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Speaker 1: Wrecked him. Damn near killed him. That was the punchline

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Speaker 1: to a joke without the rest of the joke, because

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Speaker 1: I think we can all put things together now as adults.

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Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. Yeah, hi, Jamie, this is behind the Bastards.

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Speaker 1: We talk about bad people on this podcast. Um. And

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Speaker 1: that was a little a little bit of levity at

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Speaker 1: the start of it before we get into depressing ship again.

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Speaker 1: Some abstract levity, some abstract levity. Yeah, pieces of levity

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Speaker 1: that one can assemble into comedy. Um. Yeah, very nice. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean comedy. You know, it is just a series

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Speaker 1: of things that you put in the correct order. It's

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Speaker 1: like a deconstruction of comedy, like when people take up

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Speaker 1: part of sandwich and then serve it on a plane

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Speaker 1: in a fancy restaurant. I gotta be on it. Anytime

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Speaker 1: someone says it's a deconstruction of comedy, it's the least

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Speaker 1: funniest ship you'll ever hear in your entire life. Like

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Speaker 1: he's deconstructing the medium, and it's usually just like some

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Speaker 1: some guy. It's yeah, some guy. Yeah, it's never any good,

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Speaker 1: but you know it is good. Jamie, what Facebook's peanut butter?

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Speaker 1: I was like, this can't be a transition to Mark Zuckerberg, No,

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Speaker 1: because nothing about him. Just talked about this delicious lunch

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Speaker 1: he had as I eat, I had a great lunch

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Speaker 1: and I'm eating a peanut butter and you know what,

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Speaker 1: I'm content, Sophie is eating peanut butter. I ate a

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Speaker 1: delicious lunch, love for you, had a couple of chips,

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Speaker 1: and most important, most important, we're all going to get

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Speaker 1: back to my favorite thing to do with my good

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Speaker 1: friend Jamie Loftus, which is talk about the extensive crimes

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Speaker 1: of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh yes, I changed shirts between episodes.

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Speaker 1: Roberts and I have a little Marquis with me. Yeah

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Speaker 1: you do, You've got your your your Marquez shirt. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: my favorite, my favorite Mark quote that you can't you

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Speaker 1: can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way

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Speaker 1: I live my life. Ha ha. It is amazing. And

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Speaker 1: he really, I mean there's been a lot said about him,

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Speaker 1: but the man sticks to his guns. He lives by

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Speaker 1: this credo to this very day. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you

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Speaker 1: know who else sticks to their guns? Jamie whom the

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Speaker 1: death squads of the various dictatorial political candidates who use

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Speaker 1: Facebook to crush opposition and insight race riots. That was

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Speaker 1: a transition. That was a transition. So Jamie, all right,

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna start. It's time to start the episode, and

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Speaker 1: gonna start with a little bit of a little bit,

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Speaker 1: little well bit of an essay here. So once, once

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Speaker 1: upon a decade or so ago, I had the fortune

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Speaker 1: to to visit the ruins of a vast Mayan city

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Speaker 1: in guatemality call Um. And the scale of the architecture

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Speaker 1: there was astonishing. If you ever get the chance to

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Speaker 1: visit one of these cities, you know, in Guatemala or

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Speaker 1: in mexicoever really worth the experience. Um, Just again, the

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Speaker 1: size of everything you see, the the the precision of

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Speaker 1: the stonework. Um, it's just amazing. And one of the

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Speaker 1: things that was most kind of stirring about it was

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Speaker 1: the fact that everything that surrounded it was just hundreds

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Speaker 1: and hundreds of miles of dense, howling jungle. UM. So

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Speaker 1: I spent like an afternoon there and I got to

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Speaker 1: sit on top of one of these giant temple pyramids,

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Speaker 1: drinking a one lead bottle of guy O beer and

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Speaker 1: staring out over the jungle canopy and just kind of

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Speaker 1: marveling at the weight of human ingenuity and dedication necessary

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Speaker 1: to build a place like that sounds metaphorical, and while

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Speaker 1: I was there, Jamie, I thought about what had killed

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Speaker 1: this great city and the empire that built it, Because

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Speaker 1: a couple of years earlier, really not all that long

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Speaker 1: before I visited, theories had started to circulate within the

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Speaker 1: academic community that the Mayans had, in the words of

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Speaker 1: a NASA article in this subject in two thousand nine,

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Speaker 1: killed themselves through a combination of massy forestation in human

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Speaker 1: induced climate change. A year after my visit, the first

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Speaker 1: study on the matter was published in Proceedings of the

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Speaker 1: National Academy of Sciences. I'm gonna call to hear from

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Speaker 1: the Smithsonian magazine. Researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological

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Speaker 1: data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding

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Speaker 1: of the environmental conditions when the area was abandoned around

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Speaker 1: this time. They found severe reductions in rainfall were coupled

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Speaker 1: within a rapid rate of deforestation as the Mayans burned

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Speaker 1: and shopped down more and more forests to clear land

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Speaker 1: for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts of wood

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Speaker 1: to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for

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Speaker 1: their elaborate constructions, Experts estimated would have taken twenty trees

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Speaker 1: to produce a single square meter of city escape. So,

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Speaker 1: in other words, the Mayans grew themselves to death, turning

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Speaker 1: the forests that fed them into deserts, all in the

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Speaker 1: pursuit of expansion. It's a story that brings to mind

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Speaker 1: a quote from the great historian Tacitus writing about Augustus

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Speaker 1: Caesar and men like him solitudinum faciunt pack him appellante.

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Speaker 1: They make a desert and call it peace. That's what

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Speaker 1: he's saying about Augustus Caesar and the Emperor's like him.

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Speaker 1: They make a desert and call it peace. That's That's

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Speaker 1: one of those Sun dial phrases. I think a more

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Speaker 1: accurate summation of the two hundred years of peace that

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Speaker 1: Augustus Caesar created than than what Mark put out. They

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Speaker 1: make a desert and call it peace. Now, I read

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Speaker 1: that quote for the first time as a Latin student

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Speaker 1: in high school, and I saw it referenced in relation

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Speaker 1: to Mark Zuckerberg in a Guardian article covering that New

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Speaker 1: Yorker piece. We quoted from last episode and the title

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Speaker 1: of that New Yorker article was, can Mark Zuckerberg fixed

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Speaker 1: Facebook before it breaks democracy? So democracy a free and

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Speaker 1: open society where numerous viewpoints are tolerated, cultural experimentation is possible,

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Speaker 1: and evolution is encouraged. These are the things that have

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Speaker 1: made Facebook success possible. It could not have come about

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Speaker 1: without them, um, and outside of a culture that embodies

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Speaker 1: those values. And now that Facebook's member count is closing

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Speaker 1: in at three billion, the social network is doing what

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Speaker 1: all empires do. It's turning the fertile soil that birthed

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Speaker 1: it into a desert. And as it was with the Mayans,

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Speaker 1: all of this is being done in the name of growth.

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Speaker 1: Katherine Lois was an early Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg

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Speaker 1: speech writer for a time. In her memoire The Boy Kings,

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Speaker 1: which is what you call it, sigured, I don't know

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Speaker 1: that's a good title, um, she lays out what she

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Speaker 1: saw as the engineering ideology of Facebook. Quote, scaling and

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Speaker 1: growth are everything. Individuals and their experiences are secondary to

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Speaker 1: what is necessary to maximize the system. Mark Zuckerberg and

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Speaker 1: thus Facebook have held a very consistent line since day

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Speaker 1: one of the company operating as an actual business, and

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Speaker 1: that Lion is that Facebook's goal is to connect people,

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Speaker 1: but this was and always has been a lie. The

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Speaker 1: goal is growth, growth at the cost. In two thousand seven,

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Speaker 1: Facebook's growth leveled off at around fifty million users. At

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Speaker 1: the time, this was not unusual for social networks, and

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Speaker 1: it seemed to be something of a built in natural

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Speaker 1: growth limit, Like maybe fifty million is about as much

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Speaker 1: as a social network can get unless you really start

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Speaker 1: jinking the results um and fifty million users. That's a

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Speaker 1: very successful business. You can be a very rich person

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Speaker 1: operating a business. You can call it a day. That's

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Speaker 1: a great thing to accomplish. My Space Tom was thrilled

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Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, my God, blessed Tom. Space Tom is

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Speaker 1: now who hasn't done a goddamn problematic thing traveling the

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Speaker 1: world now taking photographs of of of the world that

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Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg is destroying. I mean, he might be the

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Speaker 1: only person worth hundreds of millions of dollars that I'm

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Speaker 1: fine with not taking the money back, right, Like, let Tom,

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Speaker 1: You're fine, Like go keep doing your things, use the

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Speaker 1: money to be boring. It feels like he is just

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Speaker 1: used his fortune to be boring. What is I remember

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Speaker 1: it took like five months for me to get my

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Speaker 1: my space to lead. So I don't remember anything about

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Speaker 1: my space. That's my favorite thing about my space is

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Speaker 1: I've forgotten everything about it but the name my space.

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Speaker 1: Oh for sure my space was not good. But did

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Speaker 1: I learn about a lot of goth music on it?

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Speaker 1: Now I'm the middle school anchst from not being in

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Speaker 1: somebody's top aid. But oh my god, PC four PC,

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Speaker 1: I did a lot of PC that I'm my friend,

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Speaker 1: you are so pretty PC four PC, And you know what,

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Speaker 1: you know what? No one used my space for Jetta's

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Speaker 1: side that organizing militia's to show up at the side

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Speaker 1: of protests and shoot Black Lives Matter activists was not

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Speaker 1: done with with with my space, and I suspect Tom

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Speaker 1: would have had an issue if it had been. I think, so,

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Speaker 1: I well, I don't well, I I don't know about

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Speaker 1: Tom's but the fact that he's kept his fucking mouth

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Speaker 1: shut since getting rich and going off to do whatever

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Speaker 1: he does makes me suspect that he's a reasonable man.

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Speaker 1: So Facebook hits this growth limit and it and it

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Speaker 1: it kind of levels off a bit um And again,

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Speaker 1: it's a very successful business in two thousand seven, but

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Speaker 1: it's not an empire, and that's what Mark wanted. That's

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Speaker 1: the only thing Mark has ever wanted um in his

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Speaker 1: entire life. And so he ordered the creation of what

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Speaker 1: he called a growth team, dedicated to putting Facebook back

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Speaker 1: on the path to expansion, no matter what it took.

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Speaker 1: So the Growth team quickly came to include the very

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Speaker 1: best minds in the company, who started applying their intellect

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Speaker 1: and ingenuity to this task. One solution they found was

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Speaker 1: to expand Facebook to users who spoke other languages. And

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Speaker 1: this is what began. We talked about last episode, the

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Speaker 1: company's heedless growth into foreign markets. Obviously, at no point

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Speaker 1: did anyone care or even consider what impact Facebook might

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Speaker 1: have on those places. Yeah, I'm gonna quote from The

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Speaker 1: New Yorker again. Alex Schultz, a founding member of the

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Speaker 1: growth team, said that he and his colleagues were fanatical

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Speaker 1: in their pursuit of expansion. You will fight for that inch,

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Speaker 1: Alex said, You will die for that inch. Facebook left

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Speaker 1: no opportunity untapped. In two thousand eleven, the company asked

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Speaker 1: the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules requiring

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Speaker 1: the source of funding for political ads to be disclosed

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Speaker 1: and filings a Facebook lawyer argued that the agency should

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Speaker 1: not stand in the way of innovation. Oh okay, it

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Speaker 1: doesn't seem like an innovation to me, real loose interpretation

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Speaker 1: of the word. You know, I get this to an extent.

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Speaker 1: So the other day I was drunk driving my Forerunner,

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Speaker 1: UM and I was I was, I was shooting at

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Speaker 1: some targets I'd set up in the trees and the

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Speaker 1: people in the neighborhood. I was doing this and said, oh,

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Speaker 1: for the love of God, you're you're please, you're endangering

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Speaker 1: all of our lives. Um, And I said, you're standing

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Speaker 1: in the way of innovation because I was innovating what

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Speaker 1: you can do drunk in a Forerunner with a kalashnikov,

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Speaker 1: and they got in the way of that. I understand

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Speaker 1: that I have to really heat up a pan and

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Speaker 1: put it on someone's face just to innovate the art

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Speaker 1: of what you you innovate their skins. Yeah, and and really,

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Speaker 1: people standing in the way of that innovation. Am I

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Speaker 1: supposed to make progress in hurting people's faces? Yeah? I'm

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Speaker 1: a fan of how Polpod innovated the capital city of

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Speaker 1: Cambodia by forcing everyone out of it and then killing

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Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of just it's just it's innovative. The

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Speaker 1: way all of this is just horrific and like, I

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Speaker 1: don't know, like I'm talking about something else, but it's

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Speaker 1: like the language of Silicon Valley applied to the two

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Speaker 1: genocidal situations is just so it makes my fucking I mean,

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Speaker 1: I'm just peeled all my skin off. You have to

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Speaker 1: you have to agree that Hitler was an innovator. He

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Speaker 1: innovated so many things. He really did change. He changed

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Speaker 1: the game. Yeah, he absolutely changed the narrative from there

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Speaker 1: not being a war in Europe to there being a

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Speaker 1: war in Europe. That's called disrupting, Honey. He didn't disrupt it.

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Speaker 1: He disrupted the ship out of the Polish government. Oh

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Speaker 1: my god, doing this dinner wrong. So Sandy Parakilis, who

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Speaker 1: joined Facebook in two thousand and eleven as an operations manager,

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Speaker 1: paraphrase the message of the orientation session he received as

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Speaker 1: we believe in the religion of growth. Um, the religion

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Speaker 1: of growth is what he was told when he joined

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Speaker 1: the company. That's what it was called him not only horrifying,

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Speaker 1: but like, what could you sound like a more of

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Speaker 1: a sniveling loser? Okay, he said quote the growth team

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Speaker 1: was the Cure was the coolest. Other teams would even

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Speaker 1: try to call subgroups within their teams the growth X

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Speaker 1: or the Growth Y to try and get people excited. Um.

