Speaker 1: Kiota. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page,
Speaker 1: a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Meta,
Speaker 1: the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has implemented some
Speaker 1: changes across its organization since Donald Trump's election win. The
Speaker 1: social media giant is set to remove independent fact checkers
Speaker 1: from its service, replacing them with community driven notes, similar
Speaker 1: to what x implemented after its rebrand from Twitter. The
Speaker 1: company has also ended various diversity, equity and inclusion measures,
Speaker 1: while chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has called for more masculine
Speaker 1: energy in the corporate world. All this came before he
Speaker 1: was seated in the front row at Trump's inauguration alongside
Speaker 1: other tech bosses, raising questions about how tied up these
Speaker 1: global companies are becoming with the current US administration. Francis
Speaker 1: Hougan is a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower over the
Speaker 1: company's actions. She joins us today on the Front Page
Speaker 1: to discuss the changes in the take world. Francis, could
Speaker 1: you start by giving us a quick rundown of what
Speaker 1: you did, it matter and what prompted you to go
Speaker 1: public with those thousands of internal documents.
Speaker 2: Certainly so when I joined Facebook. Facebook knew it had
Speaker 2: a problem, so it had invested a great deal of
Speaker 2: money in something called third party factchecking. That's the program
Speaker 2: that they recently ended. But they knew that that program
Speaker 2: only covered a tiny, tiny sliver of the people in
Speaker 2: the world. Overwhelmingly the money was invested in the United States.
Speaker 2: Beyond that, it was a little bit in Australia, a
Speaker 2: little bit in Europe, a little bit scattered in a
Speaker 2: few other places. But Facebook is the Internet for most
Speaker 2: of the world. You know, for many, many, many people.
Speaker 2: They live in countries where, you know, seventy percent, eighty percent,
Speaker 2: ninety percent of the content available on the Internet in
Speaker 2: their language will only be on Facebook. And so they said, hey,
Speaker 2: we need to have a way to deal with misinformation
Speaker 2: when we can't have factcheckers. And so that was the
Speaker 2: responsibility of my team. So the Civic Misinformation Team and
Speaker 2: I came forward in twenty twenty one. Because in the
Speaker 2: process of doing that job for two years, different variants
Speaker 2: of it worked on different parts ended up within threat
Speaker 2: intelligence within Facebook. I realized that Facebook was serially lying.
Speaker 2: They had a habit of lying about what their company
Speaker 2: was doing, what the effects of their action or inaction
Speaker 2: was and they actively misled the pubook about what was possible.
Speaker 2: And so I came forward because I wanted people to
Speaker 2: have the information they needed to protect themselves. And in
Speaker 2: the process I became known as the Facebook whistleblower, even
Speaker 2: though there are very very many whistleblowers that come out
Speaker 2: of Facebook, because I'm not the only employee that knows
Speaker 2: their problems the public needs to act on.
Speaker 1: Now, I've had in recent ways about metas plans to
Speaker 1: remove independent fact check is and let use this fact
Speaker 1: check content. Does this feel like a backward step to you?
Speaker 2: You know, it's one of these actions that on the
Speaker 2: surface feels really dramatic. But one of the key things
Speaker 2: that I detailed when iking forward was was how superficial
Speaker 2: the third party fact checking program was. You know, every
Speaker 2: month they fact checked maybe hundreds and maybe less than
Speaker 2: like five hundred. We're talking three hundred two hundred pieces
Speaker 2: of content globally, when Facebook was producing hundreds of millions,
Speaker 2: if not billions, the pieces of content globally. So in
Speaker 2: many ways, we're ending an era of you know, lipstick
Speaker 2: on the pig, if you will. When it comes to
Speaker 2: seeing like third party fact checking is our first line
Speaker 2: of defense. But I think the larger issue is around
Speaker 2: how a lot of this has been framed. Right, The
Speaker 2: idea that you know, Facebook is quote like fighting for
Speaker 2: freedom and fighting for freedom of speech, and yet we
Speaker 2: see that they're quite willing to take down content from
Speaker 2: issues that maybe be politically expedient to them. So it'll
Speaker 2: be interesting to see how all this evolves.
