Speaker 1: Wrecked him. Damn near killed him. That was the punchline
Speaker 1: to a joke without the rest of the joke, because
Speaker 1: I think we can all put things together now as adults.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. Yeah, hi, Jamie, this is behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: We talk about bad people on this podcast. Um. And
Speaker 1: that was a little a little bit of levity at
Speaker 1: the start of it before we get into depressing ship again.
Speaker 1: Some abstract levity, some abstract levity. Yeah, pieces of levity
Speaker 1: that one can assemble into comedy. Um. Yeah, very nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean comedy. You know, it is just a series
Speaker 1: of things that you put in the correct order. It's
Speaker 1: like a deconstruction of comedy, like when people take up
Speaker 1: part of sandwich and then serve it on a plane
Speaker 1: in a fancy restaurant. I gotta be on it. Anytime
Speaker 1: someone says it's a deconstruction of comedy, it's the least
Speaker 1: funniest ship you'll ever hear in your entire life. Like
Speaker 1: he's deconstructing the medium, and it's usually just like some
Speaker 1: some guy. It's yeah, some guy. Yeah, it's never any good,
Speaker 1: but you know it is good. Jamie, what Facebook's peanut butter?
Speaker 1: I was like, this can't be a transition to Mark Zuckerberg, No,
Speaker 1: because nothing about him. Just talked about this delicious lunch
Speaker 1: he had as I eat, I had a great lunch
Speaker 1: and I'm eating a peanut butter and you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm content, Sophie is eating peanut butter. I ate a
Speaker 1: delicious lunch, love for you, had a couple of chips,
Speaker 1: and most important, most important, we're all going to get
Speaker 1: back to my favorite thing to do with my good
Speaker 1: friend Jamie Loftus, which is talk about the extensive crimes
Speaker 1: of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh yes, I changed shirts between episodes.
Speaker 1: Roberts and I have a little Marquis with me. Yeah
Speaker 1: you do, You've got your your your Marquez shirt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my favorite, my favorite Mark quote that you can't you
Speaker 1: can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way
Speaker 1: I live my life. Ha ha. It is amazing. And
Speaker 1: he really, I mean there's been a lot said about him,
Speaker 1: but the man sticks to his guns. He lives by
Speaker 1: this credo to this very day. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know who else sticks to their guns? Jamie whom the
Speaker 1: death squads of the various dictatorial political candidates who use
Speaker 1: Facebook to crush opposition and insight race riots. That was
Speaker 1: a transition. That was a transition. So Jamie, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start. It's time to start the episode, and
Speaker 1: gonna start with a little bit of a little bit,
Speaker 1: little well bit of an essay here. So once, once
Speaker 1: upon a decade or so ago, I had the fortune
Speaker 1: to to visit the ruins of a vast Mayan city
Speaker 1: in guatemality call Um. And the scale of the architecture
Speaker 1: there was astonishing. If you ever get the chance to
Speaker 1: visit one of these cities, you know, in Guatemala or
Speaker 1: in mexicoever really worth the experience. Um, Just again, the
Speaker 1: size of everything you see, the the the precision of
Speaker 1: the stonework. Um, it's just amazing. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that was most kind of stirring about it was
Speaker 1: the fact that everything that surrounded it was just hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of miles of dense, howling jungle. UM. So
Speaker 1: I spent like an afternoon there and I got to
Speaker 1: sit on top of one of these giant temple pyramids,
Speaker 1: drinking a one lead bottle of guy O beer and
Speaker 1: staring out over the jungle canopy and just kind of
Speaker 1: marveling at the weight of human ingenuity and dedication necessary
Speaker 1: to build a place like that sounds metaphorical, and while
Speaker 1: I was there, Jamie, I thought about what had killed
Speaker 1: this great city and the empire that built it, Because
Speaker 1: a couple of years earlier, really not all that long
Speaker 1: before I visited, theories had started to circulate within the
Speaker 1: academic community that the Mayans had, in the words of
Speaker 1: a NASA article in this subject in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: killed themselves through a combination of massy forestation in human
Speaker 1: induced climate change. A year after my visit, the first
Speaker 1: study on the matter was published in Proceedings of the
Speaker 1: National Academy of Sciences. I'm gonna call to hear from
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian magazine. Researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological
Speaker 1: data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding
Speaker 1: of the environmental conditions when the area was abandoned around
Speaker 1: this time. They found severe reductions in rainfall were coupled
Speaker 1: within a rapid rate of deforestation as the Mayans burned
Speaker 1: and shopped down more and more forests to clear land
Speaker 1: for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts of wood
Speaker 1: to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for
Speaker 1: their elaborate constructions, Experts estimated would have taken twenty trees
Speaker 1: to produce a single square meter of city escape. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, the Mayans grew themselves to death, turning
Speaker 1: the forests that fed them into deserts, all in the
Speaker 1: pursuit of expansion. It's a story that brings to mind
Speaker 1: a quote from the great historian Tacitus writing about Augustus
Speaker 1: Caesar and men like him solitudinum faciunt pack him appellante.
Speaker 1: They make a desert and call it peace. That's what
Speaker 1: he's saying about Augustus Caesar and the Emperor's like him.
Speaker 1: They make a desert and call it peace. That's That's
Speaker 1: one of those Sun dial phrases. I think a more
Speaker 1: accurate summation of the two hundred years of peace that
Speaker 1: Augustus Caesar created than than what Mark put out. They
Speaker 1: make a desert and call it peace. Now, I read
Speaker 1: that quote for the first time as a Latin student
Speaker 1: in high school, and I saw it referenced in relation
Speaker 1: to Mark Zuckerberg in a Guardian article covering that New
Speaker 1: Yorker piece. We quoted from last episode and the title
Speaker 1: of that New Yorker article was, can Mark Zuckerberg fixed
Speaker 1: Facebook before it breaks democracy? So democracy a free and
Speaker 1: open society where numerous viewpoints are tolerated, cultural experimentation is possible,
Speaker 1: and evolution is encouraged. These are the things that have
Speaker 1: made Facebook success possible. It could not have come about
Speaker 1: without them, um, and outside of a culture that embodies
Speaker 1: those values. And now that Facebook's member count is closing
Speaker 1: in at three billion, the social network is doing what
Speaker 1: all empires do. It's turning the fertile soil that birthed
Speaker 1: it into a desert. And as it was with the Mayans,
Speaker 1: all of this is being done in the name of growth.
Speaker 1: Katherine Lois was an early Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: speech writer for a time. In her memoire The Boy Kings,
Speaker 1: which is what you call it, sigured, I don't know
Speaker 1: that's a good title, um, she lays out what she
Speaker 1: saw as the engineering ideology of Facebook. Quote, scaling and
Speaker 1: growth are everything. Individuals and their experiences are secondary to
Speaker 1: what is necessary to maximize the system. Mark Zuckerberg and
Speaker 1: thus Facebook have held a very consistent line since day
Speaker 1: one of the company operating as an actual business, and
Speaker 1: that Lion is that Facebook's goal is to connect people,
Speaker 1: but this was and always has been a lie. The
Speaker 1: goal is growth, growth at the cost. In two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: Facebook's growth leveled off at around fifty million users. At
Speaker 1: the time, this was not unusual for social networks, and
Speaker 1: it seemed to be something of a built in natural
Speaker 1: growth limit, Like maybe fifty million is about as much
Speaker 1: as a social network can get unless you really start
Speaker 1: jinking the results um and fifty million users. That's a
Speaker 1: very successful business. You can be a very rich person
Speaker 1: operating a business. You can call it a day. That's
Speaker 1: a great thing to accomplish. My Space Tom was thrilled
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, my God, blessed Tom. Space Tom is
Speaker 1: now who hasn't done a goddamn problematic thing traveling the
Speaker 1: world now taking photographs of of of the world that
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg is destroying. I mean, he might be the
Speaker 1: only person worth hundreds of millions of dollars that I'm
Speaker 1: fine with not taking the money back, right, Like, let Tom,
Speaker 1: You're fine, Like go keep doing your things, use the
Speaker 1: money to be boring. It feels like he is just
Speaker 1: used his fortune to be boring. What is I remember
Speaker 1: it took like five months for me to get my
Speaker 1: my space to lead. So I don't remember anything about
Speaker 1: my space. That's my favorite thing about my space is
Speaker 1: I've forgotten everything about it but the name my space.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure my space was not good. But did
Speaker 1: I learn about a lot of goth music on it?
Speaker 1: Now I'm the middle school anchst from not being in
Speaker 1: somebody's top aid. But oh my god, PC four PC,
Speaker 1: I did a lot of PC that I'm my friend,
Speaker 1: you are so pretty PC four PC, And you know what,
Speaker 1: you know what? No one used my space for Jetta's
Speaker 1: side that organizing militia's to show up at the side
Speaker 1: of protests and shoot Black Lives Matter activists was not
Speaker 1: done with with with my space, and I suspect Tom
Speaker 1: would have had an issue if it had been. I think, so,
Speaker 1: I well, I don't well, I I don't know about
Speaker 1: Tom's but the fact that he's kept his fucking mouth
Speaker 1: shut since getting rich and going off to do whatever
Speaker 1: he does makes me suspect that he's a reasonable man.
