That's how we realize the idea
13:23
Speaker 3: of democracy. Well, why it matters is because the idea
13:27
Speaker 3: here is almost a textbook violation of what Rehnquist said
13:30
Speaker 3: you couldn't do. And that's to try to commandeer local
13:33
Speaker 3: government and make them do the bidding of the federal government. Now,
13:37
Speaker 3: in this case, do the bidding in order to undermine
13:39
Speaker 3: our election integrity. And no, the 10th Amendment, I think,
13:42
Speaker 3: protects us here. And that's what California is going to
13:45
Speaker 3: say in these lawsuits today. And it's why they'll prevail,
13:47
Speaker 3: I think, against this really dangerous attempt to manipulate our
13:51
Speaker 3: elections yet again.
13:52
Speaker 1: Well, then let me bring it over to Alaska, because
13:54
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's more evil, but it's probably
13:56
Speaker 1: equally corrupt. Y'all know that there is the Republican nominee,
13:59
Speaker 1: Dan Sullivan, and an independent candidate with the same name, right?
14:03
Speaker 1: So voters are going to have to pay attention and
14:05
Speaker 1: make sure they're voting for the right one. We'll come
14:07
Speaker 1: back to why that's historically relevant in a second. So
14:10
Speaker 1: the DOJ has announced, oh, no, if the Democrat wins,
14:14
Speaker 1: if Mary Patola wins in Alaska, We might have to
14:17
Speaker 1: throw that whole election out because clearly people voted accidentally
14:20
Speaker 1: for the wrong person. Clearly, if the Democrat wins, we
14:24
Speaker 1: have to toss it. So the Democrats asked the federal
14:28
Speaker 1: court to throw out the DOJ's, I think, unprecedented lawsuit
14:32
Speaker 1: to preemptively block certification of a Democratic woman senator, an
14:38
Speaker 1: indigenous no less, in Alaska if the Republican loses. this
14:42
Speaker 1: is the most insane thing I've ever heard of. Why
14:44
Speaker 1: would the federal government professors seek to intervene before an
14:48
Speaker 1: election result even comes in, in case the Republican incumbent loses?
14:53
Speaker 1: There's only one reason I can think of, and it
14:55
Speaker 1: involves cheating.
14:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you laid it out perfectly.
14:58
Speaker 3: What blows my mind, and I also was flabbergasted, you know,
15:01
Speaker 3: we're seeing shocking stuff all the time, but the idea
15:04
Speaker 3: that the election has to be stopped only if the
15:08
Speaker 3: Democratic candidates wins.
15:10
Speaker 2: I mean, it's almost like, You know.
15:12
Speaker 1: If the independent Dan Sullivan wins, they got to shut
15:17
Speaker 1: up and let that guy serve.
15:18
Speaker 2: But instead, you're right. Yeah.
15:19
Speaker 3: They're not claiming that somehow the process is flawed as
15:22
Speaker 3: a whole or something needs to be fixed. No, it's
15:24
Speaker 3: that if this outcome that harms us, our party happens,
15:28
Speaker 3: that's the thing that we want you to stop.
15:30
Speaker 2: And that's why I think it's going nowhere.
15:31
Speaker 3: It's obviously a partisan attempt to try to manipulate the
15:35
Speaker 3: outcome of an election, which is the core of what
15:37
Speaker 3: you cannot do in election law.
15:39
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
15:40
Speaker 1: Exactly. And I want to point out the Alaska Supreme
15:42
Speaker 1: Court already allowed the second Dan Sullivan to remain on
15:46
Speaker 1: the ballot. So the DOJ's got no business whatsoever interfering
15:50
Speaker 1: beyond the fact that they really want to cheat. Here's
15:52
Speaker 1: why it's historically relevant, Corey. We talked about this on
15:55
Speaker 1: Sirius XM this week. You know, if they double down
15:58
Speaker 1: on this and try to do it and throw out
16:01
Speaker 1: the democratically elected Senate of Alaska... They're going to say, well,
16:05
Speaker 1: the voters didn't realize they were voting for the wrong person.
16:08
Speaker 1: These voters didn't realize on the ballot that they weren't
16:10
Speaker 1: voting for the candidate they intended. And if that happens,
16:13
Speaker 1: I really want to hear Brett Kavanaugh's take on things.
16:16
Speaker 1: Because this, if we can now throw out the election
16:19
Speaker 1: results of a state because some voters were confused by
16:22
Speaker 1: the ballot, then when do we inaugurate President Al Gore
16:26
Speaker 1: for winning Florida in the year 2000, Corey? Because that's,
16:29
Speaker 1: tell me I'm wrong. That was the same exact thing.
16:32
Speaker 1: That was an illegal ballot. Warren Christopher, who would have
16:34
Speaker 1: been 101 this week, rest in peace. Warren Christopher said
16:38
Speaker 1: the ballot was illegal. Supreme Court didn't care. And again,
16:41
Speaker 1: it's on the Democrats in Florida for certifying an illegal
16:43
Speaker 1: ballot anyway. But it wasn't legal. There were not thousands
16:47
Speaker 1: of old Jews in Florida who really wanted to vote
16:49
Speaker 1: for Pat Buchanan. This was the whole hanging Chad debacle
16:52
Speaker 1: because they were confused. They don't care. It's only about
16:56
Speaker 1: when can the status quo assume power, and they will
16:58
Speaker 1: take an opposing view to what they fought for in
17:02
Speaker 1: 2000 to do the opposite here in Alaska. Am I
17:05
Speaker 1: off on this comparison?
17:06
Speaker 3: Not only are you not off, John, but you're talking
17:08
Speaker 3: about my topic that I am really— diving into. When
17:12
Speaker 3: the history of Brett Kavanaugh and his hypocrisy is written,
17:15
Speaker 3: it is going to shock Americans because it's somebody who
17:18
Speaker 3: just will move between legal positions depending on which Republican
17:22
Speaker 3: master he's serving at the particular time.
17:25
Speaker 2: And I know because I'm writing that history. So I
17:28
Speaker 2: can guarantee it is being written.
17:31
Speaker 3: It's part of what I'm doing is in my book
17:33
Speaker 3: about the post-Nixon threat to democracy is looking at Brett Kavanaugh,
17:36
Speaker 3: who is against the independent counsel and law later in
17:40
Speaker 3: his career when he's working for a president, for it
17:43
Speaker 3: when he's trying to prosecute Bill Clinton.
17:45
Speaker 2: And the other place that I see.
17:46
Speaker 3: His coming hypocrisy is when it comes to the idea
17:50
Speaker 3: in Bush v. Gore of just allowing the votes to count,
17:53
Speaker 3: they come up with excuse after excuse. You know, they
17:56
Speaker 3: claim there's an equal protection argument in having all ballots
18:00
Speaker 3: counted equally across the United States.
18:03
Speaker 2: That's in the decision itself.
18:05
Speaker 3: There's an Article 2 argument that Brett Kavanaugh himself championed
18:09
Speaker 3: that says you can't allow the recount because it violates
18:12
Speaker 3: Florida law and under Article 2, which creates the.
18:15
Speaker 2: Rules of presidential election, that's not allowed. This was the
18:18
Speaker 2: guy who was the.
18:18
Speaker 3: Spokesman for not allowing the votes to be counted.
18:23
Speaker 2: That's how he endeared himself to the Bush team.
18:29
Speaker 3: And yet here we have the Republican Party saying, you know,
18:32
Speaker 3: we've got to essentially redo it.
18:34
Speaker 2: We lose. Unbelievable.
18:36
Speaker 1: And also, I just want to close it out before
18:38
Speaker 1: we hit the break that there's a long history in
18:40
Speaker 1: Alaska of trying to block the native vote. And Mary
18:43
Speaker 1: Patola being an indigenous candidate is very, very exciting. And
18:47
Speaker 1: maybe that's why, as of Friday, at least 18 early
18:50
Speaker 1: voting centers in rural Alaska still hadn't been opened. All
18:54
Speaker 1: the areas that are home to a majority Alaska native
18:57
Speaker 1: population still that have historically had to deal with disenfranchising
19:01
Speaker 1: policies over and over again. And Todd Blanch, let's point out,
19:05
Speaker 1: Trump will never go to jail, but boy, there's a
19:07
Speaker 1: good chance Attorney General Jack Smith will do something. First,
19:10
Speaker 1: he came out and said that they weren't trying to
19:12
Speaker 1: block Alaska from certifying the vote, but his own department's
19:15
Speaker 1: complaint proved that they are. And then the next day,
19:19
Speaker 1: Todd Blanch tried to blame it on Alaska having ranked
19:21
Speaker 1: choice voting, which caused confusion to justify his lawsuit. So
19:27
Speaker 1: The top cop has already lied twice about this corrupt lawsuit.
19:32
Speaker 1: I also want to point out that Mary Peltola was
19:34
Speaker 1: involved in a terrible car crash the other night. Apparently,
19:38
Speaker 1: she only had minor injuries. Her vehicle with her family
19:41
Speaker 1: was traveling to a campaign event and hit by another driver.
19:44
Speaker 1: She's a great lady, and we certainly wish her a
19:46
Speaker 1: swift recovery in addition to a decisive victory. Corey, it's
19:49
Speaker 1: going to be an ugly couple of weeks.
19:52
Speaker 3: Well, Trump won was all about him trying to manipulate
19:54
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice into doing his bidding, into buying,
19:58
Speaker 3: for instance, his false claims that there was election fraud
20:01
Speaker 3: when he lost and that actually he won the election.
20:04
Speaker 3: And there was resistance within the Department of Justice. It
20:06
Speaker 3: functioned in many ways as you would hope it would
20:09
Speaker 3: function with civil servants and even attorney generals saying, you know,
20:12
Speaker 3: I don't think so. And now what's happening is the
20:15
Speaker 3: extreme opposite. Todd Blanche is functioning just as we thought
20:18
Speaker 3: he would, as the president's criminal defense lawyer and attack dog.
20:22
Speaker 3: And if there's an election that's to be won on
20:24
Speaker 3: behalf of Republicans that he can use the threat of
20:27
Speaker 3: a lawsuit to influence, then so be it. And they're
20:29
Speaker 3: doing that in Alaska. They're doing it in California. And
20:32
Speaker 3: they really are damaging. I worry permanently it's going to
20:35
Speaker 3: be hard to recover from this. Trust in our electoral system.
20:39
Speaker 3: And the events of January 6th continue on as a
20:42
Speaker 3: matter of Department of Justice policy. Wow.
20:46
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break. And when we come back,
20:48
Speaker 1: I want to tug on your coat, Corey, about a
20:51
Speaker 1: couple of other issues, including what they are trying to
20:54
Speaker 1: do to James Comey as soon as a judge says
20:58
Speaker 1: they have to rehire James Comey's daughter. We'll be right
21:00
Speaker 1: back on The Oath in the Office. Welcome back to
21:11
Speaker 1: The Oath in the Office. Professor, wow, what a week.
