Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. Valentine's Day is coming up.
Speaker 1: I wish all of you a happy, happy Valentine's. May
Speaker 1: it be blissful, may it be peaceful, and may it
Speaker 1: be filled with whatever you need. That's what we say
Speaker 1: back home. Valentine's is a very important day in South Africa.
Speaker 1: We celebrated in church. Has nothing to do with like
Speaker 1: like sex and romans. You go to church and then
Speaker 1: you pray about sex and romance. You know what's crazy
Speaker 1: about Valentine'sday is that it's based on Saint Valentine, Like
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like it's like the Saint
Speaker 1: of Valentine's Day, And do you ever think about like
Speaker 1: how shitty it is for certain saints, like what they
Speaker 1: have to look after? Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Because like some saints have cool things. St Christopher, the
Speaker 1: Saint of Travel sat look after me as I take
Speaker 1: on this treacherous durn. Please Saint Christopher look after me.
Speaker 1: Saint Sebastian, the Saint of Martyrdom, you're going to die,
Speaker 1: You're gonna give up your life. St. Sebastian look after
Speaker 1: my soul as I give my life up for a
Speaker 1: great cause. St. Valentine. St. Valentine, Yo, man, can you
Speaker 1: help me find chocolate the CBS? Please? Man, let me
Speaker 1: figure out out because I'm trying to smash tonight, yo.
Speaker 1: And the cheap chocolate is not as like super expensive
Speaker 1: Belgian ones, just good enough that she thinks I thought
Speaker 1: about her ahead of time. All right, Saint Valentine, Thanks
Speaker 1: my dude, coming to you from the heart of times.
Speaker 1: Were in New York City, the only city in America.
Speaker 1: It's the Daily shy here edition Tonight Roads or Races.
Speaker 1: Reading up for Valentine Francis is The Daily Show with Trevor. Hey,
Speaker 1: what's going on? Everybody? Welcome to the Daily Show. I'm
Speaker 1: Trevor Noah. Let's jump straight into today's headlines. We kick
Speaker 1: things off with bitcoin, the only money that doesn't have
Speaker 1: slaveholders on. One of the advantages of cryptocurrency was supposed
Speaker 1: to be how it was secure from theft, and I
Speaker 1: would explain why, but instead just us that one dude
Speaker 1: at the next party you go to. He'll be very
Speaker 1: happy to go into great detail. But despite the supersecurity
Speaker 1: of crypto, they have unfortunately been some major crypto heists
Speaker 1: over the years, and the same technology that makes it
Speaker 1: hard to steal, also makes the perpetrators extremely hard to catch. Hard,
Speaker 1: but not impossible. This morning, the Justice Department announcing the
Speaker 1: largest single seizure of funds in the department's history. Investigators
Speaker 1: say hackers broke into an online currency exchange back in
Speaker 1: stealing one D twenty thousand bitcoin, which at the time
Speaker 1: was worth seventy one million dollars, but today it's worth
Speaker 1: a staggering four point five billion. Ilia Lichtenstein and his wife,
Speaker 1: Heather Morgan are charged with laundering bitcoin tied to the
Speaker 1: hat using thousands of small transactions and accounts set up
Speaker 1: with fake ideas. Holy shit, four and a half billion
Speaker 1: dollars in stolen bitcoin. This is huge. You realize, You
Speaker 1: realize there's three d and thirty million people in the
Speaker 1: United States and that's four point five billion dollars. So
Speaker 1: that means you could give each person in the US
Speaker 1: ten ten if you fire, you could give everyone some money.
Speaker 1: And by the way, you might think that everyone who
Speaker 1: uses bitcoin would be happy that the police were able
Speaker 1: to track down the stolen crypto, but it turns out no.
Speaker 1: It turns out a lot of the crypto community actually
Speaker 1: took this as bad news because cryptocurrency is supposed to
Speaker 1: be anonymous, and if the FBI can trace bitcoin to
Speaker 1: someone who might have stolen it, what's to stop them
Speaker 1: from tracking innocent people who are just using bitcoin to
Speaker 1: buy heroin and automatic weapons. This is scary stuff, but
Speaker 1: where some people see a problem, I'd like to see opportunities,
Speaker 1: which is why, my friends, I've created a new form
Speaker 1: of currency that is totally anonymous and completely untraceable, and
Speaker 1: it comes with just a little bit of cocaine on it.
Speaker 1: So if you're interested, I'm gonna be selling these on
Speaker 1: my website for fifty dollars each. I think it's a steel.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably wondering who are the criminal geniuses who
Speaker 1: are part of one of the biggest financial crimes in history. Well,
Speaker 1: you know when they say you should never meet your heroes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is why Litzon signed A US and Russian citizen,
Speaker 1: is described in a profile online as a tech entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: and according to morgan social media profiles, she's a serial
Speaker 1: entrepreneur and a part time rapper. In one of her songs,
Speaker 1: Morgan calls herself the infamous Crocodile of Wall Street and
Speaker 1: many things, a rapper, an economist, a journalist writer. I
Speaker 1: don't know what you're thinking, the bitcoin crimes or nothing
Speaker 1: compared to Colin this ship rap? What was that? A rapper?
