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Speaker 1: Kiota. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page,

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Speaker 1: a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Meta,

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Speaker 1: the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has implemented some

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Speaker 1: changes across its organization since Donald Trump's election win. The

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Speaker 1: social media giant is set to remove independent fact checkers

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Speaker 1: from its service, replacing them with community driven notes, similar

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Speaker 1: to what x implemented after its rebrand from Twitter. The

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Speaker 1: company has also ended various diversity, equity and inclusion measures,

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Speaker 1: while chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has called for more masculine

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Speaker 1: energy in the corporate world. All this came before he

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Speaker 1: was seated in the front row at Trump's inauguration alongside

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Speaker 1: other tech bosses, raising questions about how tied up these

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Speaker 1: global companies are becoming with the current US administration. Francis

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Speaker 1: Hougan is a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower over the

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Speaker 1: company's actions. She joins us today on the Front Page

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Speaker 1: to discuss the changes in the take world. Francis, could

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Speaker 1: you start by giving us a quick rundown of what

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Speaker 1: you did, it matter and what prompted you to go

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Speaker 1: public with those thousands of internal documents.

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Speaker 2: Certainly so when I joined Facebook. Facebook knew it had

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Speaker 2: a problem, so it had invested a great deal of

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Speaker 2: money in something called third party factchecking. That's the program

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Speaker 2: that they recently ended. But they knew that that program

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Speaker 2: only covered a tiny, tiny sliver of the people in

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Speaker 2: the world. Overwhelmingly the money was invested in the United States.

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Speaker 2: Beyond that, it was a little bit in Australia, a

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Speaker 2: little bit in Europe, a little bit scattered in a

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Speaker 2: few other places. But Facebook is the Internet for most

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Speaker 2: of the world. You know, for many, many, many people.

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Speaker 2: They live in countries where, you know, seventy percent, eighty percent,

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Speaker 2: ninety percent of the content available on the Internet in

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Speaker 2: their language will only be on Facebook. And so they said, hey,

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Speaker 2: we need to have a way to deal with misinformation

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Speaker 2: when we can't have factcheckers. And so that was the

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Speaker 2: responsibility of my team. So the Civic Misinformation Team and

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Speaker 2: I came forward in twenty twenty one. Because in the

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Speaker 2: process of doing that job for two years, different variants

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Speaker 2: of it worked on different parts ended up within threat

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Speaker 2: intelligence within Facebook. I realized that Facebook was serially lying.

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Speaker 2: They had a habit of lying about what their company

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Speaker 2: was doing, what the effects of their action or inaction

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Speaker 2: was and they actively misled the pubook about what was possible.

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Speaker 2: And so I came forward because I wanted people to

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Speaker 2: have the information they needed to protect themselves. And in

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Speaker 2: the process I became known as the Facebook whistleblower, even

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Speaker 2: though there are very very many whistleblowers that come out

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Speaker 2: of Facebook, because I'm not the only employee that knows

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Speaker 2: their problems the public needs to act on.

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Speaker 1: Now, I've had in recent ways about metas plans to

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Speaker 1: remove independent fact check is and let use this fact

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Speaker 1: check content. Does this feel like a backward step to you?

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Speaker 2: You know, it's one of these actions that on the

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Speaker 2: surface feels really dramatic. But one of the key things

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Speaker 2: that I detailed when iking forward was was how superficial

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Speaker 2: the third party fact checking program was. You know, every

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Speaker 2: month they fact checked maybe hundreds and maybe less than

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Speaker 2: like five hundred. We're talking three hundred two hundred pieces

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Speaker 2: of content globally, when Facebook was producing hundreds of millions,

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Speaker 2: if not billions, the pieces of content globally. So in

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Speaker 2: many ways, we're ending an era of you know, lipstick

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Speaker 2: on the pig, if you will. When it comes to

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Speaker 2: seeing like third party fact checking is our first line

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Speaker 2: of defense. But I think the larger issue is around

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Speaker 2: how a lot of this has been framed. Right, The

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Speaker 2: idea that you know, Facebook is quote like fighting for

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Speaker 2: freedom and fighting for freedom of speech, and yet we

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Speaker 2: see that they're quite willing to take down content from

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Speaker 2: issues that maybe be politically expedient to them. So it'll

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Speaker 2: be interesting to see how all this evolves.