21:14
Speaker 1: Federal judge in New York ruled on Monday that Donald
21:18
Speaker 1: Trump's Justice Department, I hope you're sitting down for this, Corey,
21:20
Speaker 1: this might shock you. Donald Trump's Justice Department broke the
21:24
Speaker 1: law when they fired Maureen Comey for no reason. Now,
21:27
Speaker 1: this woman had spent about a decade as a federal
21:29
Speaker 1: prosecutor in Manhattan. She worked on cases against Diddy. She
21:33
Speaker 1: worked on cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, which can
21:36
Speaker 1: have helped her. But she got so much praise from
21:39
Speaker 1: all corners of the government along the way. And in 2025,
21:43
Speaker 1: they had to fire her. And her lawsuit alleged that
21:45
Speaker 1: the real reason was her last name. Her father is
21:48
Speaker 1: Trump's very prominent critic who he has harassed and fired
21:52
Speaker 1: for a long time. And U.S. District Judge Jesse Fuhrman wrote,
21:55
Speaker 1: the department, and I quote, invented a new and expansive
21:58
Speaker 1: theory of executive power to justify the firing. I think
22:01
Speaker 1: that means he's calling her a liar. What exactly did
22:03
Speaker 1: the judge find unlawful, Corey, about Maureen Comey's dismissal?
22:07
Speaker 3: Well, you can't fire somebody for solely political reasons in
22:11
Speaker 3: retribution for hating their father. That's a basic point about
22:16
Speaker 3: the way the civil service protections in the United States work.
22:19
Speaker 3: And I should say many civil servants in the executive branch,
22:22
Speaker 3: as much as this president believes they are just loyalists
22:25
Speaker 3: who are supposed to work for him, enjoy protection from
22:29
Speaker 3: political firing. And that's an idea that goes back to
22:31
Speaker 3: the 19th century. For instance, the Pendleton Act was meant
22:34
Speaker 3: as a way of reforming the civil service, to make
22:37
Speaker 3: sure that we had people who were actually doing their jobs.
22:39
Speaker 3: And in the Department of Justice, the idea that civil
22:42
Speaker 3: servants are serving the common good is protected by disallowing
22:48
Speaker 3: political firing. Now, I think that we have to think,
22:51
Speaker 3: look at this legislation and think about ways of increasing it,
22:54
Speaker 3: given what we've seen in the past few years. But
22:57
Speaker 3: at least this judge is not buying it, the idea
22:59
Speaker 3: that the president can fire anyone he wants.
23:01
Speaker 2: Let me be clear, as much as.
23:02
Speaker 3: I agree with what this judge did, and I'm very
23:05
Speaker 3: glad to see Maureen Comey vindicated, the theory that the
23:08
Speaker 3: president is relying on is not quirky.
23:11
Speaker 2: It isn't just his theory.
23:12
Speaker 3: It's the theory of the unitary executive that really claims
23:15
Speaker 3: that basically all executive power is in the hands and
23:20
Speaker 3: vested in one person, and that's the president. And he
23:23
Speaker 3: has a lot of the Supreme Court often backing him up.
23:27
Speaker 3: So we have seen this radical theory implemented in his
23:31
Speaker 3: destruction of protection, for instance, for independent agencies, the Federal
23:35
Speaker 3: Trade Commission, and his desire to reclassify so much of
23:39
Speaker 3: the federal government as fireable for his own.
23:42
Speaker 2: Reasons, whatever they be, including political reasons.
23:45
Speaker 3: So as much as I want to celebrate this victory,
23:47
Speaker 3: it also points to an area of law that we
23:50
Speaker 3: really need to reform in order to ensure, well, the
23:53
Speaker 3: ideal of the 19th century, that we're not going to
23:55
Speaker 3: have presidents engaged in political firing whenever they're elected. And
24:00
Speaker 3: this is a textbook example of a political firing, of course.
24:03
Speaker 1: I want to point out the judge ordered retroactive reinstatement
24:06
Speaker 1: and back pay. And in case anyone thinks this isn't
24:08
Speaker 1: complete corruption, the same day the judge ruled against the
24:11
Speaker 1: DOJ over Maureen Comey's firing, the DOJ's prosecutors pursued a
24:16
Speaker 1: third criminal case against her father, he of the dangerous seashells. Now, Corey,
24:21
Speaker 1: the DOJ says they're going to appeal this Maureen Comey ruling.
24:24
Speaker 1: What legal arguments can this administration make at this point?
24:29
Speaker 1: And would anything be at stake if a higher court
24:31
Speaker 1: overturns these rulings? I don't expect any of these guys
24:33
Speaker 1: to ever be held accountable for their crimes, but I mean,
24:36
Speaker 1: they're going to appeal it? What's their argument going to be?
24:39
Speaker 3: Well, I gave you a preview of it, and I'll
24:41
Speaker 3: lay it out even more specifically. The idea of the
24:43
Speaker 3: unitary executive is very simple and very radical. It says
24:47
Speaker 3: that all of the protections of civil servants that are
24:50
Speaker 3: in the executive branch, independent agencies, are all, even if
24:54
Speaker 3: they're codified in law, they're illegal because the Constitution gives
24:59
Speaker 3: the power of the president all executive power. The language
25:03
Speaker 3: that they rely on, they claim this is based on
25:05
Speaker 3: the text, it's just a few words, is the idea
25:07
Speaker 3: that the executive power is vested in a president.
25:11
Speaker 2: And what they believed, and.
25:12
Speaker 3: When I say they, this isn't just this administration, it
25:15
Speaker 3: is this Supreme Court, it is the lawyers on this
25:18
Speaker 3: Supreme Court who were lawyers in the Reagan administration when
25:21
Speaker 3: these Theories were developed largely at the behest of Justices
25:25
Speaker 3: Scalia and Judge Bork. They're the heroes, really, of the
25:29
Speaker 3: unitary executive. And what they want to do is increase
25:33
Speaker 3: presidential power so that ultimately they've already succeeded in one ambition,
25:38
Speaker 3: destroying independent agencies, allowing the head of the FTC or
25:41
Speaker 3: the FCC to be fired for political reasons. And the
25:45
Speaker 3: next move, this is where they're going next. And this
25:47
Speaker 3: is why they care about this case. It's not just
25:49
Speaker 3: a one-off. is to give him the.
25:51
Speaker 2: Ability to fire all civil servants.
25:54
Speaker 3: So that means all the people like Maureen Comey, who
25:57
Speaker 3: are just doing their jobs, trying to carry out laws
26:00
Speaker 3: passed by Congress, which also has a power vested in
26:03
Speaker 3: it to make the law, they want to destroy those laws,
26:07
Speaker 3: say they're unconstitutional. So that's the wider argument. It's about
26:11
Speaker 3: this unitary executive idea.
26:13
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to get to the heart
26:15
Speaker 1: of how deeply, corrosively hypocritical these guys have been regarding
26:20
Speaker 1: James Comey from the beginning, and I'm no big Comey fan,
26:23
Speaker 1: believe me. But I mean, let's not forget the name
26:25
Speaker 1: Rod Rosenstein way back in the first term when Trump
26:29
Speaker 1: fired James Comey as FBI director in May of 2017.
26:33
Speaker 1: Do you remember what the administration's official stated justification was?
26:38
Speaker 1: For firing him was, it was Comey's handling of the
26:40
Speaker 1: FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
26:44
Speaker 1: Rod Rosenstein's memo said that Comey had been really unfair
26:48
Speaker 1: to Hillary Clinton, the woman they hated and lied about
26:51
Speaker 1: and smeared and besmirched. But when they wanted to fire Comey,
26:55
Speaker 1: they fired him because he was unfair to her in
26:58
Speaker 1: his investigation, which we all said at the time. But
27:01
Speaker 1: that was their official stated reason for firing this guy.
27:05
Speaker 1: And then they fired his daughter because she's his daughter.
27:08
Speaker 1: And you actually have a personal story, Professor, from Brown
27:11
Speaker 1: University connected to Hillary Clinton that deals with this directly.
27:16
Speaker 1: The question of why she lost to Donald Trump in 2016.
27:20
Speaker 1: Could you share that story with our listeners? Because I
27:21
Speaker 1: think sometimes this sort of unexpected personal moment reveals what
27:25
Speaker 1: the post-election analysis cannot. What happened and what did it
27:29
Speaker 1: teach you about Hillary Clinton and the political climate of
27:32
Speaker 1: 10 years ago?
27:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.
27:33
Speaker 3: Just to close out the other story, the prosecution of
27:36
Speaker 3: Comey himself continues to be one of the most brazen.
27:39
Speaker 2: Acts of retribution.
27:40
Speaker 3: The idea that you would prosecute somebody for a seashell
27:44
Speaker 3: display that says 86-47. It's just so obvious to us
27:48
Speaker 3: when the history is written, this will be the paradigm
27:52
Speaker 3: of Trump's attack on democracy by trying to attack his opponents.
27:56
Speaker 3: But my story about Hillary Clinton also transitions us to
27:59
Speaker 3: our interview with Francis Haugen. It helps us to understand
28:02
Speaker 3: the power of Facebook and why in a podcast about
28:06
Speaker 3: threats to democracy and saving democracy, she is such an
28:09
Speaker 3: essential guest. And it goes back to that election, to
28:13
Speaker 3: Trump's rise. Hillary Clinton came to Brown. And, you know,
28:17
Speaker 3: sometimes in these events, you just don't learn anything. It's
28:20
Speaker 3: a lot of slogans. That was not the case here.
28:23
Speaker 3: She told the story that I've never seen reported. And
28:26
Speaker 3: I'll be interested from listeners if you've seen it anywhere else.
28:29
Speaker 3: But what she said is that Facebook came to her
28:32
Speaker 3: in that election and came to Donald Trump and offered
28:35
Speaker 3: to embed several Facebook employees within the camp and to
28:41
Speaker 3: help them essentially use the tool of Facebook in their
28:45
Speaker 3: election attempts to win election.
28:47
Speaker 2: To the presidency of the United States.
28:49
Speaker 3: And Hillary Clinton, after deliberating about it, explained that she
28:53
Speaker 3: decided not to do it. that Obama, for instance, had
28:57
Speaker 3: used Facebook very effectively. They thought they had a good
28:59
Speaker 3: internal team enough to make use of the technology and
29:03
Speaker 3: to compete effectively with Trump. Trump did take the offer,
29:07
Speaker 3: and she attributed that decision to why she lost, because
29:11
Speaker 3: what Trump was able to do with this team, which
29:13
Speaker 3: sounds like it had a kind of Stockholm syndrome, they
29:16
Speaker 3: weren't Trump supporters, but they went all in on helping
29:19
Speaker 3: him manipulate these algorithms to get people to vote.
29:22
Speaker 2: And what did they use? They used lies, disinformation.
29:25
Speaker 3: And so from the beginning, the Trump presidency and Facebook
29:29
Speaker 3: have been so tied together. And unfortunately, partly at Hillary
29:32
Speaker 3: Clinton's own explanation goes to her decision to allow the
29:36
Speaker 3: company employees to embed with her. But Trump decision at
29:40
Speaker 3: the same time to accept the offer.
29:43
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes me think about bringing it back to,
29:45
Speaker 1: you know, the whole Amy Acton story and that horrific ad. Like,
29:50
Speaker 1: you know, you look at these gendered expectations of voters
29:53
Speaker 1: evaluate women candidates and suddenly, you know, personal attacks happen.
29:58
Speaker 1: I mean, they are much more powerful in some cases
30:01
Speaker 1: with some voters than legitimate scrutiny of a candidate's record.