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Speaker 1: And in the end, Facebook's finest minds decided that the

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Speaker 1: best way they could I know, I know, yeah, I'm excited.

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Speaker 1: I'm a horny, I'm ready to go. I mean with

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Speaker 1: with that kind of narrative. I love to hear it.

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Speaker 1: I love you do love to hear it. So in

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Speaker 1: the end, Facebook's finest minds decided the best way they

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Speaker 1: could further the great god of growth was too for

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Speaker 1: Facebook to become a platform for outside developers. Um that

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Speaker 1: this was the way to really really get things going again.

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Speaker 1: And you will remember the start of this period when

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Speaker 1: Facebook made this change. This is when like what had

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Speaker 1: once been a pretty straightforward service for keeping up with

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Speaker 1: your friends from college was suddenly flooded with games like

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Speaker 1: Farmville and a bunch of like personality tests and ship

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Speaker 1: that period of time, the mom's fucking drone struck Facebook

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Speaker 1: by coming down with Farmville, sending you five trillion invitations,

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Speaker 1: leaving your like high school choir concert to go harvest strawberries. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I'm making a bunch of fucking money for Facebook. Whatever

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Speaker 1: rance these apps took. Their main purpose was the same,

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Speaker 1: which was to hoover up all of your personal data

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Speaker 1: and sell it for profit. Yeah. I've given her a

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Speaker 1: social security number to the Farmville and that's just a fact. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And the only person you should give your social security

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Speaker 1: number two is me. I do encourage all all of

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Speaker 1: our listeners to find my email, um and just just

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Speaker 1: email me your social uh yeah, just to just do

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Speaker 1: your tips line. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's like that

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Speaker 1: you like that thing from that that documentary about Keith

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Speaker 1: Ranieri who also did episodes on the vow. It's your

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Speaker 1: collaterals and me your social security number, so I'll know

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Speaker 1: that you really care. Um. Yeah. So Facebook's employees kind

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Speaker 1: of realized very quickly after this change was made and

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Speaker 1: these developers start flooding the service with all of their

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Speaker 1: ship um that the company's new partners were engaged in

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Speaker 1: some really shady behavior. One worker who was put in

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Speaker 1: charge of a team order to make sure developers weren't

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Speaker 1: using user data immediately found out that they were. And

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the new Yorker. Here, some

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Speaker 1: games were siphoning off users messages and photographs. In one case,

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Speaker 1: he said, a developer was harvesting user information, including that

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Speaker 1: of children, to create unauthorized profiles on its own website.

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Speaker 1: Facebook had given away data before I had a system

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Speaker 1: to check for abuse. Peraculis suggested that there be an

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Speaker 1: audit to uncover the scale of the problem, but according

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Speaker 1: to Paraculus, an executive rejected that idea, telling him, do

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Speaker 1: you really want to see what you'll find? No, which

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Speaker 1: look I can identify with that too. I recently had

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Speaker 1: an issue where I left a bag of potatoes and

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Speaker 1: the top counter of my of my kitchen for I

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Speaker 1: don't know, somewhere between four and seven months, and when

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Speaker 1: I took them I didn't want to. I knew something

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Speaker 1: was wrong. I knew something was wrong up there because

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Speaker 1: of the flies and the strange smell, but I didn't

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Speaker 1: want to look into it because I didn't want to

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Speaker 1: see the extent of the problem. And when I finally did,

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Speaker 1: I regretted learning what an issue I had made for

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Speaker 1: myself and my home. You are really since the last

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Speaker 1: BO you've become very prone to a metaphor. I am

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Speaker 1: I am a living metaphor. You you are living out

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Speaker 1: an innovative. I innovated those potatoes. You distruct those potatoes.

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Speaker 1: Works with a family magic. It's okay. We don't need

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Speaker 1: to We don't need to talk about what a problem

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Speaker 1: my life has become. Um Parakeelis told me the New

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Speaker 1: Yorker reporter quote, it was very difficult to get the

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Speaker 1: kind of resources that you needed to do a good

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Speaker 1: job of ensuring real compliance. Meanwhile, you looked at the

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Speaker 1: growth team and they had engineers coming out of their ears.

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Speaker 1: All the smartest minds are focused on doing whatever they

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Speaker 1: can do to get those growth numbers up. Now, Jamie

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Speaker 1: Jamie Loft, I happened to read this quote well. I

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Speaker 1: was struggling to work in the midst of unprecedented wildfires

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Speaker 1: that devastated a huge amount of the state of Oregon

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Speaker 1: um and made our air quality the worst in the

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Speaker 1: world for a while. On the very day I read

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Speaker 1: that article, four of my friends and journalistic colleagues were

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Speaker 1: held and threatened at gunpoint by militiamen who had taken

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Speaker 1: to the streets of a town very near Portland in

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Speaker 1: the middle of an evacuation. Because viral Facebook memes convinced

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Speaker 1: them that Antipho was starting the fires. Around the same

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Speaker 1: time that this was happening, that my buddies were getting

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Speaker 1: held at gunpoint because they were not white people. Uh,

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Speaker 1: and a militia thought that was suspicious. Around that same time,

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Speaker 1: a tweet went viral from a Portland resident and a

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Speaker 1: former Facebook employee named bo Wrin. She posted a picture

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Speaker 1: of the city blotted out by thick, acrid clouds of

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Speaker 1: smoke and wrote, my dad sent me this view from

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Speaker 1: my childhood room in Portland. It hit me that we

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Speaker 1: have been wasting our collective intelligence in tech, optimizing for

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Speaker 1: profits and ad clicks. Huhmm, glad you got on the

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Speaker 1: on that page. Bow well glad. We I mean sometimes

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Speaker 1: it just takes something to put it all in perspective,

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Speaker 1: wouldn't you say, like your home burning down? Yeah? Sometimes,

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Speaker 1: and the militias minutes from your door. Yes, unfu believable

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Speaker 1: militias that organized on Facebook. Yeah, I mean the story

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Speaker 1: went pretty viral about it. They weren't harmed, um yes,

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Speaker 1: um yeah. The two people I knew best who were

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Speaker 1: there were Sergio almost ingined almost In Justin Yao, who

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Speaker 1: are both wonderful reporters, But yeah, it was. It was

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Speaker 1: not lost on me that I think of the four

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Speaker 1: people who were there, three of them were not white people. Um,

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Speaker 1: and that some of the white reporters had a much

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Speaker 1: easier time. Interesting things about militias you learn? Anyway, Do

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Speaker 1: you think it makes you think? Now? I thought that

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Speaker 1: quote was interesting? Um. Anyway, opening interesting, disruptive, disruptive, like

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Speaker 1: the fires, like malicious. The thing has made me think

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Speaker 1: when I could think, Yeah, I threw up in my

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Speaker 1: d n mask walking down the street, awesome. Yeah, I've

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Speaker 1: been jogging and doing pull ups in a gas mask. Um,

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Speaker 1: just half naked in a gas mask in my front

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Speaker 1: lawn like a normal person. You're the only person I

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Speaker 1: know who would have seen this as a as a

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Speaker 1: possible outcome. And for that, Um, for that, I thank

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Speaker 1: you and I curse you. Yeah. So anyway, opening Facebook

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Speaker 1: up to developers made a shipload of money and membership grew,

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Speaker 1: and from Mark's point of view, everything was going great.

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Speaker 1: But Catherine Katherine Loss, his speech writer, saw a lot

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Speaker 1: of the same problems Parakeelis had seen, and in her

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Speaker 1: memoir she writes the idea of providing developers with a

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Speaker 1: massive platform for application promotion didn't exactly accord I thought

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Speaker 1: with the site state admission of connecting people to me.

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Speaker 1: Connection with another a person required intention. They have to

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Speaker 1: personally signal that they want to talk to me, and

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Speaker 1: vice versa. Platform developers, though, went it human connection from

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Speaker 1: a more automated angle. They churned out applications that promised

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Speaker 1: to tell you who had a crush on you if

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Speaker 1: you would just send an invitation to the application to

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Speaker 1: all of your friends. Idea was that after the application

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Speaker 1: had a list of your contacts, it would begin the

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Speaker 1: automated work of inquiring about people's interests in matching people

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Speaker 1: who were interested in each other. Soon, developers didn't even

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Speaker 1: ask you if you wanted to send invitations to your friends.

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Speaker 1: Simply adding the application would automatically notify all of your

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Speaker 1: Facebook friends that you had added it and invite them

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Speaker 1: to add it to using each user as a vessel

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Speaker 1: through which invitations would flow viral e without the user's consent.

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Speaker 1: In this way, users needs for friendship and connection became

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Speaker 1: a powerful engine of spam, as it already was with

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Speaker 1: email and on the Internet long before Facebook. The same

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Speaker 1: will tell you you have a crush on who has

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Speaker 1: a crush on you if you just send this email

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Speaker 1: to your address book. Ploys were familiar to me from Hopkins,

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Speaker 1: when spammers would blank at the entire email server with

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Speaker 1: emails in a matter of hours, spread violarly by students

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Speaker 1: scullably entering the names of their crushes and their crushes

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Speaker 1: email addresses. So this was the face. This was the

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Speaker 1: start of Facebook making choices for its users, choices that

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Speaker 1: were based on what would be best for the social network,

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Speaker 1: which was keeping people on the site for as long

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Speaker 1: as possible. The growth teams saw that proactively connecting people

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Speaker 1: to each other worked out really well for Facebook's bottom line,

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Speaker 1: even though sometimes, for example, people who had been horribly

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Speaker 1: abused and raped by their spouses were reconnected to those

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Speaker 1: spouses who they were hiding from and had their personal

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Speaker 1: data exposed to them, a thing that happened repeatedly. Um

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Speaker 1: and still happens repeatedly, you know. But that's a small

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Speaker 1: price to pay for growth. For that inch, you gotta

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Speaker 1: fight for that And sometimes fighting for that inch means

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Speaker 1: connecting abused women to the men who horribly injured them.

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Speaker 1: That's like Mark talking to Priscilla when they're trying to

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Speaker 1: conceive a child. He's just like, you gotta fight for

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Speaker 1: my inch, honey, you gotta fight for it. Oh. Mark

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Speaker 1: Zuckerberg is incapable of talking during sex um. He lets

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Speaker 1: out a high pitched hum that is only audible to crickets.

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Speaker 1: He doesn't. Yeah, he's sort of got a Kendall situation

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Speaker 1: going on, whereas he just has a sex lump that

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Speaker 1: gets really hot. Yeah. Yeah. She has to actually withdraw

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Speaker 1: the semen from inside his sax using a needle. I think,

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Speaker 1: actually put in a little a little hold on, hold on,

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Speaker 1: hold on, okay, on the subject holding my vomit but

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Speaker 1: in a syringe and then suck and then and then

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Speaker 1: she just has it. And then she just has it.

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Speaker 1: And if you want to have the emotional equivalent of

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Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg, seem no, that's not that's not fair to

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Speaker 1: the products or services. It's not anyway. Here they are vomit.

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Speaker 1: We're back, Okay. So in two thousand ten, Facebook launched

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Speaker 1: Facebook Groups, which would allow just about anyone to create

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Speaker 1: a private wald Off community to discuss just about anything,

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Speaker 1: including fascism, white genocide, or the need to gather a

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Speaker 1: militia together and use it to kill their political enemies.

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Speaker 1: If you're a regular listener of my show, you know

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Speaker 1: the next part of this story. From about two thousand

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Speaker 1: ten to two thousand and sixteen, the United States saw

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Speaker 1: an astonishing leap in the number of active hate groups.

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Speaker 1: For some perspective, just from two thousand fifteen to two

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Speaker 1: thou twenty, the SPLC estimates there were at increase in

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Speaker 1: the number of hate groups nationwide. Um All of this

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Speaker 1: growth was mostly spurred on by social media, and Facebook

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Speaker 1: was one of the main culprits. And they knew they

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Speaker 1: were at two. They didn't admit it openly, but internally

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Speaker 1: they were talking about it from pretty early on. And

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a report in the All

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Speaker 1: Street Journal. A two thousand sixteen presentation that names is

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Speaker 1: author of Facebook. Researcher and sociologist monocha Ly found extremist

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Speaker 1: content thriving and more than one third of large German

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Speaker 1: political groups on the platform swamped with racist, conspiracy minded,

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Speaker 1: and pro Russian content. The groups were disproportionately influenced by

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Speaker 1: a subset of hyperactive users. The presentation notes most of

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Speaker 1: them were private or secret. The high number of extremist

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Speaker 1: groups was concerning the presentation says worse was Facebook's realization

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Speaker 1: that it's algorithms were responsible for their growth. The two

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Speaker 1: thousand sixteen presentation says that sixty of all extremist group

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Speaker 1: joins are due to our recommendation tools. Yeah, and that

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Speaker 1: most of the activity came from the platforms groups you

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Speaker 1: should join and discover algorithms from the presentation, are recommendation

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Speaker 1: systems grow the problem? Oh okay, Well, I mean as

429
00:24:59,760 --> 00:25:01,880
Speaker 1: long the word grows in the sentence, I think that

430
00:25:01,880 --> 00:25:04,600
Speaker 1: that's good enough. Growth is in there, You're good is

431
00:25:04,640 --> 00:25:07,359
Speaker 1: in there? So really where we're growing and and what

432
00:25:07,440 --> 00:25:10,560
Speaker 1: the consequences are? Not really worried about it. Yeah, It's

433
00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:13,119
Speaker 1: just like when I'm in my Forerunner drunk is shipped

434
00:25:13,160 --> 00:25:15,560
Speaker 1: on mescal and firing a collash to CoV All that

435
00:25:15,720 --> 00:25:19,360
Speaker 1: matters is forward movement. It doesn't matter if that forward

436
00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:23,159
Speaker 1: movement is driving through the trailer that a family lives in.

437
00:25:23,320 --> 00:25:26,719
Speaker 1: What matters is that I'm moving forward and shooting and drunk.

