Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kurk, and this is next question.
Speaker 1: In September of twenty twenty one, The Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: began to roll out a series of eleven stories that
Speaker 1: would have a major impact on the way people think
Speaker 1: about technology companies. The series was called The Facebook Files,
Speaker 1: and the source for the series maybe one of the
Speaker 1: biggest journalistic treasure troves of the century, was a former
Speaker 1: Facebook product manager named Francis Hogan. Francis had only been
Speaker 1: at Facebook for a couple of years, but during that
Speaker 1: time she became increasingly alarmed by a disturbing pattern.
Speaker 2: The only data that we get out of these companies
Speaker 2: is how many users do they have? How much time
Speaker 2: do you spend, how the ads do you book on?
Speaker 2: What's that revenue? You don't get the societal costs that
Speaker 2: come as a consequence.
Speaker 1: It seemed that Facebook was prioritizing their own profits over
Speaker 1: public safety and putting people's lives at risk. So she
Speaker 1: blew the whistle. She made tens of thousands of pages
Speaker 1: of internal documents available to The Wall Street Journal. And
Speaker 1: what happened next testifying before the US Congress, the UK
Speaker 1: and EU parliaments, and filing a complaint with the sec
Speaker 1: exposed the depths that the tech company would go to
Speaker 1: to mislead the public and grow its bottom line. Now,
Speaker 1: Francis has written a book. It's called The Power of One.
Speaker 1: How I found the strength to tell the truth and
Speaker 1: why I blew the whistle on Facebook, And I'm very
Speaker 1: glad that it's brought her to next question. First of all, Francis,
Speaker 1: it's great to finally meet you. I am a huge
Speaker 1: admirer of yours, so.
Speaker 2: Excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's been quite a ride for you since
Speaker 1: you became the Facebook whistleblower in October of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: now a year and a half or so later. How
Speaker 1: are you feeling? Are you happy that you came forward?
Speaker 1: Do you have any regrets? Would you do it all
Speaker 1: over again?
Speaker 2: You know, when I originally came forward, I had very
Speaker 2: very basic goals, like I wanted to not have to
Speaker 2: carry a secret that I thought had the potential to
Speaker 2: really impact the lives of others. I came forward because
Speaker 2: I was concerned about how Facebook was operating in African
Speaker 2: countries in Southeast Asia, and I then and still genuinely
Speaker 2: believe that if we continue to operate the way we do,
Speaker 2: there are millions of lives on the line from things
Speaker 2: like ethnic violence. But the world has changed a lot
Speaker 2: since I came out. I was really shocked last week
Speaker 2: when the Surgeon General issued his advisory on social media
Speaker 2: and mental health for kids. I've been amazed at how
Speaker 2: just knowing that these companies knew these harms were real
Speaker 2: across a wide variety of harms has really galvanized the
Speaker 2: activist community. It's caused legislative conversations around the world that
Speaker 2: were pretty stalled for a long time. And so if
Speaker 2: I could do it again, I would totally do it again.
Speaker 2: I've been incredibly fortunate and how smooth it's gone, and
Speaker 2: it's exceeded my wildest expectations.
Speaker 1: You've written a book about your experiences. Why did you
Speaker 1: want to take pen to paper, fingers to laptop and
Speaker 1: share your story with the world.
Speaker 2: One of the things that kind of baffles tech journalists
Speaker 2: when I talk to them is because tech journalists live
Speaker 2: in a little bit of an echo chamber. You know,
Speaker 2: like our classic criticism of tech is tech lives in
Speaker 2: an echo chamber. Tech journalists also live in an echo chamber.
Speaker 2: A little bit when I say to them, you know,
Speaker 2: when I take flights. You know, I'm a friendly person.
Speaker 2: I'm one of those annoying people that talks to their
Speaker 2: seed mates.
Speaker 1: I did that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's amazing. At least half the people I
Speaker 2: sit next to you have never heard of the Facebook whistleblower.
Speaker 2: And so it's one of these things where culture change,
Speaker 2: and that's the thing that we really need. We need
Speaker 2: to reset our relationship with these companies. It takes a
Speaker 2: long time, and this book, I'm hoping helps a much
Speaker 2: much larger set of people, much more diverse set of
Speaker 2: people get a seat at the table, but kind of
Speaker 2: laying out, like what are the conversations we need to
Speaker 2: be having, Like what are the choices we get to
Speaker 2: make in the next few years, because we are in
Speaker 2: a moment of inflection and we need to have as
Speaker 2: many informed people at the table as possible.