30:04
Speaker 3: You know, it's why it's so important to we had
30:06
Speaker 3: a computer scientist on not too long ago, Congressman Ted Lieu,
30:09
Speaker 3: talking to us about regulating AI. And when we think
30:12
Speaker 3: about Facebook, what we're seeing on our screens and what
30:15
Speaker 3: we're hearing about. to you and I and to our listeners,
30:18
Speaker 3: often just makes no sense. How can Vivek Ramaswamy be
30:21
Speaker 3: saying these things? How can he still be competitive in
30:24
Speaker 3: a race? And the answer has to do with the
30:26
Speaker 3: complexities of the way that social media works and our
30:30
Speaker 3: politics works now. And we're going to need an insider
30:33
Speaker 3: to explain that to us. And that's why this film,
30:36
Speaker 3: The Social Reckoning, is so important. I recommend that people
30:39
Speaker 3: see it. You'll see the hero Francis Haugen is, but
30:43
Speaker 3: you're also going to hear in a few moments.
30:45
Speaker 2: the.
30:45
Speaker 3: Real explanation of how she's even bigger of a hero
30:49
Speaker 3: than that movie lets on.
30:51
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break. And when we come back,
30:53
Speaker 1: we will sit down with the one and only Frances Haugen,
30:55
Speaker 1: the famous Facebook whistleblower. I can't wait. This is The
30:59
Speaker 1: Oath in the Office. Welcome back to The Oath in
31:11
Speaker 1: the Office. I'm John Fuglesang. Professor, I'm really excited about
31:14
Speaker 1: this next guest. You know, we throw around words like
31:17
Speaker 1: civic hero and bravery, but wow, I think this particular
31:21
Speaker 1: lady really qualifies and shows us why whistleblowers are heroic
31:25
Speaker 1: and necessary and deserve a lot of protections.
31:28
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
31:29
Speaker 3: I mean, it's such an honor to have Frances Haugen
31:31
Speaker 3: with us, and we're going to touch on so many
31:33
Speaker 3: of the themes that are central to the podcast, the
31:36
Speaker 3: rise of extremism, the threat to democracy, the questions of
31:40
Speaker 3: free speech and its limits. So it really is an
31:42
Speaker 3: honor to introduce to the Oath in the Office audience
31:45
Speaker 3: Frances Haugen. She, of course, is the Facebook whistleblower who
31:49
Speaker 3: exposed what Facebook knew about the harms of its own platforms,
31:53
Speaker 3: about its amplification of extremism, and about, frankly, its danger
31:58
Speaker 3: to democracy. She's the author of the great book, The
32:01
Speaker 3: Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell
32:04
Speaker 3: the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.
32:07
Speaker 2: I recommend that book to you.
32:09
Speaker 3: And of course, her story is now dramatized on the
32:11
Speaker 3: big screen in Aaron Sorkin's amazing film, which I was
32:15
Speaker 3: pleased to watch and which we talked about earlier, The
32:18
Speaker 3: Social Reckoning. And Mikey Madison, of course, plays Frances. So
32:22
Speaker 3: today we'll talk about extremism, January 6th, and reform, what
32:26
Speaker 3: it'll take to make social media safer. Frances, welcome to
32:30
Speaker 3: The Oath in the Office.
32:32
Speaker 2: Happy to be here.
32:32
Speaker 4: Thanks for inviting me.
32:34
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
32:35
Speaker 2: Pleasure.
32:36
Speaker 3: Just to jump right in, some of our audience will
32:38
Speaker 3: have seen the film. They've heard us talk about some
32:40
Speaker 3: of the basics. But I'm really interested in the real
32:43
Speaker 3: story and the audience hearing what it was that made
32:47
Speaker 3: you decide to blow the whistle. I know it happened
32:50
Speaker 3: over time, but was there something in particular that you
32:53
Speaker 3: saw that you just thought your conscience required you to
32:57
Speaker 3: become a whistleblower and to seek legal whistleblower protection?
33:01
Speaker 4: I would say the like the instigating event, if you will,
33:05
Speaker 4: is like the movie. They play around the timeline a
33:07
Speaker 4: little bit, a little liberally. So they kind of make
33:10
Speaker 4: the movie take place over two years when the vast
33:12
Speaker 4: majority of like the, you know, I only started talking
33:15
Speaker 4: to Jeff in December of 2020. So when I left
33:19
Speaker 4: in May of 2020 or 2021, excuse me, and the
33:23
Speaker 4: movie has to take place from like 2019 to sometime
33:25
Speaker 4: in January of 2021. It's a little confusing exactly how
33:28
Speaker 4: the timelines all interweave at the end. The thing that
33:31
Speaker 4: made me realize there was no other option than figuring
33:34
Speaker 4: out how to get the public involved was Facebook dissolved,
33:38
Speaker 4: or excuse me, they integrated into the rest of the
33:40
Speaker 4: company this organization that they had made called Civic Integrity.
33:44
Speaker 4: So Civic Integrity was intentionally meant to be, as the
33:48
Speaker 4: movie describes it, a point of friction, right? Like everything
33:51
Speaker 4: inside the company was optimized for growth and like very,
33:54
Speaker 4: very cut and dry. You know, if the number goes up,
33:57
Speaker 4: it's good. Civic Integrity was supposed to be there and say, hey,
33:59
Speaker 4: actually- There's more complexity to this. If you just optimize
34:03
Speaker 4: for a number going up, you're going to fade into
34:04
Speaker 4: the background all the other side effects that go along
34:07
Speaker 4: with that number going up. Because there's actually many different
34:09
Speaker 4: paths to having that number go up. And less obvious
34:12
Speaker 4: ones may actually be superior when you take all the
34:15
Speaker 4: other factors into consideration. And so when they called us
34:18
Speaker 4: all together in early December, so this is like less
34:20
Speaker 4: than a month after the 2020 election. And they're basically like,
34:24
Speaker 4: you know, you could tell that we had been allowed
34:26
Speaker 4: to operate because they had feared blood on the streets.
34:30
Speaker 4: Like that was the fear going into the 2020 election.
34:33
Speaker 4: And when they dodged that bullet, they're like, oh, we
34:35
Speaker 4: made it. Like, clearly we don't need to, we don't
34:38
Speaker 4: need to try anymore. Like we succeeded in our goal.
34:40
Speaker 4: And unfortunately, because the group of people who are responsible
34:45
Speaker 4: for kind of like watching if things go off the rails,
34:48
Speaker 4: I basically have been told go on a long vacation.
34:50
Speaker 2: Right.
34:50
Speaker 4: Like my, my former manager, I think basically it was
34:53
Speaker 4: just floating around Facebook all the way up until I
34:56
Speaker 4: came forward. It's like a year. Like they said, go, go,
34:59
Speaker 4: go on a long vacation. It meant that when Stop
35:02
Speaker 4: the Steal started exploding on Facebook in December of 2020,
35:06
Speaker 4: there was no one around to be aware that a
35:09
Speaker 4: whole bunch of safety systems that were designed around preventing
35:13
Speaker 4: the weaponization of the platform had broken. You know, things
35:16
Speaker 4: had gotten bad enough that, for example, the most outlier
35:19
Speaker 4: individual on Facebook, one person invited 300,000 people to stop
35:23
Speaker 4: the steal groups. Like that's not supposed to be possible
35:26
Speaker 4: within the geometry of Facebook. I think most reasonable people
35:29
Speaker 4: would say like, You can invite 100 people a day
35:31
Speaker 4: to groups, maybe 1,000 people a day, but probably not,
35:34
Speaker 4: you know, 300,000 people.
35:36
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, talk to us about that.
35:38
Speaker 3: This sort of naive view of Facebook is, you know,
35:41
Speaker 3: it's just a platform. And certainly we hear Zuckerberg himself
35:44
Speaker 3: say this is a free speech platform. public square and
35:47
Speaker 3: we're just inviting people in. And yet what you're telling
35:51
Speaker 3: us is that when you look, especially at, well, one
35:53
Speaker 3: of the most violent moments in the transition of power,
35:56
Speaker 3: the one non-peaceful transition of power in our country's history,
36:00
Speaker 3: January 6th, that really Facebook shares some of the blame
36:04
Speaker 3: that it wasn't a neutral platform, that it was providing
36:06
Speaker 3: ways of people to organize and to spread the lies
36:10
Speaker 3: that led about the election and the supposed.
36:13
Speaker 2: Fraud that, of.
36:16
Speaker 3: Using it in order to, well, stoke the fires and
36:18
Speaker 3: the flames of January 6th.
36:20
Speaker 2: Is that right? That's what the kind of bottom line
36:22
Speaker 2: of what you saw that the platform was doing?
36:24
Speaker 4: I think one way, I think I would say there's
36:27
Speaker 4: two or three main pillars. So I would say the
36:29
Speaker 4: first and kind of like one of the core things
36:30
Speaker 4: that keeps us from being able to have conversations about
36:32
Speaker 4: going forward is that Facebook took advantage of the fact
36:35
Speaker 4: that we couldn't see how they operated to tell us
36:39
Speaker 4: how to solve our own problems. And they came out
36:41
Speaker 4: and said, you know, there's really only one thing we
36:43
Speaker 4: can do, which is if you see bad things, we
36:45
Speaker 4: can take them down. But do you really want us
36:47
Speaker 4: to have that job? Do you really want us to
36:48
Speaker 4: be the ref calling balls and strikes? And people quite
36:52
Speaker 4: reasonably say, no, that is not a good job for
36:55
Speaker 4: you to be doing. You're a private company. We don't
36:56
Speaker 4: want you to police what ideas are acceptable as a
37:00
Speaker 4: general rule. But the challenge with that is that is, one, ineffective.
37:06
Speaker 4: A huge part of what I brought forward said, hey,
37:08
Speaker 4: Facebook has claimed that the path to safety comes through
37:11
Speaker 4: having AIs monitoring our speech. But the reality is that
37:14
Speaker 4: because language is fluid, Because understanding that something is ironic
37:18
Speaker 4: or satire or, you know, just a joke in general,
37:22
Speaker 4: because it's hard to tell what people actually mean by language,
37:25
Speaker 4: you're never going to be able to have the level
37:28
Speaker 4: of control of just speech itself that would allow you
37:32
Speaker 4: to fulfill that vision. And one of the examples of
37:34
Speaker 4: kind of like the counter example is when you look
37:38
Speaker 4: at Arabic and you look at terrorism content, 75% of
37:43
Speaker 4: counterterrorism content was getting taken down as terrorism content because
37:48
Speaker 4: the AI couldn't tell the difference between someone de-radicalizing and radicalizing, right?
37:53
Speaker 4: So one, Facebook has told us there's only one solution.
37:55
Speaker 4: It's really unpleasant. So you won't push for anything, which
37:58
Speaker 4: is censorship when they knew it didn't work or it
38:00
Speaker 4: couldn't work the way they described it working. But the
38:03
Speaker 4: second thing was that Facebook knew that the thing that
38:05
Speaker 4: mattered much, much more than your uncle having weird beliefs
38:08
Speaker 4: and posting them on Facebook was was which systemic biases
38:12
Speaker 4: exist in the algorithm and how are the platforms designed
38:14
Speaker 4: as a whole? And I thought Sorkin did a really
38:17
Speaker 4: good job of when he went and looked through the,
38:19
Speaker 4: you know, thousand plus pages of memoirs that he started
38:22
Speaker 4: from and distilled down a two hour, you know, thriller.
38:26
Speaker 4: The thing he chose to focus on as like the
38:28
Speaker 4: idea that was simple enough for people to understand was
38:31
Speaker 4: that Facebook knew that when you had violent extremism groups
38:35
Speaker 4: on Facebook, two thirds of the people who joined those
38:38
Speaker 4: groups joined because Facebook recommended to the person who joined
38:42
Speaker 4: the group, you might like this group. And those kinds
38:45
Speaker 4: of decisions, what does it mean to make a successful recommendation?
