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Offline: Alex Stamos on Leaving Facebook and Zuckerberg’s Reign · Pod Save America

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• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Was there a moment where you said to yourself, like,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I think I have to leave? I've butted heads enough
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: here and I got to go?
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, in 2018, that's what happened. Facebook's this
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: place that, like, if you go and you're, like, a
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: lower-down employee, your new employee, it's like Care Bear land, right? Like,
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: everything's wonderful and the food is free. And, like, the
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: posters say things about people supporting people and stuff, right?
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: So it's like the Care Bears for 80, 90% of
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: the company. And if you're in the top 10% of
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: the company, it's Game of Thrones.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Happy New
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Year and welcome back to Offline. So my guest this
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: week is Alex Stamos, who's currently director of the Stanford
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Internet Observatory, where they do all kinds of research on
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the negative impact of technology and disinformation. But it's Alex's
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: last job that we spend most of this episode talking about.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: From 2015 to 2018, he was the chief information security
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: officer at Facebook. We've heard a lot about product manager-turned-whistleblower
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Francis Haugen in the last few months, but Alex was
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: actually the first high-ranking employee to leave the company over
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: a dispute with other senior executives about how Facebook handles
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: the spread of disinformation on its platform. Basically, he wanted
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: the company to be more transparent about the issue. They disagreed.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Stamos has plenty of criticism for his former employer, but
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: not too surprisingly, he also takes issue with some of
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: the criticism directed towards Facebook from media outlets and liberals
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: like me. We get into all that, and we also
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: talk about how he and his team first noticed that
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: the Russian government was using Facebook to influence the 2016 election,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: why he decided to quit the company, what the internal
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: culture and decision-making process is like at Facebook, why he
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: thinks it's time for Mark Zuckerberg to step down, and
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: what changes he thinks would make the platform better. It's
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: the first episode we've done with someone who's actually worked
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: at a social media company, and I think it's a
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: valuable perspective to hear. As always, if you have questions, comments,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: or complaints about the show, feel free to email us
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: at offlineatcricket.com. Here's Alex Stamos. Alex Stamos, thanks for joining Offline.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me, John.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: So I've been doing this series on all the way
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: that the internet is breaking our brains. And you're the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: first guest we've had who's actually worked at a social
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: media company. So you're here to answer for the sins
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: of all.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that. Thank you.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: So you were Facebook's chief security officer from 2015 to 2018.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Is that right? What did that job entail?
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: So the majority of that job is kind of the
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: traditional information security job, right? So, um, you know, I
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: led a team whose job it was to keep people
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: from breaking Facebook, the company, stealing data, uh, stealing money, um, doing,
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: you know, kind of your standard hacker things. Um, and
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: then there was a component that was about preventing people
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: from doing harmful things on the platform. Uh, so I had,
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: for example, a child safety investigations team that would do
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: The investigation is kind of the worst of the worst
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: of the child safety issues. While I was there, we
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: started a counterterrorism investigation team due to mostly ISIS, but
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: other terrorist groups who were doing, you know, kind of
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: advertisement on the platform. We had an anti-fraud team, and
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: then we had a big team that worked on state-sponsored hacking,
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: so whose job it was to kind of track what
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and other
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: countries like that. were doing to cause harm as well
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: as to try to attack the company to get information
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: out of it.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: I was going to say, things got pretty interesting for
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: you and your team in 2016. Can you talk about
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: how and when you guys discovered that the Russian government
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: was using Facebook to influence the election in the US?
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: So they're really two totally different kind of online Russian
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: campaigns by two totally different Russian groups, for which the
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: connections between them are actually pretty loose.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: There's not a lot of good evidence.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: At least in the unclassified side that we have, that
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: those groups are working together. So the part that a
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: lot of people talk about from a disinformation perspective is
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: the troll factory, right? So there's the Russian Internet Research
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: Agency is a private company that belongs to one of,
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: Putin's oligarchs and who pushes propaganda on behalf of what
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: is in support of Putin. Most of their propaganda is
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: actually in Russian, but they do have divisions that focus
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: on the United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and such.
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: And then there's a totally different section, which is the
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: hack and leak campaign by the GRU, which the GRU
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: is actually part of the government is the Russian military. Um, and, uh,
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: they have both hackers and disinformation actors. Um, but they,
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: they have the actual hands-on hacking capability, which is something
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: that the internet research agency and the other troll farms lack.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: And so that had a very different texture, which is
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: those were the attacks against John Podesta against the DNC,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: the D triple C and such, um, as well as
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: then the leak campaign of using WikiLeaks and then a
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: variety of, of fake outlets that they created to push
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: the propaganda that they wanted. So we actually saw the
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: second one first, right? So often if you're a professional
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: hacker working for a government, the first step in what
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: we call the kill chain, right?
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: Which are the steps a hacker has to take to
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: do what they wanna do is reconnaissance.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: And so reconnaissance will often be done on social media
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: to try to find out everything about a target and
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: figure out the ways that you can possibly attack them, right?
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: Can I text them here? Can I send them a
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: message here?
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: Stuff like that.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: And we saw reconnaissance activity in the spring of 2016
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: by accounts that we were able to tie to GRU.
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: We had a dedicated guy who all he did was
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: track this group and had been doing so during actions
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: in Ukraine, during attacks against the World Anti-Doping Agency, stuff
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: like that.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: And so then when did you start sort of disagreeing
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: with other Facebook executives about either the transparency of how
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: to release this information, how to talk about it, the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: spread of disinformation on the platform itself?
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Could you talk about that?
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: A lot of the problems that Facebook is still facing,
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: I think, were set up in that kind of August,
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: September of 2017, where there have always been a couple
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: of different, you know, people talk about Facebook wants this,
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: but the truth is, you know, a big company of 50,000
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: people will have all these different groups that want different things.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: And the big fight has been since that time, should
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: we be open and transparent and honest about these failings
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: to demonstrate, one, to help other people figure it out, two,
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: to coordinate with others, and three, to kind of demonstrate
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: forward movement. Or is it better to just be kind
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: of to save the minimum amount possible and to, you know,
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: keep as much as close to the best as possible?