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Speaker 3: After Trump first got elected in twenty sixteen, the legacy

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Speaker 3: media wrote NonStop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.

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Speaker 3: We tried, in good faith to address those concerns without

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Speaker 3: becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have

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Speaker 3: just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust

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Speaker 3: than they've created, especially in the US. So over the

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Speaker 3: next couple of months, we're going to phase in a

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Speaker 3: more comprehensive community notes system.

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Speaker 1: I know some of the revelations from your Facebook files

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Speaker 1: centered on Meta's failure to fact check stolen election claims

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Speaker 1: prior to the January sixth insurrection. Right, does it surprise

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Speaker 1: you that the company is now I guess, perceivably handing

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Speaker 1: the power back to its consumers. It doesn't feel like

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Speaker 1: they've actually learned any kind of lessons, does it.

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Speaker 2: Well, I would say the larger issue in my disclosures was,

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Speaker 2: for example, prior to genuine so before the twenty twenty election,

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Speaker 2: they actually took a lot of actions. You know, they

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Speaker 2: had one hundred plus what they know is break the

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Speaker 2: glass measures, which were little tweaks to how the company operated.

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Speaker 2: You know, for example, if you're in a group that

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Speaker 2: has a very small number of people who are driving

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Speaker 2: all the invites for the group, that's kind of suspicious.

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Speaker 2: You know, when you have point three percent of people

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Speaker 2: who send out invites for stop the Steal, inviting a

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Speaker 2: third of all the members, you know, that should be

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Speaker 2: something that you would maybe take pause on or maybe

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Speaker 2: operate that group a little bit differently because you know

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Speaker 2: that someone's trying to manipulate your platform. I was trying

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Speaker 2: to hack your vulnerabilities. Facebook knew prior to the twenty

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Speaker 2: twenty election they had a bunch of problems, and they

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Speaker 2: flipped a bunch of little switches to make their systems

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Speaker 2: work in a way that they knew was safer. But

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Speaker 2: prior to January sixth, they turned off. They left all

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Speaker 2: those switches in the dangerous position. I think one of

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Speaker 2: the key kind of differences of what's changed in the

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Speaker 2: last few years is this question of do companies have

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Speaker 2: a responsibility to understand their vulnerabilities and do they have

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Speaker 2: responsibility to act to address those vulnerabilities if those vulnerabilities

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Speaker 2: have the ability to say, change the course of an election.

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Speaker 2: And back in twenty twenty, Facebook very clearly thought they

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Speaker 2: had a responsibility to do that because they had a

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Speaker 2: three hundred person team staffed to look for things like

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Speaker 2: voter disenfranchisement, to look for foreign operations trying to amplify

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Speaker 2: misleading information. But by the twenty twenty four election, they

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Speaker 2: had dissolved that team. And now they're taking even a

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Speaker 2: step further and coming out and slandering their own efforts

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Speaker 2: to go and try to make the platform safer by

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Speaker 2: labeling with words like censorship, even though many many of

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Speaker 2: those interventions had nothing to do with content. So it's

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Speaker 2: interesting to see how far Mark has come and how

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Speaker 2: his perceptions around what his responsibilities are have shifted in

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Speaker 2: a remarkably small amount of time.

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Speaker 1: What do you think it's because perhaps they more at

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Speaker 1: home now. I suppose at Trump's inauguration last week we

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Speaker 1: saw metas Mark Zuckerberg X's elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos,

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Speaker 1: and Google's the d Pachi in the front row ahead

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Speaker 1: of Trump's cabinet. Why are these tech CEOs so keen to,

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Speaker 1: I guess kiss the ring cozy app to the new administration.

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Speaker 2: So we're in a really interesting moment where when we

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Speaker 2: look across the world, countries are starting to say that

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Speaker 2: they want a different balance of power with Silicon Valley.

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Speaker 2: And I've heard very openly on certain podcasts where people

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Speaker 2: who are really deeply connected into Silicon Valley say things

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Speaker 2: like part of why people shifted, why these taxios shifted

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Speaker 2: to support Trump, was that as those countries, as the

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Speaker 2: European Union passed the DSA, as Australia started sending boundaries

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Speaker 2: on how young should children be when they to use

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Speaker 2: social media, they expected the United States government to step

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Speaker 2: up and defend their economics interests. And the Biden administration,

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Speaker 2: I think, in many ways took what is probably a

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Speaker 2: more appropriate position, which is to say every country is different,

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Speaker 2: trace should have autonomy to say how they want to

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Speaker 2: govern forces that shape their own countries. But if you're

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Speaker 2: a tech ceo, your job is to optimize for your company.