438
00:25:27,200 --> 00:25:33,720
Speaker 1: You're right, thank you? Wow a judgmental statement. I'm innovating

439
00:25:33,960 --> 00:25:37,679
Speaker 1: homeownership there. I mean, this is another example of just

440
00:25:37,800 --> 00:25:41,840
Speaker 1: you know, Facebook innovating people's interests, Like hey, do you

441
00:25:42,400 --> 00:25:44,399
Speaker 1: do you enjoy this? I'm trying to think of the

442
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:47,119
Speaker 1: old Facebook groups that you used to be able to join,

443
00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:50,040
Speaker 1: like ten years ago, where it would be like science

444
00:25:50,160 --> 00:25:55,480
Speaker 1: is my boyfriend, and it's like enjoy the Smithsonian Institute.

445
00:25:55,640 --> 00:26:00,399
Speaker 1: Like groups would be like Class of two thousand and twell,

446
00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:03,439
Speaker 1: stuff like that. With like early I mean, it's like,

447
00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:06,639
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously very much in the same line of

448
00:26:06,880 --> 00:26:09,639
Speaker 1: algorithmic thinking as YouTube, where it's like, oh, did you

449
00:26:09,760 --> 00:26:14,160
Speaker 1: enjoy this, like collage of Gerard Butler images? How about

450
00:26:14,280 --> 00:26:18,000
Speaker 1: a man sitting at his four runner whispering conspiracy theories

451
00:26:18,040 --> 00:26:22,520
Speaker 1: for three hours on end? Yeah, that's just growth. I

452
00:26:22,560 --> 00:26:25,240
Speaker 1: love growth. I love growth almost as much as I

453
00:26:25,280 --> 00:26:28,119
Speaker 1: love everything that I do. With the Toyota four runner

454
00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:33,000
Speaker 1: um hammered in a trailer park. Yeah, that's that's the

455
00:26:33,040 --> 00:26:38,840
Speaker 1: real is innovating the trailer parks near my house with

456
00:26:38,880 --> 00:26:42,080
Speaker 1: a Toyota and a rifle, just changing the narrative around it,

457
00:26:42,240 --> 00:26:46,840
Speaker 1: changing the narrative around it, um to screaming mainly. So yeah,

458
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:52,240
Speaker 1: throughout right, So throughout two thousand sixteen, uh, and particularly

459
00:26:52,280 --> 00:26:54,000
Speaker 1: in the wake of the election, a lot of Facebook

460
00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:56,920
Speaker 1: employees began to increasingly express their concerns that the social

461
00:26:56,920 --> 00:26:59,480
Speaker 1: network they were pouring their lives into might be tearing

462
00:26:59,480 --> 00:27:01,640
Speaker 1: the world a right, because again, most of these are

463
00:27:01,720 --> 00:27:04,240
Speaker 1: very nice and intelligent people who don't want to live

464
00:27:04,320 --> 00:27:08,560
Speaker 1: in a planet dominated by nightmarish dictatorships and a complete

465
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:12,320
Speaker 1: collapse in the understanding of truth that allows, for example,

466
00:27:12,400 --> 00:27:16,119
Speaker 1: viral pandemics to spread long after where they should have spread,

467
00:27:16,160 --> 00:27:19,160
Speaker 1: because people don't have any sort of common conception about

468
00:27:19,160 --> 00:27:22,320
Speaker 1: basic reality UM as a result of the influence of

469
00:27:22,520 --> 00:27:26,240
Speaker 1: social media. They don't like that, they like the people

470
00:27:26,240 --> 00:27:28,919
Speaker 1: who work at Facebook kind of bummed out about contributing

471
00:27:28,960 --> 00:27:32,000
Speaker 1: to that UM. One observer at the time reported to

472
00:27:32,040 --> 00:27:34,600
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal, there was this soul searching period

473
00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:37,600
Speaker 1: after these thousand sixteen that seemed to me, this period

474
00:27:37,600 --> 00:27:40,640
Speaker 1: of really sincere, oh man, what if we really did

475
00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:46,520
Speaker 1: mess up the world? And two thousands sixteen? Yeah, yeah,

476
00:27:46,560 --> 00:27:49,399
Speaker 1: I love that We're going from in the forties, like

477
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:52,800
Speaker 1: like the scientist who does this, who does the same thing,

478
00:27:52,920 --> 00:27:56,240
Speaker 1: going now, I am become death, the destroyer of world

479
00:27:56,720 --> 00:27:59,520
Speaker 1: an appropriate comment for the thing that he had done,

480
00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:04,680
Speaker 1: and then something honestly equivalent in its destructive potential UM.

481
00:28:04,760 --> 00:28:08,080
Speaker 1: But the response this time because everything is tacky. Now, oh,

482
00:28:08,160 --> 00:28:10,080
Speaker 1: what if we messed up the world, we might have

483
00:28:10,119 --> 00:28:17,520
Speaker 1: sucked this up? God, like starting to think we've severely

484
00:28:17,680 --> 00:28:23,560
Speaker 1: fucked up the planet never mind, Like, yeah, this is

485
00:28:23,600 --> 00:28:26,159
Speaker 1: why Aaron Sorkin is still working is because people are

486
00:28:26,160 --> 00:28:30,159
Speaker 1: saying shitty stuff in shitty ways. Yeah, I don't you

487
00:28:30,160 --> 00:28:33,080
Speaker 1: should cut that out history. No, No, let's we connect.

488
00:28:33,119 --> 00:28:36,680
Speaker 1: We should never cut out criticizing histories. Real villain Aaron Sorkin,

489
00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:46,640
Speaker 1: who I call the poll pot of cable television. Yeah.

490
00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:49,680
Speaker 1: This soul searching did not extend to Mark Zuckerberg, who

491
00:28:49,760 --> 00:28:52,360
Speaker 1: after the election gave the order to pour even more

492
00:28:52,400 --> 00:28:56,200
Speaker 1: resources into Facebook groups. Marking that feature out is emblematic

493
00:28:56,280 --> 00:28:58,360
Speaker 1: of what he saw is the future of his sight.

494
00:28:58,800 --> 00:29:01,600
Speaker 1: He wrote a six thousand and word manifesto in two

495
00:29:01,600 --> 00:29:05,840
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen which admitted to playing some role in the

496
00:29:05,920 --> 00:29:09,320
Speaker 1: disinformation in bigotry flooding the body politics. So he's like, yeah,

497
00:29:09,400 --> 00:29:11,920
Speaker 1: we did, we had we had something to do with it. Um.

498
00:29:12,000 --> 00:29:14,440
Speaker 1: He also claimed that Facebook was going to start fighting

499
00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:19,400
Speaker 1: against this by fostering safe in meaningful communities. From CNBC quote,

500
00:29:19,880 --> 00:29:22,200
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg noted that more than a hundred million users were

501
00:29:22,200 --> 00:29:24,800
Speaker 1: members of very meaningful Facebook groups, but he said that

502
00:29:24,840 --> 00:29:27,440
Speaker 1: most people don't seek out groups on their own. There

503
00:29:27,520 --> 00:29:29,600
Speaker 1: is a real opportunity to connect more of us with

504
00:29:29,640 --> 00:29:32,920
Speaker 1: groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives.

505
00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:35,520
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg wrote at the time, if we can improve our

506
00:29:35,520 --> 00:29:38,760
Speaker 1: suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities,

507
00:29:38,920 --> 00:29:42,880
Speaker 1: that can strengthen our social fabric. Since then, fascinating use

508
00:29:42,920 --> 00:29:49,240
Speaker 1: of the word meaningful, meaningful, meaningful, meaningful. What happened next

509
00:29:49,360 --> 00:29:54,520
Speaker 1: was terrible and predictable and meaningful, Jamie, very meaningful. A

510
00:29:54,560 --> 00:29:57,320
Speaker 1: flood of new users got introduced and even pushed into

511
00:29:57,360 --> 00:30:01,120
Speaker 1: extremist groups on Facebook that changes are consisted upon have

512
00:30:01,200 --> 00:30:03,200
Speaker 1: been critical to the growth of q and on, which

513
00:30:03,240 --> 00:30:05,280
Speaker 1: was able to break containment from the weird parts of

514
00:30:05,280 --> 00:30:07,400
Speaker 1: the Internet and start infecting the minds of our aunts

515
00:30:07,400 --> 00:30:10,880
Speaker 1: and uncles, thanks mostly to Facebook, which took no action

516
00:30:10,920 --> 00:30:14,840
Speaker 1: against it until like a month or two ago. Within

517
00:30:14,920 --> 00:30:18,160
Speaker 1: two years, Facebook hosted thousands of q and on pages

518
00:30:18,160 --> 00:30:21,840
Speaker 1: with tens of millions of collective members. I'm gonna quote

519
00:30:21,880 --> 00:30:25,040
Speaker 1: now from an NBC News investigation on the matter. Facebook

520
00:30:25,040 --> 00:30:26,920
Speaker 1: has been key to q and On's growth, in large

521
00:30:26,920 --> 00:30:29,320
Speaker 1: part due to the platform's groups feature, which is also

522
00:30:29,360 --> 00:30:32,000
Speaker 1: seen a significant uptick in use since the social network

523
00:30:32,040 --> 00:30:35,560
Speaker 1: began emphasizing it in two thousands seventeen. There are tens

524
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:38,520
Speaker 1: of millions of active groups, a Facebook spokesperson told NBC

525
00:30:38,560 --> 00:30:41,200
Speaker 1: News in two thousand nineteen, a number that has probably

526
00:30:41,240 --> 00:30:44,000
Speaker 1: grown since the company began serving up group group posts

527
00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:46,880
Speaker 1: in the user's main feeds. Well. Most groups are dedicated

528
00:30:46,920 --> 00:30:50,280
Speaker 1: to innocuous content. Extremists from q and on conspiracy theorists

529
00:30:50,280 --> 00:30:53,360
Speaker 1: to anti vaccination advocates have also used the group's feature

530
00:30:53,360 --> 00:30:56,880
Speaker 1: to grow their audiences and spread misinformation. Facebook aided that

531
00:30:56,920 --> 00:30:59,680
Speaker 1: growth with it with its recommendations feature, powered by a

532
00:30:59,720 --> 00:31:02,880
Speaker 1: c great algorithm that suggests groups to users seemingly based

533
00:31:02,920 --> 00:31:08,360
Speaker 1: on interest and existing group membership and growth and growth. Yeah,

534
00:31:08,480 --> 00:31:11,400
Speaker 1: it's funny. There's one of the things I like about

535
00:31:11,440 --> 00:31:14,800
Speaker 1: this NBC report, which is partly authored by Brandy's at Rosne,

536
00:31:14,840 --> 00:31:16,680
Speaker 1: who has done a lot of great work on this subject,

537
00:31:17,120 --> 00:31:21,160
Speaker 1: um is uh, they kind of talk about how profitable

538
00:31:21,800 --> 00:31:26,160
Speaker 1: spreading dangerous fascist content is for Facebook. Quote. A small

539
00:31:26,160 --> 00:31:28,960
Speaker 1: team working across several of Facebook's departments found a hundred

540
00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:32,520
Speaker 1: and eighty five ads that the company had accepted praising, supporting,

541
00:31:32,600 --> 00:31:35,440
Speaker 1: or representing q and on. According to an internal post

542
00:31:35,520 --> 00:31:39,160
Speaker 1: shared among more than four employees, the ads generated about

543
00:31:39,200 --> 00:31:42,160
Speaker 1: twelve dollars for Facebook and four million impressions in the

544
00:31:42,240 --> 00:31:44,680
Speaker 1: last thirty days. Well you have to imagine, like they

545
00:31:44,720 --> 00:31:48,880
Speaker 1: have to if if they're doing the math of what

546
00:31:48,960 --> 00:31:51,080
Speaker 1: I mean, it has to be financially profitable because it

547
00:31:51,080 --> 00:31:53,480
Speaker 1: has to offset the cost of the pr hits that

548
00:31:53,520 --> 00:31:55,880
Speaker 1: they know that they're going to take for ship. So

549
00:31:55,920 --> 00:31:59,600
Speaker 1: there and again, it's just as signing yes, a signing

550
00:31:59,640 --> 00:32:04,400
Speaker 1: of is to uh lives and and and brains. Yeah,

551
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:08,280
Speaker 1: which is a good thing to do. Seems reasonable, Yeah,

552
00:32:08,280 --> 00:32:12,520
Speaker 1: it seems fair to me. Yeah. Um so yeah. Outside Facebook,

553
00:32:12,600 --> 00:32:15,280
Speaker 1: the only people who really noticed what was happening initially

554
00:32:15,640 --> 00:32:19,480
Speaker 1: were a handful of researchers that studied extremist groups. Um

555
00:32:19,520 --> 00:32:21,120
Speaker 1: and I wasn't really one of them until like two

556
00:32:21,160 --> 00:32:25,400
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen that I realized Facebook groups specifically were a problem.

557
00:32:25,400 --> 00:32:28,080
Speaker 1: Was obviously that Facebook was the issue, but the um

558
00:32:28,600 --> 00:32:32,239
Speaker 1: I wasn't until Facebook group kept threatening to kill me

559
00:32:32,320 --> 00:32:35,240
Speaker 1: for two years. Yeah that did happen to you? Huh?