Speaker 1: And economists? Yo, rapper is not just like saying what
Speaker 1: what is that? And also even if you are a rapper,
Speaker 1: you know it's never a good sign for your rap
Speaker 1: career when you're listening all your other jobs in a song,
Speaker 1: you're just a rapper. This person is running around like
Speaker 1: yo yo yo. This definitely doesn't pay the bills. I
Speaker 1: have to do a bunch of other things because as
Speaker 1: you can tell, no one would pay for this. And
Speaker 1: this wasn't a once off crime. By the way, the
Speaker 1: rap video not not the money. This woman, it turns out,
Speaker 1: has been spitting wet fire everywhere that she's been given
Speaker 1: a chance. Mothers, howdo what I gotta do? Yodo? Our
Speaker 1: mission is noble? Yeah, I want to be a mogul.
Speaker 1: My attendees going global building Empire, Coln Stantinople, you made
Speaker 1: a stable get icy like fro Yo. I gotta stay
Speaker 1: vocal Bitcoin etherory of Hodu am C game stop Yolo please, Jesus,
Speaker 1: I beg you no more? Like what is she? Which
Speaker 1: rap is she listening to that, she thought that was
Speaker 1: a reference for rap. That's what I want to know, Like,
Speaker 1: where were she listening to rapp? And she's like, I
Speaker 1: could do that. I'm gonna go and do the exact
Speaker 1: same thing. No, no, yo yo. And if you're sitting
Speaker 1: next to you in the room, what are you thinking?
Speaker 1: Are you okay in that? Here's the tip, kids, if
Speaker 1: you want to look cool while doing your rap, don't
Speaker 1: read your lyrics off to the side. Practice and learn
Speaker 1: the thing, because otherwise it sort of eliminates your swag
Speaker 1: the whole time. She's like doing this to catch the
Speaker 1: next rhyme that's dead though. You can't do that. No
Speaker 1: rapper would have six Can you imagine if Tupuk was
Speaker 1: reading his rhymes off on the side. You claim to
Speaker 1: be a player? Butt up? Just screwed. Sorry, guys, screwed
Speaker 1: your wife? We bust on a bed? Can we gotta
Speaker 1: Can we get a different fut? If you have four
Speaker 1: five four point five billion dollars? Why are you on TikTok?
Speaker 1: What are you doing on TikTok? Huh? The whole point
Speaker 1: of being on TikTok is to get followers so that
Speaker 1: you can get paid so you can be rich enough
Speaker 1: so you don't have to be on TikTok anymore. No
Speaker 1: one wants to be on TikTok. You think Shock is
Speaker 1: dancing for fun, don't matter his dance. Look at the
Speaker 1: pain in his eyes. They're coming for his family. I'll
Speaker 1: never understand how people are smart enough to commit the
Speaker 1: biggest crimes but them dumb enough to never get away
Speaker 1: with it. I mean, like, there's a better way to
Speaker 1: do this crime. And I'm not trying to give anyone
Speaker 1: advice on how to do crime. Please, I'm not giving advice.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. If you steal crypto, don't just
Speaker 1: keep it all in one place, yo. What you gotta
Speaker 1: do is break it up into multiple wallets. You keep
Speaker 1: those wallets offline, in separate drives, right. Then you make
Speaker 1: sure that your keys are not in the cloud or
Speaker 1: written down anyway. Then you move to a country that
Speaker 1: doesn't have any extradition laws to the US. Then you
Speaker 1: loaned the money slowly using other crypto or n f
Speaker 1: t s. And again, I'm not giving advice on doing
Speaker 1: crime this alright, let's move on to our top story.
Speaker 1: One of President Biden's guest accomplishments so far. I mean,
Speaker 1: aside from allowing students to keep their debt, has been
Speaker 1: the infrastructure package. It's at one point to trillion dollar
Speaker 1: law that's going to help rebuild roads, expand access to
Speaker 1: clean drinking water, and finally get around to adding all
Speaker 1: the other colors to stoplights. And while most of the
Speaker 1: infrastructure package was pretty uncontroversial, there was one thing that
Speaker 1: was very deep in the package that has actually got
Speaker 1: a lot of people riled up. Democrats, led by President Biden,
Speaker 1: say now is the time to build back better. But
Speaker 1: leaders don't just want to build an update roads. In
Speaker 1: some cases, they want highways torn down. Democrats would like
Speaker 1: to provide funding to tear down highways that had a
Speaker 1: damaging effect on urban minority communities. There is racism physically
Speaker 1: built into some of our highways, and that's why the
Speaker 1: Jobs Plan has dollars specifically committed to reconnect some of
Speaker 1: the communities that were divided. Critics, though, slamming the secretary
Speaker 1: after he said Biden's infrastructure bill would address racism in highways.