38:51
Speaker 4: Those kinds of decisions are much, much more impactful in
38:54
Speaker 4: how the overall ecosystem functions than your uncle having an
38:59
Speaker 4: odd idea and posting it. And unfortunately, because we are
39:02
Speaker 4: not able to look behind the curtain and see how
39:04
Speaker 4: these things operate, We don't get to have a lively
39:07
Speaker 4: public debate about, well, how should the platform operate? Because
39:10
Speaker 4: we don't even know what levers exist for us. And
39:13
Speaker 4: that means that Facebook gets to continue doing business as usual.
39:15
Speaker 4: You know, they get to make whatever decisions and whatever
39:17
Speaker 4: optimizations they want to. And we don't actually get to
39:20
Speaker 4: have a conversation about what tradeoffs we want to have
39:22
Speaker 4: in our public square.
39:24
Speaker 3: John, I know you want to jump in, but can
39:25
Speaker 3: I just ask Frances to get clarity? Because what you're
39:27
Speaker 3: saying is fascinating and more disturbing. I think, even than
39:31
Speaker 3: what the movie presents. But that, you know, they really
39:33
Speaker 3: focus on this statistic that you give of the number
39:36
Speaker 3: of recommendations that are leading people to join hate groups.
39:40
Speaker 2: And that's sort of the moment, at least in the film.
39:42
Speaker 3: Where you are making this decision. But what I hear
39:45
Speaker 3: you saying is something more disturbing, which is that Facebook
39:48
Speaker 3: really saw the events of January 6th unfold, they saw
39:52
Speaker 3: the violence that was about to happen. They had this
39:55
Speaker 3: very weak strategy of relying on AIs in order to
39:58
Speaker 3: ferret out some of the speech. But in the end,
40:00
Speaker 3: they really did allow and give a green light to
40:03
Speaker 3: these groups that were organizing what became the insurrection.
40:06
Speaker 2: Is that fair?
40:09
Speaker 4: I would say it's actually, I think, a lot worse
40:13
Speaker 4: than what you're describing.
40:14
Speaker 2: So it's a lot worse side.
40:15
Speaker 4: So There's a scene in the movie where, you know,
40:20
Speaker 4: the Frances Haugen character goes to this review, soft interventions.
40:24
Speaker 4: And that's a real term of art. So a hard
40:27
Speaker 4: intervention is we take a person off the platform, we
40:29
Speaker 4: take a group off the platform, we take a piece
40:30
Speaker 4: of content off the platform. That's a hard intervention. A
40:33
Speaker 4: soft intervention is saying, you know, maybe we'll turn commenting
40:37
Speaker 4: off on your group if, like, a very large fraction
40:41
Speaker 4: of the content being posted is about violence.
40:43
Speaker 3: Right.
40:43
Speaker 4: And the reason why turning commenting off actually has an
40:46
Speaker 4: outsized impact is because every time someone puts a new
40:49
Speaker 4: comment on a post, that post is considered new and
40:52
Speaker 4: it can go back to the top of your feed.
40:55
Speaker 4: So if you dog pile on a post, like if
40:57
Speaker 4: someone's like, let's go and do this, this violent thing
40:59
Speaker 4: and people like pile on, someone might see that post
41:02
Speaker 4: over and over again in their feed if comments are on.
41:05
Speaker 1: Right.
41:06
Speaker 4: So in the lead up to the 2020 election, so
41:09
Speaker 4: for like a full two years, you know, full two years,
41:12
Speaker 4: people had been trying to figure out what are all
41:15
Speaker 4: the available little knobs that you can twist that when
41:18
Speaker 4: you twist them, it doesn't actually make Facebook less money, right?
41:21
Speaker 4: So for example, turning off comments on violent groups doesn't
41:25
Speaker 4: really impact any money for Facebook, right? Nothing meaningful happens.
41:28
Speaker 4: Nothing in the business success changes. You just get like
41:30
Speaker 4: less violence. And they had come up with on the
41:32
Speaker 4: order of like, say 35 to 40 of these knobs
41:35
Speaker 4: they could twist. And on election day, 2020, all of
41:39
Speaker 4: those knobs were set to the safer configuration on the dial.
41:43
Speaker 4: And in the weeks after the election, they put everything
41:47
Speaker 4: back to normal. You know, we'll say they turned everything
41:49
Speaker 4: back up to 11, 12, you know, just optimized for
41:52
Speaker 4: raw growth engagement. And on the morning of January 6th,
41:57
Speaker 4: because the people who should have been saying, hey, I'm
42:00
Speaker 4: noticing the pot is starting to boil over, you know,
42:03
Speaker 4: like the water's really frothy. I think I think it's
42:05
Speaker 4: getting a little too hot. Let's start turning some of
42:07
Speaker 4: these knobs back to like eight instead of 11. Because
42:10
Speaker 4: all the people who, that was their responsibility because they
42:13
Speaker 4: were basically told go on vacation for a couple of weeks, right?
42:16
Speaker 4: Like come back in January. Like, like I know it's
42:18
Speaker 4: only December 3rd, go on, just, just have a leisurely December.
42:21
Speaker 4: Don't worry about it. And so, and especially the decision makers, right?
42:25
Speaker 4: Because the people who had had authority that reported straight
42:28
Speaker 4: up to Mark, they had been like, my boss had
42:31
Speaker 4: been removed, right? Our team had been decentralized. So who
42:34
Speaker 4: gets to make the decision to pull the trigger now, right?
42:38
Speaker 4: And so in the weeks leading up to January 6th,
42:41
Speaker 4: you know, they had a whole bunch of these small
42:43
Speaker 4: little things that add up to a lot difference in
42:45
Speaker 4: terms of the overall temperature of the platform. But no
42:48
Speaker 4: one felt they could turn them on. And one of
42:51
Speaker 4: the things that I brought through my whistleblowing was a
42:54
Speaker 4: photo like screenshots of the tracker that showed here's all
42:57
Speaker 4: the knobs available to us at 10 a.m. on January 6th.
43:02
Speaker 4: And only maybe 20 percent of them have been turned on.
43:05
Speaker 4: And by the next day on January 7th, all of
43:07
Speaker 4: them have been turned on. So it really was a
43:10
Speaker 4: thing where like they could have at any point been like,
43:13
Speaker 4: let's turn the heat down. But because basically all of
43:16
Speaker 4: Facebook goes on vacation for three weeks in a normal
43:19
Speaker 4: year for the holidays, let alone more people being kind
43:23
Speaker 4: of checked out because they had dissolved the team. No
43:26
Speaker 4: one was there to like kind of jump in and
43:28
Speaker 4: begin building like the response when you started seeing the
43:31
Speaker 4: stop the steal groups begin to kind of spiral out
43:33
Speaker 4: of control.
43:34
Speaker 2: I mean, so to sum up, and then I'll throw
43:36
Speaker 2: it to you, John.
43:36
Speaker 1: Sure.
43:37
Speaker 3: It's not just that they, you know, were neutral or
43:40
Speaker 3: any of this language that they didn't feel an obligation.
43:43
Speaker 3: It's that they actually had the tools to either slow
43:46
Speaker 3: this down or maybe even stop it. And they were
43:49
Speaker 3: so negligent that they sent people away.
43:51
Speaker 4: And tools that they felt they needed to use before
43:54
Speaker 4: the election.
43:54
Speaker 2: Before.
43:55
Speaker 3: Before they actually needed it in order to save democracy
43:58
Speaker 3: at the moment of an impending coup.
44:00
Speaker 1: Right, because that's what it was all about.
44:03
Speaker 4: And I think one other thing just to like flag
44:04
Speaker 4: for people, like to give an example of like why
44:07
Speaker 4: Stop the Steal was in many ways like a very
44:09
Speaker 4: artificial thing. When they went and I brought out the
44:12
Speaker 4: reports on this, like when data scientists went and inspected
44:15
Speaker 4: Stop the Steal at the time of afterwards, they found
44:19
Speaker 4: things like, so something that is not allowed under Facebook's
44:22
Speaker 4: rules is if you have a group and you call
44:24
Speaker 4: it Stop the Steal, you are not allowed to start
44:27
Speaker 4: a second group called Stop the Steal 2 or Stop
44:30
Speaker 4: the Steal again or the Stop the Steal. you know,
44:33
Speaker 4: like something that's basically the same group and then have
44:35
Speaker 4: the same administrators. So like, let's say you have 10 administrators,
44:38
Speaker 4: 15 administrators that run group A, you can't have the
44:41
Speaker 4: same people run group B because you are very clearly
44:43
Speaker 4: just making duplicate groups. And the reason for this is
44:47
Speaker 4: Facebook has a bunch of design intentional things where it's like,
44:51
Speaker 4: if someone posts to, let's call it group A and
44:54
Speaker 4: post to group B, if they had been two posts
44:57
Speaker 4: to group A, they would have gotten less, just each
45:00
Speaker 4: of those posts would kind of share the distribution. Like
45:03
Speaker 4: we're not going to flood your feed with content from
45:06
Speaker 4: one group. We're going to show you stuff from a
45:08
Speaker 4: bunch of different groups. So if I go and make
45:10
Speaker 4: 10 groups that are called like Stop the Steal 1,
45:12
Speaker 4: Stop the Steal 2, Stop the Steal 3, Stop the
45:14
Speaker 4: Steal 4, Stop the Steal 5, and I invite the
45:17
Speaker 4: same 100,000 people to each one, I can send you
45:20
Speaker 4: 10 times as much content than if I had only
45:23
Speaker 4: invited you to one group. And I think what happened
45:26
Speaker 4: based on people who did storm the Capitol, like when
45:30
Speaker 4: you talk to them and you say like, hey, like,
45:31
Speaker 4: why did you do this? A surprisingly large number of
45:34
Speaker 4: them say it felt real. Like when I opened Facebook,
45:38
Speaker 4: everything in my feed said that there was a coup
45:40
Speaker 4: going on and that like people who cared about their country,
45:43
Speaker 4: they needed to rise up and come do this thing.
45:46
Speaker 4: And so the question is, you know, when you go
45:48
Speaker 4: read the Jan 6th Commission's report, like they talk about
45:51
Speaker 4: like here's all the ways which Facebook was asleep at
45:54
Speaker 4: the wheel and how they facilitated people having this false
45:57
Speaker 4: perception of the world. Hmm.
46:00
Speaker 1: You know, what's most impressive to me about your service
46:03
Speaker 1: in this whole ordeal is that you were not some
46:06
Speaker 1: outsider campaigning against Facebook. You were an insider who always
46:10
Speaker 1: believed in the company's mission. And you photographed thousands of
46:13
Speaker 1: pages of internal documents to provide evidence of what was
46:16
Speaker 1: going on on the inside. And I commend you for
46:19
Speaker 1: believing that the public had a right to know. I'm
46:22
Speaker 1: fascinated by something that you said, that there was really
46:24
Speaker 1: only a very small number of people internally who understood Facebook.
46:29
Speaker 1: how Facebook's recommendation systems really worked. Was it just conventional
46:34
Speaker 1: wisdom within that it was totally normal and acceptable and
46:38
Speaker 1: nothing strange about a handful of engineers and executives getting
46:42
Speaker 1: to shape the information environment for billions of people without
46:45
Speaker 1: any kind of independent oversight? Was that just considered to
46:49
Speaker 1: be normal?