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: You know, one of the things that complicated the whole
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: thing was we had privately given the data to the
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: Mueller team that summer, right? And Mueller, as an actual prosecutor,
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: was able to go to a judge and get a
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: search warrant. And then he took all this stuff and
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: then he gave us a gag order saying that we
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: weren't allowed to talk about the fact that we had
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: given it to the Mueller team. And then, you know,
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: Facebook comes out and says, hey, this bad thing happened,
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: but we're not going to share it with anybody. but
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: also can't say at the time, hey, but because we're
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: working with the Mueller team and becomes this big back
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: and forth where the company takes like the most aggressive
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: interpretation of the privacy laws around this to not share.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: It with Congress.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: And this becomes like this big brouhaha that eventually the
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: data gets shared to Congress and then Congress can share
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: it with other folks. And that's how we're able to
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: now see all of that. But that fight at Facebook
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: has happened continuously since then.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: And you know, I, I've always thought that being open
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: about this stuff is the only way that we're going
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: to fix it because this is a society wide problem
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: and you can't, you know, a company by itself cannot
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: go do this.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: This is require, not just the private sector to work together,
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: but the private and public sector to work together. And
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: when you try to control everything and make it about
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: the PR outcome, it makes it very hard to fix
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: the problem. And from my perspective, like if Facebook wants
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: to fix their PR problems, the best thing to do
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: is to fix the underlying issues themselves, that that's actually
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: the shortest. Like you can't really spin your way out
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: of these things. But that's what started there. Now we've
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: had many, many examples since then of that kind of
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: fight happening over.
• 9:19
  Speaker 4: And over again.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Well, I was going to say like, you know, the
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: specific Mueller gag order issue aside, why do you think
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the specifically the product comms legal side of Facebook is
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: always erring on the side of less transparency and not more?
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: So if there's like a fundamental, there's a couple of
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: like kind of fundamental organizational flaws at Facebook that I
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: think are real problems. One is the Mark Sherrill split. Right,
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: so everybody thinks Sheryl Sandberg is the second most powerful
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: person on Facebook. She's like the 10th or something, right?
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: The truth is there's a bunch of people who run
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: product teams, and don't even run product teams, who are
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: lower down, but who do, important things like metrics and such,
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: who actually have more power over what the real impact is,
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: because Facebook's real impact is what is built into the products, right?
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: Cheryl has the legal department, the comms department, the policy team.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: They're kind of the cleanup on aisle five, folks. At
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: the time, my team reported to Cheryl, which is actually
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: kind of another fundamental problem, is that you had, you know,
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: we were part of the team of kind of cleaning
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: up the product mess. And so that kind of division,
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: I think, is really harmful in that kind of the
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: idea is like, oh, you can throw this stuff out
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: in the world and break a bunch of things, and
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: then these people will clean it up. And that's not
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: our responsibility is kind of the feeling from the product side.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: The other kind of fundamental policy problem that I think
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: goes directly to this issue is that the team, the
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: comms and policy team is huge, right? So there's this
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: humongous team that now reports to Nick Clegg, the former
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: deputy prime minister of the UK, but was all big
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: together at the time. And that included the people who
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: were trying to decide kind of substantively what the rules
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: should be at Facebook. And I think there's actually a
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: fundamental problem here is that you know, their goal is
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: to keep governments happy with the company. So the company
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: can operate everywhere and make money everywhere. And I think the,
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: probably the biggest kind of driver, you know, there's a
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: natural kind of comms reaction of, you know, this, this phrase, like,
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: let's not break into jail of, if we don't release
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: things that people won't talk about, like that has failed
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: over and over again for Facebook.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: So like, I hope people don't say that inside.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Never, never a good political comms strategy. It doesn't seem
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: like a good corporate comms strategy either. Right.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't work.
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: And I think, like, we probably talk about this, like,
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: I think there's probably a lot of parallels between Facebook
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: and government, both from, like, all the different actors who
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: are fighting, but also of getting pulled into these policy
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: discussions for which there's no real right answer. And so
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: no matter what, you're going to be in trouble with somebody,
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: so you can't, like, make everybody happy. And specifically at
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: the time, you've got this new Republican administration, you've got,
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: you know, Republicans in Congress, and so you have a
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: policy team whose job it is to push to make
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: the government happy, who's then very close to the comms team.
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: And so you end up with this general strategy of, hey,
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: let's not get involved in this because at the time
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: it was like super controversial to talk about Trump and Russia, right?
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: That was seen as like a really political thing. And
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: so their impulse was, well, instead of us coming out
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: and talking about this publicly and honestly, it's better to
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: just avoid it and stay out of it because we
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: don't want, you know, we don't want to take sides.
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: And that's like a constant problem at Facebook is people
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: not wanting to take sides when one side is right
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: and one side's wrong and neutrality is actually the problem. Yeah.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: No, I've noticed that from the outside. I mean, when
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: you say that their job is to keep governments happy,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: it sounds like what you're saying is their job is
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: to make sure that a government, whether in the U.S.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: or elsewhere in the world, doesn't get so pissed off
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: that they regulate Facebook in ways that Facebook doesn't want.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, yeah.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, keep a government happy is regulatory. Then also
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: just kind of the administrative state, right? Like even if
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: you don't actually pass laws, there's all kinds of powers
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: governments have to punish companies and make things hard for them.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: And so, you know, just like any other government fair shop,
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: they're trying to keep in basic governments. That's the ruling party,
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: which is like the really scary thing is, you know,
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: governments don't necessarily reflect government. all or even, you know,
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: a majority of the people in the country. And so
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: they end up, if you like, are just keeping the
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: ruling party happy, that you end up twisting yourself in
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: all these decisions. And so I think a lot of
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: it came out of like, let's not piss off Trump.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: Let's not piss off the Republicans. It's not like take
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: a side, because if we're being honest about this stuff,
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: then that's kind of taking a side, which I think
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: is ridiculous and has way hurt the company. But that's
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: kind of this impulse you see over and over again.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Was there a moment where you said to yourself, like,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: I think I have to leave. This is, this is,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: I've butted heads enough here and I got to go.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, in 2018, that's what happened. They effectively,
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: you know, I was trying to fight to kind of
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: make my team much more effective. I was, you know,
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: get out from under Cheryl, be closer to the product teams,
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: have the ability to actually affect things, massively grow the
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: number of people who are investigating and working on this stuff. Um,
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: and some of that stuff ended up happening, but I, Effectively,
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: there were a handful of executives. Facebook's this place that
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: like if you go and you're like a lower down employee,
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: your new employee, it's like Care Bear land, right? Like
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: everything's wonderful and the food is free. And like the
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: posters say things about people supporting people and stuff, right?