Speaker 1: I guess now, according to Democrats, roads are now racist
Speaker 1: and you need to apologize for it. Roads can't be
Speaker 1: racist you can build racism into a road. Roads are
Speaker 1: made of sand and gravel and asphalt. Ask any road builder.
Speaker 1: Roads cannot be racist anymore than toasters or sectional couches
Speaker 1: can be racist. They are inanimate objects. They're not alive. Okay,
Speaker 1: First of all, toasters can totally be racist. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: can't even count how many times I've put a piece
Speaker 1: of white bread into a toaster and it came out
Speaker 1: wearing black face. That ship it wasn't cool. But yes, Look,
Speaker 1: the idea that highways can be racist has completely blown
Speaker 1: the minds over at Fox and US and I get why,
Speaker 1: I get why, and I get white. Tuka is so
Speaker 1: puzzled by this. If highways were racist, then surely they
Speaker 1: would have been a guest on his show. By now.
Speaker 1: It must be very confusing for him. But there is
Speaker 1: actually a real explanation for why Pete b is so
Speaker 1: mad about America's roads, And it's not just because he
Speaker 1: keeps failing his driver's head tests. No, there's another reason.
Speaker 1: So let's find out why. In another installment of If
Speaker 1: you don't Know, Now you know. Highways. They are the
Speaker 1: vital arteries that criss cross America, helping the country's truckers
Speaker 1: transport goods, it's workers commute to and from the office,
Speaker 1: and it's O. J's flee the L A p D.
Speaker 1: What you may not know is that when America first
Speaker 1: started building its highway system back in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: people were often forced to leave their homes to make
Speaker 1: room for all these fancy new roads. And guess which
Speaker 1: people were moved the most. Yes. The Federal Aid Highway
Speaker 1: Act of nineteen fifty six was one of the largest
Speaker 1: public works projects in American history. It added forty one
Speaker 1: miles to our interstate system. Pretty much every major setting
Speaker 1: in the country New York, d C. San Francisco, Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: you have major highways cutting through neighborhoods, requiring the demolition
Speaker 1: of lots of housing and other friends of buildings that
Speaker 1: the thinking about where they're going to rob highways and
Speaker 1: destroy neighborhoods, they invariably single out what they see is
Speaker 1: the worst neighborhoods in their communities. It became a pattern
Speaker 1: in cities across the country. Poor and minority residents were
Speaker 1: displaced to make way for highways, and white residents used
Speaker 1: those highways to commute into the city for jobs and
Speaker 1: commute back home at nine. Planners had an uncanny ability
Speaker 1: to pick out the black neighborhoods. The route for ninety
Speaker 1: four in St. Paul displaced one in seven of the
Speaker 1: city's black residents. Very few blacks were living in Minnesota,
Speaker 1: one critic noted, but the road builders found them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Highway ninety four could have been anywhere in Minnesota,
Speaker 1: but it just happened to displace the very few black
Speaker 1: people living in Minnesota, more commonly known as the Minnesota
Speaker 1: timber Wolves. And look, don't get me wrong, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, these highways had to go somewhere. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying no highways, but more often than not, that's somewhere
Speaker 1: was right through a black neighborhood. Because you see, rich
Speaker 1: white neighborhoods they didn't allow this to happen to them,
Speaker 1: But brown and black families didn't have any political power
Speaker 1: to stop it. I mean, what were they gonna do.
Speaker 1: Take to the streets. It was impossible. They hadn't been
Speaker 1: built yet. And look, black people are used to being
Speaker 1: displaced by gentrification even today. But at least when that happens,
Speaker 1: they get to enjoy shape check for a few months. First.
Speaker 1: These highways, on the other hand, they didn't provide any
Speaker 1: improvement to the neighborhood. They slashed a hole through it,
Speaker 1: and whatever was left of that neighborhood just withered and died.
Speaker 1: From the beginning, the Rondo neighborhood was a haven for
Speaker 1: people of color. At its peak from the thirties to
Speaker 1: the fifties. It had black owned grocery stores, credit unions
Speaker 1: from social clubs. During construction, from nineteen fifty six to nine,
Speaker 1: Rondo lotts seven hundred houses, three hundred businesses, and the
Speaker 1: population declined by In Florida, Overtown was the center of
Speaker 1: black Miami tour through the neighborhood, wiping out countless homes
Speaker 1: as well as its thriving business district. Kansas City, Chicago, Boston,
Speaker 1: in Detroit, New York City, Montgomery, Los Angeles. The list
Speaker 1: goes on and on, and it's actually pretty heartbreaking to
Speaker 1: see how devastating these highways were for the black communities
Speaker 1: that they ran through. Streets that were once filled with
Speaker 1: black people are still empty to this day. And of course,
Speaker 1: of course, these communities crumbled once a highway ran through it,
Speaker 1: I mean highways. Think of all the things they bring.
