Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, April sixteen, twenty twenty five. The Greens have
Speaker 1: canceled plans for an Anzac Day rave after a backlash.
Speaker 1: The party was planning to charge thirty dollars a ticket
Speaker 1: and offered party people the chance to donate up to
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars to help the Greens get elected. You
Speaker 1: can read all our role in coverage of the federal
Speaker 1: election campaign right now at The Australian dot com dot AU.
Speaker 1: A whistleblower has given explosive testimony to the United States
Speaker 1: Congress about the rot inside of Facebook, and The Australian's
Speaker 1: reporting is front and center of the proceedings. Today, Managing
Speaker 1: editor Darren Davidson reflects on breaking the story that exposed
Speaker 1: Facebook's targeting of vulnerable teams.
Speaker 2: It's a reporter for an Australian newspaper who's got his
Speaker 2: hands on one of the internal documents about how Facebook
Speaker 2: actually does this, and he reaches out for a comment
Speaker 2: from Facebook before publishing.
Speaker 1: This is the voice of Facebook's former public policy director,
Speaker 1: Sarah win Williams. Win Williams is reading an excerpt from
Speaker 1: her new book Careless People, A Story of where I
Speaker 1: used to work. She's become the latest whistleblower to turn
Speaker 1: on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The
Speaker 1: reporter she's talking about is Darren Davidson. He's now The
Speaker 1: Australian's managing editor and commercial director. And the newspaper, of course,
Speaker 1: is The Australian.
Speaker 2: That's when I hear about it. I didn't know anything
Speaker 2: about this, and neither did the policy team in Australia.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, Darren broke a story about the way
Speaker 1: Facebook raked in millions of advertising dollars by targeting children
Speaker 1: when they were vulnerable, and bragged about it to advertising agencies.
Speaker 1: It was a global bombshell.
Speaker 3: So Facebook is under fire again, this time because of
Speaker 3: a leaked document that could allow advertisers to target these
Speaker 3: teams when they are at their most vulnerable.
Speaker 4: The twenty three page report leaked to The Australian shows
Speaker 4: how Facebook gathers data.
Speaker 5: To determine when users are feeling stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed,
Speaker 5: among other things. The idea in this piece of research,
Speaker 5: this presentation to the bank, was that they could then
Speaker 5: target their products at those moments when people needed a
Speaker 5: boost and therefore they would be more vulnerable susceptible to
Speaker 5: the advertising. This was buried at the back of a
Speaker 5: bachel documents that managed to get hold of and verify.
Speaker 5: At the time, it was really really concerning to me.
Speaker 5: I remember saying to my contact, wow, have you seen this?
Speaker 5: Because at the time I was more interested in a
Speaker 5: different aspect of the Facebook story, and it struck me
Speaker 5: as interesting that the person that handed me in these
Speaker 5: documents hadn't really paid a lot of attention to this
Speaker 5: discovery at the back of the bachelor documents and initially
Speaker 5: didn't occur to them this might be concerning or disturbing.
Speaker 5: It was only when I kind of laid it out
Speaker 5: and said, hey, look at what they're saying that they
Speaker 5: actually went wow, actually, yeah, that is that's pretty disturbing,
Speaker 5: pretty concerning.
Speaker 1: The scoop came at a time when society at large
Speaker 1: was just at the beginning of grappling with a huge
Speaker 1: shift brought about by the big tech platforms and social
Speaker 1: media networks.
Speaker 5: We had written a number of stories at that point.
Speaker 5: It was a big story for us on the Australian
Speaker 5: at the time, and it wasn't necessarily a big story
Speaker 5: in the wider media. It wasn't as fashionable as it
Speaker 5: is now to write about the power of the big
Speaker 5: tech platforms. And we were very interested in this sorts
Speaker 5: of reasons. The digital advertising market at that point was booming,
Speaker 5: and it continues to be this day, a very strongly
Speaker 5: growing market, but it's very opaque and there's lots of
Speaker 5: intermediaries middlemen. So it was of great interest to us,
Speaker 5: and I was looking at lots of different story angles.
Speaker 5: I had heard rumors about the way in which the
Speaker 5: advertising business at Facebook worked.
Speaker 1: Facebook didn't like Darren's reporting. They dispatched a team to
Speaker 1: discredit him to other reporters who'd picked up the story.
Speaker 5: The reaction from Facebook was staggering. They asked for more
Speaker 5: time to prepare a statement. They then delayed sending me
Speaker 5: the statement. They kind of set off a bomb inside
Speaker 5: Facebook at the time that involved all levels of the
Speaker 5: organization at the very top of Facebook about how they
Speaker 5: could actually initially kill the story and then contain it.
Speaker 1: Coming up why Sarah Wynn Williams has turned on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Sarah Wynn Williams is a former lawyer and diplomat, and
Speaker 1: as you heard in those excerpts from her book, She's
Speaker 1: a KeyWe She worked at Meta, the parent company of
Speaker 1: social media networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,
Speaker 1: for seven years, starting in twenty eleven. She hasn't just
Speaker 1: been critical of Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, She's
Speaker 1: gone absolutely nuclear. And Meta, so incensed by her claims,
Speaker 1: has tried to stop her from promoting her book, Careless People.
Speaker 4: While it couldn't stop its release, Matter is trying to
Speaker 4: stop further sales of a new book written by a
Speaker 4: former employee. The arbitrator in the case sided with Matter,
Speaker 4: saying the company would suffer immediate and irreparable loss. He
Speaker 4: also sided with Matter on the grounds of the non
Speaker 4: disparagement agreement.
Speaker 1: It worked for a while, but the book is well
Speaker 1: and truly out there and it's landed. Sarah Wyn Williams
Speaker 1: in front of the US Congress a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation.