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: So it's like the Care Bears for 80, 90% of
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: the company. And if you're in the top 10% of
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: the company, it's Game of Thrones, right? And I was
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: the victim of a very smart political machination by somebody
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: who basically said, oh, well, I can take care of
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: the problems Alex is working on, but I can do
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: so without pissing you off, aka telling the truth, right?
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: And so there were basically a bunch of decisions that
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: were made that I would not be able to make
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: things any better.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: And so I had to leave.
• 14:47
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  Speaker 1: started today. I talked to Charlie Worzel about Facebook for
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: this series.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I thought that was a
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: good interview.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Oh, thank you. Well, he said in that interview that
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: he thinks there's very little cynicism in the upper ranks
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: of Facebook management because... most people are true believers in
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: what they're doing, that they basically think they're doing the
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: right thing. Was that your experience?
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that is definitely true. Lack of cynicism
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: is not the term I would use. Right.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: I would say one, you know, Mark Zuckerberg.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: Really does truly believe that letting everybody in the world
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: talk to each other is a good thing.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: Now, I'm not the right person to ask about this
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: because I have spent my entire career working on the
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: downside of letting people use computers. I'm a total Luddite.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: All I've done is security and safety. And so once
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: you've worked on the sexual abuse of children online, once
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: you've worked on counterterrorism issues, it is very difficult to
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: feel good about the internet. And so I'm way farther
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: on the other side. And I think there's a truth
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: somewhere in the middle. But Mark really.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: believes that.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: And one of the basic problems at Facebook is it
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: quite a small C conservative company in that the people
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: who run it have barely changed in like 12, 14 years, right?
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: One of Zuckerberg's smart moves in the beginning when he
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: started Facebook was he realized that he was just a
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: kid and there's a bunch of things he didn't know.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: So he surrounded himself with all these adults from Silicon
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: Valley who knew how do you sell ads?
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: How do you build a business? How do you hire people?
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: How do you build data centers?
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: Right. How do you run multimillion computer infrastructures? He had
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: no idea how to do that being like a Harvard dropout.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: He had a product idea. And so he surrounded himself
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: with those people. And that group has barely changed since
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: the IPO. Right. Since the 2010, 2011. And so I
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: think that's like one of the fundamental problems is that one,
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: those people believe everything. But the other problem is that
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: there's all these decisions that kind of made sense when
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: Facebook was a scrappy upstart company. Right. When you're like, oh, no,
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Google Plus is going to defeat us. Or when people
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: are saying, hey, Instagram acquisition is crazy or mobile is
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: going to crush Facebook. Facebook will never be profitable. The
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: IPO is a disaster. And so they make all these
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: decisions when they're a scrappy upstart. And then once you're
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: like the dominant platform and you are intermediating most of
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: the human interactions on the planet, those decisions don't make
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: sense anymore. Right. But the people who made them are
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: exactly the same. And it's really hard for them to
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: go back and to be like, oh, maybe I need
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: to change my mind now. And I think like, again,
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: like it's this small C conservatism of there's all this
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: talk about the good old days were the good old days, right?
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: And like, oh, things were much better when we were
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: smaller and stuff. And it's kind of like the company's
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: incredibly successful. You can celebrate that, but then you have
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: to recognize like, man, we have a huge amount of
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: responsibility now that didn't exist back in those good old days.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: And so things do have to be different.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: Like you do have to have more bureaucracy in the
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: things that product people complain about, because when you have
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: more responsibility, you've got to spend a bunch of time
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: thinking about what bad things are going to happen. And
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: I think that's like a fundamental problem that has not
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: been solved is that the turnover at the top ranks
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: is incredibly slow. And those people create kind of this
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: bubble where Zuckerberg gets to be detached. This is the
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: other issue is, you know, Mark's never had another job, right?
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: Like this is all the guy's done since Harvard. And
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: so he never had like a real kind of young
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: adulthood where he went into a company and he saw
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: how a company was run and stuff. And I've seen
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: a bunch of companies and like really well-run companies. The
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: CEOs know they're in a bubble and they pop the
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: bubble and Mark does not pop the bubble. He's okay
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: being in this bubble of people who are telling him,
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: you know, not necessarily what he wants to hear, but
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: they are formatting things in the way he wants them
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: to be structured.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: And that will never be, there's a fundamental problem in
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: like your business plan. It's always going to be like,
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: here's a metric that we can make better.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it does seem, and from my conversations with people
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: higher up in Facebook too that I've had, that he is,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: he believes in his mission. He's a little clueless about
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: everything else that's going on. When he gets public criticism,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: he's pretty stubborn about it. And he thinks that because
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: what he's doing is right and good and he's getting
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: unfair criticism and the people close to him are telling
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: him that it's unfair criticism, and he thinks to himself, well,
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: I'm just a I'm just a computer guy. I'm just
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: a product guy. And I didn't think I was going
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: to be this CEO. That's fine. That's all he has
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: to do.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a real problem.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: And I've said this publicly for years now. I said
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: to Kara Swisher on stage a couple of years ago
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: in Canada, he just shouldn't be the CEO. And he
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: shouldn't be the CEO for a couple of reasons. One,
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: he has made all these decisions that have to be revisited.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: And so it's time for somebody to come in. They
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: need a major culture change, and it's very hard to
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: change the culture of a company while it's the same people, right?
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: There's a bunch of tech companies that have had kind
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: of really great second acts, and the best example is Microsoft.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: They were kind of stuck in their Windows monopoly world
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: of the 1990s because it was Bill Gates and then
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was part of that inner circle. And
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: it was not until those guys were gone and Satya
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: and Della came in, it was like, we're gonna redo everything, right?