Speaker 1: So Facebook hits this growth limit and it and it
Speaker 1: it kind of levels off a bit um And again,
Speaker 1: it's a very successful business in two thousand seven, but
Speaker 1: it's not an empire, and that's what Mark wanted. That's
Speaker 1: the only thing Mark has ever wanted um in his
Speaker 1: entire life. And so he ordered the creation of what
Speaker 1: he called a growth team, dedicated to putting Facebook back
Speaker 1: on the path to expansion, no matter what it took.
Speaker 1: So the Growth team quickly came to include the very
Speaker 1: best minds in the company, who started applying their intellect
Speaker 1: and ingenuity to this task. One solution they found was
Speaker 1: to expand Facebook to users who spoke other languages. And
Speaker 1: this is what began. We talked about last episode, the
Speaker 1: company's heedless growth into foreign markets. Obviously, at no point
Speaker 1: did anyone care or even consider what impact Facebook might
Speaker 1: have on those places. Yeah, I'm gonna quote from The
Speaker 1: New Yorker again. Alex Schultz, a founding member of the
Speaker 1: growth team, said that he and his colleagues were fanatical
Speaker 1: in their pursuit of expansion. You will fight for that inch,
Speaker 1: Alex said, You will die for that inch. Facebook left
Speaker 1: no opportunity untapped. In two thousand eleven, the company asked
Speaker 1: the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules requiring
Speaker 1: the source of funding for political ads to be disclosed
Speaker 1: and filings a Facebook lawyer argued that the agency should
Speaker 1: not stand in the way of innovation. Oh okay, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like an innovation to me, real loose interpretation
Speaker 1: of the word. You know, I get this to an extent.
Speaker 1: So the other day I was drunk driving my Forerunner,
Speaker 1: UM and I was I was, I was shooting at
Speaker 1: some targets I'd set up in the trees and the
Speaker 1: people in the neighborhood. I was doing this and said, oh,
Speaker 1: for the love of God, you're you're please, you're endangering
Speaker 1: all of our lives. Um, And I said, you're standing
Speaker 1: in the way of innovation because I was innovating what
Speaker 1: you can do drunk in a Forerunner with a kalashnikov,
Speaker 1: and they got in the way of that. I understand
Speaker 1: that I have to really heat up a pan and
Speaker 1: put it on someone's face just to innovate the art
Speaker 1: of what you you innovate their skins. Yeah, and and really,
Speaker 1: people standing in the way of that innovation. Am I
Speaker 1: supposed to make progress in hurting people's faces? Yeah? I'm
Speaker 1: a fan of how Polpod innovated the capital city of
Speaker 1: Cambodia by forcing everyone out of it and then killing
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of just it's just it's innovative. The
Speaker 1: way all of this is just horrific and like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, like I'm talking about something else, but it's
Speaker 1: like the language of Silicon Valley applied to the two
Speaker 1: genocidal situations is just so it makes my fucking I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just peeled all my skin off. You have to
Speaker 1: you have to agree that Hitler was an innovator. He
Speaker 1: innovated so many things. He really did change. He changed
Speaker 1: the game. Yeah, he absolutely changed the narrative from there
Speaker 1: not being a war in Europe to there being a
Speaker 1: war in Europe. That's called disrupting, Honey. He didn't disrupt it.
Speaker 1: He disrupted the ship out of the Polish government. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, doing this dinner wrong. So Sandy Parakilis, who
Speaker 1: joined Facebook in two thousand and eleven as an operations manager,
Speaker 1: paraphrase the message of the orientation session he received as
Speaker 1: we believe in the religion of growth. Um, the religion
Speaker 1: of growth is what he was told when he joined
Speaker 1: the company. That's what it was called him not only horrifying,
Speaker 1: but like, what could you sound like a more of
Speaker 1: a sniveling loser? Okay, he said quote the growth team
Speaker 1: was the Cure was the coolest. Other teams would even
Speaker 1: try to call subgroups within their teams the growth X
Speaker 1: or the Growth Y to try and get people excited. Um.
Speaker 1: And in the end, Facebook's finest minds decided that the
Speaker 1: best way they could I know, I know, yeah, I'm excited.
Speaker 1: I'm a horny, I'm ready to go. I mean with
Speaker 1: with that kind of narrative. I love to hear it.
Speaker 1: I love you do love to hear it. So in
Speaker 1: the end, Facebook's finest minds decided the best way they
Speaker 1: could further the great god of growth was too for
Speaker 1: Facebook to become a platform for outside developers. Um that
Speaker 1: this was the way to really really get things going again.
Speaker 1: And you will remember the start of this period when
Speaker 1: Facebook made this change. This is when like what had
Speaker 1: once been a pretty straightforward service for keeping up with
Speaker 1: your friends from college was suddenly flooded with games like
Speaker 1: Farmville and a bunch of like personality tests and ship
Speaker 1: that period of time, the mom's fucking drone struck Facebook
Speaker 1: by coming down with Farmville, sending you five trillion invitations,
Speaker 1: leaving your like high school choir concert to go harvest strawberries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm making a bunch of fucking money for Facebook. Whatever
Speaker 1: rance these apps took. Their main purpose was the same,
Speaker 1: which was to hoover up all of your personal data
Speaker 1: and sell it for profit. Yeah. I've given her a
Speaker 1: social security number to the Farmville and that's just a fact. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the only person you should give your social security
Speaker 1: number two is me. I do encourage all all of
Speaker 1: our listeners to find my email, um and just just
Speaker 1: email me your social uh yeah, just to just do
Speaker 1: your tips line. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's like that
Speaker 1: you like that thing from that that documentary about Keith
Speaker 1: Ranieri who also did episodes on the vow. It's your
Speaker 1: collaterals and me your social security number, so I'll know
Speaker 1: that you really care. Um. Yeah. So Facebook's employees kind
Speaker 1: of realized very quickly after this change was made and
Speaker 1: these developers start flooding the service with all of their
Speaker 1: ship um that the company's new partners were engaged in
Speaker 1: some really shady behavior. One worker who was put in
Speaker 1: charge of a team order to make sure developers weren't
Speaker 1: using user data immediately found out that they were. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the new Yorker. Here, some
Speaker 1: games were siphoning off users messages and photographs. In one case,
Speaker 1: he said, a developer was harvesting user information, including that
Speaker 1: of children, to create unauthorized profiles on its own website.
Speaker 1: Facebook had given away data before I had a system
Speaker 1: to check for abuse. Peraculis suggested that there be an
Speaker 1: audit to uncover the scale of the problem, but according
Speaker 1: to Paraculus, an executive rejected that idea, telling him, do
Speaker 1: you really want to see what you'll find? No, which
Speaker 1: look I can identify with that too. I recently had
Speaker 1: an issue where I left a bag of potatoes and
Speaker 1: the top counter of my of my kitchen for I
Speaker 1: don't know, somewhere between four and seven months, and when
Speaker 1: I took them I didn't want to. I knew something
Speaker 1: was wrong. I knew something was wrong up there because
Speaker 1: of the flies and the strange smell, but I didn't
Speaker 1: want to look into it because I didn't want to
Speaker 1: see the extent of the problem. And when I finally did,
Speaker 1: I regretted learning what an issue I had made for
Speaker 1: myself and my home. You are really since the last
Speaker 1: BO you've become very prone to a metaphor. I am
Speaker 1: I am a living metaphor. You you are living out
Speaker 1: an innovative. I innovated those potatoes. You distruct those potatoes.
Speaker 1: Works with a family magic. It's okay. We don't need
Speaker 1: to We don't need to talk about what a problem
Speaker 1: my life has become. Um Parakeelis told me the New
Speaker 1: Yorker reporter quote, it was very difficult to get the
Speaker 1: kind of resources that you needed to do a good
Speaker 1: job of ensuring real compliance. Meanwhile, you looked at the
Speaker 1: growth team and they had engineers coming out of their ears.