46:50
Speaker 4: I think that's really important for people to understand about
46:52
Speaker 4: kind of tech, right? Is that it's very easy to
46:55
Speaker 4: look at engineers and view all engineers as kind of
46:57
Speaker 4: like interchangeable widgets, right? It's like, oh, I have a
47:00
Speaker 4: widget here, I have a widget here, I can just
47:02
Speaker 4: swap them. And that was actually like a huge problem
47:04
Speaker 4: for me my first six months at Facebook was that
47:08
Speaker 4: even at Facebook, because disproportionately the engineers at Facebook are
47:12
Speaker 4: what I would call like a front engineer, they were, right?
47:15
Speaker 4: Like today, because they've done this AI pivot, I bet
47:16
Speaker 4: a larger fraction of them are algorithmic or data engineers.
47:20
Speaker 4: There are many, many more people who I would consider
47:22
Speaker 4: like an algorithmic or a data engineer today than there
47:24
Speaker 4: were five years ago.
47:25
Speaker 3: Sure.
47:25
Speaker 4: Or seven years ago, right? Because when I started, it
47:27
Speaker 4: was 2019, right? But when I came in, I was like, hey,
47:30
Speaker 4: you gave me three engineers who make front ends. These
47:34
Speaker 4: people have never run a query. They've never asked a
47:37
Speaker 4: data set for questions. I can't teach them to be
47:40
Speaker 4: data scientists and have them build an AI product in
47:42
Speaker 4: the same six months. That's not a reasonable ask. And
47:45
Speaker 4: because their own managers were more front end people, they, one,
47:49
Speaker 4: bristled at the notion that algorithms are hard, right? They're like, whatever,
47:53
Speaker 4: anyone can learn these things. And I'm like, well, as
47:55
Speaker 4: someone who's worked on this for 15 years, I would
47:57
Speaker 4: not agree. I would just not agree. But I think
48:00
Speaker 4: the situation was you had a culture that had a
48:03
Speaker 4: strength in that they cared a lot about what the
48:07
Speaker 4: user saw, right? So usability, you might've noticed that like
48:11
Speaker 4: Apple products are a little bit more usable than say
48:13
Speaker 4: Google products, right? On average, right? Like there are people
48:17
Speaker 4: tell these jokes about like, you know, it's funny that
48:19
Speaker 4: Google did X, Y, Z. Well, Google is a company
48:21
Speaker 4: that has over-indexed on algorithmic engineers since the beginning because
48:25
Speaker 4: they had search quality. Search quality was the thing that
48:28
Speaker 4: differentiated Google from all the other search engines. Because Facebook
48:33
Speaker 4: was not famous for being a place that really respected
48:39
Speaker 4: algorithmic engineers like data people, because they had great data scientists,
48:42
Speaker 4: but not particularly great algorithmic engineers, they just didn't have
48:46
Speaker 4: a very big pool. So if you come in with
48:48
Speaker 4: the mindset of, we have always struggled to hire engineers,
48:52
Speaker 4: because even by the time I joined, their brand was
48:55
Speaker 4: bad enough in the Valley that the vast majority of
48:57
Speaker 4: their engineers only had five years of experience or less.
49:00
Speaker 4: And amongst your engineers who are more senior, you know,
49:03
Speaker 4: they can go to Google and have like a much
49:05
Speaker 4: more pleasant work-life balance and be respected more. You end
49:09
Speaker 4: up in a situation where a very small population of
49:11
Speaker 4: people is kind of like holding the fork together. And
49:13
Speaker 4: so when I surveyed kind of how the organization operated,
49:16
Speaker 4: it was really clear that there was like 10%, to
49:20
Speaker 4: 15 people who had been working on it for a
49:22
Speaker 4: decade and had been kept there with like huge sums
49:24
Speaker 4: of money. And a lot of those people had acquired
49:26
Speaker 4: enough money that they were like, I kind of want
49:28
Speaker 4: to go to somebody else now. And I looked at
49:30
Speaker 4: it and I was really, really worried that once those
49:33
Speaker 4: people left, there would be no continuity of knowledge. And like,
49:37
Speaker 4: the ways of thinking about how a change to an
49:41
Speaker 4: algorithm affects like all these downstream things, that's really not obvious.
49:45
Speaker 4: And if you were going to take the few people
49:47
Speaker 4: who had like actually accumulated that knowledge base and then
49:51
Speaker 4: be like, it's going to be fine. It's going to
49:52
Speaker 4: be fine if they leave. Like, I just didn't, I
49:54
Speaker 4: didn't think that was going to be true.
49:55
Speaker 3: It all raises a question. I mean, I was very
49:58
Speaker 3: eager to hear you answer this. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg
50:00
Speaker 3: has a massive amount of control over the company and
50:03
Speaker 3: probably compared to other tech companies he's a much more powerful,
50:07
Speaker 3: not just founder, but the current CEO. So I guess
50:11
Speaker 3: if you could help us get into his mindset, because
50:13
Speaker 3: listening to you, my thought, you know, is not sympathetic.
50:17
Speaker 2: It's that either he.
50:18
Speaker 3: Was extremely naive in thinking that they didn't need more engineers.
50:22
Speaker 3: They didn't need a team looking out for this danger,
50:26
Speaker 3: even with Trump. increasing his rhetoric. And basically, it's not
50:29
Speaker 3: that this was a secret. I mean, the plot of
50:31
Speaker 3: January 6, as the report lays out, was outlined by
50:35
Speaker 3: the president with the aid of John Eastman. They were,
50:38
Speaker 3: you know, giving the speech at the Ellipse. All of
50:40
Speaker 3: this was unfolding. We were all watching it. It was
50:42
Speaker 3: like a slow car crash. So, you know, what's in
50:45
Speaker 3: his mindset? Was he so naive that he didn't realize
50:48
Speaker 3: that the danger was there and that's what all these
50:50
Speaker 3: vacations were about, business as usual?
50:53
Speaker 2: Or do we need to think he's so late?
50:55
Speaker 3: And was he complicit and refused to act in the
50:58
Speaker 3: moment where actually he could have, I mean, literally stopped
51:02
Speaker 3: at least a lot of the violence that occurred that
51:04
Speaker 3: day and a lot of the turmoil that almost resulted. Yes,
51:08
Speaker 3: there was a perception of a coup, but an actual
51:10
Speaker 3: attempted coup did unfold that day as a result of it.
51:13
Speaker 4: There were people walking around the Capitol with guns.
51:15
Speaker 2: I mean, people died.
51:17
Speaker 3: And there was a plan to, you know, we've had
51:20
Speaker 3: we had Jared Huffman who talked to us about the
51:22
Speaker 3: role of Christian nationalists that day. We had one of
51:26
Speaker 3: the primary authors of the January 6th report who outlined
51:29
Speaker 3: how the plan works. So I think our viewers know
51:31
Speaker 3: it well, but now you're adding a different part of
51:34
Speaker 3: the story. So what was Mark Zuckerberg thinking in all
51:37
Speaker 3: of this? I mean, did he, he just sort of
51:38
Speaker 3: let it happen?
51:39
Speaker 2: Did he not know?
51:41
Speaker 4: So I think, I think it's important, you know, like
51:42
Speaker 4: a lot of the drama or like the pathos of
51:45
Speaker 4: Facebook and like how it's operated is like, it is
51:48
Speaker 4: definitely an unprecedented scale of, compared to like previous times
51:51
Speaker 4: in history, given that, you know, you do have this
51:54
Speaker 4: one man and for context on like how absurd it's gotten,
51:57
Speaker 4: it's like actually much, much more absurd, even in the
51:59
Speaker 4: last like two weeks than it was for the last
52:00
Speaker 4: like 20 years, which is, so for your listeners, people
52:03
Speaker 4: understand some companies have something called a dual stock structure.
52:08
Speaker 4: So most companies have a single class of shares and
52:11
Speaker 4: the number of shares you hold, that's how many votes
52:13
Speaker 4: you get. So if you economically own 10% of the company,
52:17
Speaker 4: you also get 10% of the votes. And inside of Facebook,
52:20
Speaker 4: you know, he was advised very early on, you know,
52:22
Speaker 4: you should maintain control. Like you should have two classes
52:25
Speaker 4: of shares. So you may economically not own a lot
52:27
Speaker 4: of the company. Like he still owns on the order
52:29
Speaker 4: of like 13%. Like it's under 15% of the economic
52:33
Speaker 4: value of Facebook. So in terms of the dividend checks
52:36
Speaker 4: he gets at the end. In terms of votes, he
52:37
Speaker 4: has 60% of the votes. And that number has gone
52:41
Speaker 4: up over the last five years because they keep doing
52:43
Speaker 4: stock buybacks. So needless to say, there's only one voice
52:46
Speaker 4: that matters at Facebook.
52:47
Speaker 2: It's Marks.
52:48
Speaker 4: So if Mark wants to make the whole company into
52:50
Speaker 4: a metaverse company, the whole company like turns on a
52:53
Speaker 4: dime and becomes a metaverse company. And if a few
52:55
Speaker 4: years later, he's like, oh, the metaverse isn't working. Okay,
52:58
Speaker 4: now we're an AI company, right? Whatever Mark wants to do,
53:00
Speaker 4: he now gets to do it. And understandably, a lot
53:04
Speaker 4: of people have said this is not respecting the other shareholders, right?
53:07
Speaker 4: Like you can get truly dysfunctional levels of mismanagement when
53:10
Speaker 4: you have that much singular control. But if we were
53:13
Speaker 4: going to generalize outwards and say like, hey, like part
53:16
Speaker 4: of the reason we don't do organizational or governmental structures
53:20
Speaker 4: like this is for some reason like why Putin invaded Ukraine, right?
53:24
Speaker 4: Like Putin has a complete control over Russia. That means
53:28
Speaker 4: the people around him are only there because he wants
53:30
Speaker 4: them there. They give him information he wants to hear.
53:34
Speaker 4: If someone gives him too much information he doesn't want
53:36
Speaker 4: to hear, that person goes away. And the same is
53:38
Speaker 4: true of Mark. Like it takes a truly, a truly
53:42
Speaker 4: mature and sophisticated person to keep people around you who
53:44
Speaker 4: constantly disagree with you. And so Mark, as he has
53:48
Speaker 4: gotten more and more and more kind of out of
53:51
Speaker 4: our consensus reality, he has been surrounded by people who
53:53
Speaker 4: tell him things that allow him to accept the way
53:56
Speaker 4: things are right now. And remember, no one around him
53:59
Speaker 4: has an interest in changing anything because the people around
54:01
Speaker 4: him right now are paid huge sums of money to
54:05
Speaker 4: do whatever it is they do. And so if they
54:08
Speaker 4: upturn the apple cart at all, there's only downside for them.
54:11
Speaker 1: Wow. So he has more in common with Trump than
54:13
Speaker 1: I even realized. Surrounded by yes-men who are not necessarily
54:17
Speaker 1: steering him towards what is good for the overall culture,
54:20
Speaker 1: but what's good for them. I mean, I'm still fascinated
54:23
Speaker 1: by his decision to end third-party fact-checking in the U.S.
54:27
Speaker 1: by claiming, oh, it's greater freedom of expression, allowing liars
54:31
Speaker 1: like Elon Musk, allowing anti-Semites to take over Twitter as
54:35
Speaker 1: a greater freedom of expression. You've argued that, yeah, the
54:38
Speaker 1: old fact checking was inadequate in some important ways. What
54:42
Speaker 1: was wrong with it? And what do you feel should
54:44
Speaker 1: have replaced it rather than bring your lies, folks, and
54:48
Speaker 1: accept no consequences?