Speaker 1: You know, you talk about the Vic Murphy, the Surgeon
Speaker 1: General issuing a warning about the dangers of social media
Speaker 1: for kids. Other people becoming more aware, and I'm just
Speaker 1: curious if you feel this way. But for me, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like, what took so long? This doesn't take
Speaker 1: a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist, or a tech expert
Speaker 1: to know that people were becoming have become incredibly addicted
Speaker 1: to social media. Tristan Harris was sounding the alarm after
Speaker 1: he left Google. All kinds of experts were saying, this
Speaker 1: is dangerous. Why did it take so long for this
Speaker 1: to really become headline news.
Speaker 2: One of the things I talk about in my book is,
Speaker 2: you know, what's the difference between say, the car industry
Speaker 2: and like the automotive industry and social media when it
Speaker 2: comes to our ability to hold it accountable or or
Speaker 2: our ability to understand it. Back in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: it's going to sound shocking. There were no seatbelts in cars,
Speaker 2: no airbags. I remember that, Yeah, Like I listened to
Speaker 2: like my parents still stories about the kids all like
Speaker 2: jumbling all over each other in the back of the
Speaker 2: station wagon, and it's like, really, wow, a different world.
Speaker 2: We now put eight year olds in car seats, right.
Speaker 2: But the world changed very suddenly when a guy named
Speaker 2: Ralph Nader came out with a book called Unsafe at
Speaker 2: Any Speed. And what really changed was that people didn't
Speaker 2: realize that there was the ability to live in a
Speaker 2: different world. You know, that our fatality rate today is
Speaker 2: way less per mild driven for cars because of a
Speaker 2: long series of actions. But the thing that people need
Speaker 2: to understand is when when Ralph Nator published that book.
Speaker 2: You know, there were one hundred thousand automotive engineers in
Speaker 2: the world when I came forward. I think they were
Speaker 2: on in order, probably three hundred or four hundred people
Speaker 2: in the world who really understood how systems like facebooks work.
Speaker 2: And of those people, you know, we are educated in
Speaker 2: such narrow ways, I think a lot of those people
Speaker 2: didn't understand the larger societal consequences of those choices and decisions.
Speaker 2: And so Ralph Nader could have a chorus of automotive
Speaker 2: engineers all say this is happening. When it comes to
Speaker 2: social media, each of us sees a different world. You know,
Speaker 2: for many, many, many people who would be the ones
Speaker 2: asking those questions. When they open social media, they see
Speaker 2: their friends and family who are likely relatively similar to themselves.
Speaker 2: You know, the idea that Facebook could be radically different,
Speaker 2: radically more dangerous in a place like an African country
Speaker 2: or in Southeast Asia, it sounds foreign to us. Were
Speaker 2: like social media is about looking at pictures of cats,
Speaker 2: and so I think that's a big part of it,
Speaker 2: Like we need to be able to have the right
Speaker 2: to study social media, We need to have the right
Speaker 2: to be able to get independent data off these systems,
Speaker 2: because then we can have definitive conversations.
Speaker 1: Is that because we're not having a universal experience. It's
Speaker 1: a highly deeply personalized experience for everyone. So it's not
Speaker 1: as if we're all driving cars. We're all on different vehicles,
Speaker 1: if you will. So it's not unifying people to realize
Speaker 1: that they have to demand change.
Speaker 2: It's really important for people to understand just how different
Speaker 2: those worlds are in terms of transparency. And that's part
Speaker 2: of why I wrote the book. You know, I've I've
Speaker 2: got to live a lot of that arc of how
Speaker 2: we write software or like what does it mean to
Speaker 2: have experiences online? And I wanted to walk people through,
Speaker 2: you know, this is what changed from step to step
Speaker 2: to step so that more people have that context.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, Francis, I know you weren't super psyched
Speaker 1: to go to Facebook. When did you realize we're not
Speaker 1: in Kansas anymore? Something is awry.
Speaker 2: It was interesting, like when they reached out to me,
Speaker 2: I was like the only thing I work on is misinformation.