Speaker 1: All the smartest minds are focused on doing whatever they
Speaker 1: can do to get those growth numbers up. Now, Jamie
Speaker 1: Jamie Loft, I happened to read this quote well. I
Speaker 1: was struggling to work in the midst of unprecedented wildfires
Speaker 1: that devastated a huge amount of the state of Oregon
Speaker 1: um and made our air quality the worst in the
Speaker 1: world for a while. On the very day I read
Speaker 1: that article, four of my friends and journalistic colleagues were
Speaker 1: held and threatened at gunpoint by militiamen who had taken
Speaker 1: to the streets of a town very near Portland in
Speaker 1: the middle of an evacuation. Because viral Facebook memes convinced
Speaker 1: them that Antipho was starting the fires. Around the same
Speaker 1: time that this was happening, that my buddies were getting
Speaker 1: held at gunpoint because they were not white people. Uh,
Speaker 1: and a militia thought that was suspicious. Around that same time,
Speaker 1: a tweet went viral from a Portland resident and a
Speaker 1: former Facebook employee named bo Wrin. She posted a picture
Speaker 1: of the city blotted out by thick, acrid clouds of
Speaker 1: smoke and wrote, my dad sent me this view from
Speaker 1: my childhood room in Portland. It hit me that we
Speaker 1: have been wasting our collective intelligence in tech, optimizing for
Speaker 1: profits and ad clicks. Huhmm, glad you got on the
Speaker 1: on that page. Bow well glad. We I mean sometimes
Speaker 1: it just takes something to put it all in perspective,
Speaker 1: wouldn't you say, like your home burning down? Yeah? Sometimes,
Speaker 1: and the militias minutes from your door. Yes, unfu believable
Speaker 1: militias that organized on Facebook. Yeah, I mean the story
Speaker 1: went pretty viral about it. They weren't harmed, um yes,
Speaker 1: um yeah. The two people I knew best who were
Speaker 1: there were Sergio almost ingined almost In Justin Yao, who
Speaker 1: are both wonderful reporters, But yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 1: not lost on me that I think of the four
Speaker 1: people who were there, three of them were not white people. Um,
Speaker 1: and that some of the white reporters had a much
Speaker 1: easier time. Interesting things about militias you learn? Anyway, Do
Speaker 1: you think it makes you think? Now? I thought that
Speaker 1: quote was interesting? Um. Anyway, opening interesting, disruptive, disruptive, like
Speaker 1: the fires, like malicious. The thing has made me think
Speaker 1: when I could think, Yeah, I threw up in my
Speaker 1: d n mask walking down the street, awesome. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been jogging and doing pull ups in a gas mask. Um,
Speaker 1: just half naked in a gas mask in my front
Speaker 1: lawn like a normal person. You're the only person I
Speaker 1: know who would have seen this as a as a
Speaker 1: possible outcome. And for that, Um, for that, I thank
Speaker 1: you and I curse you. Yeah. So anyway, opening Facebook
Speaker 1: up to developers made a shipload of money and membership grew,
Speaker 1: and from Mark's point of view, everything was going great.
Speaker 1: But Catherine Katherine Loss, his speech writer, saw a lot
Speaker 1: of the same problems Parakeelis had seen, and in her
Speaker 1: memoir she writes the idea of providing developers with a
Speaker 1: massive platform for application promotion didn't exactly accord I thought
Speaker 1: with the site state admission of connecting people to me.
Speaker 1: Connection with another a person required intention. They have to
Speaker 1: personally signal that they want to talk to me, and
Speaker 1: vice versa. Platform developers, though, went it human connection from
Speaker 1: a more automated angle. They churned out applications that promised
Speaker 1: to tell you who had a crush on you if
Speaker 1: you would just send an invitation to the application to
Speaker 1: all of your friends. Idea was that after the application
Speaker 1: had a list of your contacts, it would begin the
Speaker 1: automated work of inquiring about people's interests in matching people
Speaker 1: who were interested in each other. Soon, developers didn't even
Speaker 1: ask you if you wanted to send invitations to your friends.
Speaker 1: Simply adding the application would automatically notify all of your
Speaker 1: Facebook friends that you had added it and invite them
Speaker 1: to add it to using each user as a vessel
Speaker 1: through which invitations would flow viral e without the user's consent.
Speaker 1: In this way, users needs for friendship and connection became
Speaker 1: a powerful engine of spam, as it already was with
Speaker 1: email and on the Internet long before Facebook. The same
Speaker 1: will tell you you have a crush on who has
Speaker 1: a crush on you if you just send this email
Speaker 1: to your address book. Ploys were familiar to me from Hopkins,
Speaker 1: when spammers would blank at the entire email server with
Speaker 1: emails in a matter of hours, spread violarly by students
Speaker 1: scullably entering the names of their crushes and their crushes
Speaker 1: email addresses. So this was the face. This was the
Speaker 1: start of Facebook making choices for its users, choices that
Speaker 1: were based on what would be best for the social network,
Speaker 1: which was keeping people on the site for as long
Speaker 1: as possible. The growth teams saw that proactively connecting people
Speaker 1: to each other worked out really well for Facebook's bottom line,
Speaker 1: even though sometimes, for example, people who had been horribly
Speaker 1: abused and raped by their spouses were reconnected to those
Speaker 1: spouses who they were hiding from and had their personal
Speaker 1: data exposed to them, a thing that happened repeatedly. Um
Speaker 1: and still happens repeatedly, you know. But that's a small
Speaker 1: price to pay for growth. For that inch, you gotta
Speaker 1: fight for that And sometimes fighting for that inch means
Speaker 1: connecting abused women to the men who horribly injured them.
Speaker 1: That's like Mark talking to Priscilla when they're trying to
Speaker 1: conceive a child. He's just like, you gotta fight for
Speaker 1: my inch, honey, you gotta fight for it. Oh. Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg is incapable of talking during sex um. He lets
Speaker 1: out a high pitched hum that is only audible to crickets.
Speaker 1: He doesn't. Yeah, he's sort of got a Kendall situation
Speaker 1: going on, whereas he just has a sex lump that
Speaker 1: gets really hot. Yeah. Yeah. She has to actually withdraw
Speaker 1: the semen from inside his sax using a needle. I think,
Speaker 1: actually put in a little a little hold on, hold on,
Speaker 1: hold on, okay, on the subject holding my vomit but
Speaker 1: in a syringe and then suck and then and then
Speaker 1: she just has it. And then she just has it.
Speaker 1: And if you want to have the emotional equivalent of
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg, seem no, that's not that's not fair to
Speaker 1: the products or services. It's not anyway. Here they are vomit.
Speaker 1: We're back, Okay. So in two thousand ten, Facebook launched
Speaker 1: Facebook Groups, which would allow just about anyone to create
Speaker 1: a private wald Off community to discuss just about anything,
Speaker 1: including fascism, white genocide, or the need to gather a
Speaker 1: militia together and use it to kill their political enemies.
Speaker 1: If you're a regular listener of my show, you know
Speaker 1: the next part of this story. From about two thousand
Speaker 1: ten to two thousand and sixteen, the United States saw
Speaker 1: an astonishing leap in the number of active hate groups.
Speaker 1: For some perspective, just from two thousand fifteen to two
Speaker 1: thou twenty, the SPLC estimates there were at increase in
Speaker 1: the number of hate groups nationwide. Um All of this
Speaker 1: growth was mostly spurred on by social media, and Facebook
Speaker 1: was one of the main culprits. And they knew they
Speaker 1: were at two. They didn't admit it openly, but internally
Speaker 1: they were talking about it from pretty early on. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a report in the All
Speaker 1: Street Journal. A two thousand sixteen presentation that names is
Speaker 1: author of Facebook. Researcher and sociologist monocha Ly found extremist
Speaker 1: content thriving and more than one third of large German
Speaker 1: political groups on the platform swamped with racist, conspiracy minded,
Speaker 1: and pro Russian content. The groups were disproportionately influenced by
Speaker 1: a subset of hyperactive users. The presentation notes most of
Speaker 1: them were private or secret. The high number of extremist
Speaker 1: groups was concerning the presentation says worse was Facebook's realization
Speaker 1: that it's algorithms were responsible for their growth. The two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen presentation says that sixty of all extremist group
Speaker 1: joins are due to our recommendation tools. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: most of the activity came from the platforms groups you
Speaker 1: should join and discover algorithms from the presentation, are recommendation
Speaker 1: systems grow the problem? Oh okay, Well, I mean as
Speaker 1: long the word grows in the sentence, I think that
Speaker 1: that's good enough. Growth is in there, You're good is
Speaker 1: in there? So really where we're growing and and what
Speaker 1: the consequences are? Not really worried about it. Yeah, It's
Speaker 1: just like when I'm in my Forerunner drunk is shipped
Speaker 1: on mescal and firing a collash to CoV All that
Speaker 1: matters is forward movement. It doesn't matter if that forward
Speaker 1: movement is driving through the trailer that a family lives in.
Speaker 1: What matters is that I'm moving forward and shooting and drunk.
Speaker 1: You're right, thank you? Wow a judgmental statement. I'm innovating
Speaker 1: homeownership there. I mean, this is another example of just
Speaker 1: you know, Facebook innovating people's interests, Like hey, do you
Speaker 1: do you enjoy this? I'm trying to think of the
Speaker 1: old Facebook groups that you used to be able to join,
Speaker 1: like ten years ago, where it would be like science
Speaker 1: is my boyfriend, and it's like enjoy the Smithsonian Institute.