54:50
Speaker 4: So for context for your listeners, like the headline totally
54:53
Speaker 4: is distressing. You're like, oh, my God, they had journalists.
54:56
Speaker 4: They had these third party fact checkers. Now they've gotten
54:58
Speaker 4: rid of them. And the timing was very convenient to it.
55:00
Speaker 4: Like it happened around Trump to coming back.
55:03
Speaker 1: Right.
55:04
Speaker 4: A big part of what I brought out was. like
55:07
Speaker 4: the more actual truth of what third party fact checking is.
55:09
Speaker 4: So back in 2017, actually, let's start with 2016. So 2016,
55:12
Speaker 4: this is the rise of Trump. As much impact as
55:16
Speaker 4: Russia had on that election, there was a group of
55:18
Speaker 4: entrepreneurs that had far bigger impact, which was back then,
55:22
Speaker 4: if you put up like a fake news site, right,
55:25
Speaker 4: like you could run it on Blogspot, make it look
55:27
Speaker 4: like a little local newspaper, you know, call it the
55:29
Speaker 4: Detroit Bee, you know, whatever you want to call it. Interesting.
55:33
Speaker 4: People in Macedonia, specifically northern Macedonia, discovered that if you
55:38
Speaker 4: made more sensationalistic headlines, the crazier the better, the more
55:42
Speaker 4: traffic Facebook gave you.
55:44
Speaker 3: Yeah.
55:44
Speaker 4: And this is a kind of– so when you talk
55:48
Speaker 4: about why do people weaponize social media, they have different ends.
55:51
Speaker 4: So maybe it's a monetary end. Maybe they want influence.
55:54
Speaker 4: Maybe they want to disturb your culture. Maybe they want clout, right?
55:58
Speaker 4: And they're going to monetize that clout in other ways.
56:00
Speaker 4: Or like maybe they're evangelical. They want to spread religious meaning.
56:03
Speaker 4: Like there's different ways to get paid, right? In the
56:06
Speaker 4: case of these Macedonians, they were getting paid like in dollars, right?
56:09
Speaker 4: Like the more traffic they could get their site sent back,
56:12
Speaker 4: the more dollars AdSense would give them. And when the
56:15
Speaker 4: election happened, people called out like, hey, like you should
56:19
Speaker 4: have known that you were giving in this insane platform
56:24
Speaker 4: to stories like Pope endorses Donald Trump. And part of
56:28
Speaker 4: how this happened was through very specific design choices. So
56:31
Speaker 4: back in 2016, it used to be like if I
56:33
Speaker 4: clicked like on a post about the Pope visiting France,
56:37
Speaker 4: I don't know, the Pope making a statement about agricultural policy,
56:41
Speaker 4: I don't know, a little carousel would pop up underneath
56:43
Speaker 4: the post that would give me other stories I might like,
56:47
Speaker 4: which sounds great. You know, it's like if you're trying
56:48
Speaker 4: to keep people on your site longer, like showing them
56:49
Speaker 4: other stuff they might like, that sounds totally reasonable, right?
56:52
Speaker 1: Sure, that's what they all do.
56:53
Speaker 4: The problem was that when you looked at which stories,
56:56
Speaker 4: so of the whole world of papal content I could
56:58
Speaker 4: possibly be shown, it was very clear they were picking
57:02
Speaker 4: content based on the click-through rate. Because the first story
57:05
Speaker 4: would always be something like Pope endorses Donald Trump. You know,
57:08
Speaker 4: it would be something that was just insane. And so
57:11
Speaker 4: when Facebook is taking kind of an accounting of like,
57:14
Speaker 4: what did we do? How did we contribute to this? Like,
57:16
Speaker 4: here's all this blame coming in. What can we actually do?
57:19
Speaker 4: They said, okay, we acknowledge we have a problem with misinformation.
57:22
Speaker 4: we are going to pay journalists to fact check stories
57:25
Speaker 4: and put these little corrections on them saying like, hey,
57:27
Speaker 4: this has been found by a journalist to not be true.
57:30
Speaker 4: So while this sounds like a great idea in theory,
57:33
Speaker 4: writing a fact check takes on average three days because
57:37
Speaker 4: they're journalists. They have to go and talk to people,
57:39
Speaker 4: document why they think this is, write it up. The
57:42
Speaker 4: internet moves fast enough that between the fact that journalists
57:46
Speaker 4: were not even starting fact checks until things got popular-
57:51
Speaker 4: And then it would take three more days. By the
57:54
Speaker 4: time a fact check would go up, the content would
57:56
Speaker 4: have already gone 75% of all the distribution it was
57:59
Speaker 4: going to get. So it's this question of like, you know,
58:02
Speaker 4: and there was all this research that Facebook found of like, okay,
58:05
Speaker 4: so if you don't take a story down, do people
58:07
Speaker 4: even respond if you put a little fact check thing
58:09
Speaker 4: on and say this has been shown to be false?
58:11
Speaker 4: Or like if someone has already been shown a piece
58:13
Speaker 4: of content, do you show them the correction later and say, hey,
58:16
Speaker 4: a fact check came in? because they found that once
58:18
Speaker 4: someone was exposed to an idea, it was very hard
58:20
Speaker 4: to walk them away from the idea.
58:21
Speaker 1: It's still the pre-Community Notes days as well.
58:24
Speaker 4: Yes, yes. So Community Notes, I think, is a great...
58:28
Speaker 4: And for context for your listeners, there's billions of pieces
58:30
Speaker 4: of content created on Facebook each month. There were like
58:33
Speaker 4: 300 stories fact-checked globally, and they were disproportionately in English
58:37
Speaker 4: and in Western European languages. So the places in the
58:39
Speaker 4: world that had the most dependence on Facebook, like this
58:42
Speaker 4: is why I came forward, places like African countries, countries
58:44
Speaker 4: in Southeast Asia, Places where the internet is functionally Facebook, right?
58:49
Speaker 4: Because they went in there and paid for people to
58:51
Speaker 4: use Facebook. They paid for their data if they used
58:53
Speaker 4: Facebook versus like having the free internet cost you money
58:56
Speaker 4: and data. They never wrote fact checks there. Like the
58:59
Speaker 4: places where they needed to have a high quality environment
59:02
Speaker 4: from Facebook, that was the very places they didn't invest
59:04
Speaker 4: in it. So what's the alternative? So Community Notes has
59:08
Speaker 4: this amazing potential. And this is a great example where
59:11
Speaker 4: we need to have the right to transparency and we
59:13
Speaker 4: need to have public conversations about how these systems should work.
59:16
Speaker 4: Because in other domains, for example, have you ever used Waze?
59:20
Speaker 4: It's like the direction site. So Waze is crowdsourced, right?
59:26
Speaker 4: Like those maps were created by people putting little lines
59:29
Speaker 4: on maps. So there's this question of like, how do
59:31
Speaker 4: you establish, you know, if you and I disagree that
59:34
Speaker 4: there's a road here or that you can go this,
59:36
Speaker 4: this is a one way versus a two way road.
59:38
Speaker 4: How do we, how do we reconcile this?
59:41
Speaker 1: Right.
59:42
Speaker 4: And Noam Bardeen is the guy who founded Waze. And
59:44
Speaker 4: a big part of it was that they actually had
59:46
Speaker 4: systems for cascading credibility. So like, let's say John and
59:50
Speaker 4: I disagree and Corey comes and weighs in and like
59:53
Speaker 4: settles the conflict. If it turns out that other people
59:57
Speaker 4: then agree with Corey, then Corey's credibility.
59:59
Speaker 2: Should go up, right?
1:00:01
Speaker 4: Or if John is the one that Corey picks and
1:00:04
Speaker 4: everyone agrees with John, my credibility should go down a
1:00:06
Speaker 4: teeny bit and John's should go up too, right? There
1:00:08
Speaker 4: are ways of designing these systems to be able to
1:00:11
Speaker 4: say like, hey, how do we actually incentivize collective sense-making?
1:00:17
Speaker 4: And I know Mardeen tried to start something called the
1:00:19
Speaker 4: Post News that was based on this idea. And because
1:00:22
Speaker 4: starting new social platforms is really hard, and I think
1:00:25
Speaker 4: he didn't commit to doing it over a long enough
1:00:27
Speaker 4: time period, and it really has to be a thing
1:00:29
Speaker 4: where you have to choose to do this log, that
1:00:33
Speaker 4: he was trying to ground it in things like, I
1:00:35
Speaker 4: should be able to tip you five cents. I really
1:00:37
Speaker 4: like this tweet. I'm like, I'm really glad you wrote
1:00:38
Speaker 4: this fact check. I want to give you a tip.
1:00:40
Speaker 4: You might only get five bucks in tips between all
1:00:42
Speaker 4: these nickels and dimes and stuff, but the data is
1:00:45
Speaker 4: so precious. The fact that someone was willing to be like, oh,
1:00:48
Speaker 4: I'm really glad I got this fact check.
1:00:50
Speaker 2: That actually.
1:00:51
Speaker 4: information to the system that could be allowing us to
1:00:54
Speaker 4: form this kind of information immune system. And so there
1:00:58
Speaker 4: are ways that we can do this at scale, and
1:01:00
Speaker 4: there are ways that we can do this in a
1:01:01
Speaker 4: decentralized way, but you have to have incentives in place
1:01:04
Speaker 4: that either through market incentives or governmental incentives encourage these
1:01:08
Speaker 4: systems to be adopted.
1:01:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that, Frances, because
1:01:11
Speaker 3: the more that we talk about the problems at Facebook
1:01:15
Speaker 3: and also the control of the company, I guess I'm
1:01:17
Speaker 3: increasingly skeptical that there's any purely market-based solution to this,
1:01:21
Speaker 3: because after all, that's how the company has been operating,
1:01:25
Speaker 3: is thinking about, not just thinking about profitability, but not
1:01:29
Speaker 3: willing to give up even an iota of profitability if
1:01:32
Speaker 3: it means more safety. And that suggests to me, you know,
1:01:36
Speaker 3: kind of market failure where we really need experts and
1:01:39
Speaker 3: regulators to come in and to start to think. So
1:01:42
Speaker 3: one thing we're always doing on the show is talking
1:01:44
Speaker 3: about the depths of how dangerous things are right now.
1:01:47
Speaker 3: And you've given us a very Good sense of that
1:01:49
Speaker 3: from the beginning that Trump's rise has been.
1:01:51
Speaker 2: Tied to social media, tied to Facebook.
1:01:53
Speaker 3: And then January 6th, of course, really egged on, not
1:01:57
Speaker 3: just allowed by the Facebook platform and was enacting in
1:02:01
Speaker 3: a neutral way.
1:02:01
Speaker 2: We've learned from you.
1:02:03
Speaker 3: So, I mean, don't we really need external government regulation
1:02:06
Speaker 3: in the world in which we don't have this president,
1:02:08
Speaker 3: we don't have this Congress?
1:02:10
Speaker 2: And what would it look like to you?
1:02:12
Speaker 3: Hmm.