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: And they're kicking butt in a lot of ways. And
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: they fixed a lot of the problems of the problems
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: that they created in society. And Facebook needs kind of
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: the equivalent cultural change I have never seen a company
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: do that while the same people are in charge. And
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: so I think like, no matter what, he, he, he
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: probably should not be CEO partially because he also, he's
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: just really bad at representing the company, right? It's like
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: a fundamental job of a public company CEO is you
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: have to be able to go to the Senate and
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: take a bunch of crap from people who don't really
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: know what they're talking about that well. Um, and who perhaps,
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: you know, some of their criticisms are correct. Some of
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: them are, totally off base and crazy, uh, read Ted Cruz. And, um,
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: you have to kind of sit there and take it
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: and then be able to represent the company well.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And he can't do that.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: So it's like, if he didn't own a voting majority
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: of the shares, I think like a very reasonable board
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: of directors would say you're failing at the fundamental job.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: And I actually think they, they kind of missed an
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: opportunity here because you know, they became meta and, And
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: when Google did this, again, it was that kind of
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: shift where Larry Page went up into the stratosphere of
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: I'm going to be the CEO of this holding company
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: and I'm going to be able to work on rockets
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: and all kinds of fun stuff. And then they hired
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: a manager to run Google, the big part. And so
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: there was an opportunity, I think, when Meta happened that
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: he could go play with his virtual reality. And go
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: do the fun stuff that he obviously wants to do.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: And then let somebody else take over as CEO of Facebook,
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: preferably from the outside, and kind of revamp it culturally
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: and fix a bunch of these problems.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: And they didn't do that.
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: He's both the CEO of Meta, but he's still running
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: Facebook day to day in a way that I think.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: Is really unhealthy.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, do you see a scenario where he ever
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: steps down? Is it possible that there's internal pressure from within,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: especially after the Facebook papers and everything over the last
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: several months? It doesn't seem like anything has changed or
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: there's a desire to change there. From my perspective, it
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: seems like they were just trying to get through that
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: last controversy and hope that it quiets down and then
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: continue on their merry way.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean, I think the strategy is working out. Like,
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: the company's never been richer and never been making more money.
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: It's never had more users. They're not facing really true
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: regulatory pressure, at least in the United States. Because, I mean,
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: the fundamental thing is that Republicans and Democrats agree that
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: they hate Facebook, but for completely opposite reasons, right? And
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: they finally figured that out. There's this weird period during
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: which that Ted Cruz retweeted, I remember this very distinctly,
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: it's like, Elizabeth Warren tweeted this big criticism of Facebook
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: and then Ted Cruz retweeted hers. And I was like,
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: that can't hold, right? Because it's like, because yes, they're
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: both angry, but they want completely different futures. And so,
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: and you know, they are facing, I think, some reasonable
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: antitrust pressure. And so if there's an antitrust move and
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: you end up breaking off the cool new sexy stuff,
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: then I think there is.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: A world where Mark goes with it, right?
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: Like if there was a Oculus metaverse spinoff that in
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: the end, he's like a nerd who likes building stuff.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: He has a product vision and he's quite good at
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: kind of predicting where things are going to go from
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: a product direction.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: That's what he wants to do.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Not like deal with this huge social network with a
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: gazillion languages and all these people causing all these problems
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: that in that case, he might go with the smaller company. Um,
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: but that's the only situation I could, I could think
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: of it. I mean, the guy's going to live for
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: a long time. He's very young still. And so you
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: don't really have this Bill Gates situation where Gates finally
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: like gave it up, uh, and decided he was going
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: to give all his money away. Mark's already giving his
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: money away. His wife's doing all the good work.
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: And so I think part of his long term plan
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: is like Priscilla is going to save my reputation, uh, by,
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: you know, curing cancer or whatever. So yeah, I'm not sure.
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: And there's no good way to create that pressure from
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: the outside because the board of directors is captured by
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: his votes.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Well, so there's the obvious leadership issues, but I'm interested
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: in your take on Frances Haugen and the document she leaked.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: To me, I think the most damning and compelling takeaway
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: is that Facebook is not just some neutral public square
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: where people are acting like people, that the company is
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: making intentional decisions about the information that we see and
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: that we engage with. And the effect of those decisions,
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: whether intentional or not, is often to amplify the worst
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: parts of human nature. Would you agree with that?
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: Well, that last one.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: So this is the problem is we don't know what
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: the Hagen documents say. So there's like 1500 documents, something
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: like 30,000 pages of documents and only a couple dozen,
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: the couple dozen that were like the steamiest in the, the, the, that,
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: you know, that were the most interesting to a handful of,
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: of news outlets got published.
• 28:19
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Right. A majority, I've seen a couple of the documents
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: that have been published. A majority of those documents are
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: people actually doing a good job, which is bad things
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: happen online. We should study how it happens. We should
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: come up with mitigations. We should test those mitigations and
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: then we should see what the outcome is. And that's
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: what you want, right? That's actually what we want. And
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: so my overall feeling in the Hagen documents is one,
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: Facebook could have solved this problem for them by being
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: much more public about this, right? Like most of these documents,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: if they were published on a blog post or in
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: a journal or something would not have been a scandal.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: And when you say they would reveal that people were
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: basically doing a good job, are you saying that they
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: would reveal that people were taking steps to reduce the
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: potential harm that the platform caused or that people on
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: the platform were causing.
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: So these documents exist because Facebook has created this org
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: called integrity, right? Which is a bad word, but like
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: is effectively like a trust and safety. It's exactly integrity
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: is the Facebook term for trust and safety. They should
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: just call themselves trust and safety instead of Facebook always
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: has to come up with their own branding for anything.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: But anyway, it's, it is because Facebook has like by
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: far the largest trust and safety team in all of
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: social media. And so there are more quantitative social science
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: PhDs doing research on Facebook's negative effects than in probably
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: the rest of the industry combined.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: And so now, are those people always effective?
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: And I think one of the outcomes from the documents
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: that I have seen is that there continues to be
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: this problem that understanding what is going on does not
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: help you if you run into either a policy team
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: who wants you to be neutral, or if you run
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: into a growth team that doesn't wanna do anything that
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: hurts their metrics, right? And so I think that is
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: like a continuous problem of you could say, we've noticed
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: this uptake in some kind of bad behavior we have
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: some ideas to fix it. And then you have that
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: getting vetoed by a growth team. That's like, well, your
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: idea to fix it hurts our metrics by one and
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: a half percent. So we're not even going to consider it. Right.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: We're not even going to test it. And, um, and
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: so I think that that continues to be a fundamental problem. Um,
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: but you know, again, this is kind of like the
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: direction we want to go. And the hogging documents are
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: not really well-timed here for the industry because it is
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: good that Facebook has started on this path. They have
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: not gone there yet. And now we're at this junction
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: where everybody else is watching and is trying to decide
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: like is it worth it for us to know what
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: the bad things are if knowing is what creates the
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: possibility that all of a sudden we're going to get
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: criticized for it which is like again this constant battle
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: inside of facebook of like publicly fix identify and fix
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: our problems or just kind of cover it all up
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: and hope that it passes us by is that like
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: which one of those teams is winning it looks like
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: the pass it by team from reading the tea leaves
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: on the outside, from the people who have quit and
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: the people who have been fired. There's a bunch of
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: people who work on transparency and integrity stuff that are
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: now gone. And so on the overall, I think it's
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: a much more mixed bag because we want them to
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: do this work, right? Like we want them to do
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: this work. And most of the companies in the world,
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: media and social media don't do it, right? That's the
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: other kind of great irony here is that we're reading
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: about all this in the Wall Street Journal, which belongs
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: to Rupert Murdoch. The idea of Rupert Murdoch having a
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: civic integrity team, like measuring what is the outcome of
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: the Wall Street Journal and Fox News on American democracy
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: is just laughable.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're never going to do that. Right.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: And so we kind of want this work to happen.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: We should be critical when then the work does not
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: make it into actually fixing problems. We should not be
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: critical when it's just, okay, well, you identified a problem, right?