Speaker 1: Like groups would be like Class of two thousand and twell,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. With like early I mean, it's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously very much in the same line of
Speaker 1: algorithmic thinking as YouTube, where it's like, oh, did you
Speaker 1: enjoy this, like collage of Gerard Butler images? How about
Speaker 1: a man sitting at his four runner whispering conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: for three hours on end? Yeah, that's just growth. I
Speaker 1: love growth. I love growth almost as much as I
Speaker 1: love everything that I do. With the Toyota four runner
Speaker 1: um hammered in a trailer park. Yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 1: real is innovating the trailer parks near my house with
Speaker 1: a Toyota and a rifle, just changing the narrative around it,
Speaker 1: changing the narrative around it, um to screaming mainly. So yeah,
Speaker 1: throughout right, So throughout two thousand sixteen, uh, and particularly
Speaker 1: in the wake of the election, a lot of Facebook
Speaker 1: employees began to increasingly express their concerns that the social
Speaker 1: network they were pouring their lives into might be tearing
Speaker 1: the world a right, because again, most of these are
Speaker 1: very nice and intelligent people who don't want to live
Speaker 1: in a planet dominated by nightmarish dictatorships and a complete
Speaker 1: collapse in the understanding of truth that allows, for example,
Speaker 1: viral pandemics to spread long after where they should have spread,
Speaker 1: because people don't have any sort of common conception about
Speaker 1: basic reality UM as a result of the influence of
Speaker 1: social media. They don't like that, they like the people
Speaker 1: who work at Facebook kind of bummed out about contributing
Speaker 1: to that UM. One observer at the time reported to
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal, there was this soul searching period
Speaker 1: after these thousand sixteen that seemed to me, this period
Speaker 1: of really sincere, oh man, what if we really did
Speaker 1: mess up the world? And two thousands sixteen? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that We're going from in the forties, like
Speaker 1: like the scientist who does this, who does the same thing,
Speaker 1: going now, I am become death, the destroyer of world
Speaker 1: an appropriate comment for the thing that he had done,
Speaker 1: and then something honestly equivalent in its destructive potential UM.
Speaker 1: But the response this time because everything is tacky. Now, oh,
Speaker 1: what if we messed up the world, we might have
Speaker 1: sucked this up? God, like starting to think we've severely
Speaker 1: fucked up the planet never mind, Like, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: why Aaron Sorkin is still working is because people are
Speaker 1: saying shitty stuff in shitty ways. Yeah, I don't you
Speaker 1: should cut that out history. No, No, let's we connect.
Speaker 1: We should never cut out criticizing histories. Real villain Aaron Sorkin,
Speaker 1: who I call the poll pot of cable television. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This soul searching did not extend to Mark Zuckerberg, who
Speaker 1: after the election gave the order to pour even more
Speaker 1: resources into Facebook groups. Marking that feature out is emblematic
Speaker 1: of what he saw is the future of his sight.
Speaker 1: He wrote a six thousand and word manifesto in two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen which admitted to playing some role in the
Speaker 1: disinformation in bigotry flooding the body politics. So he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we did, we had we had something to do with it. Um.
Speaker 1: He also claimed that Facebook was going to start fighting
Speaker 1: against this by fostering safe in meaningful communities. From CNBC quote,
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg noted that more than a hundred million users were
Speaker 1: members of very meaningful Facebook groups, but he said that
Speaker 1: most people don't seek out groups on their own. There
Speaker 1: is a real opportunity to connect more of us with
Speaker 1: groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg wrote at the time, if we can improve our
Speaker 1: suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities,
Speaker 1: that can strengthen our social fabric. Since then, fascinating use
Speaker 1: of the word meaningful, meaningful, meaningful, meaningful. What happened next
Speaker 1: was terrible and predictable and meaningful, Jamie, very meaningful. A
Speaker 1: flood of new users got introduced and even pushed into
Speaker 1: extremist groups on Facebook that changes are consisted upon have
Speaker 1: been critical to the growth of q and on, which
Speaker 1: was able to break containment from the weird parts of
Speaker 1: the Internet and start infecting the minds of our aunts
Speaker 1: and uncles, thanks mostly to Facebook, which took no action
Speaker 1: against it until like a month or two ago. Within
Speaker 1: two years, Facebook hosted thousands of q and on pages
Speaker 1: with tens of millions of collective members. I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: now from an NBC News investigation on the matter. Facebook
Speaker 1: has been key to q and On's growth, in large
Speaker 1: part due to the platform's groups feature, which is also
Speaker 1: seen a significant uptick in use since the social network
Speaker 1: began emphasizing it in two thousands seventeen. There are tens
Speaker 1: of millions of active groups, a Facebook spokesperson told NBC
Speaker 1: News in two thousand nineteen, a number that has probably
Speaker 1: grown since the company began serving up group group posts
Speaker 1: in the user's main feeds. Well. Most groups are dedicated
Speaker 1: to innocuous content. Extremists from q and on conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: to anti vaccination advocates have also used the group's feature
Speaker 1: to grow their audiences and spread misinformation. Facebook aided that
Speaker 1: growth with it with its recommendations feature, powered by a
Speaker 1: c great algorithm that suggests groups to users seemingly based
Speaker 1: on interest and existing group membership and growth and growth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's funny. There's one of the things I like about
Speaker 1: this NBC report, which is partly authored by Brandy's at Rosne,
Speaker 1: who has done a lot of great work on this subject,
Speaker 1: um is uh, they kind of talk about how profitable
Speaker 1: spreading dangerous fascist content is for Facebook. Quote. A small
Speaker 1: team working across several of Facebook's departments found a hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty five ads that the company had accepted praising, supporting,
Speaker 1: or representing q and on. According to an internal post
Speaker 1: shared among more than four employees, the ads generated about
Speaker 1: twelve dollars for Facebook and four million impressions in the
Speaker 1: last thirty days. Well you have to imagine, like they
Speaker 1: have to if if they're doing the math of what
Speaker 1: I mean, it has to be financially profitable because it
Speaker 1: has to offset the cost of the pr hits that
Speaker 1: they know that they're going to take for ship. So
Speaker 1: there and again, it's just as signing yes, a signing
Speaker 1: of is to uh lives and and and brains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is a good thing to do. Seems reasonable, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems fair to me. Yeah. Um so yeah. Outside Facebook,
Speaker 1: the only people who really noticed what was happening initially
Speaker 1: were a handful of researchers that studied extremist groups. Um
Speaker 1: and I wasn't really one of them until like two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen that I realized Facebook groups specifically were a problem.
Speaker 1: Was obviously that Facebook was the issue, but the um
Speaker 1: I wasn't until Facebook group kept threatening to kill me
Speaker 1: for two years. Yeah that did happen to you? Huh?
Speaker 1: That did happen to me? Yeah? If you have a
Speaker 1: listener her my year in menso podcast What are you
Speaker 1: doing there? Thankfully, the people threatening to kill you were
Speaker 1: just members of MENSA who I trust are not competent
Speaker 1: enough to pull off an assassination. I mean, don't challenge them,
Speaker 1: but let's hope. So no, this I'm throwing down the
Speaker 1: Gautensd're like, no, no, no, I don't think they could
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, sorry, so, um yeah. I didn't really
Speaker 1: grasp the scale of the problem with Facebook groups and
Speaker 1: specific until two thousand nineteen when I started really looking
Speaker 1: into the Boogaloo movement UM, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: camouflaged because there was just so much fascist content everywhere
Speaker 1: on Facebook. UM that the fact that groups in specific
Speaker 1: we're driving a lot of the expansion of fascism in
Speaker 1: this country kind of got lost in the noise. But
Speaker 1: there were other researchers who started to realize this early on,
Speaker 1: and workers inside Facebook realized what was happening right away,
Speaker 1: and two eighteen they held a meeting for Mark and
Speaker 1: other senior leadership members to reveal their troubling findings. From
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal quote, a Facebook team had a
Speaker 1: blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing
Speaker 1: people together, they were driving people apart. Quote. Our algorithms
Speaker 1: exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Read a slide
Speaker 1: from a two thousand eighteen presentation. If left on checked,
Speaker 1: it warned Facebook would feed users more and more divisive
Speaker 1: content and an effort to gain user attention and increase
Speaker 1: time on platform. So that presentation went to the heart
Speaker 1: of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding, does
Speaker 1: its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it
Speaker 1: found in some cases was yes. In some case, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess that's technically accurate. In some cases yeah. So Facebook,
Speaker 1: in response to this meeting, starts like a massive internal
Speaker 1: effort to try to figure out like how its platform
Speaker 1: might be harming people, and Mark Zuckerberg in public and
Speaker 1: private around this time, started talking about his concern that
Speaker 1: sensationalism and polarization we're being enabled by Facebook. Into Mark's credit,
Speaker 1: he made his employees do something about that phrase, yeah
Speaker 1: a little bit to his credit. It's okay, we'll take
Speaker 1: away the credit in just a second. Um so quote.