Speaker 2: One example is that Facebook was targeting thirteen to seventeen
Speaker 2: year olds. It could identify when they were feeling worthless
Speaker 2: or helpless, or like a failure, and they would take
Speaker 2: that information and share it with advertisers. If a thirteen
Speaker 2: year old girl would delete her selfie, that's a really
Speaker 2: good time to try and sell her a beauty product.
Speaker 5: As we know now from a book that the Facebook
Speaker 5: whistle blooder has written, Careless People, they put out misleading
Speaker 5: statements that senior manage and knew what untrue, but yet
Speaker 5: they still put them out at the time. And as
Speaker 5: we've since discovered, and the whistleblower in the book call
Speaker 5: as people noticed this, there was a case of a
Speaker 5: teenager in the UK who took her own life and
Speaker 5: what they noticed looking back at her social activity was
Speaker 5: that she was following an Instagram account called feeling Worthless.
Speaker 5: And Worthless was one of the emotional fields in that
Speaker 5: document that was given to the media agency in the
Speaker 5: Bank that we discovered back in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: There seemed to be a moment in the internal Facebook
Speaker 1: discussions revealed by this whistleblower Darren, where senior executives at
Speaker 1: Facebook discussed amongst themselves, well are we doing this? You know,
Speaker 1: is this possible?
Speaker 2: Joel directs that our comms should swap that down clearly,
Speaker 2: but he's told that it's not possible. Joel's response, we
Speaker 2: can't confirm that, we don't target on the basis of
Speaker 2: insecurity or how someone is feeling. Despite Elliott Joel and
Speaker 2: many of Facebook's most senior executives devise a cover up,
Speaker 2: Facebook issues a second statement that's a flat out lie.
Speaker 1: What do you think about the way those senior executives
Speaker 1: at Facebook handled it, in their initial reaction and then
Speaker 1: their spin to you.
Speaker 5: It's amazing to read some of those comments in the
Speaker 5: book Careless People. Some of the executives felt that they
Speaker 5: should be proud of this technology, and they should be
Speaker 5: out there boasting about their capabilities and the very precision
Speaker 5: targeted way in which they can connect with their users
Speaker 5: and people on Facebook. I think so many of them
Speaker 5: are caught up in a bubble and a world that's
Speaker 5: far removed from ours that they don't necessarily stop to
Speaker 5: think about the ethical consequences of what they're doing. However,
Speaker 5: I didn't note that Sarah Wynn Williams was dispatched by
Speaker 5: Facebook to kill my story, and she talks about that
Speaker 5: in the book. She notes that many executives are in
Speaker 5: Silicon Balley and Facebook like absolutely refuse to allow their
Speaker 5: children to have smartphones spent any time on screens, and
Speaker 5: in fact, the favorite thing of these very expensive wooden toys.
Speaker 5: There's a brand in the US, and they would rather
Speaker 5: give their Kinstiny's wooden toys. And I think that really
Speaker 5: says it already, that anecdote that she shares about the
Speaker 5: pavior of the parents that work at Facebook.
Speaker 2: These executives, they know, they know the harm that this
Speaker 2: product does. They don't allow their own teenagers to use
Speaker 2: the products that Meta develops. I mean, the hypocrisy is
Speaker 2: at every level.
Speaker 1: Sarah wyn William's testimony about young people was kind of
Speaker 1: an aside at the Senate committee, which was mainly looking
Speaker 1: at her revelations about Meta's relationship with China.
Speaker 2: We are engaged in a high stakes AI right arms
Speaker 2: race against China, and during my time at Meta, company
Speaker 2: executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese
Speaker 2: Communist partymployees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public. Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 2: pledged himself a free speech champion, yet I witnessed Matter
Speaker 2: work hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to
Speaker 2: construct and test custom built censorship tools that silenced and
Speaker 2: censored their critics. When Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the
Speaker 2: account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil.
Speaker 2: They did it and then lied to Congress When asked
Speaker 2: about the incident in a Senate hearing.
Speaker 1: Meta rejects Sarah Wyn Williams's testimony. In a statement, Meta said,
Speaker 1: this is all pushed by an employee terminated eight years
Speaker 1: ago for poor performance. We do not operate our services
Speaker 1: in China today. It is no secret we were once
Speaker 1: interested in doing so as part of Facebook's effort to
Speaker 1: connect the world world. We ultimately opted not to go
Speaker 1: through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. Now, of course, the Australian government has
Speaker 1: banned social media for people under sixteen. That's yet to
Speaker 1: come into effect, but will do soon. We talk now
Speaker 1: about the concept of a social license. In the years
Speaker 1: since you broke that story originally, do you think Facebook
Speaker 1: has done anything to earn that social license?
Speaker 5: I think you know, the thing about Facebook is it's
Speaker 5: we all know like it's an aggressive commercial operation. It
Speaker 5: ruthlessly executes on its technology to do that. I was
Speaker 5: thinking the ad revenue Facebook the other day annuallyzed it's
Speaker 5: more than one hundred and sixty billion. Now, which is
Speaker 5: the advertising market, and Australia alone, the whole country or
Speaker 5: the ad revenue, the pool of money is about ten billion.
Speaker 5: The Facebook alone makes one hundred and sixty billion. So
Speaker 5: unless there's pressure from the government and the e Safety
Speaker 5: Commission and stuff like that to do tools don't read bother,
Speaker 5: and they certainly weren't doing it back then.
Speaker 1: Darren Davidson is The Australian's Managing editor and commercial director.
Speaker 1: You can read his reflections on this story right now
Speaker 1: at The Australian dot com dot au