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: Because here's also the truth here is every single platform
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: has these, right? Facebook is not the largest advertiser in
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: the world. They're not the biggest website in the world anymore, right?
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: TikTok is actually the biggest in the United States now. Um,
• 31:51
  Speaker 3: YouTube has more time spent. Facebook, I think has the most, uh,
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: unique users when you add up all the products, right?
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: So it is the biggest by one measurement, but not
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: by all of them. All of them have this, but
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: most companies don't look. And so I think we need
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: to create an incentive structure for there to be transparency
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: and inner kind of self-reflection on these problems and not
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: punish that self-reflection by just saying these documents say that
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: they're bad.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: That, that I completely agree with, like, like stipulated. It's
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: good that Facebook. is introspective like this and tries to
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: find and identify problems on the platform. Every social media
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: platform should do the same thing. The ones that aren't
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: should be criticized for that. I think at least in
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: the documents that were leaked in the stories, the problem
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: seems to be when researchers, employees within the company can say, hey,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: you know what? This is a problem with the product.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: This is an algorithm that is, if we tweaked it
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: this way, would cause less harm. and then running up
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: against a brick wall, senior leadership saying, no, we're not
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: going to make that change because we want to prioritize
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: growth over safety.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: And so just to be more specific, which revelations from
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: those stories do you think Facebook deserves criticism for? And
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: what do you think that Haugen and maybe the media
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: got wrong about Facebook? And what criticisms do you think
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: is unfair? Maybe just into two categories.
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: So again, of the documents that have been publicly discussed,
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: I really want to get access to these and I
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: want them to be public so we can have a
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: public discussion. Because also there's a huge amount that we
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: can learn both at Academia and other companies can learn
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: from learning from Facebook's mistakes. Right.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Look, I will just say that it's always bothered me
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: that like. the press strategy to deliver documents to a
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: media consortium and not to just make them public so
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: that everyone could see them has always bothered me. And
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: I don't really understand that.
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: I get why she didn't just make it public without
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: doing any kind of censure. Cause you have all these
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: names of people. And the truth is, so I had
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: people who I was doxxed by ISIS on a telegram channel, right?
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: Like I had people who had got death threats from ISIS.
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: So you really don't want of like, here is one
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: of our low level employees who writes a report about
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: ISIS and all of a sudden is now getting death
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: threats at home. And so like, I, I, as you
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: can imagine, I support that because there's probably like things
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: in there about the ministry of state security in China
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: or the GRU that have my name on it, where
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: I'm saying not so great things about people who could,
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: you know, make my life.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: You don't want to piss those people.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: You've been there. I've been there.
• 34:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: Right. Um, and so like I worked for Mike McFall, right?
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: Like I I've seen what that's like to have the
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: GRU on your ass.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: Um, Oh yeah.
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: And so, uh, anyway, um, and so, but yes, I
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: think like there, there was an alternate universe in which
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: you go through like a reasonable step of like getting
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: rid of people's names and stuff like that. And then
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: they are released on a rolling basis publicly, or at
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: least to like a group of academic groups that can
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: then release them publicly later. But that, that pissed me
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: off anyway. So of the things that are the worst,
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: I mean, the worst one for me is the one
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: that was always a problem. And I think is a
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: continuous problem at Facebook was there's an article in there
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: about the under investment and kind of basic trust and
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: safety issues. outside of English in the developing world, right?
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: Which is the amount of investment, you know, the sad
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: part is like the Facebook that we get as Americans
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: is the best one that exists on the planet. Maybe
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: the German one's a little better depending on a couple
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: of different metrics, but like English and German are the
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: ones for which a lot of work happens, French a
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: little bit. And then outside of those languages, it drops
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: off precipitously. And so that specific one was about human
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: trafficking where there are a bunch of different components that
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: are happening on Facebook with the most egregious was that
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: the people were advertising the jobs to pull people into
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: this trafficking. They're advertising jobs on Facebook. Now, you know,
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: doing a job advertisement is obviously not illegal, but this
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: guy was able to pull together of like the people
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: doing this job advertisement are then on the backend are
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: basically selling these people as slaves.
• 35:36
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: And so that this is the kind of thing that
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: if was proper investment that you could take care of.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: And Um, and this is one of my, one of
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: my kind of issues.
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Overall, what kind of the media discussion of Facebook is
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: that 99% of it about disinformation, like among like kind
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: of the elite corporate, mostly liberal media in the United States,
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: 99% of it is about political disinformation in the U
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: S right. Which is bad, but disinformation is the hardest
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: of the problems here because there are legitimate free expression
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: concerns and legitimate concerns around kind of the political power
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: you want the platforms to have, there's a bunch of
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: bad things that happen for which there is no counter argument, right?
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: Like human trafficking should not happen. The abuse of children
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: should not happen. The organizing of terrorist attacks should not happen.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: And so I think that is like the, of all
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: the articles that that kind of hit home for me
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: as in with my personal experience is that the investment
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: Outside of a handful of countries that have really high
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: media criticism and really high kind of regulatory potentially problems
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: are just way underinvested. And that causes a lot of
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: unnecessary suffering, especially in the developing world.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: And you could fix that problem just with more investment,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: more staff, more resources in these other countries. This is
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: not like one of those really tricky problems to solve.