Speaker 1: Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to
Speaker 1: rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the projects
Speaker 1: forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized user engagement, a
Speaker 1: metric involving time spent like shares and comments that for
Speaker 1: years had been the loadstar of its system, championed by
Speaker 1: Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time, in
Speaker 1: a top debt beauty to Mr Zuckerberg. The work was
Speaker 1: carried out over much of two thousands, seventeen and eighteen
Speaker 1: by engineers and researchers assigned to a cross jurisdictional task
Speaker 1: force dubbed common Ground, and employees and a newly created
Speaker 1: newly created integrity teams embedded around the company. Integrity teams
Speaker 1: sounds good to me. It sounds reliable. It sounds like
Speaker 1: they made sure that integrity was accomplished via teamwork. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the common Ground team proposed a number of solutions,
Speaker 1: and to my ears, some of them were actually pretty good.
Speaker 1: One proposal was basically to um uh like to to
Speaker 1: kind of try to take conversations that were derailing UH groups,
Speaker 1: like conversations over hot button political issues, and exercise them
Speaker 1: from those groups. So basically, if if a couple of
Speaker 1: members of a Facebook group started fighting, about vaccinations, and
Speaker 1: like a group based around parenting, the moderators would be
Speaker 1: able to make a temporary subgroup for the argument to
Speaker 1: exist in so that other people, like the Zoom breakout room. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that other people wouldn't be expect which I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's a great idea, but it was something.
Speaker 1: Another idea that I do think was better was to
Speaker 1: tweak recommendation algorithms um to give people a wider range
Speaker 1: of Facebook group suggestions. Um. Yeah. But it was kind
Speaker 1: of determined that doing these things uh would probably help
Speaker 1: with polarization, but would come at the cost of lower
Speaker 1: user engagement and less time spent on site, which the
Speaker 1: common Ground team warned about in a two thou eighteen
Speaker 1: document that described some of their own proposals as anti
Speaker 1: growth and requiring Facebook to take a moral stance. Guess
Speaker 1: how that all went. Yeah, marks Uckerberg almost immediately lost interest. Um.
Speaker 1: Some of this. A lot of this is probably due
Speaker 1: to the fact that it would harm Facebook's growth, But
Speaker 1: another culprit that, like employees who talked to the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal and other publications repeatedly mentioned is the fact
Speaker 1: that he was all but heard about how journalists were
Speaker 1: reporting on Facebook because after the Cambridge analytic A scandal,
Speaker 1: they kept writing mean things about him. Mr Well, Mr
Speaker 1: Marc always has to ask himself, what would what would
Speaker 1: bad haircut Emperor do? And that the haircut Emperor wouldn't
Speaker 1: you know, wouldn't slow down? And this ship absolutely not.
Speaker 1: One person was familiar with the situation told The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal, the internal pendulum swung really hard to the
Speaker 1: media hates us no matter what we do, So let's
Speaker 1: just batten down the hatches. But January of Mark's feelings
Speaker 1: had hardened enough that he announced he would stand up
Speaker 1: quote against those who say that new types of communities
Speaker 1: forming on social media are dividing us. According to the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, people who have heard him speak, I've
Speaker 1: at least say he argues social media bears little responsibility
Speaker 1: for polarization. Now there may be an additional explanation from
Speaker 1: marks shifting opinions on the matter that go beyond being
Speaker 1: just greedy and angry about bad press. And that explanation
Speaker 1: is a fella named Joel Kaplan. Do you know Joel Kaplan?
Speaker 1: You ever heard of this? Dude? I don't know this
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan character. Well, in short, he's the goddamn devil.
Speaker 1: Um long, he's the guy that Facebook hired to head
Speaker 1: up US Public Policy in two thousand eleven, and he
Speaker 1: became the VP of Global Public Policy in two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: And Joel was picked for these jobs because, unlike most
Speaker 1: Facebook employees, he is a registered Republican with decades of
Speaker 1: experience and government. This made him the perfect person to
Speaker 1: help the social network deal with allegations of anti conservative
Speaker 1: bias as little empathy as possible. I'm sure. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and sixteen, there's all these rumors that Facebook
Speaker 1: is like censoring conservative content that are proven to be untrue,
Speaker 1: but the rumors go viral on the right, and so
Speaker 1: everyone on the right forever assumes that they were true.
Speaker 1: Um And basically, Joel becomes increasingly influential after this point
Speaker 1: because he's Mark Zuckerberg's best way out of angering the
Speaker 1: right wing, which you actually can't not do because they're
Speaker 1: they're always angry, and we'll just yell about everything until
Speaker 1: they get to kill everyone who wasn't them, because that's
Speaker 1: what life finds a way for that. So Joel was
Speaker 1: a policy advisor for George W. Bush's two thousand campaign
Speaker 1: and a participant in the Brooks Brothers riot, which is
Speaker 1: the thing that was orchestrated by Roger Stone to help
Speaker 1: hide a bunch of ballots in Florida that he was
Speaker 1: a part of that. That's the guy who's basically running
Speaker 1: Facebook's response to partisanship right now. I have a physical
Speaker 1: reaction to that. It's awesome, so upset. He worked in
Speaker 1: the White House for basically the whole Bush administration, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six he took over Carl Rob's job.
Speaker 1: So if you visualized Joe Kaplan, he's the guy you
Speaker 1: get when you can't get car Old Rove anymore. He's
Speaker 1: Mr Carl Rove wasn't when the worst person in the
Speaker 1: world is like, I can't do this job anymore. Joe
Speaker 1: Kaplan's like, I got you. I got you famous monsters,
Speaker 1: Like I'm trying to srub some ship over here, infamous
Speaker 1: piece of ship, Carl Rove, don't worry. I will continue
Speaker 1: your good work. I am Joe Kaplan and now I
Speaker 1: basically run Facebook. And if you google him, Google has
Speaker 1: enlisted as American Advocate. Yeah, he is an advocate of things.
Speaker 1: I was like, I was like, again, I guess more
Speaker 1: specific don't enjoy his face, just put it out there.
Speaker 1: Joe is one of the most influential voices in Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's world, and he was one of the most influential
Speaker 1: voices in the entire company when the common Ground team
Speaker 1: came back with their suggestions for reducing partisanship. As policy chief,
Speaker 1: you had a lot of power to approve these new changes,
Speaker 1: and he argued against all of them. His main point
Speaker 1: was that the proposed changes were, in his words, paternalistic um.
Speaker 1: He also said that basically babying people. He also said
Speaker 1: that these changes story, yeah, be a daddy story. I
Speaker 1: can't there daddy stories that end in a genocide. Robert, Well, God,
Speaker 1: if it makes you feel any better, all the genocides
Speaker 1: that this is going to lead to, heaven happened yet?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, well there you go. He yeah. So. Joel
Speaker 1: also said that these changes would disproportionately impact conservative content
Speaker 1: because it tends to be bigotted, a divisive. Since the
Speaker 1: Trump administration was at this point regularly tossing threats at Facebook,
Speaker 1: this had some weight. Quote from Wall Street Journal, Mr
Speaker 1: Kaplan said in a recent interview that he and other
Speaker 1: executives had approved certain changes meant to improve civic discussion.
Speaker 1: In other cases where proposals were blocked, he said he
Speaker 1: was trying to instill some discipline, rigor, and responsibility into
Speaker 1: the progress as he vetted the effectiveness in potential unintended
Speaker 1: consequences of changes to how the platform operated internally, The
Speaker 1: vetting process earned a nickname eat your Veggies No, which
Speaker 1: sounds paternalistic to me. Actually sounds like the beginning of
Speaker 1: a daddy story that ends in a genocide. Wow. Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll get back to Joe Caplan in a little bit.
Speaker 1: For now, we need to talk some more about the
Speaker 1: problem of violent of how we want to talk about
Speaker 1: how the problem of violent extremism on Facebook groups got
Speaker 1: completely out of control. So this summer, which was marked
Speaker 1: by constant militia rallies, the explosive growth of the Boogaloo movement,
Speaker 1: numerous deaths as a result of violent far right actors
Speaker 1: showing up at protests with guns, Facebook finally took action
Speaker 1: in late September to ban militias from using their service
Speaker 1: because they have to be balanced. They also banned anarchists
Speaker 1: from Facebook at the same time, even though anarchists have
Speaker 1: not been tied to any acts of fatal terrorism in
Speaker 1: recent memory. Um, because you know, you gotta placate the
Speaker 1: right wing, because they're the only ones who matters. So
Speaker 1: let's play. Let's let's ban the anarchists who have been
Speaker 1: spending the last four years trying to lay out the
Speaker 1: individual actors and groups who are members of these militias
Speaker 1: that are doing stuff like taking over checkpoints and holding
Speaker 1: my friends at gunpoint. We wouldn't one of the folks
Speaker 1: who were keeping track of them to be able to
Speaker 1: use Facebook. That's the wrong kind of disruptive, you see.
Speaker 1: That's the wrong kind of disrruptive and advocating. You know,
Speaker 1: that's very similar to what the dude and that trailer
Speaker 1: said when I was driving my Forerunner through his trailer
Speaker 1: and shooting towards his children. Not at um. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell I'll tell you what I told him. What did
Speaker 1: What did you say? I'm an innovator, Mark, I don't know.