Speaker 1: Highways bring noise, they bring pollution, and if you're really
Speaker 1: unlucky spontaneous musical numbers, I'm trying to get to work.
Speaker 1: I mean, have you ever looked on the side of
Speaker 1: a highway and thought to yourself, Yeah, that looks like
Speaker 1: a nice place to live. No, you probably thought, I
Speaker 1: wonder if I can use the bathroom in that gas
Speaker 1: station without being murdered. And the fact that they destroyed
Speaker 1: black neighborhoods wasn't the only racist thing about how highways
Speaker 1: were designed. You see, around the time the highways were
Speaker 1: being built, segregation laws were being struck down in America.
Speaker 1: But lucky for the racists, they didn't need the laws
Speaker 1: to enforce segregation because now the highways did it full them.
Speaker 1: Infrastructure didn't just break up black communities, it reinforced segregation.
Speaker 1: The Federal Housing Administration underwriting manual said an artificial barrier
Speaker 1: like a highway could protect a neighborhood from quote adverse
Speaker 1: influences like quote inharmonious racial groups. They laid the interstate
Speaker 1: down right on the black white line cam and what
Speaker 1: that meant was that it made much harder to have
Speaker 1: school integration. I mean, you can have kids walking across
Speaker 1: the interstate for heaven's sakes. A report from the Georgia
Speaker 1: Historical Society says that while deciding the route of I twenty,
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Bureau of Planning said it would be the
Speaker 1: boundary between white and African American communities because the highways
Speaker 1: in Atlanta were laid down primarily with regard to keeping
Speaker 1: the races apart, rather than keeping traffic moving efficiently. Uh,
Speaker 1: it laid them down a way that today traffic in
Speaker 1: Atlanta is incredibly snarl. I twenty of zigzags from east
Speaker 1: to west and a route that makes no sense unless
Speaker 1: you know it was laid down with a desire to segregate. Man.
Speaker 1: Racism is a hell of a drug. I mean, think
Speaker 1: about it. Instead of designing the most efficient highway, they
Speaker 1: instead made it zigzag around the city like some kind
Speaker 1: of racist Mario Karts. Although if you if you're real
Speaker 1: about it, Mario Kott is pretty racist because in real life,
Speaker 1: when Italians get in a car accident, they don't yell
Speaker 1: my mommy, I love the spaghetti. Do you have any insurance?
Speaker 1: Something new? You and guys, I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but there is nobody that I hate more than I
Speaker 1: hate traffic, like I will literally shake hands with my
Speaker 1: worst enemy if it means I can get where I'm
Speaker 1: going thirty minutes faster. I'm still not friends with you, winter,
Speaker 1: but at least we're both gonna get home at five
Speaker 1: and I'll make the sun set at five. You so
Speaker 1: much or can you turn on the A C please? So? Yes,
Speaker 1: highways might not be following black people around department stores
Speaker 1: or turning them down for long, but the way that
Speaker 1: highways were built in America was inarguably racist in ways
Speaker 1: that still affect American society to this day. And I know,
Speaker 1: like I know that people like Taker and Sean Hannity,
Speaker 1: they love to make it seem like talking about the
Speaker 1: racist history of highways means that you're somehow calling people
Speaker 1: racist today because they still drive on those freeways. Why
Speaker 1: are you raised? No, No, that's not the case. Nobody's
Speaker 1: telling you to walk to your next family vacation. What
Speaker 1: we're saying is, if we can try to understand the
Speaker 1: history of how a thing came to be, then maybe
Speaker 1: we can figure out how to make it better when
Speaker 1: we build new roads in the future. And if you
Speaker 1: don't know now, you know all right when we come back,
Speaker 1: Dulce Sloan is going to get us in the mood
Speaker 1: for Valentine's Day. Oh yeah, welcome back to the Daily Show.
Speaker 1: This Monday is Valentine's Day, the day that will be
Speaker 1: the reason couples break up six months from now. But
Speaker 1: for all the people up there who are already single,
Speaker 1: we turned to Dulce Sloan for a Valentine's Day episode
Speaker 1: of DULs saying, Hello, friends, I want to wish all
Speaker 1: the couples that happy Valentine's Day. I hope you all
Speaker 1: have a romantic key thing and your carriage ride around
Speaker 1: the park is filled with horse park. I've been single
Speaker 1: for too long because you know, davy apps are digital
Speaker 1: dumpster diving. The only thing that's got me through it
Speaker 1: our romance novels. But not just any romance novel. I'm
Speaker 1: talking about the unsung heroines of the erotic, all the
Speaker 1: black women writing the best ones. For example, the Queen
Speaker 1: of Black historical romance, Beverly Jenkins. Just check out the
Speaker 1: passage from her novel Indigo, which I imagine has read
Speaker 1: to me by Jesse Williams. She moved her hands over
Speaker 1: the strength of its back kissing him, flicking her tongue
Speaker 1: against the edges of his lips, experimenting with the boldness
Speaker 1: his passion that planted within her, while his hands beneath
Speaker 1: her gown toward lustily. No man had ever touched her
Speaker 1: this way. Damn. I remember the first time I read this.