Speaker 2: You know. It's interesting. I got there and I think
Speaker 2: one of the first moments where I was like, wow,
Speaker 2: this is this is chaotic is to the role I
Speaker 2: had is something called a product manager. So product managers
Speaker 2: are responsible for helping articulate what is the problem we're
Speaker 2: trying to solve, how might we solve that, and then
Speaker 2: once we come to consensus on a solution, what's this
Speaker 2: series of engineering tasks that will allow us to execute
Speaker 2: that solution. I had a role of being a product manager.
Speaker 2: And Facebook understood that they were a different enough company
Speaker 2: that they had seen that if people came in from
Speaker 2: the outside, they didn't succeed at a very high rate,
Speaker 2: like there was a lot of churn, and so they
Speaker 2: established a boot camp for two full weeks to just
Speaker 2: give kind of a basic level of like heire's how
Speaker 2: Facebook works. And my manager pulled me out of it
Speaker 2: with a like three days. He was like, we're you know,
Speaker 2: things aren't fired too much, Like we have to come
Speaker 2: up with a plan for the next six months, even
Speaker 2: though you know nothing about the problem or what's going on,
Speaker 2: Like we need you an articulative plan. Now. That was
Speaker 2: kind of my first warning that I was like, oh, wow,
Speaker 2: like the house is on fire. The house is on fire,
Speaker 2: and people are running around, even having the self awareness
Speaker 2: to be like, oh, we know that if people don't
Speaker 2: get at least a certain amount of bootstrapping. Facebook is
Speaker 2: very hard to figure out, even internally, how it works.
Speaker 2: And it was interesting. I showed up for that first meeting,
Speaker 2: you know, the one that my managers like urgently pushing
Speaker 2: me to prepare for, and we spent twenty minutes basically
Speaker 2: discussing should I have a job? So imagine you show up,
Speaker 2: You've just gotten hired for this thing, and all the
Speaker 2: leadership you're saying is like, why why do you have
Speaker 2: a team? Like why does this team exist? Like think
Speaker 2: about that for a moment. You know, because activists have
Speaker 2: told you, because the un told you, Hey, and me
Speaker 2: and Mark, your negligence around misinformation killed twenty four thousand people.
Speaker 2: You know of a problem. And yet I could sit
Speaker 2: in a room full of the leadership of safety having
Speaker 2: them be like shouldn't this team exist? Right? You can
Speaker 2: imagine that first six months was a little stressful.
Speaker 1: What was Facebook doing in the lead up to the events?
Speaker 1: On January sixth, we'll talk about that right after this,
Speaker 1: we're back with Francis Hogan, Facebook whistleblower and author of
Speaker 1: the Power of Want. Francis, did Facebook really care about
Speaker 1: misinformation or did the company just feel like dealing with
Speaker 1: it was an exercise and futility.
Speaker 2: I think part of the problem was that Facebook had
Speaker 2: taken the most obvious path to deal with misinformation, which was,
Speaker 2: let's hire experts, let's hire journalists to help us assess
Speaker 2: what's true and false. But that kind of approach, you know,
Speaker 2: fixing safety after the fact, like, oh, we've already hyper
Speaker 2: amplified you know, extreme content. Now we're going to pluck
Speaker 2: out the dangerous parts. Those strategies don't scale. You know,
Speaker 2: Facebook has three billion users. There were maybe a few
Speaker 2: thousand fact checks being done a month, maybe a few thousand.
Speaker 2: You can see why you actually need to take a
Speaker 2: different kind of approach, which is coming in and saying,
Speaker 2: why are the algorithms rewarding extreme content? How do we
Speaker 2: change our operations to deal with that fact?
Speaker 1: As they say, lies make it around the world before
Speaker 1: the truth has the chance to tie its shoes, And
Speaker 1: so what was the alternative? What would that approach it?
Speaker 1: Ben I mean, what is the answer.
Speaker 2: Let's take, for example, something as simple as should you
Speaker 2: have to click on a link before you reshare it,
Speaker 2: so you hit the nail on the head. One of
Speaker 2: the problems with third party fact checking is journalism takes time.
Speaker 2: At Facebook, on average, it was like two or three
Speaker 2: days for someone to write a fact check, and they
Speaker 2: put a huge amount of effort into trying to build
Speaker 2: prediction systems to guess which are the pieces of content
Speaker 2: that might go viral, because we have to give the
Speaker 2: journalists a head start. Alternatives are things like if you
Speaker 2: require people to click on a link before they reshare it,
Speaker 2: that reduces misinformation by like ten or fifteen percent, just
Speaker 2: because people have to pause and think for a moment.