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Speaker 2: And so Trump's inauguration is a second chance for a

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Speaker 2: lot of these companies, you know, the AI regulations that

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Speaker 2: you're a past. The only way Silicon Valley won't have

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Speaker 2: to figure out how to adapt to those things like

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Speaker 2: they did to GDPR the privacy law is by having

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Speaker 2: people like Trump's step in and say we're just not

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Speaker 2: going to do that. Look at what happened with the

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Speaker 2: TikTok Investment Bill, also sometimes to know as the TikTok ban.

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Speaker 2: He said, I'm very popular in TikTok. I don't want

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Speaker 2: it to go away. You know, there's these interesting moments where,

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Speaker 2: you know, Silicon Valley sees we have someone who is lawless.

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Speaker 2: You know, he doesn't care that the Supreme Court has

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Speaker 2: ruled that Congress had the right to do this, that

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Speaker 2: this is a legal action. He believes he's about the law.

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Speaker 2: So if they can show Trump that they are useful

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Speaker 2: to him, they are going to get a second chance

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Speaker 2: at all these mechanisms of oversight. And I think that's

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Speaker 2: the thing that they're fighting for.

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Speaker 3: And as of today, TikTok is back. And I said,

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Speaker 3: we need to save.

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Speaker 4: TikTok because we're talking about a tremendous who in this

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Speaker 4: audience goes with TikTok Benny very popular.

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Speaker 1: And frankly, we have no choice. We have to save

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Speaker 1: it a lot of jobs.

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Speaker 2: We don't want to.

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Speaker 1: Give our business to China. We don't want to give

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Speaker 1: our business to other people. You mentioned the TikTok ben

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Speaker 1: and it's quite incredible to see once it came back online,

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Speaker 1: there was a message shown to all users that thanked

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Speaker 1: the Trump administration. That doesn't seem like something that we've

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Speaker 1: seen before.

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Speaker 2: No, well, they know flattery works. You know, this is

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Speaker 2: what foreign governments realized in the first Trump administration. But

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Speaker 2: the number one thing that you can do to get

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Speaker 2: your way is just make him feel like a really

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Speaker 2: big man. And so we have the situation now where

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Speaker 2: tech CEOs are coming in and saying, as long as

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Speaker 2: we can stay on Trump's good side. And remember, in

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Speaker 2: the case of Mark, he really needs Trump. For context,

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Speaker 2: when we look at what's coming down the pipeline, just

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Speaker 2: this year, we're going to start seeing the cases that

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Speaker 2: are going to make up the forty four US state

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Speaker 2: lawsuit against Trump against Meta herting kids. You know, this

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Speaker 2: is often compared to like the tobacco lawsuit. We're going

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Speaker 2: to see school districts suing to say, hey, you're costing

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Speaker 2: us tons of money by forcing us to have to

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Speaker 2: pay for tutors, to pay for more security guards, to

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Speaker 2: pay for therapists because kids are shown up to school suicidal.

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Speaker 2: We need those costs rehooped. There's a lot of these

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Speaker 2: major actions that are coming down the pipeline. More countries

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Speaker 2: are probably going to follow Australia's lead and putting in

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Speaker 2: age restrictions. Mark's only chance to subvert the democratic processes

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Speaker 2: that are happening here is to get Trump to intervene

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Speaker 2: in one of these hail Mary's. And so I think

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Speaker 2: it makes a ton of sense strategically for these companies

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Speaker 2: to be doing everything they can to kiss the ring.

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Speaker 2: That's the thing that's going to protect them from this

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Speaker 2: wave of oversight that democracies around the world have been

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Speaker 2: pushing forward.

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Speaker 1: Zuckerberg recently suggested on the Joe Rogan podcast that corporate

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Speaker 1: culture needs more masculine energy, describing it as culturally muted,

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Speaker 1: and that having a culture that celebrates the aggression a

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Speaker 1: bit more has its own merits. Now having worked in

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Speaker 1: that Silicon Valley environment, to those ring true to you.