Speaker 3: After Trump first got elected in twenty sixteen, the legacy
Speaker 3: media wrote NonStop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
Speaker 3: We tried, in good faith to address those concerns without
Speaker 3: becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have
Speaker 3: just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust
Speaker 3: than they've created, especially in the US. So over the
Speaker 3: next couple of months, we're going to phase in a
Speaker 3: more comprehensive community notes system.
Speaker 1: I know some of the revelations from your Facebook files
Speaker 1: centered on Meta's failure to fact check stolen election claims
Speaker 1: prior to the January sixth insurrection. Right, does it surprise
Speaker 1: you that the company is now I guess, perceivably handing
Speaker 1: the power back to its consumers. It doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: they've actually learned any kind of lessons, does it.
Speaker 2: Well, I would say the larger issue in my disclosures was,
Speaker 2: for example, prior to genuine so before the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 2: they actually took a lot of actions. You know, they
Speaker 2: had one hundred plus what they know is break the
Speaker 2: glass measures, which were little tweaks to how the company operated.
Speaker 2: You know, for example, if you're in a group that
Speaker 2: has a very small number of people who are driving
Speaker 2: all the invites for the group, that's kind of suspicious.
Speaker 2: You know, when you have point three percent of people
Speaker 2: who send out invites for stop the Steal, inviting a
Speaker 2: third of all the members, you know, that should be
Speaker 2: something that you would maybe take pause on or maybe
Speaker 2: operate that group a little bit differently because you know
Speaker 2: that someone's trying to manipulate your platform. I was trying
Speaker 2: to hack your vulnerabilities. Facebook knew prior to the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty election they had a bunch of problems, and they
Speaker 2: flipped a bunch of little switches to make their systems
Speaker 2: work in a way that they knew was safer. But
Speaker 2: prior to January sixth, they turned off. They left all
Speaker 2: those switches in the dangerous position. I think one of
Speaker 2: the key kind of differences of what's changed in the
Speaker 2: last few years is this question of do companies have
Speaker 2: a responsibility to understand their vulnerabilities and do they have
Speaker 2: responsibility to act to address those vulnerabilities if those vulnerabilities
Speaker 2: have the ability to say, change the course of an election.
Speaker 2: And back in twenty twenty, Facebook very clearly thought they
Speaker 2: had a responsibility to do that because they had a
Speaker 2: three hundred person team staffed to look for things like
Speaker 2: voter disenfranchisement, to look for foreign operations trying to amplify
Speaker 2: misleading information. But by the twenty twenty four election, they
Speaker 2: had dissolved that team. And now they're taking even a
Speaker 2: step further and coming out and slandering their own efforts
Speaker 2: to go and try to make the platform safer by
Speaker 2: labeling with words like censorship, even though many many of
Speaker 2: those interventions had nothing to do with content. So it's
Speaker 2: interesting to see how far Mark has come and how
Speaker 2: his perceptions around what his responsibilities are have shifted in
Speaker 2: a remarkably small amount of time.
Speaker 1: What do you think it's because perhaps they more at
Speaker 1: home now. I suppose at Trump's inauguration last week we
Speaker 1: saw metas Mark Zuckerberg X's elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos,
Speaker 1: and Google's the d Pachi in the front row ahead
Speaker 1: of Trump's cabinet. Why are these tech CEOs so keen to,
Speaker 1: I guess kiss the ring cozy app to the new administration.
Speaker 2: So we're in a really interesting moment where when we
Speaker 2: look across the world, countries are starting to say that
Speaker 2: they want a different balance of power with Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2: And I've heard very openly on certain podcasts where people
Speaker 2: who are really deeply connected into Silicon Valley say things
Speaker 2: like part of why people shifted, why these taxios shifted
Speaker 2: to support Trump, was that as those countries, as the
Speaker 2: European Union passed the DSA, as Australia started sending boundaries
Speaker 2: on how young should children be when they to use
Speaker 2: social media, they expected the United States government to step
Speaker 2: up and defend their economics interests. And the Biden administration,
Speaker 2: I think, in many ways took what is probably a
Speaker 2: more appropriate position, which is to say every country is different,
Speaker 2: trace should have autonomy to say how they want to
Speaker 2: govern forces that shape their own countries. But if you're
Speaker 2: a tech ceo, your job is to optimize for your company.