Speaker 2: You know, there's one or two billion people on Facebook
Speaker 2: who live in places where Facebook is the internet. You know,
Speaker 2: they might have become literate to use Facebook, and as
Speaker 2: a result those places. In some countries, thirty five percent
Speaker 2: of everything you see on your news feed is a
Speaker 2: reshare and so Facebook wasn't willing to take the hit
Speaker 2: of you know, zero point one point two percent less
Speaker 2: profit of reducing the amount of content that was moving
Speaker 2: through the ecosystem. As a whole. So those are kinds
Speaker 2: of product design ways of dealing with misinformation.
Speaker 1: Our third party fact checker still the primary way Facebook
Speaker 1: is ostensibly trying to combat miss and disinformation.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know like because we have no transparency.
Speaker 2: You know, right now, we don't have any trend parency
Speaker 2: into how these book operates. We know that Mark fired
Speaker 2: lots and lots of safety people during his year of efficiency,
Speaker 2: so it's possible that things have changed, but given his
Speaker 2: recent behavior, it's unlikely things have materially changed.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about sort of the public facing explanation from Facebook.
Speaker 1: I interviewed Cheryl Samberg in twenty nineteen when you were
Speaker 1: still working at Facebook. I asked her if she felt
Speaker 1: like Facebook was doing enough to invest in its security.
Speaker 1: Let's take a listen and let's hear your reaction to
Speaker 1: what Cheryl told me.
Speaker 3: We've put tremendous engineering resources, and we're doing things like
Speaker 3: red teams, asking what do we think the bad guys
Speaker 3: would do and how would we do it? So we're
Speaker 3: never going to fully be ahead of everything. But if
Speaker 3: you look at if you want to understand what companies
Speaker 3: care about, you look at where they invest their resources
Speaker 3: and if you look back three to five years and
Speaker 3: you look at today, we've totally changed when we invest
Speaker 3: our resources. And my job has changed too. If I
Speaker 3: look at up at Facebook eleven and a half years,
Speaker 3: for the first eight or so, I spent most of
Speaker 3: my time growing the company and sometime protecting the community.
Speaker 3: We always did some protection, but now that's definitely flipped.
Speaker 3: My job is a majority building the systems that protect
Speaker 3: and minority grow. And so we're definitely changing as a company.
Speaker 3: We're in a different place across the board on all
Speaker 3: of these things.
Speaker 1: Do you think you're changing enough fast enough?
Speaker 3: I hope, so we're trying.
Speaker 1: What's your reaction to that, Francis, It's.
Speaker 2: So interesting when we listen to media, you know, a
Speaker 2: film clip, an audio clip from the past, you know,
Speaker 2: you can often hear the emotional echoes of that moment.
Speaker 2: And I think back in twenty nineteen, she's quite earnest,
Speaker 2: like the only part of Facebook that was growing was
Speaker 2: the civic Integrity team. I think twenty nineteen was the
Speaker 2: year that the UN report on Menmark came out and
Speaker 2: you know, firmly placed blame on Facebook. They were still
Speaker 2: living right in the immediate echoes of Cambridge Analytico for context,
Speaker 2: right about when when you interviewed her, that would have
Speaker 2: been when the FTC find Facebook five billion dollars because
Speaker 2: of privacy violations from Cambridge Alica. But over the course
Speaker 2: of the next two years or even the next year,
Speaker 2: I think Facebook began to realize that having a big
Speaker 2: safety team, having people with PhDs asking questions was putting
Speaker 2: Facebook in a quite awkward position because the more people
Speaker 2: dug in, the more people having the ability to ask questions,
Speaker 2: they found things, and they found things that were quite disturbing.
Speaker 2: I think they did a pretty good job in the
Speaker 2: run up to the twenty twenty election, but as soon
Speaker 2: as the twenty twenty election passed, they fired that team,
Speaker 2: the Civic Integrity team.
Speaker 1: One month after the election, yeah, one month, and of
Speaker 1: course five weeks later was when the Trump supporters, many
Speaker 1: of whom organized on Facebook, stormed the US capital.
Speaker 2: And I think part of what happened was their papers
Speaker 2: in the Facebook files. They say like, we saw all
Speaker 2: this building up. But I think because now no single
Speaker 2: person was responsible, no one felt like they had the
Speaker 2: authority to go in there and intervene.
Speaker 1: Where do you draw the line? And nobody has a
Speaker 1: crystal ball to say these people are going to do that.