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Speaker 2: You know, it's fascinating. So Google spent a huge amount

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Speaker 2: of money and a huge amount of effort, bringing in

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Speaker 2: data scientists, bringing sociologists, doing huge amounts of work to

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Speaker 2: figure out what makes for a highly performing team in

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Speaker 2: Silicon Valley. And the thing that they found was most

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Speaker 2: important was that people felt psychologically safe. So when you

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Speaker 2: sit there and you say we need more masculine energy, like,

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Speaker 2: what does that mean? Does it mean violent? Like you know,

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Speaker 2: active aggression, doesn't mean more yelling? Like, what's the behavior

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Speaker 2: you want to see more of in the office? You know,

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Speaker 2: I think if I were sitting at Google, you know

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Speaker 2: the thing they actively did after they did that research

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Speaker 2: was go and give their managers more EQ training because

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Speaker 2: you know, if you want to have a highly performed

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Speaker 2: team where people take risks, people have to feel psychologically safe.

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Speaker 2: So it feels just like marketing messages. It doesn't feel

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Speaker 2: like you know, a serious person actively looking at the

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Speaker 2: research that's been done on what makes teams.

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Speaker 1: Achieve, Yeah and not. The key thing we've learned in

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Speaker 1: recent ways is about the end of DEI initiatives that

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Speaker 1: the company and Meta, including removing tampons from men's toilets

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Speaker 1: that were there for trends or non binary employees. What

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Speaker 1: point are they trying to get across by doing this?

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Speaker 2: It's purely performative, right Like what harm was done by

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Speaker 2: having tampons in those laboratories? Right? Like? Who has been

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Speaker 2: damaged by this? I think one of the interesting trends

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Speaker 2: that we are going to start to see happen over

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Speaker 2: the next few years is AI encoding radically changes the

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Speaker 2: constraints the companies were built on. So let's be super

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Speaker 2: honest here. Part of why Silicon Valley companies started investing

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Speaker 2: more in these diversity initiatives is they just needed more employees.

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Speaker 2: You know, It's like the US military. The US military

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Speaker 2: cannot function today without reinstating the draft, without having women's soldiers.

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Speaker 2: It's like, you can, you can drive the limit a way,

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Speaker 2: you can drive the racial minorities away, but then we're

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Speaker 2: gonna have to bring back the draft. In the case

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Speaker 2: of Silicon value, you can't force people to work at

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Speaker 2: a tech company. But at the same time, with the

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Speaker 2: advent of AI, you don't need as many employees. Like

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Speaker 2: I think there will be companies that emerge that make

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Speaker 2: very different choices esthetically, And I'm saying esthetically because that's

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Speaker 2: what banning tampons or having tampons is in this case. Right,

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Speaker 2: you're saying, hey, we want to be a culture. The

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Speaker 2: way we envision happiness is being inclusive in the following

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Speaker 2: ways or or or not being inclusive. It's going to

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Speaker 2: be possible for some companies to actually reach reasonable scale

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Speaker 2: by just having fewer employees. And so I think one

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Speaker 2: of the things that Facebook is probably looking at is,

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Speaker 2: you know, they purge to huge number employees in twenty

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Speaker 2: twenty two. They've done it again over the last few years.

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Speaker 2: It seems like every single year they say their goal

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Speaker 2: is to decrease headcount. And they also are one of

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Speaker 2: the top companies at investing in large language models, and

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Speaker 2: so it you know, maybe they've made a decision where

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Speaker 2: they're like, we don't have to anymore be a space

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Speaker 2: that welcomes a diverse set of people because we can

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Speaker 2: get away with it with So. I don't know this

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Speaker 2: will become a larger trend. I don't know if it's

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Speaker 2: going to be. Like I mentioned before, people are going

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Speaker 2: to go by the research and say, hey, if we

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Speaker 2: want people to take risks, if we want them to

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Speaker 2: act effectually at work, we're going to create spaces where

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Speaker 2: people feel safe. But who knows, It'll be an interesting

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Speaker 2: few years to see how it all plays out.

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Speaker 4: Within days, Musk has not only moved to reshape the product,

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Speaker 4: but the company's culture itself.

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Speaker 3: What Twitter prides itself on is a real human centric,

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Speaker 3: people first mentality.

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Speaker 4: That's what Twitter Canada's then boss told us in twenty twenty.