Speaker 1: That didn't really tie into it worked for me. I
Speaker 1: could see it. I could see it in kind of
Speaker 1: an ozarchy kind of way. I could see Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Uh. Mark. By the way, Uh is on record
Speaker 1: declaring that Facebook is a guardian of free speech which
Speaker 1: is one of the things he did when he refused
Speaker 1: noted that he was refusing to fact check political ads.
Speaker 1: In so, anarchists who want to talk about operating a
Speaker 1: communal garden or you know, share details about dangerous militias
Speaker 1: are the same as militiamen baying for the blood of protesters.
Speaker 1: But political candidates spreading malicious lies about protesters who are
Speaker 1: being assaulted and killed based on those lies. That is fine.
Speaker 1: Back to Facebook growth or anything like that. Let's get
Speaker 1: back to Facebook's integrity teams, and they're doomed quests to
Speaker 1: stop their boss from destroying democracy. So the engineers and
Speaker 1: data scientists on these teams in chief like mainly like
Speaker 1: the guys who are working on the news feed. Uh
Speaker 1: they yeah, they accorded to the Wall Street Journal arrived
Speaker 1: at the polarization problem indirectly. Um asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait,
Speaker 1: and in authentic users. The employees looked for ways to
Speaker 1: diminish the reach of such ills. One early discovery bad
Speaker 1: behavior came disproportionately from a small of hyperpartisan users um now.
Speaker 1: Another finding was that the US saw a larger infrastructure
Speaker 1: of accounts and publishers that met this definition on the
Speaker 1: far right than the far left, UM and outside observers
Speaker 1: documented the same phenomenon. The gap meant that seemingly a
Speaker 1: political action, such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines
Speaker 1: along the title of you won't believe what happened next, uh,
Speaker 1: it meant that, like, doing this stuff affected conservative speech
Speaker 1: more than liberal speech. Now, yeah, and obviously this piste
Speaker 1: off conservatives. The way that Facebook works means that users
Speaker 1: who posted an engage with the site more have more influence.
Speaker 1: The algorithm sees if you're posting a thousand times a
Speaker 1: week instead of fifty, it likes that engagement because engagement
Speaker 1: means money, and so it prioritizes your content over the
Speaker 1: content of someone who posts less often. This means that
Speaker 1: a bunch of networks of Russian bots and hyperactive or
Speaker 1: like Ian Miles Chong who's a fascist troll who lives
Speaker 1: in fucking Malaysia and tweets about how like everybody needs
Speaker 1: to have a that they can use to shoot democrats
Speaker 1: even though guns are legal in his country, and like
Speaker 1: makes like did very recently miss anyway, total piece of
Speaker 1: ship that that that these pieces of ship um who
Speaker 1: are actively attempting to urge violence, and who have urged
Speaker 1: violence and cause death mobs in other countries. It means
Speaker 1: that these people, because they're just shotgunning out hundreds of
Speaker 1: posts per day, will always be more influential than local
Speaker 1: journalists and reporters who are trying to bring out factually
Speaker 1: based information, because it's better for Facebook for a stream
Speaker 1: of lies to spread on their platform than a smaller
Speaker 1: amount of truth. Yeah. And it also lends itself to
Speaker 1: just never like to be releasing contents so quickly that
Speaker 1: you couldn't possibly disprove or fact check things fast enough,
Speaker 1: because there's just it's just a bullshit machine. Yeah uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, Facebook's teams found that most of these
Speaker 1: hyperactive accounts were way more partisan the normal Facebook users,
Speaker 1: and we're more likely to appear suspicious, like to engage
Speaker 1: in suspicious behavior that suggested either a bunch of people
Speaker 1: working in shifts or there were bots. So these these teams,
Speaker 1: these integrity teams did like the thing that has integrity,
Speaker 1: which was they suggested their company fixed the algorithm to
Speaker 1: not reward this kind of behavior. Now, this would lose
Speaker 1: the company a significant amount of money. And since most
Speaker 1: of these hyperactive accounts were right wing and nature it
Speaker 1: would piss off conservatives. So you can imagine how this
Speaker 1: idea went over with Joel Kaplan. Uh. Since Mark was
Speaker 1: terrified of right wing anger, he tended to listen to
Speaker 1: Joel about these sort of things. Joel's daddy and the
Speaker 1: eat your veggies policy review process stymied and killed any
Speaker 1: movement on halting this problem. So, well, how do we
Speaker 1: feel about that? We feel we feel great, We feel good.
Speaker 1: Glad that's in charge, Glad everyone's eating their veggies. I mean,
Speaker 1: even just the dystopian nature of like mobilizing these teams
Speaker 1: to be like, hey, I've ruined the world. Do you
Speaker 1: think you could stop it before it blows up? Because
Speaker 1: this is going to be a real pr issue. Why
Speaker 1: would you do that? Just of luck to the team.
Speaker 1: There was another case where because basically the only way
Speaker 1: to combat this stuff is to have another person Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg respects or is at least scared of yelling at
Speaker 1: him um or you know, talking politely to him. The
Speaker 1: daddies of the world opposite of whatever John Kaplan is saying.
Speaker 1: And there, thankfully was someone like that in Facebook. They
Speaker 1: hired in two thousands seventeen, Carlos Gomez Uribe, who was
Speaker 1: the former head of Netflix's recommendation system, which is obviously
Speaker 1: made a lot of money for Netflix. So this guy,
Speaker 1: Carlos Uribe is a big important get for Facebook. UM.
Speaker 1: So he gets on staff and he immediately is like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this looks like we might be destroying the world, and
Speaker 1: so he starts pushing to reduce the impact that hyperactive
Speaker 1: users had on Facebook. Um and one of the proposals
Speaker 1: that his team championed was called sparing sharing, which would
Speaker 1: have reduced the spread of content that was favored by
Speaker 1: these hyperactive users. UM and this would obviously have had
Speaker 1: the most impact on content favored by far right and
Speaker 1: far left users. Um And number one, there's more far
Speaker 1: right users on Facebook than far left, so that was
Speaker 1: going to disproportionately impact them. But the people who mainly
Speaker 1: would have gained influence were political moderates. UM. Mr Uribe
Speaker 1: called it the the happy Face. That's what he called
Speaker 1: this plan, and Facebook's data scientists thought that it might
Speaker 1: actually like it might actually help fight the kind of
Speaker 1: spam efforts that Russia was doing in two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: But Joe Kaplan and other Facebook executives pushed back because yeah,
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to say because you know, Max UiB,
Speaker 1: you couldn't like you had to be careful arguing with
Speaker 1: some instead of saying this will be bad for money
Speaker 1: or it'll make the right angry at us. Joe Kaplan
Speaker 1: invented a hypothetical girl Scout troupe, and he asked, what
Speaker 1: would happen if the girls became Facebook super sharers as
Speaker 1: part of a cookie selling program. That sounds like a
Speaker 1: metaphor you would do at the big of an episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was like, basically like, what if these girl scouts
Speaker 1: made a super successful account to so their cookies? Like,
Speaker 1: we would be unfairly hurting them if we stopped these
Speaker 1: people who are baying for the deaths of their fellow
Speaker 1: citizens and gathering militias to their banner. Okay, I hear you,
Speaker 1: but what about fictional girls girl scouts? Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker 1: So the debate between Mr aib and Um and Joel
Speaker 1: Kaplan eventually did make it to Mark Zuckerberg. He had
Speaker 1: to make a call on this one because both of
Speaker 1: them were kind of big names in the company. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mark listened to both sides and he took the coward's
Speaker 1: way out. He approved Ureb's plan, but he also said
Speaker 1: they had to cut the weighing by eight percent, which
Speaker 1: mitigated most of the positive benefits of the plan. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After this, Mark, according to the Wall Street Journal quote,
Speaker 1: signaled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate
Speaker 1: the platform in the name of social good, asking that
Speaker 1: they not bring him something like that again. Neat two
Speaker 1: years apiece, Mark, do that that has big two hundred
Speaker 1: years of pieces, big two d years of piece energy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nineteen, uh Mark announced that Facebook would
Speaker 1: start taking down content that violated specific standards, but would
Speaker 1: take a hands off approach to policing material that didn't
Speaker 1: clearly violate as standards. In a speech to Georgetown that October,
Speaker 1: he said, you can't impost tolerance top down. It has
Speaker 1: to come from people opening up, sharing experiences and developing
Speaker 1: a shared story for society that we all feel we're
Speaker 1: a part of. That's how we make progress together. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's like that is just such a wild
Speaker 1: way of saying, like, I don't feel I am accountable
Speaker 1: for this, and once again I'm going to delegate this
Speaker 1: to the users. Of the people brains. I'm actively ruining
Speaker 1: You know what makes progress harder in my opinion, Jamie
Speaker 1: Products and services. No, no, when fascists are allowed to
Speaker 1: spread lies about disadvantaged in endangered groups to tens of
Speaker 1: millions of angry and armed people because your company decided
Speaker 1: sites like The Daily Caller and Breitbart are equivalent to
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. This is something Facebook did when, at
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan's behest, it made both companies Facebook news partners.