Speaker 2: Facebook talks about the difference between movements and we are
Speaker 2: to knows adversarial movements. So an adversarial movement knows that
Speaker 2: they're violating Facebook's policies and actively does countermeasures to try
Speaker 2: to get around Facebook. That's one we differentiate between, like,
Speaker 2: does this movement think they're doing something wrong? Right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And you saw that extensively with Stop the Seal.
Speaker 1: If the Facebook Civic Integrity Team had not been disbanded
Speaker 1: less than one month after the election, what would they
Speaker 1: have seen and what would they have done with the
Speaker 1: activity they witnessed going on on the platform.
Speaker 2: In the round of the twenty twenty election, there were
Speaker 2: a number of things in place where Facebook said, hey,
Speaker 2: we know we have vulnerability in our system. For example,
Speaker 2: live videos. This is where you know, I can film
Speaker 2: something on my phone and Facebook will put a little
Speaker 2: announcement at the top of people's feeds. Facebook knew that
Speaker 2: live video was a particularly big vulnerability for the company
Speaker 2: because video is harder to monitor than audio or text,
Speaker 2: for sure. So you either can deal with that after
Speaker 2: the fact, or you can say, hey, what's leading to
Speaker 2: that video? Going viral, and in the case of live video,
Speaker 2: Facebook said, hey, you know, every piece of content on
Speaker 2: Facebook earns a score based on how relevant it is
Speaker 2: to uktie or to your listener. You know, is it
Speaker 2: similar to other things that they've seen before. Does this
Speaker 2: person generally produce content that people would like to engage with?
Speaker 2: You know, there's a bunch of factors. You earn a score,
Speaker 2: and that gives you a priority in the news feed.
Speaker 2: When it came to live video, they would give a boost.
Speaker 2: They'd say that score, We're going to multiply it by
Speaker 2: eight hundred and fifty times to make sure that it
Speaker 2: will show up at the top of your feed. They said, hey,
Speaker 2: we know this is dangerous. We're going to only boost
Speaker 2: it sixty five times. In the runchy election, it's a
Speaker 2: little tiny detail, but when they stormed the capitol, the
Speaker 2: rioters actively used live video to coordinate, and so there's
Speaker 2: these little things where they could have had the safety
Speaker 2: measures on that were on election day, but because no
Speaker 2: one felt they had the authority to say we're in
Speaker 2: a situation, no one turned those on until the day
Speaker 2: after they stormed the capital. These are little, tiny details,
Speaker 2: but you have to remember When people interviewed the rioters
Speaker 2: after January six, they said it seemed real. It seemed real.
Speaker 2: It seemed like everyone was saying, like, we're about to
Speaker 2: experience a coup, like we need to like go and
Speaker 2: save our democracy. These little product tweaks would have changed
Speaker 2: the information environment that those people experienced, and who knows
Speaker 2: what would have happened with January six.
Speaker 1: So why didn't they do it? Because the team had
Speaker 1: been dissolved.
Speaker 2: There was no longer a person in the company who
Speaker 2: wore the hat of saying, let's make sure we're a
Speaker 2: positive force in society, right, there was diffuse responsibility for
Speaker 2: Little Tiny Slippers. And I think after they dissolved the team,
Speaker 2: which was on December second or December third, I don't
Speaker 2: think there was anyone who felt like they had the
Speaker 2: authority to say, hey, some people are going to have
Speaker 2: to work over the holidays, right, Like this is a
Speaker 2: big enough deal that someone's going to have to do something.
Speaker 2: And I think that's why Facebook was asleep at the wheel.
Speaker 1: When we come back, Francis and I talk about improvements
Speaker 1: in social media that could have a positive impact on
Speaker 1: the team Mental health crisis. We're back with Francis, Howgan
Speaker 1: do you think Mark Zuckerberg just cares about profit over everything?
Speaker 1: And is there something about the broader culture of Facebook
Speaker 1: that makes this almost a Sisifian task to try to
Speaker 1: control or at least even monit or remove really dangerous content.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad that you bring up Mark, so just
Speaker 2: for people understand how different the leadership of Facebook is
Speaker 2: versus other companies. Mark Zuckerberg holds about fifty five fifty
Speaker 2: six percent of the voting shares that control Facebook, so
Speaker 2: that means he's the chairman of the board, He's the CEO.