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: You don't have to decide like what is vaccine disinformation,
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: which is a angels on the head of the pin
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: kind of question that 50 lawyers at Facebook will argue
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: over for a month. deciding human trafficking should not happen
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: on the advertising platform is pretty simple.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: All the rules are there.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: You just need the investment in the people and the
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: languages and the skill sets to pull it through at
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: the end. Part of the problem there too, is that
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: a lot of the investigatory work at Facebook is in
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: a loop with the public sector, right? So like when
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: we found a bad guy hurting children in America, we
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: were able to get law enforcement on like that, right?
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: If we found a potential terrorist attack in Western Europe,
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: that guy was arrested like that. when you're dealing with
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: some of these problems in the developing world, it is
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: hard to get law enforcement to get involved. And so
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: what happens is instead of continuing of like, well, we're
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: going to do the best we can on our own.
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: I think there's a little bit that loop has to
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: exist where law enforcement comes back to you and says,
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: this is a problem and I want to work on it.
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: So I think Facebook needs to kind of redouble down
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: on in the places where maybe we can't get this
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: guy in jail. We are going to double down on
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: mitigating the harm, even if this person's going to continue
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: to exist and we know they're going to come back
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: over and over again.
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• 40:15
  Speaker 1: New episodes come out every Tuesday. What about the story
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: regarding the meaningful social interaction sort of algorithm there? That
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: was one that really got me because I feel like
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: it gets to the core of at least my problem
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: with Facebook, which is not so much about like let's
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: moderate content everywhere, but they are specifically prioritizing in news
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: feeds and people's feeds content that gets people angry, enraged, etc.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: Well, that's not exactly what that story said.
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: And so this is where I get a little, like
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post stories
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: here were not really matching up with what the document said.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: And so like, this is where I think like it
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: gets pretty complicated. Part of it is whenever you make
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: these change, it's the company doesn't like make a change
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: in the vacuum. And so I think like the mean
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: social interaction, when you make a change like that, even
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: if it's well-meaning, there will be an outcome. And so, yes,
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: I think that like the bad part there is that
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: clearly there was like the growth team is putting their
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: finger on the scale in a bunch of different situations
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: where their metrics, they believe have to monotonically go up, right?
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: Like you can never go backwards. It is not okay
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: to make a trade-off. And that is, again, a fundamental
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: kind of Zuck problem is that he allows the growth
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: team to have that power without holding them accountable for
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: what the outcomes are. But I want to caution against
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: the idea, there's kind of this not to use, you're
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: using me as a standard of all Silicon Valley. So
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: I'll use the standard of all liberal media.
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: And so like the first kind of like, there's this
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: first kind of liberal media bubble of everything's Russian propaganda.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: 99% of the bad stuff that happens is Americans doing
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: it to herself.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: So that bubble's popped. You're, you're past that.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: Like everybody says it wasn't them, but you go roll
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: the tape back to 2017. And a lot of people,
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: a lot.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: Of people go, yeah, everyone gets swept up in it.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: Right. The second bubble was kind of like, okay, well,
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: and this bubble continues to exist. you can content moderate
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: your way out of this, right? That like, as long
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: as you enforce your rules, then the bad stuff I
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: don't like will go away. Now that should be true
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: for a bunch of things for which are not kind
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: of politically difficult, but for the things that a lot of,
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: you know, people are talking about these days, like vaccine disinformation,
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: political disinformation, it's not that easy to come up with
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: those rules. Right. And, um, and it, and that's where
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: like the adversarial stuff gets really tough. And now there's
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: kind of this new one of like, it's just the algorithm.
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: If you just tweak the algorithm, all this bad activity
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: will go away. And I'm just gonna tell you, that's
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: not true. One, this happens with every single platform, right?
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: So like everybody who has all of these different algorithms
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: and one of the Hagen documents that was leaked is
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: actually an experiment that Facebook did where a certain percentage
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: of people saw reverse chrono, right? Which is just all
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: the stuff that people have shared who are friends of
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: yours on Facebook in reverse chronological order, no ranking at all.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: And that was worse by almost every metric of badness
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: than the ranking, right? Which makes sense because people will
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: do things like if you're a spammer, you do a
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: lot of spam. If you're a click baiter, you do
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: a lot of clickbait. And so it is quite complicated
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: of if I tweak this algorithm, you can make it better.
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: And I think that's like this bubble that continues to
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: inflate because just kind of imagine like all these bad
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: problems will go away if you're able to figure out
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: the algorithm and tweak it. And I just don't think
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: that's true. I don't think that's empirically, there's not empirical
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: evidence for that either in the Hagen documents or kind
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: of in the public academic literature.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: I don't necessarily think that if you just tweak the algorithms,
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: you're going to fix these problems. But I think that
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: what has been revealed is that what you're seeing on
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: Facebook is not just some, it's not just a public
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: square where everyone just gathers and shares news. Like the
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: team does have its hand on the lever. Like it
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: can deprioritize this or prioritize this. So like there's a
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: lot of power here. And I don't, and I think
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: the fact that if you make one change, it causes
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: one problem. And then if you change it back, it
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: causes another problem. Just speaks to the fact that something
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: has been created that is so unwieldy that even the
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: people in charge of it can't fully control the harms
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: that it causes, which is probably a bad thing for society.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: Well, the harms that it causes. So Facebook causes.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: You're saying it's people.
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: No, no, no.
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: What I'm saying is we have to separate out the
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: things that Facebook makes worse from the things that are
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: a reflection of society. And that's the, that is now
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: the kind of overall media liberal bubble that is inflated
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: is the idea that like you want the social media
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: companies to make people better. And I actually, I think
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: that is like the scariest direction here. Yeah.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: I don't think their job is, their job is not
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: to make us better. I think their job, I think
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: they're doing a lot of amplification of, of bad information,
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: bad impulses, stuff like that. But like, I don't think that, look,
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: the other thing too is, can they really be neutral, right? Like,
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: you know, you've talked about this in other countries, right?
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: Which is like Facebook's policy in other countries is like,
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: we follow the local law. Well, what happens when the
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: local law is supporting an autocratic regime? And does Facebook
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: really want to say that they're neutral in the global
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: struggle between autocracy and democracy right now. Well, by their
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: own mission statement, you know, bringing the world closer together
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: and building community, it doesn't sound like that's neutrality. It
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: sounds like that's on the side of democratic values, but
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like all of their internal policy decisions
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: either here or around the world necessarily match that.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: And that goes back to way too many of the
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: policy decisions are being driven by the government affairs responsibility,
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: which outside of the United States is it's way worse
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: because at least in the US, when Trump was president,
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: his power to get Facebook to take down his opponents
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: and such was.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: Pretty limited, right?