560
00:32:35,320 --> 00:32:37,520
Speaker 1: That did happen to me? Yeah? If you have a

561
00:32:37,640 --> 00:32:40,560
Speaker 1: listener her my year in menso podcast What are you

562
00:32:40,680 --> 00:32:45,400
Speaker 1: doing there? Thankfully, the people threatening to kill you were

563
00:32:45,440 --> 00:32:48,920
Speaker 1: just members of MENSA who I trust are not competent

564
00:32:49,040 --> 00:32:52,920
Speaker 1: enough to pull off an assassination. I mean, don't challenge them,

565
00:32:52,960 --> 00:32:56,560
Speaker 1: but let's hope. So no, this I'm throwing down the

566
00:32:56,600 --> 00:33:00,800
Speaker 1: Gautensd're like, no, no, no, I don't think they could

567
00:33:00,880 --> 00:33:06,880
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, sorry, so, um yeah. I didn't really

568
00:33:06,880 --> 00:33:09,840
Speaker 1: grasp the scale of the problem with Facebook groups and

569
00:33:09,840 --> 00:33:12,640
Speaker 1: specific until two thousand nineteen when I started really looking

570
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:15,360
Speaker 1: into the Boogaloo movement UM, and it was kind of

571
00:33:15,400 --> 00:33:18,600
Speaker 1: camouflaged because there was just so much fascist content everywhere

572
00:33:18,640 --> 00:33:22,560
Speaker 1: on Facebook. UM that the fact that groups in specific

573
00:33:22,640 --> 00:33:25,440
Speaker 1: we're driving a lot of the expansion of fascism in

574
00:33:25,440 --> 00:33:27,800
Speaker 1: this country kind of got lost in the noise. But

575
00:33:27,840 --> 00:33:30,600
Speaker 1: there were other researchers who started to realize this early on,

576
00:33:30,680 --> 00:33:34,360
Speaker 1: and workers inside Facebook realized what was happening right away,

577
00:33:34,640 --> 00:33:37,360
Speaker 1: and two eighteen they held a meeting for Mark and

578
00:33:37,440 --> 00:33:41,360
Speaker 1: other senior leadership members to reveal their troubling findings. From

579
00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:44,840
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal quote, a Facebook team had a

580
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:48,760
Speaker 1: blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing

581
00:33:48,800 --> 00:33:54,000
Speaker 1: people together, they were driving people apart. Quote. Our algorithms

582
00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:57,080
Speaker 1: exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Read a slide

583
00:33:57,080 --> 00:34:00,280
Speaker 1: from a two thousand eighteen presentation. If left on checked,

584
00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:03,080
Speaker 1: it warned Facebook would feed users more and more divisive

585
00:34:03,120 --> 00:34:05,800
Speaker 1: content and an effort to gain user attention and increase

586
00:34:05,880 --> 00:34:11,080
Speaker 1: time on platform. So that presentation went to the heart

587
00:34:11,080 --> 00:34:13,719
Speaker 1: of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding, does

588
00:34:13,760 --> 00:34:17,680
Speaker 1: its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it

589
00:34:17,800 --> 00:34:24,359
Speaker 1: found in some cases was yes. In some case, I mean,

590
00:34:25,560 --> 00:34:31,279
Speaker 1: I guess that's technically accurate. In some cases yeah. So Facebook,

591
00:34:31,280 --> 00:34:34,160
Speaker 1: in response to this meeting, starts like a massive internal

592
00:34:34,200 --> 00:34:36,560
Speaker 1: effort to try to figure out like how its platform

593
00:34:36,680 --> 00:34:40,640
Speaker 1: might be harming people, and Mark Zuckerberg in public and

594
00:34:40,719 --> 00:34:43,440
Speaker 1: private around this time, started talking about his concern that

595
00:34:43,520 --> 00:34:49,240
Speaker 1: sensationalism and polarization we're being enabled by Facebook. Into Mark's credit,

596
00:34:49,360 --> 00:34:52,960
Speaker 1: he made his employees do something about that phrase, yeah

597
00:34:53,040 --> 00:34:55,480
Speaker 1: a little bit to his credit. It's okay, we'll take

598
00:34:55,480 --> 00:35:00,000
Speaker 1: away the credit in just a second. Um so quote.

599
00:35:00,160 --> 00:35:03,120
Speaker 1: Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to

600
00:35:03,120 --> 00:35:06,200
Speaker 1: rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the projects

601
00:35:06,440 --> 00:35:10,120
Speaker 1: forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized user engagement, a

602
00:35:10,160 --> 00:35:13,200
Speaker 1: metric involving time spent like shares and comments that for

603
00:35:13,320 --> 00:35:16,120
Speaker 1: years had been the loadstar of its system, championed by

604
00:35:16,160 --> 00:35:18,840
Speaker 1: Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time, in

605
00:35:18,880 --> 00:35:21,520
Speaker 1: a top debt beauty to Mr Zuckerberg. The work was

606
00:35:21,560 --> 00:35:23,920
Speaker 1: carried out over much of two thousands, seventeen and eighteen

607
00:35:23,960 --> 00:35:27,440
Speaker 1: by engineers and researchers assigned to a cross jurisdictional task

608
00:35:27,480 --> 00:35:31,440
Speaker 1: force dubbed common Ground, and employees and a newly created

609
00:35:31,520 --> 00:35:36,520
Speaker 1: newly created integrity teams embedded around the company. Integrity teams

610
00:35:36,680 --> 00:35:39,319
Speaker 1: sounds good to me. It sounds reliable. It sounds like

611
00:35:39,360 --> 00:35:45,760
Speaker 1: they made sure that integrity was accomplished via teamwork. Yeah. Yeah,

612
00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:48,800
Speaker 1: So the common Ground team proposed a number of solutions,

613
00:35:48,840 --> 00:35:51,040
Speaker 1: and to my ears, some of them were actually pretty good.

614
00:35:51,360 --> 00:35:55,800
Speaker 1: One proposal was basically to um uh like to to

615
00:35:56,440 --> 00:36:01,560
Speaker 1: kind of try to take conversations that were derailing UH groups,

616
00:36:01,600 --> 00:36:05,000
Speaker 1: like conversations over hot button political issues, and exercise them

617
00:36:05,040 --> 00:36:07,239
Speaker 1: from those groups. So basically, if if a couple of

618
00:36:07,239 --> 00:36:10,520
Speaker 1: members of a Facebook group started fighting, about vaccinations, and

619
00:36:10,600 --> 00:36:13,880
Speaker 1: like a group based around parenting, the moderators would be

620
00:36:13,920 --> 00:36:16,480
Speaker 1: able to make a temporary subgroup for the argument to

621
00:36:16,560 --> 00:36:20,640
Speaker 1: exist in so that other people, like the Zoom breakout room. Yeah,

622
00:36:20,680 --> 00:36:22,640
Speaker 1: so that other people wouldn't be expect which I don't

623
00:36:22,640 --> 00:36:24,360
Speaker 1: know if that's a great idea, but it was something.

624
00:36:24,960 --> 00:36:27,000
Speaker 1: Another idea that I do think was better was to

625
00:36:27,040 --> 00:36:31,200
Speaker 1: tweak recommendation algorithms um to give people a wider range

626
00:36:31,200 --> 00:36:36,080
Speaker 1: of Facebook group suggestions. Um. Yeah. But it was kind

627
00:36:36,080 --> 00:36:40,080
Speaker 1: of determined that doing these things uh would probably help

628
00:36:40,080 --> 00:36:42,600
Speaker 1: with polarization, but would come at the cost of lower

629
00:36:42,719 --> 00:36:45,960
Speaker 1: user engagement and less time spent on site, which the

630
00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:48,360
Speaker 1: common Ground team warned about in a two thou eighteen

631
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:51,360
Speaker 1: document that described some of their own proposals as anti

632
00:36:51,440 --> 00:36:57,680
Speaker 1: growth and requiring Facebook to take a moral stance. Guess

633
00:36:57,719 --> 00:37:02,560
Speaker 1: how that all went. Yeah, marks Uckerberg almost immediately lost interest. Um.

634
00:37:03,239 --> 00:37:04,680
Speaker 1: Some of this. A lot of this is probably due

635
00:37:04,680 --> 00:37:07,360
Speaker 1: to the fact that it would harm Facebook's growth, But

636
00:37:07,400 --> 00:37:11,439
Speaker 1: another culprit that, like employees who talked to the Wall

637
00:37:11,440 --> 00:37:14,880
Speaker 1: Street Journal and other publications repeatedly mentioned is the fact

638
00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:17,399
Speaker 1: that he was all but heard about how journalists were

639
00:37:17,400 --> 00:37:21,040
Speaker 1: reporting on Facebook because after the Cambridge analytic A scandal,

640
00:37:21,080 --> 00:37:26,319
Speaker 1: they kept writing mean things about him. Mr Well, Mr

641
00:37:26,400 --> 00:37:29,600
Speaker 1: Marc always has to ask himself, what would what would

642
00:37:29,640 --> 00:37:33,000
Speaker 1: bad haircut Emperor do? And that the haircut Emperor wouldn't

643
00:37:33,120 --> 00:37:35,640
Speaker 1: you know, wouldn't slow down? And this ship absolutely not.

644
00:37:36,200 --> 00:37:38,879
Speaker 1: One person was familiar with the situation told The Wall

645
00:37:38,880 --> 00:37:42,480
Speaker 1: Street Journal, the internal pendulum swung really hard to the

646
00:37:42,520 --> 00:37:44,640
Speaker 1: media hates us no matter what we do, So let's

647
00:37:44,680 --> 00:37:49,160
Speaker 1: just batten down the hatches. But January of Mark's feelings

648
00:37:49,160 --> 00:37:51,680
Speaker 1: had hardened enough that he announced he would stand up

649
00:37:51,960 --> 00:37:54,880
Speaker 1: quote against those who say that new types of communities

650
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:57,960
Speaker 1: forming on social media are dividing us. According to the

651
00:37:57,960 --> 00:38:00,120
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, people who have heard him speak, I've

652
00:38:00,160 --> 00:38:03,680
Speaker 1: at least say he argues social media bears little responsibility

653
00:38:03,719 --> 00:38:08,399
Speaker 1: for polarization. Now there may be an additional explanation from

654
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:11,319
Speaker 1: marks shifting opinions on the matter that go beyond being

655
00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:15,359
Speaker 1: just greedy and angry about bad press. And that explanation

656
00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:19,000
Speaker 1: is a fella named Joel Kaplan. Do you know Joel Kaplan?

657
00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:20,680
Speaker 1: You ever heard of this? Dude? I don't know this

658
00:38:20,760 --> 00:38:24,200
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan character. Well, in short, he's the goddamn devil.

659
00:38:24,480 --> 00:38:27,440
Speaker 1: Um long, he's the guy that Facebook hired to head

660
00:38:27,520 --> 00:38:30,040
Speaker 1: up US Public Policy in two thousand eleven, and he

661
00:38:30,080 --> 00:38:33,080
Speaker 1: became the VP of Global Public Policy in two thousand fourteen.

662
00:38:33,480 --> 00:38:36,000
Speaker 1: And Joel was picked for these jobs because, unlike most

663
00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:39,560
Speaker 1: Facebook employees, he is a registered Republican with decades of

664
00:38:39,600 --> 00:38:42,360
Speaker 1: experience and government. This made him the perfect person to

665
00:38:42,400 --> 00:38:45,759
Speaker 1: help the social network deal with allegations of anti conservative

666
00:38:45,800 --> 00:38:49,960
Speaker 1: bias as little empathy as possible. I'm sure. Yeah. In

667
00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:52,360
Speaker 1: two thousand and sixteen, there's all these rumors that Facebook

668
00:38:52,440 --> 00:38:55,760
Speaker 1: is like censoring conservative content that are proven to be untrue,

669
00:38:56,080 --> 00:38:58,080
Speaker 1: but the rumors go viral on the right, and so

670
00:38:58,200 --> 00:39:00,680
Speaker 1: everyone on the right forever assumes that they were true.

671
00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:06,319
Speaker 1: Um And basically, Joel becomes increasingly influential after this point

672
00:39:06,360 --> 00:39:09,840
Speaker 1: because he's Mark Zuckerberg's best way out of angering the

673
00:39:09,920 --> 00:39:13,000
Speaker 1: right wing, which you actually can't not do because they're

674
00:39:13,200 --> 00:39:16,440
Speaker 1: they're always angry, and we'll just yell about everything until

675
00:39:16,480 --> 00:39:18,239
Speaker 1: they get to kill everyone who wasn't them, because that's

676
00:39:18,239 --> 00:39:22,080
Speaker 1: what life finds a way for that. So Joel was

677
00:39:22,120 --> 00:39:25,480
Speaker 1: a policy advisor for George W. Bush's two thousand campaign

678
00:39:25,520 --> 00:39:28,160
Speaker 1: and a participant in the Brooks Brothers riot, which is

679
00:39:28,200 --> 00:39:31,640
Speaker 1: the thing that was orchestrated by Roger Stone to help

680
00:39:31,719 --> 00:39:35,680
Speaker 1: hide a bunch of ballots in Florida that he was

681
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:39,720
Speaker 1: a part of that. That's the guy who's basically running

682
00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:43,200
Speaker 1: Facebook's response to partisanship right now. I have a physical

683
00:39:43,280 --> 00:39:47,400
Speaker 1: reaction to that. It's awesome, so upset. He worked in

684
00:39:47,440 --> 00:39:50,000
Speaker 1: the White House for basically the whole Bush administration, and

685
00:39:50,040 --> 00:39:53,399
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six he took over Carl Rob's job.

686
00:39:53,680 --> 00:39:58,480
Speaker 1: So if you visualized Joe Kaplan, he's the guy you

687
00:39:58,560 --> 00:40:02,440
Speaker 1: get when you can't get car Old Rove anymore. He's

688
00:40:02,680 --> 00:40:06,200
Speaker 1: Mr Carl Rove wasn't when the worst person in the

689
00:40:06,239 --> 00:40:09,080
Speaker 1: world is like, I can't do this job anymore. Joe

690
00:40:09,160 --> 00:40:13,719
Speaker 1: Kaplan's like, I got you. I got you famous monsters,

691
00:40:13,880 --> 00:40:18,120
Speaker 1: Like I'm trying to srub some ship over here, infamous

692
00:40:18,160 --> 00:40:21,400
Speaker 1: piece of ship, Carl Rove, don't worry. I will continue

693
00:40:21,440 --> 00:40:25,080
Speaker 1: your good work. I am Joe Kaplan and now I

694
00:40:25,160 --> 00:40:29,799
Speaker 1: basically run Facebook. And if you google him, Google has

695
00:40:29,880 --> 00:40:35,600
Speaker 1: enlisted as American Advocate. Yeah, he is an advocate of things.

696
00:40:35,960 --> 00:40:38,600
Speaker 1: I was like, I was like, again, I guess more

697
00:40:38,640 --> 00:40:45,439
Speaker 1: specific don't enjoy his face, just put it out there.