Speaker 1: These are the folks that Facebook trust to help them
Speaker 1: determine what stories are true. Um, they get money from Facebook,
Speaker 1: they get an elevated position in the news feed. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: On an unrelated note, earlier this year, Breitbart News shared
Speaker 1: a video that promoted bogus coronavirus treatments and told people
Speaker 1: that masks couldn't prevent the spread of the virus. This
Speaker 1: video was watched fourteen million times in six hours before
Speaker 1: it was removed from Breitbart's page. They removed it presumably
Speaker 1: because it violated Facebook policy, and Facebook has a two
Speaker 1: strike policy for its news partners sharing misinformation within a
Speaker 1: ninety day period. When Mark was asked why Breitbart got
Speaker 1: to be a Facebook trusted partner while spreading misinformation about
Speaker 1: an active plague that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Speaker 1: Mark held up the two strike policy as a shield. Quote.
Speaker 1: This was certainly one strike against them FIR misinformation, but
Speaker 1: they don't have others in the last ninety days. So
Speaker 1: by the policies we have, which by the way, I
Speaker 1: think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense to remove them. That's pretty great, Jamie, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: But you know what's even better about physical and unethical
Speaker 1: but still legal, ha ha. What's even better about this
Speaker 1: is that Breitbart absolutely violated Facebook policies more than two
Speaker 1: times in ninety days, and it was covered up. That's
Speaker 1: what's even better. Yeah, you have to imagine Breitbart is
Speaker 1: violating Facebook policies multiple times a day like the happlin
Speaker 1: have some heide it. Yeah, that is such. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's awesome, it's awesome. I'm going to read actually by
Speaker 1: citing an incredible report by BuzzFeed, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: all credit to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, and I think you know BuzzFeed,
Speaker 1: And I've cited a number of great articles, including that
Speaker 1: one from The Wall Street Journal, which is really important.
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed has probably been of all of the different media
Speaker 1: companies the most dedicated and like hounding Facebook like a
Speaker 1: fucking dog with a groin fetish. I don't know how to.
Speaker 1: I'm very proud of Buzzfeeds reporting on Facebook. Thank you
Speaker 1: for keeping on this one, y'all. Good work from my head.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm gonna quote from this report on the
Speaker 1: fact that uh Facebook fraudulently hid the fact that one
Speaker 1: of their information partners was violating their own policies and
Speaker 1: spreading this information about an active plaque. And then and
Speaker 1: then you need to take an adbreak, just you know,
Speaker 1: I'll take an ad break now. Well, we'll get we'll
Speaker 1: get we'll get to this afterwards. Because if there's one
Speaker 1: thing that prepares me to hear about how democracies, both
Speaker 1: in the nation I live and around the world are
Speaker 1: being actively murdered for the profit of a man who's
Speaker 1: already a billionaire, there's one thing that makes that easier
Speaker 1: to take. It's products and services. It's the sweet lullaby
Speaker 1: of a product or service. Ah, Nothing nothing keeps me
Speaker 1: going gets me intellectually hard like a product or a service.
Speaker 1: I want to be surrounded. I want to die surrounded
Speaker 1: by my most beloved products and services. I have a
Speaker 1: feeling that you will, because there's a good chance that
Speaker 1: a horrible wildfire will sweep through the city you live in.
Speaker 1: And sorry, that's getting too dark mine too, maybe, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as it to say, I'm like, hey, as long as
Speaker 1: we're on the same same page there, that's great, And
Speaker 1: it's okay if we make it out of that fire.
Speaker 1: Facebook cool. And sure there's lots of armed and misinformed
Speaker 1: militias waving guns wildly in the areas we attempt to
Speaker 1: evacuate through. Well, as long as my death will have
Speaker 1: been completely in vain. Yes, that's what Facebook promises for
Speaker 1: all of us, and that's what products and services promise
Speaker 1: for all of us. Here we go, Oh, all right,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we're talking about how Facebook covered up
Speaker 1: the fact that Briitbart was repeatedly spreading this information that
Speaker 1: should have gotten them removed as a trusted partner quote
Speaker 1: from BuzzFeed. Some of Facebook's own employees gathered evidence they
Speaker 1: say shows Brightbart along with other right wing outlets and figures,
Speaker 1: including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond
Speaker 1: and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University has
Speaker 1: received special treatment that helped it avoid running a foul
Speaker 1: of company policy. They see it as part of a
Speaker 1: pattern of preferential treatment for right wing publishers and pages,
Speaker 1: many of which have alleged that the social network is
Speaker 1: biased against conservatives. On July, Facebook employee posted a message
Speaker 1: to the company's internal misinformation policy group noting that some
Speaker 1: misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook,
Speaker 1: seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. A Brightbart escalation marked
Speaker 1: urgent end of day was resolved in the day, with
Speaker 1: all misinformation strikes against Breitbart's page and against their domain
Speaker 1: cleared without explanation, the employee wrote. The same employees set
Speaker 1: up partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from
Speaker 1: Charlie Kirk was flagged for priority escalation by Joel Kaplan,
Speaker 1: the company's vice president of Global public Policy. Now, the
Speaker 1: whole article itself details just a ton of other instances
Speaker 1: in this, and it's all incredibly shady. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go into all of it and tremendous detail because
Speaker 1: we are running out of time, But if you read
Speaker 1: the article, it's extremely clear that Joel Kaplan is directing
Speaker 1: Facebook to actively violate the company's own policies in order
Speaker 1: to keep right wing bullshit peddlers spreading lies on the
Speaker 1: platform for profit. Kaplan has faced no punishment for this,
Speaker 1: although his behavior did provoke outrage from employees in in
Speaker 1: Facebook's internal chat system applied to Daddy, that's how it goes.
Speaker 1: Facebook employees are be getting angrier and angrier at this
Speaker 1: sort of thing throughout the year. Remember back in May
Speaker 1: when President Trump posted this message to Twitter and Facebook
Speaker 1: vote There is no way, zero that mail and ballots
Speaker 1: will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed,
Speaker 1: Ballots will be forged and even illegally printed out and
Speaker 1: fraudulently signed. The governor of California is sending ballots to
Speaker 1: millions of people. Anyone living in the state, no matter
Speaker 1: who they are, how they got there, will get one
Speaker 1: that will be followed up with professionals telling all of
Speaker 1: these people, many of whom have never even thought of
Speaker 1: voting before, how and for whom to vote. This will
Speaker 1: be a rigged election no way. I do remember that
Speaker 1: Robert Twitter too. Again, it's unbeliod like like the mildest
Speaker 1: I could possibly give someone credit to that level of credit.
Speaker 1: Twitter fact checked the president's tweet, which was not nothing,
Speaker 1: and that's all I'll say about it. Marginally, that does
Speaker 1: not qualify as nothing. Again, that qualifies as the most
Speaker 1: responsible action that's made. A social media ceo. Took Mark,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, refused to let his employees do
Speaker 1: anything similar, allowing the president's flagrant misinformation to circular aid
Speaker 1: on his network. This enraged employees, and they got angrier
Speaker 1: when his when the Looting Starts the Shooting Starts post
Speaker 1: was let up. They created a group in workplace, their
Speaker 1: internal chat app, called Let's Fix Facebook parentheses the company.
Speaker 1: It now has about ten thousand members. One employee started
Speaker 1: a poll asking colleagues whether they agreed quote with our
Speaker 1: leadership's decisions this week regarding voting, misinformation and posts that
Speaker 1: may be considered to be inciting violence. A thousand respondents
Speaker 1: said the company had made the wrong decision on both posts,
Speaker 1: which is more than twenty times the number of responses
Speaker 1: who said otherwise. So. Facebook employees after this staged a
Speaker 1: digital walk out uh and they like changed their workplace
Speaker 1: avatars to a black and white fist and called out
Speaker 1: sick uh in mass, hundreds of them and stuff. Um
Speaker 1: and you know, yeah, I'm gonna quote from BuzzFeed again here.