Speaker 1: I felt right out of my chair. No, I slid out.
Speaker 1: I love how she was flicking her tongue against the
Speaker 1: edges of his lips. Oh, you know, a writer is
Speaker 1: good if they make kissing sound sexy even when it's wrong, Like,
Speaker 1: don't be licking his lips. Get that poor man's some chapstick. Now.
Speaker 1: If you want to go a bit more all school
Speaker 1: in your romance, you can try Ruby Saunders. She was
Speaker 1: best known for a series following Nurse Marylyn Morgan and
Speaker 1: her steamy affairs with doctors. The series was coming at
Speaker 1: you with hot lines. Hank was standing behind her now
Speaker 1: and somehow his arms were around her waist. Hag pressed
Speaker 1: close to him. She could feel his breath on the
Speaker 1: back of her neck. I won't hurt yunning, he murmured,
Speaker 1: as his arms tightened around her. They sank into the
Speaker 1: cushions together. Ship. Listen, everyone, knows that slinking into the
Speaker 1: cushion means good sex or your couch is too old.
Speaker 1: Either way, you're gonna be sow in the morning. By
Speaker 1: the way, we would never have known many of these
Speaker 1: authors if it wasn't for book publishers like Vivian Stevens.
Speaker 1: She was groundbreaking, not just because she sought out writers
Speaker 1: of color who wrote about women with real depth, but
Speaker 1: also because she wasn't afraid to publish explicit sex scenes.
Speaker 1: She changed the game with her publishing company candle lights ecstasy,
Speaker 1: which is one of those terms that only belongs to
Speaker 1: the romance novel. If you combine candle light and ecstasy
Speaker 1: in real life, you're gonna lose your eyebrows. Steven's helped
Speaker 1: published great authors like Sandra Kit, who wrote love stories
Speaker 1: featuring both black and white characters. So she referred to
Speaker 1: herself as a switch hitter, which I feel like means
Speaker 1: something different now is that when the dick is ambidextrous,
Speaker 1: like it can hold a pin with his left and
Speaker 1: it's right testicle. Anyway. One of Sandra Kid's greatest contributions
Speaker 1: was the novel Adam and Eva. This novel is about
Speaker 1: Eva dunking escaping the death of her husband, she takes
Speaker 1: a vacation to the Virgin Islands, and basically, by the
Speaker 1: time she leaves, they just called the islands. What I
Speaker 1: like about Sandra's writing is how she evokes the physical
Speaker 1: sensation of sex and also the butts. Just check out
Speaker 1: this passage when Maxwell's other hand made a sensuous journey
Speaker 1: up the back of one five, causing a quaking through
Speaker 1: the center of her body as he pressed her buttocks
Speaker 1: to bring her against his distinct hard masculine form. She
Speaker 1: finally came to her senses, pulling her mouth away with
Speaker 1: a gasp and turning completely within the circle of his arms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dul Say finished, Well, I wasn't well. I guess that
Speaker 1: about wraps it up a book club. So when your
Speaker 1: single asks curled up with a book about people curling
Speaker 1: up with each other, make sure not to forget the
Speaker 1: black women that paved the way for you to hear
Speaker 1: lines in your head like this. They could resist each
Speaker 1: other no longer. She and her robe skin of glow
Speaker 1: lips pursed. He hovered above her, lustful, yeah firm, whispering
Speaker 1: her name. Don't say right, dul Say, really did you
Speaker 1: write this? Don't great character. Did you go to acting school? No? Uh?
Speaker 1: Self talked? Okay, I see you. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for that, dul say, all right, when we come back,
Speaker 1: I'll be talking to the woman who exposed Facebook's biggest secrets.
Speaker 1: You don't want to miss it. Welcome back to the
Speaker 1: Daily Show. My guest tonight is former Facebook product manager
Speaker 1: turned whistleblower Francis Hoagan. She's here to talk about how
Speaker 1: Facebook prioritize as profits over public safety and teen mental health.