698
00:40:44,719 --> 00:40:48,680
Speaker 1: Joe is one of the most influential voices in Mark

699
00:40:48,760 --> 00:40:51,000
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's world, and he was one of the most influential

700
00:40:51,080 --> 00:40:53,640
Speaker 1: voices in the entire company when the common Ground team

701
00:40:53,680 --> 00:40:57,600
Speaker 1: came back with their suggestions for reducing partisanship. As policy chief,

702
00:40:57,719 --> 00:40:59,960
Speaker 1: you had a lot of power to approve these new changes,

703
00:41:00,320 --> 00:41:02,720
Speaker 1: and he argued against all of them. His main point

704
00:41:02,719 --> 00:41:06,800
Speaker 1: was that the proposed changes were, in his words, paternalistic um.

705
00:41:06,920 --> 00:41:10,439
Speaker 1: He also said that basically babying people. He also said

706
00:41:10,480 --> 00:41:15,640
Speaker 1: that these changes story, yeah, be a daddy story. I

707
00:41:15,640 --> 00:41:21,480
Speaker 1: can't there daddy stories that end in a genocide. Robert, Well, God,

708
00:41:21,640 --> 00:41:24,040
Speaker 1: if it makes you feel any better, all the genocides

709
00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:26,239
Speaker 1: that this is going to lead to, heaven happened yet?

710
00:41:26,560 --> 00:41:31,399
Speaker 1: Oh okay, well there you go. He yeah. So. Joel

711
00:41:31,480 --> 00:41:35,320
Speaker 1: also said that these changes would disproportionately impact conservative content

712
00:41:35,680 --> 00:41:38,400
Speaker 1: because it tends to be bigotted, a divisive. Since the

713
00:41:38,400 --> 00:41:42,440
Speaker 1: Trump administration was at this point regularly tossing threats at Facebook,

714
00:41:42,760 --> 00:41:46,359
Speaker 1: this had some weight. Quote from Wall Street Journal, Mr

715
00:41:46,440 --> 00:41:48,399
Speaker 1: Kaplan said in a recent interview that he and other

716
00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:52,000
Speaker 1: executives had approved certain changes meant to improve civic discussion.

717
00:41:52,200 --> 00:41:54,480
Speaker 1: In other cases where proposals were blocked, he said he

718
00:41:54,520 --> 00:41:57,719
Speaker 1: was trying to instill some discipline, rigor, and responsibility into

719
00:41:57,760 --> 00:42:01,080
Speaker 1: the progress as he vetted the effectiveness in potential unintended

720
00:42:01,080 --> 00:42:05,960
Speaker 1: consequences of changes to how the platform operated internally, The

721
00:42:06,040 --> 00:42:10,919
Speaker 1: vetting process earned a nickname eat your Veggies No, which

722
00:42:10,960 --> 00:42:15,880
Speaker 1: sounds paternalistic to me. Actually sounds like the beginning of

723
00:42:15,880 --> 00:42:18,480
Speaker 1: a daddy story that ends in a genocide. Wow. Okay,

724
00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:21,799
Speaker 1: we'll get back to Joe Caplan in a little bit.

725
00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:23,640
Speaker 1: For now, we need to talk some more about the

726
00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:26,319
Speaker 1: problem of violent of how we want to talk about

727
00:42:26,400 --> 00:42:29,520
Speaker 1: how the problem of violent extremism on Facebook groups got

728
00:42:29,560 --> 00:42:33,040
Speaker 1: completely out of control. So this summer, which was marked

729
00:42:33,040 --> 00:42:36,600
Speaker 1: by constant militia rallies, the explosive growth of the Boogaloo movement,

730
00:42:36,920 --> 00:42:39,520
Speaker 1: numerous deaths as a result of violent far right actors

731
00:42:39,520 --> 00:42:42,840
Speaker 1: showing up at protests with guns, Facebook finally took action

732
00:42:43,320 --> 00:42:46,680
Speaker 1: in late September to ban militias from using their service

733
00:42:47,160 --> 00:42:50,000
Speaker 1: because they have to be balanced. They also banned anarchists

734
00:42:50,080 --> 00:42:52,920
Speaker 1: from Facebook at the same time, even though anarchists have

735
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:55,560
Speaker 1: not been tied to any acts of fatal terrorism in

736
00:42:55,640 --> 00:42:59,680
Speaker 1: recent memory. Um, because you know, you gotta placate the

737
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:01,520
Speaker 1: right wing, because they're the only ones who matters. So

738
00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:04,440
Speaker 1: let's play. Let's let's ban the anarchists who have been

739
00:43:04,480 --> 00:43:07,960
Speaker 1: spending the last four years trying to lay out the

740
00:43:08,040 --> 00:43:11,960
Speaker 1: individual actors and groups who are members of these militias

741
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:14,680
Speaker 1: that are doing stuff like taking over checkpoints and holding

742
00:43:14,680 --> 00:43:16,880
Speaker 1: my friends at gunpoint. We wouldn't one of the folks

743
00:43:16,920 --> 00:43:18,640
Speaker 1: who were keeping track of them to be able to

744
00:43:18,680 --> 00:43:21,919
Speaker 1: use Facebook. That's the wrong kind of disruptive, you see.

745
00:43:21,960 --> 00:43:25,600
Speaker 1: That's the wrong kind of disrruptive and advocating. You know,

746
00:43:26,040 --> 00:43:28,600
Speaker 1: that's very similar to what the dude and that trailer

747
00:43:28,719 --> 00:43:31,960
Speaker 1: said when I was driving my Forerunner through his trailer

748
00:43:32,040 --> 00:43:36,160
Speaker 1: and shooting towards his children. Not at um. And I'll

749
00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:38,839
Speaker 1: tell I'll tell you what I told him. What did

750
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:42,840
Speaker 1: What did you say? I'm an innovator, Mark, I don't know.

751
00:43:42,920 --> 00:43:45,840
Speaker 1: That didn't really tie into it worked for me. I

752
00:43:45,840 --> 00:43:47,840
Speaker 1: could see it. I could see it in kind of

753
00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:51,160
Speaker 1: an ozarchy kind of way. I could see Yeah. Yeah,

754
00:43:51,280 --> 00:43:54,800
Speaker 1: so Uh. Mark. By the way, Uh is on record

755
00:43:54,840 --> 00:43:58,520
Speaker 1: declaring that Facebook is a guardian of free speech which

756
00:43:58,560 --> 00:44:01,240
Speaker 1: is one of the things he did when he refused

757
00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:03,960
Speaker 1: noted that he was refusing to fact check political ads.

758
00:44:04,000 --> 00:44:07,200
Speaker 1: In so, anarchists who want to talk about operating a

759
00:44:07,239 --> 00:44:11,120
Speaker 1: communal garden or you know, share details about dangerous militias

760
00:44:11,400 --> 00:44:14,719
Speaker 1: are the same as militiamen baying for the blood of protesters.

761
00:44:14,960 --> 00:44:18,520
Speaker 1: But political candidates spreading malicious lies about protesters who are

762
00:44:18,520 --> 00:44:22,959
Speaker 1: being assaulted and killed based on those lies. That is fine.

763
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:28,440
Speaker 1: Back to Facebook growth or anything like that. Let's get

764
00:44:28,440 --> 00:44:30,960
Speaker 1: back to Facebook's integrity teams, and they're doomed quests to

765
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:36,600
Speaker 1: stop their boss from destroying democracy. So the engineers and

766
00:44:36,680 --> 00:44:39,600
Speaker 1: data scientists on these teams in chief like mainly like

767
00:44:39,640 --> 00:44:42,760
Speaker 1: the guys who are working on the news feed. Uh

768
00:44:42,880 --> 00:44:47,000
Speaker 1: they yeah, they accorded to the Wall Street Journal arrived

769
00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:51,720
Speaker 1: at the polarization problem indirectly. Um asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait,

770
00:44:51,760 --> 00:44:54,120
Speaker 1: and in authentic users. The employees looked for ways to

771
00:44:54,120 --> 00:44:57,840
Speaker 1: diminish the reach of such ills. One early discovery bad

772
00:44:57,880 --> 00:45:02,640
Speaker 1: behavior came disproportionately from a small of hyperpartisan users um now.

773
00:45:02,680 --> 00:45:06,320
Speaker 1: Another finding was that the US saw a larger infrastructure

774
00:45:06,400 --> 00:45:08,920
Speaker 1: of accounts and publishers that met this definition on the

775
00:45:08,920 --> 00:45:12,360
Speaker 1: far right than the far left, UM and outside observers

776
00:45:12,400 --> 00:45:15,719
Speaker 1: documented the same phenomenon. The gap meant that seemingly a

777
00:45:15,840 --> 00:45:19,080
Speaker 1: political action, such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines

778
00:45:19,120 --> 00:45:22,200
Speaker 1: along the title of you won't believe what happened next, uh,

779
00:45:22,239 --> 00:45:25,280
Speaker 1: it meant that, like, doing this stuff affected conservative speech

780
00:45:25,280 --> 00:45:29,400
Speaker 1: more than liberal speech. Now, yeah, and obviously this piste

781
00:45:29,440 --> 00:45:33,040
Speaker 1: off conservatives. The way that Facebook works means that users

782
00:45:33,040 --> 00:45:35,719
Speaker 1: who posted an engage with the site more have more influence.

783
00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:38,640
Speaker 1: The algorithm sees if you're posting a thousand times a

784
00:45:38,680 --> 00:45:42,080
Speaker 1: week instead of fifty, it likes that engagement because engagement

785
00:45:42,080 --> 00:45:44,880
Speaker 1: means money, and so it prioritizes your content over the

786
00:45:44,920 --> 00:45:47,560
Speaker 1: content of someone who posts less often. This means that

787
00:45:47,880 --> 00:45:50,680
Speaker 1: a bunch of networks of Russian bots and hyperactive or

788
00:45:50,760 --> 00:45:55,040
Speaker 1: like Ian Miles Chong who's a fascist troll who lives

789
00:45:55,040 --> 00:45:59,400
Speaker 1: in fucking Malaysia and tweets about how like everybody needs

790
00:45:59,440 --> 00:46:01,600
Speaker 1: to have a that they can use to shoot democrats

791
00:46:01,600 --> 00:46:03,680
Speaker 1: even though guns are legal in his country, and like

792
00:46:04,200 --> 00:46:08,000
Speaker 1: makes like did very recently miss anyway, total piece of

793
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:11,400
Speaker 1: ship that that that these pieces of ship um who

794
00:46:11,520 --> 00:46:14,760
Speaker 1: are actively attempting to urge violence, and who have urged

795
00:46:14,880 --> 00:46:18,000
Speaker 1: violence and cause death mobs in other countries. It means

796
00:46:18,040 --> 00:46:20,840
Speaker 1: that these people, because they're just shotgunning out hundreds of

797
00:46:20,880 --> 00:46:24,360
Speaker 1: posts per day, will always be more influential than local

798
00:46:24,480 --> 00:46:27,280
Speaker 1: journalists and reporters who are trying to bring out factually

799
00:46:27,360 --> 00:46:31,240
Speaker 1: based information, because it's better for Facebook for a stream

800
00:46:31,280 --> 00:46:34,880
Speaker 1: of lies to spread on their platform than a smaller

801
00:46:34,920 --> 00:46:37,600
Speaker 1: amount of truth. Yeah. And it also lends itself to

802
00:46:38,160 --> 00:46:41,120
Speaker 1: just never like to be releasing contents so quickly that

803
00:46:41,160 --> 00:46:44,799
Speaker 1: you couldn't possibly disprove or fact check things fast enough,

804
00:46:44,800 --> 00:46:48,919
Speaker 1: because there's just it's just a bullshit machine. Yeah uh.

805
00:46:48,920 --> 00:46:52,080
Speaker 1: And you know, Facebook's teams found that most of these

806
00:46:52,160 --> 00:46:56,000
Speaker 1: hyperactive accounts were way more partisan the normal Facebook users,

807
00:46:56,000 --> 00:46:58,680
Speaker 1: and we're more likely to appear suspicious, like to engage

808
00:46:58,680 --> 00:47:01,879
Speaker 1: in suspicious behavior that suggested either a bunch of people

809
00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:04,760
Speaker 1: working in shifts or there were bots. So these these teams,

810
00:47:04,760 --> 00:47:07,880
Speaker 1: these integrity teams did like the thing that has integrity,

811
00:47:08,360 --> 00:47:11,200
Speaker 1: which was they suggested their company fixed the algorithm to

812
00:47:11,280 --> 00:47:14,000
Speaker 1: not reward this kind of behavior. Now, this would lose

813
00:47:14,040 --> 00:47:16,560
Speaker 1: the company a significant amount of money. And since most

814
00:47:16,600 --> 00:47:19,320
Speaker 1: of these hyperactive accounts were right wing and nature it

815
00:47:19,360 --> 00:47:22,080
Speaker 1: would piss off conservatives. So you can imagine how this

816
00:47:22,120 --> 00:47:25,400
Speaker 1: idea went over with Joel Kaplan. Uh. Since Mark was

817
00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:27,440
Speaker 1: terrified of right wing anger, he tended to listen to

818
00:47:27,560 --> 00:47:32,480
Speaker 1: Joel about these sort of things. Joel's daddy and the

819
00:47:32,600 --> 00:47:35,959
Speaker 1: eat your veggies policy review process stymied and killed any

820
00:47:36,040 --> 00:47:41,680
Speaker 1: movement on halting this problem. So, well, how do we

821
00:47:41,719 --> 00:47:45,600
Speaker 1: feel about that? We feel we feel great, We feel good.

822
00:47:46,120 --> 00:47:49,279
Speaker 1: Glad that's in charge, Glad everyone's eating their veggies. I mean,

823
00:47:49,320 --> 00:47:53,440
Speaker 1: even just the dystopian nature of like mobilizing these teams

824
00:47:53,480 --> 00:47:55,880
Speaker 1: to be like, hey, I've ruined the world. Do you

825
00:47:55,920 --> 00:47:58,520
Speaker 1: think you could stop it before it blows up? Because

826
00:47:58,560 --> 00:48:02,520
Speaker 1: this is going to be a real pr issue. Why

827
00:48:02,520 --> 00:48:07,200
Speaker 1: would you do that? Just of luck to the team.