1:02:13
Speaker 4: So I think, again, to kind of bring your listeners
1:02:15
Speaker 4: along on the journey, there's kind of two large families
1:02:18
Speaker 4: of approaches to tech regulation. So one version is kind
1:02:22
Speaker 4: of the more obvious one, which is like the don't
1:02:23
Speaker 4: do that approach. So, you know, you put up a
1:02:26
Speaker 4: fence and you say, like, thou shalt not pass. Like,
1:02:28
Speaker 4: this is where the fence is. Like, we just don't
1:02:29
Speaker 4: do those things. And the challenge with that is that
1:02:32
Speaker 4: people go around the fence. So, like, they may be like, okay,
1:02:35
Speaker 4: we don't use, I don't know, recommender systems now. We
1:02:39
Speaker 4: use content suggestors. You know, like, there's You can always
1:02:43
Speaker 4: like do the shades of gray and say, is this
1:02:45
Speaker 4: really the same thing as the other thing? A second
1:02:47
Speaker 4: strategy is, I would say, more like a spirit of
1:02:49
Speaker 4: the law or principles or process based. So in the
1:02:52
Speaker 4: European Union, they have a law called the Digital Services Act.
1:02:55
Speaker 4: And the Digital Services Act is based around the idea
1:02:58
Speaker 4: that like right now, part of why things have gone
1:03:00
Speaker 4: so bad is we have allowed these intangible products, like
1:03:05
Speaker 4: the intangible part of our economy, to operate in a
1:03:08
Speaker 4: way that is very, very different than we've ever allowed
1:03:11
Speaker 4: any other major part of our economy. So for example,
1:03:14
Speaker 4: if you sell gasoline, I can buy a gallon of
1:03:17
Speaker 4: gasoline and take it to my lab and test it
1:03:19
Speaker 4: and come back and say, you put an additive in
1:03:21
Speaker 4: that is illegal. Or I can burn your gasoline and say,
1:03:24
Speaker 4: it doesn't burn as clean as this other person's does.
1:03:27
Speaker 4: And if there's lead in that, I can then sue you, right?
1:03:30
Speaker 4: Like there's things where like I have control over establishing
1:03:32
Speaker 4: what is true. And when it comes to intangible products,
1:03:36
Speaker 4: be an AI chat assistant, be it a virtual friend,
1:03:39
Speaker 4: be it an algorithm that recommends content to you, be
1:03:42
Speaker 4: it a I think this is just hashtags or friends
1:03:46
Speaker 4: on Instagram, right? Like one of the big things that
1:03:48
Speaker 4: came out of the kids lawsuits was, you know, they
1:03:51
Speaker 4: were talking about how do, you know, predators find kids
1:03:55
Speaker 4: on Instagram and like Facebook's own employees were like, hey,
1:03:59
Speaker 4: our systems are really good. If you friend, if you're
1:04:02
Speaker 4: a 55 year old guy and you friend a couple
1:04:04
Speaker 4: of 13 year olds and some of those 13 year
1:04:06
Speaker 4: olds respond and others don't, we will keep finding you
1:04:08
Speaker 4: more 13 year olds like the ones that did respond.
1:04:12
Speaker 1: Right?
1:04:12
Speaker 4: Because the algorithm doesn't understand the significance. It's blind, right?
1:04:16
Speaker 2: It doesn't have an ethics that's baked into it. Yeah.
1:04:18
Speaker 2: It's just giving you more.
1:04:20
Speaker 4: So when someone comes along and says, hey, we think
1:04:23
Speaker 4: you have a problem, right? So like, for example, in
1:04:25
Speaker 4: the UK, one of the things that they did that
1:04:27
Speaker 4: was different and it's like actually led to part of
1:04:29
Speaker 4: why they passed their child safety laws was they went
1:04:31
Speaker 4: to the police and said, how did these predators find
1:04:33
Speaker 4: these kids? Like, explain to us the process. And they
1:04:36
Speaker 4: came back and said, hey, like, you know, we found
1:04:38
Speaker 4: that people actually befriended kids on social media. And didn't
1:04:42
Speaker 4: even go after those kids. They went after, they said, hey,
1:04:45
Speaker 4: look at what a good friend I am to you.
1:04:46
Speaker 4: Look at how caring I am. I've always got your back.
1:04:48
Speaker 4: Do you have any friends that need friends? You know,
1:04:51
Speaker 4: is anyone in a vulnerable place right now? Like, you know,
1:04:53
Speaker 4: maybe they're fighting with their parents. Maybe the things are unstable.
1:04:56
Speaker 4: And then they'd go after that kid, right? You know,
1:04:59
Speaker 4: this is one of these things where imagine the police
1:05:01
Speaker 4: write to Facebook and say, you have a problem. Like
1:05:04
Speaker 4: right now, your system is being used in these following ways.
1:05:08
Speaker 4: Under the DSA, Facebook should have to disclose that this
1:05:11
Speaker 4: is a known problem with the platform. And it would
1:05:14
Speaker 4: have to disclose like, hey, this is what we're going
1:05:15
Speaker 4: to do to try to deal with this. Because right now,
1:05:18
Speaker 4: the thing that is driving the problems with these kind
1:05:21
Speaker 4: of tech platforms is asymmetrical access to information. And under
1:05:25
Speaker 4: the DSA, you have to disclose enough data in a
1:05:28
Speaker 4: way that is reproducible. So your academics and independent observers
1:05:31
Speaker 4: have to be able to access this data for you
1:05:32
Speaker 4: to be able to see, are you actually making progress
1:05:34
Speaker 4: to address that problem? And I think that's the kind
1:05:37
Speaker 4: of rights that we need in the United States. Like
1:05:39
Speaker 4: right now, consumers work off of basically marketing messages, right?
1:05:43
Speaker 4: Like we say, oh, aren't all social media platforms kind
1:05:45
Speaker 4: of bad? No, the reality is they are meaningfully different
1:05:48
Speaker 4: on issues that matter to people. So I'll give you
1:05:50
Speaker 4: an example. Jeff Horowitz, who's like the journalist who I
1:05:53
Speaker 4: did my whistleblowing with, he did a bunch of reporting
1:05:56
Speaker 4: around Wall Street Journal. He did some reporting maybe two
1:06:00
Speaker 4: years ago on this thing called self-exploitation. So there were
1:06:04
Speaker 4: hashtags on Instagram. with half a million followers. So these
1:06:08
Speaker 4: are not like small communities that slip through the cracks.
1:06:11
Speaker 4: Half a million followers where people would post to children
1:06:15
Speaker 4: under the age of 18. Because remember, these are kids
1:06:17
Speaker 4: who want to be on OnlyFans, but because they're not 18,
1:06:19
Speaker 4: they can't go on OnlyFans. And they say, if you
1:06:21
Speaker 4: give me a photo that looks like this, I'll give
1:06:23
Speaker 4: you 50 bucks. And so these kids are voluntarily going
1:06:27
Speaker 4: and staging these photos and selling them to adults. When
1:06:30
Speaker 4: Jeff went and searched for those same hashtags on TikTok
1:06:32
Speaker 4: to just be like, oh, this is a problem everywhere.
1:06:35
Speaker 4: after like the third or fourth searches account got banned.
1:06:38
Speaker 2: Right.
1:06:38
Speaker 4: So TikTok has said, we don't want a whiff. We
1:06:41
Speaker 4: don't want a whiff of people like you. And Instagram
1:06:44
Speaker 4: was enough hands off that they were able to get
1:06:46
Speaker 4: communities that had half a million people in each one. Yeah.
1:06:49
Speaker 3: And I take it from our conversation, which really has
1:06:52
Speaker 3: been amazing that You know, one of the reasons why
1:06:54
Speaker 3: we don't, it's not just an accident that we don't
1:06:57
Speaker 3: know the difference between these platforms and who's acting in
1:07:00
Speaker 3: a way that's admirable and who's acting in a way
1:07:02
Speaker 3: that's deeply problematic and much worse, really worthy of condemnation.
1:07:07
Speaker 3: And that's certainly true of the behavior of Facebook during
1:07:09
Speaker 3: January 6th is because they're hiding it. They don't want
1:07:12
Speaker 3: us to know. And frankly, it's complicated. It's one of
1:07:15
Speaker 3: the things I think I have to thank you for.
1:07:17
Speaker 3: We're talking a lot on this show, both about the
1:07:19
Speaker 3: threat to democracy, but also about the heroes who are
1:07:22
Speaker 3: fighting back. And in this realm, it's not the kind
1:07:25
Speaker 3: of thing that it's, you know, in any way obvious
1:07:27
Speaker 3: what's happening.
1:07:28
Speaker 2: We need somebody to explain it to us.
1:07:30
Speaker 3: So that's part of why I want to thank you for,
1:07:32
Speaker 3: you know, releasing the information that you did of teaching
1:07:35
Speaker 3: us about it. And we focused on January 6th and
1:07:38
Speaker 3: the harms to democracy. But of course, there were harms
1:07:41
Speaker 3: to children and to girls that were coming from Instagram
1:07:44
Speaker 3: in particular. And a lot of your disclosures helped to
1:07:48
Speaker 3: generate lawsuits.
1:07:49
Speaker 2: To challenge that. So thank you so much for all
1:07:53
Speaker 2: of that.
1:07:54
Speaker 4: What I would chip in on in terms of like
1:07:56
Speaker 4: market forces that I think are going to end up
1:07:58
Speaker 4: influencing things, you know, the magnitude of the lawsuits is
1:08:01
Speaker 4: a lot bigger. We are not actually done with the lawsuits. So,
1:08:04
Speaker 4: so far, the attorney generals have settled with Facebook. So
1:08:08
Speaker 4: 47 U.S. states have settled with Facebook. New Mexico is
1:08:11
Speaker 4: not finished. So they recently got a $ 25 billion settlement
1:08:14
Speaker 4: based on privacy issues. one state, right, $ 25 billion. We'll
1:08:18
Speaker 4: see how it stands up on appeal. But there is
1:08:21
Speaker 4: a very, very large pool of school district lawsuits that
1:08:24
Speaker 4: are coming down the pike, which I think are likely
1:08:26
Speaker 4: going to be on the order of hundreds of billions
1:08:28
Speaker 4: of dollars in penalties. And there are still the individual
1:08:31
Speaker 4: kids and families lawsuits. And for context on that one,
1:08:34
Speaker 4: so far, we've only had one of those resolve, which
1:08:36
Speaker 4: is out of California. She got $ 2 million in, I
1:08:41
Speaker 4: can't remember the classes. There's like, there's punitive and like,
1:08:44
Speaker 4: I don't know. She got six million in total from
1:08:47
Speaker 4: Instagram and YouTube. And when you scale that up, you
1:08:51
Speaker 4: have six million dollars for a 22 year old about
1:08:54
Speaker 4: allegations of what happened when she was 16. You know,
1:08:57
Speaker 4: you only need a couple hundred thousand kids. And remember,
1:09:00
Speaker 4: we're talking about past and future teenagers. You know, you
1:09:03
Speaker 4: only need a couple hundred thousand kids to have been
1:09:05
Speaker 4: hurt at that level for it to be like a
1:09:07
Speaker 4: trillion dollars in damages.
1:09:09
Speaker 1: Wow.
1:09:09
Speaker 3: Right?
1:09:09
Speaker 4: It's wild. And so when we look at how Facebook
1:09:11
Speaker 4: is behaving today, I think we should be really scared
1:09:14
Speaker 4: of Because they are making a variety of choices or decisions.