Speaker 1: Francis Haagan, Welcome to The Daily Show. Thank you, forting Um,
Speaker 1: your name isn't as big as the story that you really,
Speaker 1: I mean leaked to the world. You know a lot
Speaker 1: of people, you say, Francis, how gonna be like, who
Speaker 1: is that? But then if you say to people, hey,
Speaker 1: remember how we all learned that Facebook and what social
Speaker 1: media is doing is essentially destroying teenagers brains and it's
Speaker 1: harming all of us. Yeah, that report happened because of you.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the question of why you've worked
Speaker 1: for Google, you worked for Pinterest, you've worked for Yelp,
Speaker 1: and yet you blew the whistle on Facebook. Why did
Speaker 1: you feel like, oh, this this is something I can't
Speaker 1: sit on. So when I joined Facebook, I thought I
Speaker 1: was gonna work on misinformation in the United States, and
Speaker 1: I was surprised, and I actually I was charged with
Speaker 1: work on information out only outside the United States. And UM,
Speaker 1: like many people and many technologists, I had never really
Speaker 1: focused on Facebook's impact internationally. And very rapidly, UM I
Speaker 1: realized kind of the horrifying magnitude of the danger that
Speaker 1: we were facing. That Facebook's algorithms give the most reached
Speaker 1: to the most extreme and divisive ideas, UM, and that
Speaker 1: that process is destabilizing some of the most fragile places
Speaker 1: in the world, like Ethiopia or what happened in me
Speaker 1: and more. You see when when when when you say
Speaker 1: that there were some people who are accepted immediately, and
Speaker 1: then there are some people be like, that's that's not
Speaker 1: true all. But I'm sure there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who will say, well, but I mean, aren't they
Speaker 1: always going to be extreme people in the world. You know,
Speaker 1: there's always somebody saying something. You know, Facebook themselves say
Speaker 1: they go like, hey, we're not We're not part of
Speaker 1: the problem. We're merely a platform that people put their
Speaker 1: views on. We are not part of the problem and
Speaker 1: you disagree with that. So let's imagine you had a
Speaker 1: relative who had particularly extreme ideas. You know, we often
Speaker 1: say like the crazy uncle. Some of us have those,
Speaker 1: uh that person if there, if we're talking to them
Speaker 1: one on one, or we're talking to them at a
Speaker 1: family gathering. That scale allows for resolution of ideas. What's
Speaker 1: happening on Facebook right now is ideas that are the
Speaker 1: most able to elicitor reaction and the shortest path to
Speaker 1: a click is anger. Those get the most reach. And
Speaker 1: ideas that are more moderate or they try to bring
Speaker 1: us into synthesis or to to help us find a
Speaker 1: middle path. Those aren't as likely to elicit a comment
Speaker 1: from you or elicit al and so Facebook doesn't give
Speaker 1: it as much distribution. So Facebook is essentially propelling certain
Speaker 1: ideas out there. So they may say with the platform,
Speaker 1: but really what they're also doing is they're advocating for
Speaker 1: certain viewpoints because they push those up, because those get
Speaker 1: people engaged and spinning in the cycle. So I think
Speaker 1: it's a thing where it's not they sit out and
Speaker 1: go help, can we have more extreme ideas? I don't
Speaker 1: think that's what they're trying to do, but they do
Speaker 1: know that there are lots of solutions that are not
Speaker 1: about censorship. It's not about picking good or bad ideas
Speaker 1: or good or bad people. It's about how do we
Speaker 1: change the dynamics of these systems so that you could
Speaker 1: have a good speech counter counter bad speech. How do
Speaker 1: we give those more of a loople say at the table,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's interesting that you lay it out
Speaker 1: like this, because I remember talking to my friends about this, saying,
Speaker 1: have we become angry in the world? Have we become
Speaker 1: less able to have misunderstands? Because I because I sit
Speaker 1: with my friends and I go like, I don't agree
Speaker 1: on so many things with my friends, But I don't
Speaker 1: remember a time when that meant that I couldn't be
Speaker 1: friends with them. In the world of social media right now,
Speaker 1: it feels like if I disagree with you on this,
Speaker 1: I disagree with you on everything. It seems like Facebook,
Speaker 1: if you disagree on this, we're gonna make or we're
Speaker 1: gonna find more ways to to to you know, to
Speaker 1: find way you disagree or how to make you disagree.
Speaker 1: So some people have said this idea of like Facebook's
Speaker 1: always leoking for fault lines, right, So, so in a
Speaker 1: high quality piece of content is one that gets lots
Speaker 1: of engagement, and it turns out an angry common thread
Speaker 1: where you know, it causes us to reality each other
Speaker 1: that is viewed as a higher quality piece of content.
Speaker 1: And so you know, during COVID, I've had friends who
Speaker 1: wrote very long, thoughtful pieces that, when and digested lots
Speaker 1: of information, that's going to cause less knee jerk reaction
Speaker 1: than something that really offends you. So mosques don't work.
Speaker 1: People are clicking on that. She's the thing about masks.