828
00:48:07,280 --> 00:48:10,160
Speaker 1: There was another case where because basically the only way

829
00:48:10,160 --> 00:48:12,719
Speaker 1: to combat this stuff is to have another person Mark

830
00:48:12,800 --> 00:48:16,200
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg respects or is at least scared of yelling at

831
00:48:16,280 --> 00:48:19,200
Speaker 1: him um or you know, talking politely to him. The

832
00:48:19,239 --> 00:48:22,520
Speaker 1: daddies of the world opposite of whatever John Kaplan is saying.

833
00:48:23,080 --> 00:48:25,799
Speaker 1: And there, thankfully was someone like that in Facebook. They

834
00:48:25,880 --> 00:48:29,560
Speaker 1: hired in two thousands seventeen, Carlos Gomez Uribe, who was

835
00:48:29,600 --> 00:48:33,360
Speaker 1: the former head of Netflix's recommendation system, which is obviously

836
00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:35,040
Speaker 1: made a lot of money for Netflix. So this guy,

837
00:48:35,080 --> 00:48:39,920
Speaker 1: Carlos Uribe is a big important get for Facebook. UM.

838
00:48:39,960 --> 00:48:42,480
Speaker 1: So he gets on staff and he immediately is like, Oh,

839
00:48:42,520 --> 00:48:45,640
Speaker 1: this looks like we might be destroying the world, and

840
00:48:45,680 --> 00:48:49,160
Speaker 1: so he starts pushing to reduce the impact that hyperactive

841
00:48:49,239 --> 00:48:52,680
Speaker 1: users had on Facebook. Um and one of the proposals

842
00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:56,359
Speaker 1: that his team championed was called sparing sharing, which would

843
00:48:56,360 --> 00:48:58,799
Speaker 1: have reduced the spread of content that was favored by

844
00:48:58,840 --> 00:49:02,799
Speaker 1: these hyperactive users. UM and this would obviously have had

845
00:49:03,280 --> 00:49:06,480
Speaker 1: the most impact on content favored by far right and

846
00:49:06,600 --> 00:49:09,879
Speaker 1: far left users. Um And number one, there's more far

847
00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:12,200
Speaker 1: right users on Facebook than far left, so that was

848
00:49:12,200 --> 00:49:15,000
Speaker 1: going to disproportionately impact them. But the people who mainly

849
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:19,200
Speaker 1: would have gained influence were political moderates. UM. Mr Uribe

850
00:49:19,320 --> 00:49:22,400
Speaker 1: called it the the happy Face. That's what he called

851
00:49:22,400 --> 00:49:25,279
Speaker 1: this plan, and Facebook's data scientists thought that it might

852
00:49:25,360 --> 00:49:29,279
Speaker 1: actually like it might actually help fight the kind of

853
00:49:29,320 --> 00:49:31,920
Speaker 1: spam efforts that Russia was doing in two thousand sixteen,

854
00:49:32,440 --> 00:49:37,840
Speaker 1: But Joe Kaplan and other Facebook executives pushed back because yeah,

855
00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:40,840
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to say because you know, Max UiB,

856
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:43,719
Speaker 1: you couldn't like you had to be careful arguing with

857
00:49:43,760 --> 00:49:45,840
Speaker 1: some instead of saying this will be bad for money

858
00:49:45,920 --> 00:49:48,640
Speaker 1: or it'll make the right angry at us. Joe Kaplan

859
00:49:48,719 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 1: invented a hypothetical girl Scout troupe, and he asked, what

860
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:55,680
Speaker 1: would happen if the girls became Facebook super sharers as

861
00:49:55,719 --> 00:49:58,680
Speaker 1: part of a cookie selling program. That sounds like a

862
00:49:58,719 --> 00:50:01,560
Speaker 1: metaphor you would do at the big of an episode. Yeah,

863
00:50:01,640 --> 00:50:03,880
Speaker 1: he was like, basically like, what if these girl scouts

864
00:50:03,880 --> 00:50:06,160
Speaker 1: made a super successful account to so their cookies? Like,

865
00:50:06,200 --> 00:50:09,239
Speaker 1: we would be unfairly hurting them if we stopped these

866
00:50:09,280 --> 00:50:11,560
Speaker 1: people who are baying for the deaths of their fellow

867
00:50:11,600 --> 00:50:16,640
Speaker 1: citizens and gathering militias to their banner. Okay, I hear you,

868
00:50:16,719 --> 00:50:23,400
Speaker 1: but what about fictional girls girl scouts? Yeah, it's awesome.

869
00:50:23,760 --> 00:50:28,280
Speaker 1: So the debate between Mr aib and Um and Joel

870
00:50:28,360 --> 00:50:31,160
Speaker 1: Kaplan eventually did make it to Mark Zuckerberg. He had

871
00:50:31,200 --> 00:50:33,279
Speaker 1: to make a call on this one because both of

872
00:50:33,320 --> 00:50:35,640
Speaker 1: them were kind of big names in the company. Uh.

873
00:50:35,680 --> 00:50:37,840
Speaker 1: Mark listened to both sides and he took the coward's

874
00:50:37,920 --> 00:50:41,879
Speaker 1: way out. He approved Ureb's plan, but he also said

875
00:50:41,920 --> 00:50:45,120
Speaker 1: they had to cut the weighing by eight percent, which

876
00:50:45,160 --> 00:50:50,360
Speaker 1: mitigated most of the positive benefits of the plan. Um. Yeah.

877
00:50:50,400 --> 00:50:53,160
Speaker 1: After this, Mark, according to the Wall Street Journal quote,

878
00:50:53,239 --> 00:50:56,239
Speaker 1: signaled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate

879
00:50:56,280 --> 00:50:59,040
Speaker 1: the platform in the name of social good, asking that

880
00:50:59,120 --> 00:51:04,239
Speaker 1: they not bring him something like that again. Neat two

881
00:51:04,640 --> 00:51:08,400
Speaker 1: years apiece, Mark, do that that has big two hundred

882
00:51:08,480 --> 00:51:13,399
Speaker 1: years of pieces, big two d years of piece energy. Yeah.

883
00:51:14,600 --> 00:51:18,799
Speaker 1: In two thousand nineteen, uh Mark announced that Facebook would

884
00:51:18,840 --> 00:51:22,919
Speaker 1: start taking down content that violated specific standards, but would

885
00:51:22,920 --> 00:51:25,360
Speaker 1: take a hands off approach to policing material that didn't

886
00:51:25,400 --> 00:51:29,160
Speaker 1: clearly violate as standards. In a speech to Georgetown that October,

887
00:51:29,239 --> 00:51:32,879
Speaker 1: he said, you can't impost tolerance top down. It has

888
00:51:32,960 --> 00:51:35,840
Speaker 1: to come from people opening up, sharing experiences and developing

889
00:51:35,880 --> 00:51:39,399
Speaker 1: a shared story for society that we all feel we're

890
00:51:39,400 --> 00:51:43,480
Speaker 1: a part of. That's how we make progress together. So

891
00:51:43,560 --> 00:51:47,200
Speaker 1: you know, it's like that is just such a wild

892
00:51:47,239 --> 00:51:50,600
Speaker 1: way of saying, like, I don't feel I am accountable

893
00:51:50,680 --> 00:51:53,040
Speaker 1: for this, and once again I'm going to delegate this

894
00:51:53,120 --> 00:51:56,160
Speaker 1: to the users. Of the people brains. I'm actively ruining

895
00:51:57,040 --> 00:52:00,600
Speaker 1: You know what makes progress harder in my opinion, Jamie

896
00:52:01,120 --> 00:52:05,040
Speaker 1: Products and services. No, no, when fascists are allowed to

897
00:52:05,080 --> 00:52:10,360
Speaker 1: spread lies about disadvantaged in endangered groups to tens of

898
00:52:10,400 --> 00:52:13,840
Speaker 1: millions of angry and armed people because your company decided

899
00:52:13,880 --> 00:52:16,600
Speaker 1: sites like The Daily Caller and Breitbart are equivalent to

900
00:52:16,600 --> 00:52:20,920
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. This is something Facebook did when, at

901
00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:24,840
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan's behest, it made both companies Facebook news partners.

902
00:52:25,040 --> 00:52:26,839
Speaker 1: These are the folks that Facebook trust to help them

903
00:52:26,840 --> 00:52:31,480
Speaker 1: determine what stories are true. Um, they get money from Facebook,

904
00:52:31,480 --> 00:52:35,120
Speaker 1: they get an elevated position in the news feed. Um. Yeah.

905
00:52:35,560 --> 00:52:38,400
Speaker 1: On an unrelated note, earlier this year, Breitbart News shared

906
00:52:38,400 --> 00:52:41,319
Speaker 1: a video that promoted bogus coronavirus treatments and told people

907
00:52:41,360 --> 00:52:44,120
Speaker 1: that masks couldn't prevent the spread of the virus. This

908
00:52:44,280 --> 00:52:47,800
Speaker 1: video was watched fourteen million times in six hours before

909
00:52:47,800 --> 00:52:51,279
Speaker 1: it was removed from Breitbart's page. They removed it presumably

910
00:52:51,520 --> 00:52:55,000
Speaker 1: because it violated Facebook policy, and Facebook has a two

911
00:52:55,040 --> 00:52:58,520
Speaker 1: strike policy for its news partners sharing misinformation within a

912
00:52:58,600 --> 00:53:01,920
Speaker 1: ninety day period. When Mark was asked why Breitbart got

913
00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:05,040
Speaker 1: to be a Facebook trusted partner while spreading misinformation about

914
00:53:05,040 --> 00:53:07,839
Speaker 1: an active plague that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

915
00:53:08,520 --> 00:53:11,960
Speaker 1: Mark held up the two strike policy as a shield. Quote.

916
00:53:12,239 --> 00:53:15,880
Speaker 1: This was certainly one strike against them FIR misinformation, but

917
00:53:15,960 --> 00:53:18,560
Speaker 1: they don't have others in the last ninety days. So

918
00:53:18,600 --> 00:53:21,040
Speaker 1: by the policies we have, which by the way, I

919
00:53:21,080 --> 00:53:23,680
Speaker 1: think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make

920
00:53:23,719 --> 00:53:30,160
Speaker 1: sense to remove them. That's pretty great, Jamie, that's pretty awesome.

921
00:53:30,640 --> 00:53:34,480
Speaker 1: But you know what's even better about physical and unethical

922
00:53:34,520 --> 00:53:38,719
Speaker 1: but still legal, ha ha. What's even better about this

923
00:53:39,040 --> 00:53:43,319
Speaker 1: is that Breitbart absolutely violated Facebook policies more than two

924
00:53:43,320 --> 00:53:46,360
Speaker 1: times in ninety days, and it was covered up. That's

925
00:53:46,400 --> 00:53:50,120
Speaker 1: what's even better. Yeah, you have to imagine Breitbart is

926
00:53:50,200 --> 00:53:54,560
Speaker 1: violating Facebook policies multiple times a day like the happlin

927
00:53:54,680 --> 00:53:57,839
Speaker 1: have some heide it. Yeah, that is such. I mean,

928
00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:03,919
Speaker 1: it's awesome, it's awesome. I'm going to read actually by

929
00:54:03,960 --> 00:54:07,160
Speaker 1: citing an incredible report by BuzzFeed, who, by the way,

930
00:54:07,320 --> 00:54:10,040
Speaker 1: all credit to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, and I think you know BuzzFeed,

931
00:54:10,080 --> 00:54:13,160
Speaker 1: And I've cited a number of great articles, including that

932
00:54:13,160 --> 00:54:15,240
Speaker 1: one from The Wall Street Journal, which is really important.

933
00:54:15,600 --> 00:54:18,680
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed has probably been of all of the different media

934
00:54:18,760 --> 00:54:23,200
Speaker 1: companies the most dedicated and like hounding Facebook like a

935
00:54:23,320 --> 00:54:26,880
Speaker 1: fucking dog with a groin fetish. I don't know how to.

936
00:54:27,360 --> 00:54:30,200
Speaker 1: I'm very proud of Buzzfeeds reporting on Facebook. Thank you

937
00:54:30,280 --> 00:54:35,879
Speaker 1: for keeping on this one, y'all. Good work from my head.

938
00:54:35,920 --> 00:54:38,600
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm gonna quote from this report on the

939
00:54:38,640 --> 00:54:42,839
Speaker 1: fact that uh Facebook fraudulently hid the fact that one

940
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:45,400
Speaker 1: of their information partners was violating their own policies and

941
00:54:45,400 --> 00:54:47,880
Speaker 1: spreading this information about an active plaque. And then and

942
00:54:47,920 --> 00:54:49,680
Speaker 1: then you need to take an adbreak, just you know,

943
00:54:49,920 --> 00:54:51,839
Speaker 1: I'll take an ad break now. Well, we'll get we'll

944
00:54:51,880 --> 00:54:55,680
Speaker 1: get we'll get to this afterwards. Because if there's one

945
00:54:55,719 --> 00:54:59,720
Speaker 1: thing that prepares me to hear about how democracies, both

946
00:55:00,040 --> 00:55:02,560
Speaker 1: in the nation I live and around the world are

947
00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:05,720
Speaker 1: being actively murdered for the profit of a man who's

948
00:55:05,719 --> 00:55:08,360
Speaker 1: already a billionaire, there's one thing that makes that easier

949
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:11,920
Speaker 1: to take. It's products and services. It's the sweet lullaby

950
00:55:11,960 --> 00:55:15,960
Speaker 1: of a product or service. Ah, Nothing nothing keeps me

951
00:55:16,080 --> 00:55:21,520
Speaker 1: going gets me intellectually hard like a product or a service.