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: What you see right now in India, especially, so India
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: is by far the most important country You know for
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: the I've said this for years that it is the
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: most important country from a regulatory perspective and just predicting
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: the future of the Internet and right now you've got
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: Modi who is trying to say trying to recreate kind
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: of the power that the People's Republic of China has
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: Within a democracy using the fact that he is democratically
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: elected He legitimately has the support of hundreds of millions
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: of people and he has very few legal and constitutional
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: restrictions the kinds of powers he can have and And
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: you are seeing a future in which the American companies,
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: Facebook and Twitter in particular, and now YouTube, are all
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: of them saying, well, we follow local law, India is
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: a democracy. And so we're going to follow their law.
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: And the outcome is support of autocracy, right? And so, yes,
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, I totally agree. And I think that is
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: the neutrality argument here is both punting responsibility and also
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: happens to be in the economic benefit of the company,
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: because you can't make money unless you have ad salespeople
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: and all the folks that you can have in a country.
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: And so the future in which Facebook pulls out of
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: India is just completely different. you know, impossible to imagine
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: from a financial and a growth perspective. Um, but like
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: not imagining that is then puts them in this trap
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: where they're like, well, then the only other option is
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: we fall with the local laws and the outcome of
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: that is going to be really, really negative.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: If you were Mark Zuckerberg, what, what internal policy changes
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: do you think could and should be made to make
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: the platform a better place?
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: I mean, so first I would, I would quit and
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: spend my money, you know, live on Kauai and let
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: somebody else take care of it and fix these problems.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: Finish buying an entire Island in Hawaii and just hang out.
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 47:42
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: Um, So I think the policy team has to be split, right?
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: Like you have to have the government affairs people not
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: be in charge of platform policy.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: I think you need.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: To specifically, you know, have somebody very high up whose
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: job it is to represent the human rights responsibility here.
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: And so get that out of the general comms and
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: policy argument and have the platform policy people, the people
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: who decide what is allowed and what is not allowed.
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: you know, have a specific set of human rights goals
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: that you want for them that effectively, like you said,
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: are not being neutral between democracy and autocracy, right? That
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: you're going to say, we're going to be on the
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: side of pluralism and democracy, even in situations that means
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: going up against a democratic elected government. That's the step
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: there that's complicated, right? Of like, well, the guy's elected, right?
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: Like Duterte was elected or, you know, Bolsonaro was elected.
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: So we should do what the guy says is like not,
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: not actually in support of democratic values, right? And so
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: I think you have to split that team. I think
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: more importantly is you have to make the integrity team
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: that creates these metrics of these are the bad things
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: that are happening. Not only do you have to invest there,
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: but you have to give them power over the growth
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: in other product teams, whereas that they have the ability
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: to basically say that our metrics are going to win
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: this one.
• 48:57
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: So exactly how you do that gets a little bit complicated,
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: but a lot of it has to do with kind
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: of the, um, what kind of metrics you're holding to
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: executive compensation.
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: So, right.
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: So like for those executives who are running product teams,
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: you need to change around their compensation plan so that like, yes,
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: your growth goals are good, but if you slip on
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: those growth goals and you've improved on these other ones
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: on these goals around safety and security, then you will
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: get your bonus anyway. I highly doubt there's anybody at
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: the VP level at Facebook that gets a big pat
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: on the back if growth goes down, but integrity goes up,
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: including the people who are running the integrity team. Right.
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: And I think that's like a fundamental problem here.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Is that like you have to create that tension
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: inside the company and then you have to let this
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: new upstart team whose job it is to measure downside
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: and to fix downside win. And then I think publicly
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: they need to decide that they're going to be much
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: more like they missed an opportunity here to release the
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: Hagen documents themselves.
• 49:50
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: They still have it like they're not public.
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: They could go do the redactions themselves and, you know,
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: get people's names out and such, but pretty much nothing else.
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: And then go release them and say, like, this is
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: the reality of what's going on in the world. And
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: we're going to be more public about this. And I
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: think that would be a huge step forward of kind
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: of turning over a new leaf on this and then
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: continuing that process of we're going to work with outside researchers.
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: We're not going to get rid of CrowdTangle. there's all
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: this stuff that looks like CrowdTangle's gonna guide. CrowdTangle is
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: the tool that our team uses to study disinformation, that
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: everybody else uses to study disinformation. It's a huge pain
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: in the ass for Facebook, right? Because there's no YouTube CrowdTangle,
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: there's no TikTok CrowdTangle. Everybody else gets away with murder
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: because they don't provide the ability to study their platform.
• 50:30
  Speaker 3: they're going to less transparency. I'd like them to go
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: to more and then to try to, you know, make
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: that a competitive advantage in the public market of, you know,
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: we are going to be more transparent and open about
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: the kinds of things that are happening.
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Um, a big problem there is Facebook groups.
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: That's actually a very hard issue to study is what going,
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: what's going on in groups. And we don't really have
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: time for that because it's a really complicated kind of
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: privacy trade off of like, at what point is a
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: group large enough that you want to have transparency and
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: what's going on or what point do you want to
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: protect people's privacy?
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: What, if we had a functioning Congress, what laws do
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: you think would help or what regulations?
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: Right, so now we're really like in a fantasy land, right?
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: Okay, so like my colleague, Nate, personally has put out
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: a law, a draft law around transparency that has two components. One,
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: it's a hold harmless for researchers to do this kind
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: of work. So, you know, there's a group at NYU
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: that has been trying to study, Facebook has an ad archive,
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: unlike a bunch of other platforms, but it's not that great.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: And so they get around the fact that the ad
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: archive is not that great by doing a bunch of
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: scraping a bunch of data in a way that Facebook prohibits.
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: This gets actually, again, pretty complicated because like a lot
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: of this goes back kind of the overreaction around Cambridge Analytica,
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: where everybody freaked out about Cambridge Analytica being the worst
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: thing ever. And so as a result, like academic study
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: of the platform has been massively cramped down. And so
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: this law basically says, well, you know, if researchers operate
• 51:54
  Speaker 3: within these parameters, they are allowed to do this work.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: And then the company is not responsible for it.