Speaker 1: We have to consider our society. What boom? Facebook not
Speaker 1: pushing that. So what's interesting, you know in everything that
Speaker 1: you've done is even though you're whistled blow, even though
Speaker 1: you came up with this information, you've never said I'm
Speaker 1: anti Facebook. You've never said shut Facebook down, You've never
Speaker 1: said this thing needs to go away. What you're arguing
Speaker 1: for is we change our relationship with not just Facebook,
Speaker 1: but social media company as a whole. Explain what that means.
Speaker 1: So I found people talk with this idea of when
Speaker 1: you change our relationship with social media. It's more about
Speaker 1: like should we use our phone so much? But I'm
Speaker 1: I'm encouraging to have a conversation about what's our relationship
Speaker 1: with companies or what's the company's relationships with us. Facebook
Speaker 1: knows that they have a level of um on accountability
Speaker 1: that's very different than either Google or your Apple or
Speaker 1: other big platforms, because in the case of Google, we
Speaker 1: can scrape, we download their results and analyze them and
Speaker 1: see if there are biases. In the case of the Apple,
Speaker 1: we can take apart the phones and put up YouTube
Speaker 1: video saying Apple phones do or don't work the way
Speaker 1: they claim. But in case of Facebook, researchers and activists
Speaker 1: have been telling Facebook, hey, we have found all these examples.
Speaker 1: We think there's a pattern here. We think there's too
Speaker 1: much human trafficking, we think kids are suffering. And Facebook
Speaker 1: keeps coming back because they know no one can call
Speaker 1: them on it and saying that's just anecdotal, that's not real.
Speaker 1: But when you release the information, realized it wasn't anecdotal.
Speaker 1: It was real because Facebook research, right. You see, Now
Speaker 1: this is interesting because this reminds me of the tobacco companies.
Speaker 1: It reminds us of the you know, the fossil fuel companies.
Speaker 1: They do the research, they find out something really bad
Speaker 1: and then I mean obviously they go like, we're not
Speaker 1: going to put this out there, but but we know
Speaker 1: one of the biggest things that's really gotten people worried
Speaker 1: is how social media affects younger brains. I mean, it
Speaker 1: affects my brain. I'm I don't consider myself younger anymore.
Speaker 1: But young people are like, it seems like the highest
Speaker 1: at the highest risk. Yeah. Facebook internal research says that
Speaker 1: the highest rates of problematic use peak at age fourteen.
Speaker 1: So you're not allowed to be on the platform until
Speaker 1: you're thirteen, So I guess it takes little bit of
Speaker 1: time to form that habit. But the largest fraction of
Speaker 1: any of those age cohorts they sampled, and they've been
Speaker 1: studies that have a hundred thousand people in them, because
Speaker 1: they're not tiny studies. Um, they find that the largest
Speaker 1: fractions say, I can't control my usage and I know
Speaker 1: it's impacting my health, my employment, or my school is
Speaker 1: at age fourteen, and so there's a real thing where
Speaker 1: young people have both you know, they're struggling with issues
Speaker 1: in their life and they don't have the self control
Speaker 1: you and they say this, They say this to researchers,
Speaker 1: They say, I know this is making me feel bad
Speaker 1: and I can't stop. I fear I'll be ostracized if
Speaker 1: I leave UM, and those factors mean it's not easy
Speaker 1: for kids just to walk away. Also not easy for
Speaker 1: people to understand how to how to fix it. You
Speaker 1: have lawmakers now who are trying to figure this thing out.
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley is way ahead of them, Like, way ahead
Speaker 1: of them lawmakers. You see these hearings, they'll be like,
Speaker 1: what if? What if my Facebook is an instant flap?
Speaker 1: They don't understand what's happening. So how do we begin
Speaker 1: creating a world where we're not destroying the companies, but
Speaker 1: we're we're regulating them the way they should be. So
Speaker 1: the main thing I'm advocating for is around transparency because
Speaker 1: one of the problems today is because Facebook is the
Speaker 1: only one that holds the cards, like they can see,
Speaker 1: they can see whether or not they're holding a royal
Speaker 1: flush or not what they claim. UM. We need to
Speaker 1: move to a world where we have more access to data,
Speaker 1: and that can be aggregate data can be privacy sensitive data.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to you know, expose people. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's a false choice of privacy versus transparency. And once
Speaker 1: we have the ability to have conversations. We can stop
Speaker 1: talking about Boogemian social media, I see, and we can
Speaker 1: start having conversations on how do we solve these problems.