952
00:55:21,600 --> 00:55:23,680
Speaker 1: I want to be surrounded. I want to die surrounded

953
00:55:23,680 --> 00:55:27,040
Speaker 1: by my most beloved products and services. I have a

954
00:55:27,080 --> 00:55:29,279
Speaker 1: feeling that you will, because there's a good chance that

955
00:55:29,320 --> 00:55:32,080
Speaker 1: a horrible wildfire will sweep through the city you live in.

956
00:55:32,120 --> 00:55:36,319
Speaker 1: And sorry, that's getting too dark mine too, maybe, yeah, yeah,

957
00:55:36,320 --> 00:55:38,160
Speaker 1: as it to say, I'm like, hey, as long as

958
00:55:38,160 --> 00:55:41,120
Speaker 1: we're on the same same page there, that's great, And

959
00:55:41,160 --> 00:55:43,000
Speaker 1: it's okay if we make it out of that fire.

960
00:55:43,080 --> 00:55:46,720
Speaker 1: Facebook cool. And sure there's lots of armed and misinformed

961
00:55:46,760 --> 00:55:49,840
Speaker 1: militias waving guns wildly in the areas we attempt to

962
00:55:49,880 --> 00:55:51,880
Speaker 1: evacuate through. Well, as long as my death will have

963
00:55:51,920 --> 00:55:55,640
Speaker 1: been completely in vain. Yes, that's what Facebook promises for

964
00:55:55,680 --> 00:55:58,000
Speaker 1: all of us, and that's what products and services promise

965
00:55:58,080 --> 00:56:06,520
Speaker 1: for all of us. Here we go, Oh, all right,

966
00:56:06,600 --> 00:56:10,400
Speaker 1: we're back. So we're talking about how Facebook covered up

967
00:56:10,440 --> 00:56:13,160
Speaker 1: the fact that Briitbart was repeatedly spreading this information that

968
00:56:13,160 --> 00:56:15,760
Speaker 1: should have gotten them removed as a trusted partner quote

969
00:56:15,760 --> 00:56:19,120
Speaker 1: from BuzzFeed. Some of Facebook's own employees gathered evidence they

970
00:56:19,120 --> 00:56:21,840
Speaker 1: say shows Brightbart along with other right wing outlets and figures,

971
00:56:21,840 --> 00:56:25,360
Speaker 1: including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond

972
00:56:25,400 --> 00:56:29,440
Speaker 1: and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University has

973
00:56:29,480 --> 00:56:32,520
Speaker 1: received special treatment that helped it avoid running a foul

974
00:56:32,560 --> 00:56:34,840
Speaker 1: of company policy. They see it as part of a

975
00:56:34,880 --> 00:56:37,720
Speaker 1: pattern of preferential treatment for right wing publishers and pages,

976
00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:40,040
Speaker 1: many of which have alleged that the social network is

977
00:56:40,080 --> 00:56:45,720
Speaker 1: biased against conservatives. On July, Facebook employee posted a message

978
00:56:45,719 --> 00:56:48,719
Speaker 1: to the company's internal misinformation policy group noting that some

979
00:56:48,840 --> 00:56:53,520
Speaker 1: misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook,

980
00:56:53,760 --> 00:56:58,160
Speaker 1: seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. A Brightbart escalation marked

981
00:56:58,239 --> 00:57:00,480
Speaker 1: urgent end of day was resolved in the day, with

982
00:57:00,520 --> 00:57:03,440
Speaker 1: all misinformation strikes against Breitbart's page and against their domain

983
00:57:03,480 --> 00:57:06,960
Speaker 1: cleared without explanation, the employee wrote. The same employees set

984
00:57:07,000 --> 00:57:09,560
Speaker 1: up partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from

985
00:57:09,640 --> 00:57:13,120
Speaker 1: Charlie Kirk was flagged for priority escalation by Joel Kaplan,

986
00:57:13,160 --> 00:57:17,600
Speaker 1: the company's vice president of Global public Policy. Now, the

987
00:57:17,640 --> 00:57:20,480
Speaker 1: whole article itself details just a ton of other instances

988
00:57:20,480 --> 00:57:22,800
Speaker 1: in this, and it's all incredibly shady. I'm not going

989
00:57:22,840 --> 00:57:25,280
Speaker 1: to go into all of it and tremendous detail because

990
00:57:25,280 --> 00:57:27,360
Speaker 1: we are running out of time, But if you read

991
00:57:27,400 --> 00:57:30,760
Speaker 1: the article, it's extremely clear that Joel Kaplan is directing

992
00:57:30,840 --> 00:57:34,680
Speaker 1: Facebook to actively violate the company's own policies in order

993
00:57:34,680 --> 00:57:38,240
Speaker 1: to keep right wing bullshit peddlers spreading lies on the

994
00:57:38,320 --> 00:57:42,040
Speaker 1: platform for profit. Kaplan has faced no punishment for this,

995
00:57:42,160 --> 00:57:45,440
Speaker 1: although his behavior did provoke outrage from employees in in

996
00:57:45,560 --> 00:57:50,040
Speaker 1: Facebook's internal chat system applied to Daddy, that's how it goes.

997
00:57:50,680 --> 00:57:53,440
Speaker 1: Facebook employees are be getting angrier and angrier at this

998
00:57:53,520 --> 00:57:56,520
Speaker 1: sort of thing throughout the year. Remember back in May

999
00:57:56,600 --> 00:57:59,640
Speaker 1: when President Trump posted this message to Twitter and Facebook

1000
00:58:00,080 --> 00:58:03,720
Speaker 1: vote There is no way, zero that mail and ballots

1001
00:58:03,720 --> 00:58:06,880
Speaker 1: will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed,

1002
00:58:06,880 --> 00:58:09,040
Speaker 1: Ballots will be forged and even illegally printed out and

1003
00:58:09,080 --> 00:58:11,720
Speaker 1: fraudulently signed. The governor of California is sending ballots to

1004
00:58:11,760 --> 00:58:14,000
Speaker 1: millions of people. Anyone living in the state, no matter

1005
00:58:14,000 --> 00:58:15,800
Speaker 1: who they are, how they got there, will get one

1006
00:58:16,240 --> 00:58:18,360
Speaker 1: that will be followed up with professionals telling all of

1007
00:58:18,360 --> 00:58:20,160
Speaker 1: these people, many of whom have never even thought of

1008
00:58:20,240 --> 00:58:23,080
Speaker 1: voting before, how and for whom to vote. This will

1009
00:58:23,120 --> 00:58:26,000
Speaker 1: be a rigged election no way. I do remember that

1010
00:58:26,080 --> 00:58:33,160
Speaker 1: Robert Twitter too. Again, it's unbeliod like like the mildest

1011
00:58:34,200 --> 00:58:37,880
Speaker 1: I could possibly give someone credit to that level of credit.

1012
00:58:37,920 --> 00:58:42,000
Speaker 1: Twitter fact checked the president's tweet, which was not nothing,

1013
00:58:42,080 --> 00:58:44,840
Speaker 1: and that's all I'll say about it. Marginally, that does

1014
00:58:44,880 --> 00:58:48,560
Speaker 1: not qualify as nothing. Again, that qualifies as the most

1015
00:58:48,640 --> 00:58:54,280
Speaker 1: responsible action that's made. A social media ceo. Took Mark,

1016
00:58:54,400 --> 00:58:56,640
Speaker 1: on the other hand, refused to let his employees do

1017
00:58:56,680 --> 00:59:00,200
Speaker 1: anything similar, allowing the president's flagrant misinformation to circular aid

1018
00:59:00,200 --> 00:59:03,440
Speaker 1: on his network. This enraged employees, and they got angrier

1019
00:59:03,520 --> 00:59:06,720
Speaker 1: when his when the Looting Starts the Shooting Starts post

1020
00:59:06,800 --> 00:59:10,040
Speaker 1: was let up. They created a group in workplace, their

1021
00:59:10,080 --> 00:59:14,880
Speaker 1: internal chat app, called Let's Fix Facebook parentheses the company.

1022
00:59:14,960 --> 00:59:18,800
Speaker 1: It now has about ten thousand members. One employee started

1023
00:59:18,800 --> 00:59:21,560
Speaker 1: a poll asking colleagues whether they agreed quote with our

1024
00:59:21,680 --> 00:59:25,200
Speaker 1: leadership's decisions this week regarding voting, misinformation and posts that

1025
00:59:25,240 --> 00:59:28,800
Speaker 1: may be considered to be inciting violence. A thousand respondents

1026
00:59:28,800 --> 00:59:31,600
Speaker 1: said the company had made the wrong decision on both posts,

1027
00:59:31,760 --> 00:59:34,080
Speaker 1: which is more than twenty times the number of responses

1028
00:59:34,080 --> 00:59:39,240
Speaker 1: who said otherwise. So. Facebook employees after this staged a

1029
00:59:39,360 --> 00:59:43,520
Speaker 1: digital walk out uh and they like changed their workplace

1030
00:59:43,560 --> 00:59:45,800
Speaker 1: avatars to a black and white fist and called out

1031
00:59:45,840 --> 00:59:50,080
Speaker 1: sick uh in mass, hundreds of them and stuff. Um

1032
00:59:50,160 --> 00:59:53,400
Speaker 1: and you know, yeah, I'm gonna quote from BuzzFeed again here.

1033
00:59:53,520 --> 00:59:56,720
Speaker 1: As Facebook grappled with yet another public relations crisis, employee

1034
00:59:56,720 --> 01:00:00,400
Speaker 1: morale plunged. Worker satisfaction metrics measured by mic A Pols

1035
01:00:00,480 --> 01:00:02,960
Speaker 1: surveys that are taken by hundreds of employees every week

1036
01:00:03,280 --> 01:00:06,400
Speaker 1: fell sharply after the ruling on Trump's looting post. According

1037
01:00:06,440 --> 01:00:09,200
Speaker 1: to data and obtained by BuzzFeed on June one, the

1038
01:00:09,240 --> 01:00:12,000
Speaker 1: day of the walkout, about forty five percent of employees

1039
01:00:12,040 --> 01:00:14,320
Speaker 1: said they agreed with the statement that Facebook was making

1040
01:00:14,320 --> 01:00:17,800
Speaker 1: the world better, down twenty five percentage points from the

1041
01:00:17,800 --> 01:00:21,520
Speaker 1: week before. That same day, Facebook's internal survey has showed

1042
01:00:21,560 --> 01:00:24,120
Speaker 1: that around forty four percent of employees were confident in

1043
01:00:24,480 --> 01:00:27,600
Speaker 1: Facebook leadership leading the company in the right direction, a

1044
01:00:27,680 --> 01:00:31,520
Speaker 1: thirty percentage point dropped from responses to that question have

1045
01:00:31,600 --> 01:00:34,120
Speaker 1: stayed around the lower mark as of earlier this month,

1046
01:00:34,480 --> 01:00:38,440
Speaker 1: so pretty significant drop and faith in the company from

1047
01:00:38,440 --> 01:00:43,440
Speaker 1: its employees. Um and yeah. Zuckerberg, the ultimate decision maker,

1048
01:00:43,520 --> 01:00:47,800
Speaker 1: according to Facebook's head of communications, initially defended his decision

1049
01:00:47,840 --> 01:00:50,720
Speaker 1: to leave Trump's looting post up without even hiding it

1050
01:00:50,760 --> 01:00:54,360
Speaker 1: like with a warning like Twitter, Mark stated quote, Unlike Twitter,

1051
01:00:54,520 --> 01:00:56,520
Speaker 1: we do not have a policy of putting a warning

1052
01:00:56,520 --> 01:00:58,600
Speaker 1: in front of posts that may incite violence, because we

1053
01:00:58,640 --> 01:01:00,919
Speaker 1: believe that if a post insights of violence, it should

1054
01:01:00,960 --> 01:01:03,640
Speaker 1: be removed, regardless of whether or not it's newsmorthy, even

1055
01:01:03,640 --> 01:01:05,880
Speaker 1: if it comes from a politician. So you have to

1056
01:01:05,960 --> 01:01:08,560
Speaker 1: wait for their to be violence and study and then

1057
01:01:08,640 --> 01:01:10,960
Speaker 1: be like, oh, it turns out that post was actually

1058
01:01:11,040 --> 01:01:13,560
Speaker 1: very bad and we should take it down. There I

1059
01:01:13,680 --> 01:01:16,920
Speaker 1: get the amount of bodies that he needs attached to

1060
01:01:17,000 --> 01:01:22,240
Speaker 1: do a single thing is staggering. Four days later, Mark

1061
01:01:22,280 --> 01:01:25,880
Speaker 1: backtracked from BuzzFeed quote. In comments at a company wine

1062
01:01:25,880 --> 01:01:28,600
Speaker 1: meeting on June two that were first reported by recode. Facebooks,

1063
01:01:28,600 --> 01:01:31,240
Speaker 1: founders said the company was considering adding labels to post

1064
01:01:31,280 --> 01:01:33,680
Speaker 1: from world leaders that incite violence. He followed that up

1065
01:01:33,720 --> 01:01:35,840
Speaker 1: with the Facebook post three days later, in which he

1066
01:01:35,880 --> 01:01:39,280
Speaker 1: declared black lives matter and made promises that the company

1067
01:01:39,280 --> 01:01:42,600
Speaker 1: would review policies on content discussing excessive use of police

1068
01:01:42,640 --> 01:01:46,520
Speaker 1: or state force. What material effect does any of this have,

1069
01:01:46,680 --> 01:01:50,840
Speaker 1: one employee asked in workplace, openly challenging the CEO commitments

1070
01:01:50,880 --> 01:01:53,560
Speaker 1: to review offer nothing material has anything changed for you

1071
01:01:53,600 --> 01:01:55,480
Speaker 1: in a meaningful way? Are you at all willing to

1072
01:01:55,520 --> 01:01:58,840
Speaker 1: be wrong here? Mark didn't respond to this, but on

1073
01:01:58,880 --> 01:02:01,760
Speaker 1: the sly a month of June. Nearly a month later,

1074
01:02:01,760 --> 01:02:04,400
Speaker 1: he posted a clarification to his remarks, noting that any

1075
01:02:04,440 --> 01:02:06,560
Speaker 1: post that is determined to be inciting violence will be

1076
01:02:06,600 --> 01:02:10,680
Speaker 1: taken down. Employee dissatisfaction has continued to swell over the

1077
01:02:10,720 --> 01:02:13,880
Speaker 1: course of the summer. One senior employee, Max Wang, even

1078
01:02:13,880 --> 01:02:17,200
Speaker 1: recorded a twenty four minute long video for his colleagues

1079
01:02:17,200 --> 01:02:19,640
Speaker 1: and BuzzFeed and another article has the all the audio

1080
01:02:19,680 --> 01:02:22,920
Speaker 1: for this, It's worth listening to. In the video, Max

1081
01:02:22,960 --> 01:02:26,720
Speaker 1: outlines why he can't morally justify working for Facebook anymore,

1082
01:02:26,760 --> 01:02:29,040
Speaker 1: and he's a pretty early employee. I think his video

1083
01:02:29,120 --> 01:02:32,240
Speaker 1: quotes at length from books on totalitarianism by Hannah Arrent,

1084
01:02:32,360 --> 01:02:36,280
Speaker 1: who was one of like the great scholars of the Holocaust. Yeah.