Speaker 1: As Facebook grappled with yet another public relations crisis, employee
Speaker 1: morale plunged. Worker satisfaction metrics measured by mic A Pols
Speaker 1: surveys that are taken by hundreds of employees every week
Speaker 1: fell sharply after the ruling on Trump's looting post. According
Speaker 1: to data and obtained by BuzzFeed on June one, the
Speaker 1: day of the walkout, about forty five percent of employees
Speaker 1: said they agreed with the statement that Facebook was making
Speaker 1: the world better, down twenty five percentage points from the
Speaker 1: week before. That same day, Facebook's internal survey has showed
Speaker 1: that around forty four percent of employees were confident in
Speaker 1: Facebook leadership leading the company in the right direction, a
Speaker 1: thirty percentage point dropped from responses to that question have
Speaker 1: stayed around the lower mark as of earlier this month,
Speaker 1: so pretty significant drop and faith in the company from
Speaker 1: its employees. Um and yeah. Zuckerberg, the ultimate decision maker,
Speaker 1: according to Facebook's head of communications, initially defended his decision
Speaker 1: to leave Trump's looting post up without even hiding it
Speaker 1: like with a warning like Twitter, Mark stated quote, Unlike Twitter,
Speaker 1: we do not have a policy of putting a warning
Speaker 1: in front of posts that may incite violence, because we
Speaker 1: believe that if a post insights of violence, it should
Speaker 1: be removed, regardless of whether or not it's newsmorthy, even
Speaker 1: if it comes from a politician. So you have to
Speaker 1: wait for their to be violence and study and then
Speaker 1: be like, oh, it turns out that post was actually
Speaker 1: very bad and we should take it down. There I
Speaker 1: get the amount of bodies that he needs attached to
Speaker 1: do a single thing is staggering. Four days later, Mark
Speaker 1: backtracked from BuzzFeed quote. In comments at a company wine
Speaker 1: meeting on June two that were first reported by recode. Facebooks,
Speaker 1: founders said the company was considering adding labels to post
Speaker 1: from world leaders that incite violence. He followed that up
Speaker 1: with the Facebook post three days later, in which he
Speaker 1: declared black lives matter and made promises that the company
Speaker 1: would review policies on content discussing excessive use of police
Speaker 1: or state force. What material effect does any of this have,
Speaker 1: one employee asked in workplace, openly challenging the CEO commitments
Speaker 1: to review offer nothing material has anything changed for you
Speaker 1: in a meaningful way? Are you at all willing to
Speaker 1: be wrong here? Mark didn't respond to this, but on
Speaker 1: the sly a month of June. Nearly a month later,
Speaker 1: he posted a clarification to his remarks, noting that any
Speaker 1: post that is determined to be inciting violence will be
Speaker 1: taken down. Employee dissatisfaction has continued to swell over the
Speaker 1: course of the summer. One senior employee, Max Wang, even
Speaker 1: recorded a twenty four minute long video for his colleagues
Speaker 1: and BuzzFeed and another article has the all the audio
Speaker 1: for this, It's worth listening to. In the video, Max
Speaker 1: outlines why he can't morally justify working for Facebook anymore,
Speaker 1: and he's a pretty early employee. I think his video
Speaker 1: quotes at length from books on totalitarianism by Hannah Arrent,
Speaker 1: who was one of like the great scholars of the Holocaust. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He shared the video on workplace with a note that started,
Speaker 1: I think Facebook is hurting people at scale? Yes, yes, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: it is absolutely yeah. Yeah. Like Emperor Augustus who had
Speaker 1: members of his own family killed for disobedience, Mark did
Speaker 1: not like being questioned and gasp dista proved of by
Speaker 1: his own employees. On Juno leventh, he hosted a life
Speaker 1: Q and A where he delivered a message to employees
Speaker 1: who were angry at his enabling of hideously violent fascist rhetoric.
Speaker 1: This is a lot of this isn't like I think
Speaker 1: response to yeah, the killings and such. I've been very
Speaker 1: worried about the level of disrespect and in some cases
Speaker 1: of vitriol that a lot of people in our internal
Speaker 1: community are directing towards each other as part of these debates.
Speaker 1: If you're bullying your fellow colleagues into taking a position
Speaker 1: on something, then we will fire you. Mm hmm, well,
Speaker 1: uh good. You know. The the amount of consistency I mean,
Speaker 1: you gotta appreciate it that. I'm really glad that employee
Speaker 1: I mean just spoke directly about because it's like, at
Speaker 1: what point, truly, what do you have to lose, Like
Speaker 1: I guess except for your life depending on how Mark
Speaker 1: Zacher wants to go about it. But I mean, it's
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it is. It is so frustrating,
Speaker 1: even though it's like I don't know what else to
Speaker 1: do other than you know, whatever, some some ship and minecraft.
Speaker 1: But because people are continually waiting for this person and
Speaker 1: this company to act in the best interest. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's not when has it ever happened? Name a time,
Speaker 1: even in the face of like the most brutal public disapproval.
Speaker 1: There's too much. It's amazing. As you're saying all this,
Speaker 1: and as I just finished the thing that I'm saying,
Speaker 1: a Bloomberg story just dropped. Like as we were recording
Speaker 1: this episode, I'm just gonna read you. I haven't read
Speaker 1: the story. I'm just gonna read you the title. Facebook
Speaker 1: accused of watching Instagram users through cameras no fucking rules.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's so good. Have we talked about
Speaker 1: that before though, because I have. I've had that issue
Speaker 1: with Instagram before where I'll close out Instagram and then
Speaker 1: you'll see the uh, the little section of your iPhone
Speaker 1: in the top left where where it indicates that you're
Speaker 1: being recorded. Uh, it goes it turns like when I listeners.
Speaker 1: Let me know if you've had a similar issue. Sometimes
Speaker 1: when I close Instagram, it looks like my phone just
Speaker 1: stopped recording, but it goes away really quickly. It's like
Speaker 1: I'm a mill a second that it's It happens all
Speaker 1: the time. So that is not shocking at all. It
Speaker 1: bury doo. I don't know what I'm going to actually
Speaker 1: title this Um, I don't know what I'm actually gonna
Speaker 1: title this episode. The working title that I started this
Speaker 1: under was Mark Zuckerberg needs to be tried in the
Speaker 1: Hague and hung in public until dead. But I don't
Speaker 1: think legal is gonna let me go with that title.
Speaker 1: I think it's clickable. I think it's clickable as Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you'd get great engagement on that. Um, I
Speaker 1: mean that's what he'd want. Yeah, we may have to
Speaker 1: go with a different time. I mean, I'm not urging
Speaker 1: a legal behavior. I'm urging that he'd be tried in
Speaker 1: the International Criminal Court and then, once convicted, hung until
Speaker 1: the by the neck until dead for his crimes um,
Speaker 1: which is what you do when a world leader commits genocide,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, it's true, But I probably won't title
Speaker 1: the episode that. I don't know. I mean, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you put it out there, though, let's let's not take
Speaker 1: it out of the running. Yeah, there's a number of
Speaker 1: other options. I mean, Mark Suckerberg continues to disrupt two
Speaker 1: hundred years of peace. There's so many options. I can't
Speaker 1: wait for the two hundred years of peace that only
Speaker 1: involved dozens of worse. Yeah, I mean it was if
Speaker 1: the two hundred years of piece began in two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, imagine how much peace we have to look
Speaker 1: forward to. I think it's similar to the amount of
Speaker 1: peace I brought that trailer park. There, this, this, this,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're a little sick. Oh, you're a little
Speaker 1: sick of I know it, I know it. Well, we're
Speaker 1: all gone be fine, Fine, We're gonna be great. Yeah
Speaker 1: you want to plug some ship? Yeah yeah, thank you
Speaker 1: for disrupting my life and intersense of peace once. It's
Speaker 1: always be disrupted. It's always been a pr You've always
Speaker 1: been a huge disruptor. And uh yeah, you can follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter or Instagram, which is watching me right now. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then if you want to contribute to a candidate
Speaker 1: that I love, uh Fatima Ball Zubert. We're doing a
Speaker 1: live read of the Twilight Script this Friday evening, five
Speaker 1: pm Pacific. That sounds very exciting. It is something to
Speaker 1: do to distract yourself from the void. See you there,
Speaker 1: see you there, and I am going to be uh um,
Speaker 1: you know he's lost doing the thing that I normally do,
Speaker 1: which is staring into the Abyss and going, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: quit being an abyss. You really bumming us all out, Abyss.
Speaker 1: And the Abyss is like you and the abyss have
Speaker 1: great chemistry. We do, we do, And the Abyss has
Speaker 1: made me a lot of money, a lot of money,
Speaker 1: which is something that I feel very very conflicted about.
Speaker 1: The abysses is rich. That's the thing that Nietzsche missed
Speaker 1: is sometimes when you stare into the Abyss you get
Speaker 1: a six figure salary because it's incredibly profitable to talk
Speaker 1: about the Abyss on a podcast. Yeah, the Abyss has
Speaker 1: facial recognition software and it's pretending to be me elsewhere. Yeah, Jamie,
Speaker 1: the abyss loftus, that's what I've been called. You can
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where you're probably being
Speaker 1: watched at Bastard Pod. You can follow Robert on Twitter
Speaker 1: and I right, okay. You can buy stuff from our
Speaker 1: te public store and also the best Dolkasti public store, uh,
Speaker 1: where Jamie designs all the artwork for that and it's
Speaker 1: amazing And yeah, I think I covered everything. Wher hands
Speaker 1: wear a mask. Yeah, Bert, did I show you my
Speaker 1: bedazzled bolt cutters. I'll send you a picture of them
Speaker 1: by Bultcutters. No, I would love to see your bedazzle
Speaker 1: bowl cutter. Yeah I have. I have a pair of
Speaker 1: bolt cutters that are still usable but also mostly covered
Speaker 1: in red stones. I'll send it to you. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the episode. Hell yeah,