Speaker 2: And so Trump's inauguration is a second chance for a
Speaker 2: lot of these companies, you know, the AI regulations that
Speaker 2: you're a past. The only way Silicon Valley won't have
Speaker 2: to figure out how to adapt to those things like
Speaker 2: they did to GDPR the privacy law is by having
Speaker 2: people like Trump's step in and say we're just not
Speaker 2: going to do that. Look at what happened with the
Speaker 2: TikTok Investment Bill, also sometimes to know as the TikTok ban.
Speaker 2: He said, I'm very popular in TikTok. I don't want
Speaker 2: it to go away. You know, there's these interesting moments where,
Speaker 2: you know, Silicon Valley sees we have someone who is lawless.
Speaker 2: You know, he doesn't care that the Supreme Court has
Speaker 2: ruled that Congress had the right to do this, that
Speaker 2: this is a legal action. He believes he's about the law.
Speaker 2: So if they can show Trump that they are useful
Speaker 2: to him, they are going to get a second chance
Speaker 2: at all these mechanisms of oversight. And I think that's
Speaker 2: the thing that they're fighting for.
Speaker 3: And as of today, TikTok is back. And I said,
Speaker 3: we need to save.
Speaker 4: TikTok because we're talking about a tremendous who in this
Speaker 4: audience goes with TikTok Benny very popular.
Speaker 1: And frankly, we have no choice. We have to save
Speaker 1: it a lot of jobs.
Speaker 2: We don't want to.
Speaker 1: Give our business to China. We don't want to give
Speaker 1: our business to other people. You mentioned the TikTok ben
Speaker 1: and it's quite incredible to see once it came back online,
Speaker 1: there was a message shown to all users that thanked
Speaker 1: the Trump administration. That doesn't seem like something that we've
Speaker 1: seen before.
Speaker 2: No, well, they know flattery works. You know, this is
Speaker 2: what foreign governments realized in the first Trump administration. But
Speaker 2: the number one thing that you can do to get
Speaker 2: your way is just make him feel like a really
Speaker 2: big man. And so we have the situation now where
Speaker 2: tech CEOs are coming in and saying, as long as
Speaker 2: we can stay on Trump's good side. And remember, in
Speaker 2: the case of Mark, he really needs Trump. For context,
Speaker 2: when we look at what's coming down the pipeline, just
Speaker 2: this year, we're going to start seeing the cases that
Speaker 2: are going to make up the forty four US state
Speaker 2: lawsuit against Trump against Meta herting kids. You know, this
Speaker 2: is often compared to like the tobacco lawsuit. We're going
Speaker 2: to see school districts suing to say, hey, you're costing
Speaker 2: us tons of money by forcing us to have to
Speaker 2: pay for tutors, to pay for more security guards, to
Speaker 2: pay for therapists because kids are shown up to school suicidal.
Speaker 2: We need those costs rehooped. There's a lot of these
Speaker 2: major actions that are coming down the pipeline. More countries
Speaker 2: are probably going to follow Australia's lead and putting in
Speaker 2: age restrictions. Mark's only chance to subvert the democratic processes
Speaker 2: that are happening here is to get Trump to intervene
Speaker 2: in one of these hail Mary's. And so I think
Speaker 2: it makes a ton of sense strategically for these companies
Speaker 2: to be doing everything they can to kiss the ring.
Speaker 2: That's the thing that's going to protect them from this
Speaker 2: wave of oversight that democracies around the world have been
Speaker 2: pushing forward.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg recently suggested on the Joe Rogan podcast that corporate
Speaker 1: culture needs more masculine energy, describing it as culturally muted,
Speaker 1: and that having a culture that celebrates the aggression a
Speaker 1: bit more has its own merits. Now having worked in
Speaker 1: that Silicon Valley environment, to those ring true to you.