1:09:17
Speaker 4: And these are just the ones we know about. This
1:09:19
Speaker 4: is just what we're getting from public reporting. Things like
1:09:22
Speaker 4: in their quarterly filings, they are increasing the number of
1:09:25
Speaker 4: ads they are showing by 14% to 19% every quarter
1:09:29
Speaker 4: for more than the last year.
1:09:31
Speaker 1: Oh, delightful.
1:09:32
Speaker 4: Oh, wow.
1:09:33
Speaker 2: Right?
1:09:33
Speaker 4: They are taking the money. They're taking the money and
1:09:35
Speaker 4: running because they don't know if they're going to be
1:09:36
Speaker 4: here in the future. Or mark just last week.
1:09:40
Speaker 1: Oh, yes. He's not afraid of a billionaire tax, is he?
1:09:44
Speaker 1: He's not afraid of a billionaire tax.
1:09:45
Speaker 3: No. Yeah, we've talked about that. Facebook will just pay
1:09:49
Speaker 3: the money that he owes. I mean, that is my
1:09:50
Speaker 3: worry is that they'll see it as.
1:09:52
Speaker 2: A cost of doing good.
1:09:53
Speaker 4: But it's actually worse than that. It means he can
1:09:55
Speaker 4: sell half of all of his equity and still remain
1:09:59
Speaker 4: full control.
1:09:59
Speaker 3: Amazing.
1:10:00
Speaker 1: Right?
1:10:00
Speaker 4: He doesn't have to choose between rich and being king.
1:10:02
Speaker 4: He could make $ 100 billion selling off his equity over
1:10:06
Speaker 4: the next eight years and retain full control.
1:10:09
Speaker 3: You also used a phrase that I don't want listeners
1:10:11
Speaker 3: to miss. And then, Chana, I think you might have
1:10:13
Speaker 3: some final thoughts. But it's that you said something about
1:10:17
Speaker 3: what we know. And of course, we know about some
1:10:20
Speaker 3: of these damages to democracy, to girls because of your disclosures.
1:10:24
Speaker 3: But how much do we not know? You haven't worked
1:10:27
Speaker 3: at the company now for some time. And the idea
1:10:30
Speaker 3: that they suddenly reformed themselves because of the lawsuits, I'm
1:10:34
Speaker 3: not sure that's right.
1:10:36
Speaker 2: And To me, anyway, that suggests the need.
1:10:38
Speaker 3: Not just for more conversation, but conversation in particular about disclosure, certainly,
1:10:43
Speaker 3: and other forms of regulation.
1:10:45
Speaker 2: John, any last thoughts before we say goodbye to our guests?
1:10:48
Speaker 1: I just want to thank you for joining us and
1:10:50
Speaker 1: at a time when we know, and the film addresses this,
1:10:53
Speaker 1: about how these platforms are just rewarding engagement and not
1:10:57
Speaker 1: just directing us to popular content, but that these algorithms
1:11:00
Speaker 1: that optimize engagement reward outrage and conflict. And it's really...
1:11:04
Speaker 1: helping us learn to hate each other. And I just
1:11:06
Speaker 1: want to close by asking you, do you think that
1:11:09
Speaker 1: these social media platforms should be made to bear responsibility
1:11:13
Speaker 1: for the political radicalization and the polarization? I mean, they've
1:11:16
Speaker 1: helped turn a lot of our friends into very mean,
1:11:19
Speaker 1: angry people.
1:11:21
Speaker 4: I do think, you know, a thing that I've suggested
1:11:23
Speaker 4: before is, so when I worked at Pinterest, so I
1:11:26
Speaker 4: used to have the job basically of being like the
1:11:27
Speaker 4: lead product manager for the algorithm that picks out all
1:11:30
Speaker 4: your pins.
1:11:31
Speaker 2: Right.
1:11:32
Speaker 4: So like part of why I can like speak with
1:11:34
Speaker 4: a certain level of compassion for the folks at Facebook
1:11:36
Speaker 4: is like I never worried about any of these things
1:11:39
Speaker 4: when I worked at Pinterest. You know, like like we
1:11:41
Speaker 4: were only kind of dabbling in the ideas of bias, like,
1:11:45
Speaker 4: you know, where unintentional effects happen with algorithms.
1:11:48
Speaker 2: Right.
1:11:48
Speaker 4: Like I never wondered if if I was spreading hate
1:11:51
Speaker 4: with Pinterest algorithmic changes. Right. But one of the things
1:11:53
Speaker 4: that I did where I gave me a pause, like
1:11:56
Speaker 4: it made me think was we rolled out a change.
1:11:59
Speaker 4: And it increased consumption by 10%, like 10 to 11%.
1:12:03
Speaker 4: So many, many lifetimes were sucked into Pinterest because of
1:12:07
Speaker 4: one change we made. We improved it that much in
1:12:08
Speaker 4: a single change. But revenue only went up 3.5%. So
1:12:11
Speaker 4: there's this question of like, okay, so we just sucked
1:12:15
Speaker 4: in all this human time, but we only made a
1:12:18
Speaker 4: little bit more money, like a third as much money
1:12:20
Speaker 4: as time that we've sucked up.
1:12:21
Speaker 2: Why?
1:12:22
Speaker 4: And it's because the people that we were able to
1:12:25
Speaker 4: make the biggest impact on were already consuming a lot.
1:12:29
Speaker 4: And we made them consume even more. And the most
1:12:32
Speaker 4: profitable impression that you view on a social network is
1:12:35
Speaker 4: the first impression you view because they show you the
1:12:37
Speaker 4: best ads upfront. So as they get three hours, four
1:12:41
Speaker 4: hours into your session, they're showing you ads that make
1:12:44
Speaker 4: them less money. Right now, there is no incentive to
1:12:48
Speaker 4: have you sign off, right? Like every marginal minute they
1:12:52
Speaker 4: can take of your time, even if they make less
1:12:54
Speaker 4: and less money off you over time is still worth
1:12:56
Speaker 4: it to them. you could imagine a world where we said, hey,
1:13:00
Speaker 4: you have to start funding the real world, like the
1:13:03
Speaker 4: physical world, like the ability for us to connect face-to-face.
1:13:06
Speaker 4: Because we used to spend a lot of money on
1:13:07
Speaker 4: community centers and like places you could go dance and
1:13:10
Speaker 4: like coffee shops. And like, what would it mean for
1:13:12
Speaker 4: us to be able to connect in person, right? Little league,
1:13:15
Speaker 4: I don't know. And, you know, if you said there
1:13:17
Speaker 4: is a flat syntax, like a fraction of a penny
1:13:21
Speaker 4: per minute on your platform, at some point, the platform
1:13:26
Speaker 4: stops making enough money to justify you being on the platform. Right.
1:13:30
Speaker 4: Then it's worth it to them to get you to,
1:13:31
Speaker 4: it's like on Netflix when they say, Hey, are you
1:13:33
Speaker 4: still there?
1:13:34
Speaker 3: Right.
1:13:34
Speaker 4: Netflix, it's always every minute they have you there costs
1:13:37
Speaker 4: them money. They don't, they don't want you like not
1:13:39
Speaker 4: actually being there, you know, in a world where we said,
1:13:41
Speaker 4: you know, every minute has a syntax of a fraction
1:13:44
Speaker 4: of a penny that will go into us funding spaces
1:13:47
Speaker 4: and subsidizing spaces in person. That would be the single
1:13:50
Speaker 4: most impactful thing we could do for our democracy is
1:13:52
Speaker 4: Because the way we learn how to take bigger risks,
1:13:56
Speaker 4: to navigate more complicated things is by trusting each other.
1:13:58
Speaker 4: And we will not trust each other if we can't
1:14:01
Speaker 4: see each other face to face. Like we're mammals. Like
1:14:03
Speaker 4: that's how we work. You're right.
1:14:05
Speaker 3: This has been an amazing conversation, Frances Haugen. whistleblower who
1:14:11
Speaker 3: really gave us all of this information that we've been
1:14:13
Speaker 3: able to use to digest what's actually happening with these companies,
1:14:16
Speaker 3: which I think in many ways would have been a
1:14:18
Speaker 3: black box without this information. And as much as we've
1:14:21
Speaker 3: talked about the threats to democracy, especially January 6th, the
1:14:25
Speaker 3: harm to girls that these platforms have caused, and then
1:14:29
Speaker 3: I love your point at the end, the harm to
1:14:31
Speaker 3: the real world in our actual social interaction, we've also
1:14:35
Speaker 3: talked about ways out of this. And I think this
1:14:37
Speaker 3: is the first step to discussions about reform. It's not
1:14:40
Speaker 3: going to happen with this president and this Congress, but
1:14:43
Speaker 3: it might happen soon. And it gives us more reason
1:14:45
Speaker 3: to think about what we might do and accomplish in
1:14:48
Speaker 3: the future. So Frances Haugen, the author of the great book,
1:14:52
Speaker 3: The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to
1:14:54
Speaker 3: Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.
1:14:58
Speaker 3: And of course, her story is now dramatized on the
1:15:00
Speaker 3: big screen in Aaron Sorkin's amazing.
1:15:03
Speaker 2: Film, The Social Reckoning. Thanks so much for joining us
1:15:06
Speaker 2: on The Oath in the Office. It's really been a pleasure.
1:15:09
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining us.
1:15:10
Speaker 4: Have a great day.
1:15:11
Speaker 1: Another great guest, Professor. Wow, now I got to go
1:15:14
Speaker 1: see that movie. I did a good job of making
1:15:15
Speaker 1: her think I had seen it, though, don't you think?
1:15:17
Speaker 3: Well, I have seen it, and I do recommend that
1:15:20
Speaker 3: everyone go see it. You'll see the story of her
1:15:23
Speaker 3: heroism comes through, but as we talked about, they simplify
1:15:27
Speaker 3: it a little bit. And the real story to me
1:15:29
Speaker 3: that you heard today is so much more powerful. It
1:15:32
Speaker 3: really is about somebody who saw the threat to democracy,
1:15:36
Speaker 3: not just in ways that we're building to extremism, but
1:15:39
Speaker 3: that we're building to January 6th itself. And then the
1:15:42
Speaker 3: inside story, too, of how really Facebook was beyond negligent,
1:15:47
Speaker 3: really active in destroying our democracy that day. And thankfully,
1:15:51
Speaker 3: we survived it. But it really was an incredible show.
1:15:55
Speaker 3: So thanks to Francis Haugen. And what a pleasure, John.
1:15:58
Speaker 1: Corey, how do our listeners follow you and keep up
1:16:00
Speaker 1: with your brilliance the other six days of the week?
1:16:02
Speaker 3: You can find us on all social, on all, I
1:16:05
Speaker 3: was going to say all social media platforms. You can
1:16:07
Speaker 3: find us on Facebook. We'll see how our algorithms do
1:16:11
Speaker 3: after this on X, on Blue Sky. But you also
1:16:14
Speaker 3: can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts, on Spotify,
1:16:18
Speaker 3: on Apple, where, of course, we usually rank in the
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Speaker 3: top three of Apple trending podcast episodes. You can also
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Speaker 3: find our sub stack, the Oath in the Office sub stack.
1:16:28
Speaker 1: And please write to us as well. We'll read your
1:16:30
Speaker 1: letters on the air. And Corey, thank you so much. Everyone,
1:16:33
Speaker 1: please subscribe. Tell your friends. And I want to thank
1:16:35
Speaker 1: Wendy and Bea Wolf and everyone who helps put the
1:16:37
Speaker 1: pod together every week. And we will see you next
1:16:40
Speaker 1: time on The Oath and the Office.