• 51:59
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: So you're, you know, if, if NYU does something bad,
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: NYU is responsible for it, but as long as you're
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: doing something good, they're, you know, they're protected. And so
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: I think that's a complicated balance to make, but Nate
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: has created this balance. And then the second is required,
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: you know, if a platform hits a certain size, they
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: are required to transfer transparency that they have to have
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: at least the content that is public has to be
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: available via APIs and certain engagement stats have to be
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: available in programmatically to certain researchers, right? And again, there's
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: some privacy issues there, but I think they're all fixable
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: because right now, Facebook and Twitter are the ones who
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: are out there. As a result, 99% of the stuff
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: of I saw something bad on the internet is written
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: about Facebook and Twitter. And almost nothing is written about
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: the platforms that are actually in some measures larger. And
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: so we don't want Twitter and Facebook feeling this pressure
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: to backslide. We want to take the bar of where
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: they are right now and set the bar on transparency
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: even a little bit higher and then try to get
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: them to meet that and then try to get these
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: other platforms to get there too.
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: Your current job is director of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: You're also part of the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: You guys issued a final report. It starts by saying
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: we're in a crisis of trust and truth that exacerbates
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: all other crises. What have you learned about the root
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: causes of that crisis and how we even begin to
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: get a handle on it as a society?
• 53:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, when we talk about kind of the disinformation
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: crisis in the United States, it's complicated by the fact
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: that things have changed a lot between 2016 and 2020, right?
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: Kind of the texture of disinformation has changed of like,
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: you know, either from Russians or from, you know, just
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: troll farms and propaganda farms, you'd have all of this
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: crap that was being spread by a large number of people,
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: that the vast majority of disinformation now is spread by
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: a relatively small number of people, and we know exactly
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: who they are, right? They're all friends of yours on Twitter,
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: I'm sure. People who love you, right? And so we
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: have like this huge report that people can get from eipartnership.net.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: But in it, if you look for like the top
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: 25 spreaders of disinformation on Twitter, you recognize all the names, right?
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: It's Gateway Pundit. It's Donald Trump Jr. It's a bunch
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: of kind of blue check mark accounts that are specifically
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: spreading disinformation.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: Because that's what they do all day. And those actors
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: are multimedia.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: And that's one of the other challenges that we've got
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: right now is that, you know, Dan Bongino has an
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: AM radio show. He has spots on Fox News. He
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: goes on Newsmax. And then he also has a big
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: presence on Facebook. Um, and so you, you end up
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: with like all of those different outlets kind of reinforcing
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: each other, um, in a way that then is very
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: difficult to act. And in only one of those cases,
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: do you really, I mean, I guess like in the
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: Newsmax or Fox news, you've got a central actor, but
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: like really only in the Facebook case, do you have
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: a central actor who has ever taken steps against disinformation?
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: And so you can push on it in one side
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: and then it just kind of squeezes out to the other, right?
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: And now that doesn't mean the company shouldn't do anything,
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: but I do think it goes to the complexity of
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: the problem because we're now at the point at which
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: it is a really profitable business to be somebody who
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: lies to people all day. They know they're being lied to,
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: but they want it.
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: Um, and you're going to provide that to them and
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: you have some different outlets to do that profitably. Uh,
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: and if some of them cut you off, you've, you've
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: built the base elsewhere. Um, and I, there's not like
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: a really good, easy.
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: Solution for that.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: So, I mean, that's something we dealt with a lot
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: in the Aspen commission, um, was effectively like the Fox
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: news problem, right? Like, um, you know, we can come
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: up with all these recommendations because we know that there's
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: a possibility of some kind of regulation that affects social
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: media platforms and some kind of interest in the social
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: media platforms to fix something, even if you don't think
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: it's enough. Whereas then there's these outlets like the Newsmax's
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: and such who their entire reason of existence is that they,
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: it is very, very profitable for them to spread disinformation. Yeah.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, the attention economy incentivizes shameless assholes. That's what's profitable.
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: So that's a much larger problem than just any social
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: media platform.
• 55:55
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: But I mean, in some ways, like we have this
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: much more, you know, you've started a media company that
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: couldn't have existed 20 years ago, right? Like you've got
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: podcasts because you can spread stuff on the internet. You know,
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: you guys, you're huge on Twitter. You've got, you know,
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: Facebook pages and stuff. And so there are positives, but like,
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: is there a way we can get those positives with,
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: without having the negatives? I'm, I'm not sure, especially when
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: you have people who are just straight up motivated to,
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: it's a supply and demand issue. And I think that's
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: the other issue I'm always dealing with, uh, you know,
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: personally is like, you know, it's easy to be kind
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: of a supply sider that like, if you, you believe
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: that if you cut off the supply of disinformation, that
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: this problem is gone. Um, and almost nothing is ever
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: done around the fact that there's a huge kind of demand, uh,
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: to be lied to. Um, yeah. And at the same
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: time that we have kind of a continuous problem of,
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: you know, kind of people not believing in institutions and
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: centralized institutions anymore, which those institutions.
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: Make worse by the way they act.
• 56:52
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: Like if you look at all the vaccine disinformation stuff,
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: you can look at misstep after misstep by CDC and
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: WHO and Dr. Fauci and others about how. the emerging
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: consensus on these issues is handled, which creates kind of
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: the opening for the, the hucksters. Like when the, when
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: the institutions say we're not really sure what's going on,
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: the hucksters can come in and say, I am absolutely
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: positive and I'm going to sell you on my vision
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: that I am totally true. And there's a huge demand
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: for people just to be told that this is the
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: absolute truth and that they don't have to have any ambiguity.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: Well, these things feel each other. The distrust in institutions
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: fuels disinformation. The disinformation fuels more distrust in institutions. And
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: so it becomes a vicious cycle. Um, last quick question
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: that I'm asking all the guests, uh, what's your favorite
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: way to unplug and how often do you do it?
• 57:36
  Speaker 2: Oh God. Um, yeah, I like to go sailing with
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: my kids.
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: So, uh, haven't, haven't done in a while. The weather
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: hasn't been great and, and we've been, you know, all
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: stuck inside unfortunately.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: But, uh, yeah, I like to get out outside. I mean,
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: I've got three kids and so, uh, Basically, anytime I'm
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: not working, I'm with him.
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: Excellent. Alex Samos, thank you so much for joining Offline.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Appreciate it.
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: Thanks, John.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Andy Gardner Bernstein
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman, and Sandy
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn,
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: episodes as videos every week.