Speaker 2: You know, it's fascinating. So Google spent a huge amount
Speaker 2: of money and a huge amount of effort, bringing in
Speaker 2: data scientists, bringing sociologists, doing huge amounts of work to
Speaker 2: figure out what makes for a highly performing team in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley. And the thing that they found was most
Speaker 2: important was that people felt psychologically safe. So when you
Speaker 2: sit there and you say we need more masculine energy, like,
Speaker 2: what does that mean? Does it mean violent? Like you know,
Speaker 2: active aggression, doesn't mean more yelling? Like, what's the behavior
Speaker 2: you want to see more of in the office? You know,
Speaker 2: I think if I were sitting at Google, you know
Speaker 2: the thing they actively did after they did that research
Speaker 2: was go and give their managers more EQ training because
Speaker 2: you know, if you want to have a highly performed
Speaker 2: team where people take risks, people have to feel psychologically safe.
Speaker 2: So it feels just like marketing messages. It doesn't feel
Speaker 2: like you know, a serious person actively looking at the
Speaker 2: research that's been done on what makes teams.
Speaker 1: Achieve, Yeah and not. The key thing we've learned in
Speaker 1: recent ways is about the end of DEI initiatives that
Speaker 1: the company and Meta, including removing tampons from men's toilets
Speaker 1: that were there for trends or non binary employees. What
Speaker 1: point are they trying to get across by doing this?
Speaker 2: It's purely performative, right Like what harm was done by
Speaker 2: having tampons in those laboratories? Right? Like? Who has been
Speaker 2: damaged by this? I think one of the interesting trends
Speaker 2: that we are going to start to see happen over
Speaker 2: the next few years is AI encoding radically changes the
Speaker 2: constraints the companies were built on. So let's be super
Speaker 2: honest here. Part of why Silicon Valley companies started investing
Speaker 2: more in these diversity initiatives is they just needed more employees.
Speaker 2: You know, It's like the US military. The US military
Speaker 2: cannot function today without reinstating the draft, without having women's soldiers.
Speaker 2: It's like, you can, you can drive the limit a way,
Speaker 2: you can drive the racial minorities away, but then we're
Speaker 2: gonna have to bring back the draft. In the case
Speaker 2: of Silicon value, you can't force people to work at
Speaker 2: a tech company. But at the same time, with the
Speaker 2: advent of AI, you don't need as many employees. Like
Speaker 2: I think there will be companies that emerge that make
Speaker 2: very different choices esthetically, And I'm saying esthetically because that's
Speaker 2: what banning tampons or having tampons is in this case. Right,
Speaker 2: you're saying, hey, we want to be a culture. The
Speaker 2: way we envision happiness is being inclusive in the following
Speaker 2: ways or or or not being inclusive. It's going to
Speaker 2: be possible for some companies to actually reach reasonable scale
Speaker 2: by just having fewer employees. And so I think one
Speaker 2: of the things that Facebook is probably looking at is,
Speaker 2: you know, they purge to huge number employees in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two. They've done it again over the last few years.
Speaker 2: It seems like every single year they say their goal
Speaker 2: is to decrease headcount. And they also are one of
Speaker 2: the top companies at investing in large language models, and
Speaker 2: so it you know, maybe they've made a decision where
Speaker 2: they're like, we don't have to anymore be a space
Speaker 2: that welcomes a diverse set of people because we can
Speaker 2: get away with it with So. I don't know this
Speaker 2: will become a larger trend. I don't know if it's
Speaker 2: going to be. Like I mentioned before, people are going
Speaker 2: to go by the research and say, hey, if we
Speaker 2: want people to take risks, if we want them to
Speaker 2: act effectually at work, we're going to create spaces where
Speaker 2: people feel safe. But who knows, It'll be an interesting
Speaker 2: few years to see how it all plays out.
Speaker 4: Within days, Musk has not only moved to reshape the product,
Speaker 4: but the company's culture itself.
Speaker 3: What Twitter prides itself on is a real human centric,
Speaker 3: people first mentality.
Speaker 4: That's what Twitter Canada's then boss told us in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Now Musk appears to be gutting the social media giant's
Speaker 4: content moderation team, and research is already pointing to a
Speaker 4: spike in racist slurs on the platform.