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Speaker 4: Now Musk appears to be gutting the social media giant's

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Speaker 4: content moderation team, and research is already pointing to a

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Speaker 4: spike in racist slurs on the platform.

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Speaker 1: You described Meta back in twenty twenty one as putting

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Speaker 1: profit over safety. I think that's the case now with

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Speaker 1: the changes we're seeing coming through and where do you

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Speaker 1: see it going from he so, I think.

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Speaker 2: I think one of the major trends that Elon Musk

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Speaker 2: released on social media as a whole is when he

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Speaker 2: reduced the size of the company by over fifty percent,

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Speaker 2: he fired many of them, many of them left on

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Speaker 2: their own accord. When he reduced the size of the

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Speaker 2: company so dramatically, he ended up showing Silicon Valley that

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Speaker 2: you could cut safety and there would be no consequences.

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Speaker 2: And when we look at what Mark said in twenty

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Speaker 2: twenty two when he cut huge spots of the safety teams.

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Speaker 2: He said, Elon showed you could quote rip the band

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Speaker 2: aid off, and we're going to do it too. And

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Speaker 2: so I think there's a real feeling that there's no

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Speaker 2: one forcing them to do even slightly the right thing. Right.

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Speaker 2: If they can evade the DSA, it doesn't matter how

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Speaker 2: little they invest in safety outside the United States. If

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Speaker 2: they can get on Trump's good side, they can evade

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Speaker 2: the consequences of the lawsuits that are stalking them. And

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Speaker 2: so I think they think that they can act any

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Speaker 2: way they want to. And part of that is there

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Speaker 2: are people on the Internet who have demonized any form

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Speaker 2: of action. They've lumked everything into one pot, even though

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Speaker 2: people like me have been out here since twenty twenty

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Speaker 2: one saying, hey, Facebook knows, there's lots and lots of

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Speaker 2: ways to do safety that aren't content moderation. And those

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Speaker 2: interventions like designing for safety, making sure the products operate

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Speaker 2: holistically in ways that are safe, work much more effectively

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Speaker 2: than choosing which ideas are good or bad. But those

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Speaker 2: messages really get lost in a world where you have

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Speaker 2: so many loud voices on the Internet saying that the

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Speaker 2: word safety is synonymous with censorship, and Mark got up publicly,

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Speaker 2: you know, not more than a few weeks ago, and

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Speaker 2: said over and over again in his announcement the word censorship,

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Speaker 2: further equiting in people's mind that safety and censorship are

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Speaker 2: so intimately intertwined.

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Speaker 1: Finally, I know you've spoken about some of Australia's measures

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Speaker 1: against the likes of Facebook, but if you could speak

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Speaker 1: to New Zealand lawmakers about the dangers of social media

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Speaker 1: and algorithms, what would you tell them?

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Speaker 2: The most important thing for lawmakers to understand is that

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Speaker 2: we are facing wildly asymmetrical forces here, that open societies

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Speaker 2: are intrinsically vulnerable to be manipulated online. You know, we

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Speaker 2: value people's opinions. If you can find ways to cheaply

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Speaker 2: and at scale influence the opinions of people, you can

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Speaker 2: change the course of a democracy. And what we've seen

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Speaker 2: time and time again now either through internal forces, because

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Speaker 2: let's be honest, you know we've seen in places like

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Speaker 2: Brazil or in Argentina there are people who are very

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Speaker 2: effective at spreading their messages on social media can go

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Speaker 2: and upend a political establishment, and so demanding transparency at

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Speaker 2: a minimum for things that impact national security. That's things

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Speaker 2: like foreign interference and manipulation of our social media platforms.

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Speaker 2: Ensuring that at a minimum we get transparency on national

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Speaker 2: security issues is not a nice to have for operating

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Speaker 2: a democracy in the twenty first century. It's a must

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Speaker 2: have if you want to continue to get to be

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Speaker 2: a place where we can have public deliberations, where we

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Speaker 2: can altogether work defind what is the best path forward,

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Speaker 2: because otherwise countries they want to make us week want

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Speaker 2: to see us divided, will divide us, and we'll lose

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Speaker 2: that magic that makes our democracies so special.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, francis my pleasure. That's it for

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Speaker 1: this episode of The Front Page. You can read more

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Speaker 1: about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot

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Speaker 1: co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan

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Speaker 1: Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.

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Speaker 1: I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio

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Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow

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Speaker 1: for another look behind the headlines.