Speaker 2: If he wants to invest tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 2: in the metaverse, no one can stop him because he
Speaker 2: is the only voice that matters. I do think responsibility
Speaker 2: goes to the top, right, Like part of the challenge
Speaker 2: here is you have a man who has been CEO
Speaker 2: since he was nineteen years old. Facebook is intimately tied
Speaker 2: to his identity, and it's very hard for people to
Speaker 2: admit that their life's work might be hurting other people.
Speaker 2: And so unfortunately, there is an internal culture to the
Speaker 2: company where the people who surround Mark know that being
Speaker 2: too critical isn't going to get you very far, I said,
Speaker 2: I think part of why Cheryl left from when I
Speaker 2: came out, she left maybe six once after the Facebook
Speaker 2: files happened. I think as Cheryl was a voice that
Speaker 2: was trying to push for responsibility, and there wasn't really
Speaker 2: an appetite in Tronto the company to do that.
Speaker 1: To this point, in twenty nineteen, I spoke with her
Speaker 1: about whether Facebook's business model ultimately rendered implementing security measures
Speaker 1: bad for business. Let's hear what she said.
Speaker 3: So on this, I'm really pretty proud of our track record.
Speaker 3: If you look a number of years ago and you
Speaker 3: listen to our earnings calls, So earnings calls are exactly
Speaker 3: what people are worried about. They're directed at investors. It's
Speaker 3: our quarterly report. If you actually watch us in earning calls,
Speaker 3: we are spending as much time talking about the measures
Speaker 3: we take on safety and security as we are about
Speaker 3: our business growth.
Speaker 2: Easily.
Speaker 3: We actually said many quarters ago, this is so important
Speaker 3: to us that we are going to make massive investments
Speaker 3: and change the profitability of our company by making real
Speaker 3: resource investments. And we have to the tune of billions
Speaker 3: and billions of dollars, and we will keep doing it.
Speaker 3: We've taken action after act after action that is better
Speaker 3: for protecting them community than it is for our growth,
Speaker 3: and we're going to continue to do that. Mark has
Speaker 3: said it over and over again. I have said it
Speaker 3: over and over again.
Speaker 1: Do you believe that, Francis.
Speaker 4: Oh, Kittie, I'm so glad you played that clip for me,
Speaker 4: because I am totally going to go get the transcripts
Speaker 4: now of the investor calls just to see how things
Speaker 4: have changed, right, because I think back in twenty nineteen
Speaker 4: they were trying like they got burned by Cambridge Analytica.
Speaker 4: They lost a huge amount of goodwill and regulators from users.
Speaker 4: I don't think that sentiment she expressed is still true.
Speaker 4: One of the things that Elon Musk showed was that
Speaker 4: you could fire all your safety teams and no one bad.
Speaker 4: It an not right because we don't have any stats.
Speaker 4: I want to be super honest with people. Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 4: has fired a huge number of safety people in the
Speaker 4: last six months, and the market has rewarded him. You know,
Speaker 4: their stock price is going up because Facebook looks more profitable.
Speaker 4: But he also fired their AI safety team, and then
Speaker 4: they open sourced their large language model when people talk
Speaker 4: about existential risks from AI. Allowing for mass proliferation of
Speaker 4: these technologies doesn't allow us to do thoughtful, slow, intentional development,
Speaker 4: And so I don't think what she's saying is true anymore.
Speaker 4: We're living in a very different world.
Speaker 1: In fairness to Cheryl, do you think it was true
Speaker 1: at the time.
Speaker 2: I think in twenty nineteen, they were trying hard. If
Speaker 2: Facebook had continued in the vein they were working in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, I probably would have never been a whistleblower.
Speaker 2: You know. I probably would have been like many people
Speaker 2: who came before me, who've kept their head down and
Speaker 2: kept trying, kept trying to make it safer, and eventually
Speaker 2: burned out because the only part of Facebook that was
Speaker 2: growing was the safety teams in twenty nineteen. By twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: they had given up on that. You know, they'd said,
Speaker 2: we're not getting acknowledged for the effort we're putting in,
Speaker 2: and these teams are just liabilities.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you just what can be done. We've
Speaker 1: heard about kids and mental health. We've heard about misinformation
Speaker 1: and the election. We've heard about so many things that
Speaker 1: are causing harms to society because social media platforms like Facebook.