Speaker 1: I think what we what we need to do, and
Speaker 1: this is why I'm going to spend two doing. Is
Speaker 1: we need to start organizing people like I want to
Speaker 1: plant a youth directed movement. Or we can begin putting
Speaker 1: pressure on Facebook to release this information, because I don't
Speaker 1: think Facebook is just going to do it automatically out
Speaker 1: of the goodness to its heart. We have to force
Speaker 1: them to and I think there's lots lots of opportunities
Speaker 1: where we can begin putting pressure on them, either socially
Speaker 1: or financially. As a user of social media, as a
Speaker 1: person who speaks to all my friends on social media,
Speaker 1: I have my enemies on social media. I appreciate this
Speaker 1: conversation because I think if we're not careful, we end
Speaker 1: up in a world where we're all fighting really just
Speaker 1: because an algorithm is trying to make us fight. Half
Speaker 1: of those fights. I've noticed, even even with the show,
Speaker 1: if I say a thing on the show, this has
Speaker 1: been like the most interesting thing for me is depending
Speaker 1: on what I say, Facebook different people. One time we
Speaker 1: had it on the show. Yeah, one time we had
Speaker 1: on the show where um, literally I'd laid out both arguments.
Speaker 1: I said, here's here's one way to see it, here's
Speaker 1: another way to see it. But then on Facebook, only
Speaker 1: one way waits to each group. Yeah, and I was
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by that because then people like, why
Speaker 1: didn't you say the other ways? Like, but that's exactly
Speaker 1: what I said. They're like, oh, well I didn't see that.
Speaker 1: And then you realize, you know, so one thing that
Speaker 1: happens is, um, so let's say you take a video clip,
Speaker 1: so we'llso you have out of any given on your shows,
Speaker 1: people going up on YouTube, lots of different little chunks.
Speaker 1: People can receive those onto Facebook. Over and over again
Speaker 1: they do. And each time that enters into Facebook, you know,
Speaker 1: someone posted to a group. Someone doesn't this, It enters
Speaker 1: into the network in a different way, and the algorithm
Speaker 1: begins picking up data on that and it says, oh, interesting,
Speaker 1: like these kinds of people engage these stone and so,
Speaker 1: And because it's entering from so many different points, it
Speaker 1: actually gets a chance to learn what kinds of people
Speaker 1: are communities and engages in most with and so that
Speaker 1: echo chamber is really like the algorithm pulls us towards comagene.
Speaker 1: It's almost like Facebook knows that you react most to
Speaker 1: your neighbor when they play loud music. There's no reaction
Speaker 1: from you when your neighbors doing other things, But when
Speaker 1: your neighbor plays in out in music, that's when you react. Actually, Facebook,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna it's even worse than that. Actually, so
Speaker 1: how's gonna be worse. Let's imagine there's music that you like,
Speaker 1: and the music you don't like, it actually knows you
Speaker 1: really don't like I don't know, reggaeton or something. And
Speaker 1: one thing that it's really sad is one of the
Speaker 1: things that was in the documents is that people talk about,
Speaker 1: especially people from marginalized communities, that they will go and
Speaker 1: and correct people who are spreading um, you know, racist
Speaker 1: homophobic comments. And guess what now, Facebook knows you engage
Speaker 1: with those keywords, so they send you Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: know they were doing that. I don't do in purpose.
Speaker 1: It's it's a it's a side effect. It's a side
Speaker 1: effect of the way the algorithm works. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: algorithm is designed to get as much engagement as possible
Speaker 1: and then engagement. Unfortunately me, you're more likely there's a
Speaker 1: there's a car accident, I'm going to engage, yeah, or
Speaker 1: more of um. If they had an option of showing
Speaker 1: you a stream of different things, they know you GACA
Speaker 1: car accidents, so they show you word man. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is hard because on the one hand, I go like, well,
Speaker 1: I just stopped looking at coll accidence. But the brain
Speaker 1: is the brain. It's the brain. You know, if if
Speaker 1: all the AI is not intelligent, right, we all likes
Speaker 1: to say artificial intelligence, but people who actually study a
Speaker 1: called machine learning because it's not intelligent. It's just a
Speaker 1: health climber. It's optimizing and you know, think of all
Speaker 1: the different pieces of content you get exposed to. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not trying to show you most extreme content. It
Speaker 1: happens to be to a fulfill its goal function and
Speaker 1: mindlessly pushes you towards it. And so this is about
Speaker 1: Facebook making choices to not fix it. That Facebook has
Speaker 1: lots lons of options that don't feeling the machine run wild.
Speaker 1: They're machine real well, money money, that's what it is.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being here. This has really
Speaker 1: been in lifing. Good luck on the reci of your journey.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. If you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about Francis's advocacy work, then you can go to Francis
Speaker 1: Hagen dot com. We're gonna take a quick break, but
Speaker 1: we'll be right back after this. Well that's our show
Speaker 1: for tonight's but before we go, please consider supporting Young
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Speaker 1: support them in their work promoting access to children's books
Speaker 1: that reflect the experiences of black children, then please donate
Speaker 1: at the length below until tomorrow. Stay safe out there,
Speaker 1: get your vaccine, and remember they can hack the bitcoins
Speaker 1: in your digital wallets, but they can't hack the bitcoins
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Speaker 1: Central podcast.