1085
01:02:36,840 --> 01:02:40,280
Speaker 1: He shared the video on workplace with a note that started,

1086
01:02:40,760 --> 01:02:47,640
Speaker 1: I think Facebook is hurting people at scale? Yes, yes, yeah, yes,

1087
01:02:47,720 --> 01:02:54,520
Speaker 1: it is absolutely yeah. Yeah. Like Emperor Augustus who had

1088
01:02:54,520 --> 01:02:57,440
Speaker 1: members of his own family killed for disobedience, Mark did

1089
01:02:57,480 --> 01:03:00,760
Speaker 1: not like being questioned and gasp dista proved of by

1090
01:03:00,760 --> 01:03:03,560
Speaker 1: his own employees. On Juno leventh, he hosted a life

1091
01:03:03,640 --> 01:03:06,080
Speaker 1: Q and A where he delivered a message to employees

1092
01:03:06,120 --> 01:03:09,560
Speaker 1: who were angry at his enabling of hideously violent fascist rhetoric.

1093
01:03:09,640 --> 01:03:11,160
Speaker 1: This is a lot of this isn't like I think

1094
01:03:11,200 --> 01:03:14,440
Speaker 1: response to yeah, the killings and such. I've been very

1095
01:03:14,480 --> 01:03:17,440
Speaker 1: worried about the level of disrespect and in some cases

1096
01:03:17,480 --> 01:03:19,480
Speaker 1: of vitriol that a lot of people in our internal

1097
01:03:19,480 --> 01:03:22,040
Speaker 1: community are directing towards each other as part of these debates.

1098
01:03:22,240 --> 01:03:24,880
Speaker 1: If you're bullying your fellow colleagues into taking a position

1099
01:03:24,920 --> 01:03:30,040
Speaker 1: on something, then we will fire you. Mm hmm, well,

1100
01:03:30,200 --> 01:03:34,400
Speaker 1: uh good. You know. The the amount of consistency I mean,

1101
01:03:34,480 --> 01:03:38,440
Speaker 1: you gotta appreciate it that. I'm really glad that employee

1102
01:03:38,480 --> 01:03:41,200
Speaker 1: I mean just spoke directly about because it's like, at

1103
01:03:41,240 --> 01:03:44,120
Speaker 1: what point, truly, what do you have to lose, Like

1104
01:03:44,640 --> 01:03:46,760
Speaker 1: I guess except for your life depending on how Mark

1105
01:03:46,840 --> 01:03:49,600
Speaker 1: Zacher wants to go about it. But I mean, it's

1106
01:03:51,200 --> 01:03:54,320
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it is. It is so frustrating,

1107
01:03:54,360 --> 01:03:55,880
Speaker 1: even though it's like I don't know what else to

1108
01:03:55,920 --> 01:03:59,440
Speaker 1: do other than you know, whatever, some some ship and minecraft.

1109
01:04:00,040 --> 01:04:04,320
Speaker 1: But because people are continually waiting for this person and

1110
01:04:04,400 --> 01:04:06,800
Speaker 1: this company to act in the best interest. It's like,

1111
01:04:06,880 --> 01:04:09,920
Speaker 1: it's not when has it ever happened? Name a time,

1112
01:04:10,000 --> 01:04:14,440
Speaker 1: even in the face of like the most brutal public disapproval.

1113
01:04:14,600 --> 01:04:19,040
Speaker 1: There's too much. It's amazing. As you're saying all this,

1114
01:04:19,120 --> 01:04:21,360
Speaker 1: and as I just finished the thing that I'm saying,

1115
01:04:21,360 --> 01:04:25,800
Speaker 1: a Bloomberg story just dropped. Like as we were recording

1116
01:04:25,800 --> 01:04:27,960
Speaker 1: this episode, I'm just gonna read you. I haven't read

1117
01:04:28,000 --> 01:04:30,520
Speaker 1: the story. I'm just gonna read you the title. Facebook

1118
01:04:30,560 --> 01:04:39,920
Speaker 1: accused of watching Instagram users through cameras no fucking rules.

1119
01:04:39,920 --> 01:04:42,920
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's so good. Have we talked about

1120
01:04:42,960 --> 01:04:45,240
Speaker 1: that before though, because I have. I've had that issue

1121
01:04:45,240 --> 01:04:48,200
Speaker 1: with Instagram before where I'll close out Instagram and then

1122
01:04:48,200 --> 01:04:51,840
Speaker 1: you'll see the uh, the little section of your iPhone

1123
01:04:51,840 --> 01:04:55,800
Speaker 1: in the top left where where it indicates that you're

1124
01:04:55,960 --> 01:05:02,880
Speaker 1: being recorded. Uh, it goes it turns like when I listeners.

1125
01:05:02,920 --> 01:05:04,520
Speaker 1: Let me know if you've had a similar issue. Sometimes

1126
01:05:04,520 --> 01:05:06,720
Speaker 1: when I close Instagram, it looks like my phone just

1127
01:05:06,760 --> 01:05:09,160
Speaker 1: stopped recording, but it goes away really quickly. It's like

1128
01:05:09,160 --> 01:05:12,080
Speaker 1: I'm a mill a second that it's It happens all

1129
01:05:12,080 --> 01:05:16,200
Speaker 1: the time. So that is not shocking at all. It

1130
01:05:16,480 --> 01:05:20,680
Speaker 1: bury doo. I don't know what I'm going to actually

1131
01:05:20,720 --> 01:05:23,720
Speaker 1: title this Um, I don't know what I'm actually gonna

1132
01:05:23,760 --> 01:05:27,360
Speaker 1: title this episode. The working title that I started this

1133
01:05:27,480 --> 01:05:30,760
Speaker 1: under was Mark Zuckerberg needs to be tried in the

1134
01:05:30,840 --> 01:05:34,080
Speaker 1: Hague and hung in public until dead. But I don't

1135
01:05:34,160 --> 01:05:36,960
Speaker 1: think legal is gonna let me go with that title.

1136
01:05:37,920 --> 01:05:41,840
Speaker 1: I think it's clickable. I think it's clickable as Yeah,

1137
01:05:41,880 --> 01:05:44,480
Speaker 1: I think you'd get great engagement on that. Um, I

1138
01:05:44,480 --> 01:05:47,600
Speaker 1: mean that's what he'd want. Yeah, we may have to

1139
01:05:47,600 --> 01:05:49,520
Speaker 1: go with a different time. I mean, I'm not urging

1140
01:05:49,560 --> 01:05:51,760
Speaker 1: a legal behavior. I'm urging that he'd be tried in

1141
01:05:51,840 --> 01:05:55,240
Speaker 1: the International Criminal Court and then, once convicted, hung until

1142
01:05:55,280 --> 01:05:59,000
Speaker 1: the by the neck until dead for his crimes um,

1143
01:05:59,040 --> 01:06:02,280
Speaker 1: which is what you do when a world leader commits genocide,

1144
01:06:02,880 --> 01:06:07,240
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, it's true, But I probably won't title

1145
01:06:07,320 --> 01:06:10,560
Speaker 1: the episode that. I don't know. I mean, I'm glad

1146
01:06:10,560 --> 01:06:12,760
Speaker 1: you put it out there, though, let's let's not take

1147
01:06:12,760 --> 01:06:14,760
Speaker 1: it out of the running. Yeah, there's a number of

1148
01:06:14,760 --> 01:06:21,520
Speaker 1: other options. I mean, Mark Suckerberg continues to disrupt two

1149
01:06:21,600 --> 01:06:24,320
Speaker 1: hundred years of peace. There's so many options. I can't

1150
01:06:24,360 --> 01:06:26,439
Speaker 1: wait for the two hundred years of peace that only

1151
01:06:26,480 --> 01:06:30,640
Speaker 1: involved dozens of worse. Yeah, I mean it was if

1152
01:06:30,640 --> 01:06:33,200
Speaker 1: the two hundred years of piece began in two thousand

1153
01:06:33,280 --> 01:06:36,439
Speaker 1: and four, imagine how much peace we have to look

1154
01:06:36,480 --> 01:06:38,800
Speaker 1: forward to. I think it's similar to the amount of

1155
01:06:38,800 --> 01:06:44,560
Speaker 1: peace I brought that trailer park. There, this, this, this,

1156
01:06:44,800 --> 01:06:47,680
Speaker 1: you're you're you're a little sick. Oh, you're a little

1157
01:06:47,680 --> 01:06:53,800
Speaker 1: sick of I know it, I know it. Well, we're

1158
01:06:53,840 --> 01:07:04,520
Speaker 1: all gone be fine, Fine, We're gonna be great. Yeah

1159
01:07:04,840 --> 01:07:07,760
Speaker 1: you want to plug some ship? Yeah yeah, thank you

1160
01:07:07,800 --> 01:07:11,600
Speaker 1: for disrupting my life and intersense of peace once. It's

1161
01:07:11,680 --> 01:07:17,280
Speaker 1: always be disrupted. It's always been a pr You've always

1162
01:07:17,280 --> 01:07:21,600
Speaker 1: been a huge disruptor. And uh yeah, you can follow

1163
01:07:21,640 --> 01:07:26,680
Speaker 1: me on Twitter or Instagram, which is watching me right now. Uh.

1164
01:07:26,720 --> 01:07:31,400
Speaker 1: And then if you want to contribute to a candidate

1165
01:07:31,520 --> 01:07:36,080
Speaker 1: that I love, uh Fatima Ball Zubert. We're doing a

1166
01:07:36,120 --> 01:07:41,200
Speaker 1: live read of the Twilight Script this Friday evening, five

1167
01:07:41,280 --> 01:07:46,400
Speaker 1: pm Pacific. That sounds very exciting. It is something to

1168
01:07:46,480 --> 01:07:53,760
Speaker 1: do to distract yourself from the void. See you there,

1169
01:07:54,520 --> 01:08:00,160
Speaker 1: see you there, and I am going to be uh um,

1170
01:08:03,320 --> 01:08:06,800
Speaker 1: you know he's lost doing the thing that I normally do,

1171
01:08:07,040 --> 01:08:10,520
Speaker 1: which is staring into the Abyss and going, hey, hey,

1172
01:08:10,640 --> 01:08:14,920
Speaker 1: quit being an abyss. You really bumming us all out, Abyss.

1173
01:08:15,240 --> 01:08:17,720
Speaker 1: And the Abyss is like you and the abyss have

1174
01:08:17,920 --> 01:08:20,840
Speaker 1: great chemistry. We do, we do, And the Abyss has

1175
01:08:20,880 --> 01:08:23,080
Speaker 1: made me a lot of money, a lot of money,

1176
01:08:23,120 --> 01:08:26,280
Speaker 1: which is something that I feel very very conflicted about.

1177
01:08:26,520 --> 01:08:29,479
Speaker 1: The abysses is rich. That's the thing that Nietzsche missed

1178
01:08:29,520 --> 01:08:32,280
Speaker 1: is sometimes when you stare into the Abyss you get

1179
01:08:32,280 --> 01:08:36,200
Speaker 1: a six figure salary because it's incredibly profitable to talk

1180
01:08:36,240 --> 01:08:39,640
Speaker 1: about the Abyss on a podcast. Yeah, the Abyss has

1181
01:08:38,920 --> 01:08:44,920
Speaker 1: facial recognition software and it's pretending to be me elsewhere. Yeah, Jamie,

1182
01:08:44,960 --> 01:08:51,639
Speaker 1: the abyss loftus, that's what I've been called. You can

1183
01:08:51,720 --> 01:08:55,479
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where you're probably being

1184
01:08:55,520 --> 01:08:58,000
Speaker 1: watched at Bastard Pod. You can follow Robert on Twitter

1185
01:08:58,040 --> 01:09:01,000
Speaker 1: and I right, okay. You can buy stuff from our

1186
01:09:01,080 --> 01:09:06,000
Speaker 1: te public store and also the best Dolkasti public store, uh,

1187
01:09:06,120 --> 01:09:09,320
Speaker 1: where Jamie designs all the artwork for that and it's

1188
01:09:09,360 --> 01:09:15,960
Speaker 1: amazing And yeah, I think I covered everything. Wher hands

1189
01:09:16,560 --> 01:09:23,200
Speaker 1: wear a mask. Yeah, Bert, did I show you my

1190
01:09:23,360 --> 01:09:26,400
Speaker 1: bedazzled bolt cutters. I'll send you a picture of them

1191
01:09:26,600 --> 01:09:29,280
Speaker 1: by Bultcutters. No, I would love to see your bedazzle

1192
01:09:29,360 --> 01:09:31,400
Speaker 1: bowl cutter. Yeah I have. I have a pair of

1193
01:09:31,400 --> 01:09:34,479
Speaker 1: bolt cutters that are still usable but also mostly covered

1194
01:09:34,479 --> 01:09:38,559
Speaker 1: in red stones. I'll send it to you. Yeah, that's

1195
01:09:38,640 --> 01:09:44,519
Speaker 1: the episode. Hell yeah,