Speaker 1: Section two thirty prevents or protects these social media platforms
Speaker 1: from liability for the content they may carry. The Supreme
Speaker 1: Court just made a ruling on that, and I guess
Speaker 1: now it's up to Congress. But in the best of
Speaker 1: all possible worlds, what would you like, Francis to be
Speaker 1: done to rain in the social media companies if you
Speaker 1: had to wave a magic wand so.
Speaker 2: I think it's important for people to understand kind of
Speaker 2: what's the tool chest that's available to us. I think
Speaker 2: the way forward is more something like what Europe did.
Speaker 2: So Europe came in and said, hey, you need to
Speaker 2: be honest with us about the risks, the harms you
Speaker 2: know about. You need to publicly tell us how you're
Speaker 2: going to reduce those risks, and you need to get
Speaker 2: us enough data that we can see if you're making
Speaker 2: progress on those things. Because for context, I think the
Speaker 2: fundamental problem is our relationship with these companies is spewed.
Speaker 1: And Congress doesn't seem to really understand the rudimentaries of
Speaker 1: the technology that powers Facebook to actually want to do
Speaker 1: something about it.
Speaker 2: I think the thing that's going to push Congress over
Speaker 2: the line is actually the growing crisis around teenage mental health. Historically,
Speaker 2: just for people's contexts, over the last sixty years, we've
Speaker 2: had only a handful of Surgeon General advisories. It's things
Speaker 2: like seat belts save lives, smoking causes cancer, breastfeeding helps
Speaker 2: infants health, things that we take for granted today. But
Speaker 2: before those advisories happened, there was ambiguity, there was controversy. Historically,
Speaker 2: after a Surgeon General advisory is issued, usually within two
Speaker 2: to three years, some sort of legislative action takes place.
Speaker 2: I think it'll be really interesting to see how things
Speaker 2: play out over the next year or two, at least
Speaker 2: in the context of kids.
Speaker 1: And what can be done about that. Tell me how
Speaker 1: to reverse or stop the negative impact that social media
Speaker 1: and things like Instagram are having on young people.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned earlier that you know the business model
Speaker 2: is working counter to our own well being or safety.
Speaker 2: Let's take a look at sleep deprivation and kits. So
Speaker 2: one of the things called up by the surge in
Speaker 2: general was that thirty percent thirty percent of teenagers say
Speaker 2: they use social media till midnight or later most weekdays.
Speaker 2: That's crazy when we look at risk factors for things
Speaker 2: like multiple kinds of mental illness. That's not just depressure
Speaker 2: and anxiety. It's also things like bipolar. When we look
Speaker 2: at risk factors for accidental death, both automotive and just
Speaker 2: general accidents. When we look at risk factors for substance use,
Speaker 2: uppers post they're tired downers because they're depressed. All of
Speaker 2: those things link back to sleep deprivation. We've known for
Speaker 2: twenty years that we can influence whether or not people
Speaker 2: use products. Imagine if for two hours before eleven, Instagram
Speaker 2: got a little bit slower and a little bit slower,
Speaker 2: and a little bit slower, it was like it was
Speaker 2: like you're pushing the post a little harder. Maybe there
Speaker 2: was a lag on TikTok between videos. Who knows. We've
Speaker 2: known for twenty years that if you make an app
Speaker 2: a little bit slower, people use the less. Imagine as
Speaker 2: you approached your bedtime, you just got tired and went
Speaker 2: to bed. That feature is live on Instagram today. That's
Speaker 2: a meaningful thing that would help kids go to bed.
Speaker 1: How Mud if parents come in and take their kids' phones.
Speaker 2: We should definitely do that, right, we ignore the fact
Speaker 2: that these technologies are extremely powerful and addictive, and they
Speaker 2: operate the level of independence that no other consumer product
Speaker 2: does today.
Speaker 1: In closing, Francis, I feel like I have to ask
Speaker 1: you about AI, which is the new boogeyman of technology,
Speaker 1: And rightfully so, it was pretty chilling when these AI
Speaker 1: leaders said that artificial intelligence poses a threat as big
Speaker 1: as pandemics and nuclear war, and it's sort of like,
Speaker 1: holy shit. And yet you wonder, since the government has
Speaker 1: been so impotent when it comes to figuring out how
Speaker 1: to regulate social media, what they're going to do about
Speaker 1: this looming threat.