Speaker 1: You described Meta back in twenty twenty one as putting
Speaker 1: profit over safety. I think that's the case now with
Speaker 1: the changes we're seeing coming through and where do you
Speaker 1: see it going from he so, I think.
Speaker 2: I think one of the major trends that Elon Musk
Speaker 2: released on social media as a whole is when he
Speaker 2: reduced the size of the company by over fifty percent,
Speaker 2: he fired many of them, many of them left on
Speaker 2: their own accord. When he reduced the size of the
Speaker 2: company so dramatically, he ended up showing Silicon Valley that
Speaker 2: you could cut safety and there would be no consequences.
Speaker 2: And when we look at what Mark said in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two when he cut huge spots of the safety teams.
Speaker 2: He said, Elon showed you could quote rip the band
Speaker 2: aid off, and we're going to do it too. And
Speaker 2: so I think there's a real feeling that there's no
Speaker 2: one forcing them to do even slightly the right thing. Right.
Speaker 2: If they can evade the DSA, it doesn't matter how
Speaker 2: little they invest in safety outside the United States. If
Speaker 2: they can get on Trump's good side, they can evade
Speaker 2: the consequences of the lawsuits that are stalking them. And
Speaker 2: so I think they think that they can act any
Speaker 2: way they want to. And part of that is there
Speaker 2: are people on the Internet who have demonized any form
Speaker 2: of action. They've lumked everything into one pot, even though
Speaker 2: people like me have been out here since twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one saying, hey, Facebook knows, there's lots and lots of
Speaker 2: ways to do safety that aren't content moderation. And those
Speaker 2: interventions like designing for safety, making sure the products operate
Speaker 2: holistically in ways that are safe, work much more effectively
Speaker 2: than choosing which ideas are good or bad. But those
Speaker 2: messages really get lost in a world where you have
Speaker 2: so many loud voices on the Internet saying that the
Speaker 2: word safety is synonymous with censorship, and Mark got up publicly,
Speaker 2: you know, not more than a few weeks ago, and
Speaker 2: said over and over again in his announcement the word censorship,
Speaker 2: further equiting in people's mind that safety and censorship are
Speaker 2: so intimately intertwined.
Speaker 1: Finally, I know you've spoken about some of Australia's measures
Speaker 1: against the likes of Facebook, but if you could speak
Speaker 1: to New Zealand lawmakers about the dangers of social media
Speaker 1: and algorithms, what would you tell them?
Speaker 2: The most important thing for lawmakers to understand is that
Speaker 2: we are facing wildly asymmetrical forces here, that open societies
Speaker 2: are intrinsically vulnerable to be manipulated online. You know, we
Speaker 2: value people's opinions. If you can find ways to cheaply
Speaker 2: and at scale influence the opinions of people, you can
Speaker 2: change the course of a democracy. And what we've seen
Speaker 2: time and time again now either through internal forces, because
Speaker 2: let's be honest, you know we've seen in places like
Speaker 2: Brazil or in Argentina there are people who are very
Speaker 2: effective at spreading their messages on social media can go
Speaker 2: and upend a political establishment, and so demanding transparency at
Speaker 2: a minimum for things that impact national security. That's things
Speaker 2: like foreign interference and manipulation of our social media platforms.
Speaker 2: Ensuring that at a minimum we get transparency on national
Speaker 2: security issues is not a nice to have for operating
Speaker 2: a democracy in the twenty first century. It's a must
Speaker 2: have if you want to continue to get to be
Speaker 2: a place where we can have public deliberations, where we
Speaker 2: can altogether work defind what is the best path forward,
Speaker 2: because otherwise countries they want to make us week want
Speaker 2: to see us divided, will divide us, and we'll lose
Speaker 2: that magic that makes our democracies so special.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, francis my pleasure. That's it for
Speaker 1: this episode of The Front Page. You can read more
Speaker 1: about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot
Speaker 1: co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan
Speaker 1: Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
Speaker 1: I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow
Speaker 1: for another look behind the headlines.