Speaker 2: So I think it's always important to remember that these
Speaker 2: are percentage risks, right, So this is you know, they
Speaker 2: say there's a one percent and two percent risk, which
Speaker 2: is terrifying, right, you know, one or two percent risks
Speaker 2: of extension. We should take those seriously. But I think
Speaker 2: one of the things that people also need to be
Speaker 2: honest about is we kind of let the cat out
Speaker 2: of the bag, right. I think things like Fortune five
Speaker 2: hundred companies should get together and say, hey, we will
Speaker 2: only buy generative AI products that meet this bar of safety.
Speaker 2: There's a code of practice, the code of conduct, where
Speaker 2: we're like, we're not going to let our economic might
Speaker 2: fuel development of AI unless you do it in an intentional, thoughtful,
Speaker 2: responsible way. I think that's totally a thing that should
Speaker 2: happen one hundred percent. I think Sam Altman's talks about
Speaker 2: having licenses of saying hey, right now, there is a
Speaker 2: market disincentive to be safe, you know, move fast and
Speaker 2: break things to quote more exeper work. The fact that
Speaker 2: Facebook fired AI safety team, no one's punishing them for them.
Speaker 2: But when people talk about existential risk, to not have
Speaker 2: that existential risk, we have to say, no one in
Speaker 2: the world, that includes governments and militaries, get to have
Speaker 2: AIS more powerful than a certain level. You know, how
Speaker 2: do we have a just more stable world? Because if
Speaker 2: we are just escalating, the path of escalation will lead
Speaker 2: to will lead to all those existential risks.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you're excited about when it comes to AI, Francis,
Speaker 1: so we don't have have to end on a terrifying note.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we need to talk about short term and long term.
Speaker 2: The short term on generative AI, I think is transformative.
Speaker 2: Right now around the world, there are literally billions of
Speaker 2: people who don't have doctors. We're going to live in
Speaker 2: a world in the next ten years where every child
Speaker 2: in the world has a pediatrician, it just might be
Speaker 2: a robot pediatrician. We're going to live in a world
Speaker 2: in the next ten years. We're going to live in
Speaker 2: a world where every child in the world is going
Speaker 2: to have the highest quality reading instruction that has ever
Speaker 2: existed for humanity. You know, an endlessly patient tutor that
Speaker 2: will sit there and over and over again as long
Speaker 2: as that kid keeps working, will help them learn to read.
Speaker 2: That's going to be transformative. There are high probability short
Speaker 2: term rewards that I think are almost certainly going to happen.
Speaker 2: It is going to transform the world. The thing I
Speaker 2: try to caution people on is those existential risks are
Speaker 2: very low probability, and they're much longer off, and so
Speaker 2: it is more important for us to try to build
Speaker 2: a just world where the motivations incentives for doing those
Speaker 2: existential risks are as low as possible. So one of
Speaker 2: the things that I am always trying to remind people
Speaker 2: is we have invented new communication technologies before. When we
Speaker 2: invented the printing press, suddenly a bunch of people learned
Speaker 2: to read, and people start publishing pamphlets on things like
Speaker 2: how do you know if your neighbor's a witch? What
Speaker 2: should you do about that? And chaos ensued. We had
Speaker 2: wars that killed huge numbers of people when we invented
Speaker 2: the cheap printing press. We had wars about misinformation things
Speaker 2: like you know, yellow journalism. But we learned and we responded.
Speaker 2: We developed journalistic ethics, We founded journalism schools to teach
Speaker 2: those things, journalistic trade associations to help people self regulate.
Speaker 2: We passed laws on media concentration to make sure that
Speaker 2: you know, you got to hear from different voices. We
Speaker 2: learned about how it lived in our media environment or
Speaker 2: information environment. It feels overwhelming right now because because we're
Speaker 2: the ones who are responsible for figuring out where we
Speaker 2: go from here, you know, it's about how are we
Speaker 2: going to learn, How are we going to respond, how
Speaker 2: are we going to act? And part of why I
Speaker 2: have faith that we're going to figure this out is
Speaker 2: is while it may seem impossible right now, every single
Speaker 2: time before when we've made a new media technology, we've
Speaker 2: learned and we've responded. So I will keep on pushing
Speaker 2: and I just have a longer time horizon, I think
Speaker 2: than many other people did.
Speaker 1: From your lips to God's ears. Francis Hagen, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for talking with me. Your new book is
Speaker 1: called The Power of One. How I found the Strength
Speaker 1: to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle
Speaker 1: on Facebook. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening everyone.
Speaker 1: If you have a question for me, or want to
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