Speaker 1: Uhmerica, I don't know why I opened the show this way.
Speaker 1: I really, I really don't know why you did. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I did that. Um, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, Hi, Hi,
Speaker 1: is this a podcast? Yeah, it's like, after all these years,
Speaker 1: it's a podcast. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. Sometimes
Speaker 1: podcast I get on the phone to podcast and I
Speaker 1: think that I'm just talking to my friends, But then
Speaker 1: I remember that every relationship in my life is dominated
Speaker 1: by podcasting, and I don't even know how to interact
Speaker 1: with people outside of the filter of a zoom call anymore.
Speaker 1: That it is incredibly accurately. I really, that's actually the
Speaker 1: saddest thing I've ever heard of my entire life. Thank you, Jamie.
Speaker 1: How are you doing it to me? Like? I'm gonna agree?
Speaker 1: I was? I was terrible, and then I was great,
Speaker 1: and now I'm fine. Excellent. That sounds like a solid trajectory.
Speaker 1: That's a good little hero's journey. That's like the that's
Speaker 1: like The Green Night. More or less, I didn't see
Speaker 1: that movie. It looked long. It is it is, but
Speaker 1: it's quite a film. I would not see a movie
Speaker 1: over an hour and forty minutes anymore. That's marred out.
Speaker 1: You know what, I don't recommend for short movies as
Speaker 1: Herbert West Reanimator or The Reanimator. Sorry, it was before
Speaker 1: the Herbert West one, which was a Halloween movie. I
Speaker 1: loved and then rewatched this Halloween and it was really
Speaker 1: great up until one one really horrifying scene that I
Speaker 1: had kind of forgotten Reanimator before. It's got some amazing
Speaker 1: stuff in it if you're a horror movie fan, and
Speaker 1: then there is an incredibly uncomfortable sexual assault scene. Um
Speaker 1: that is like really bad, like really bad. Wow, thank you.
Speaker 1: I think we're opening this episode in a really strong,
Speaker 1: powerful than you focused way. I want to recommend a
Speaker 1: horror movie to you. If it's Midsummer, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to listen. It's not. It's not. I only watch Midsummer
Speaker 1: to get all horny for Will Poulter, and then I
Speaker 1: turned it off Shifter he dies. But that's a reasonable
Speaker 1: thing for a person to say. Absolutely, when the person
Speaker 1: that I want to have sex with dies, I turn
Speaker 1: off the movie because it's boring. After that, it's a
Speaker 1: very healthy way to go through life. Thank you so much. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the movie, which I will show you at some
Speaker 1: point is called Pin heard of Pin so Pin Pin
Speaker 1: is a It's about a pediatrician who has like a
Speaker 1: life size medical dummy sitting in his office. Oh, this
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like it's going a good place. The pediatrician
Speaker 1: the only way. It's like a psychological thriller. It's not
Speaker 1: really that gory. But the pediatrician the only way that
Speaker 1: he can communicate with emotional honesty with his children is
Speaker 1: by making a little ventriloquist ventriloquist voice for the dummy.
Speaker 1: And so the ventriloquist dummy gives the kids sex head
Speaker 1: the ventrala because dummy does all this stuff, and then um,
Speaker 1: and then one of the kids thinks that the ventrals
Speaker 1: quest dummy whose name is Pin, is real. And then
Speaker 1: Pin starts to like control his thoughts and actions. And
Speaker 1: then there's a scene where a nurse has sex with Pin,
Speaker 1: but he's just a dummy. Okay, it's the greatest movie
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. I'm not doing it justice that that
Speaker 1: that sounds like quite a film, Jamie. That sounds like
Speaker 1: quite a film. Mars has sex with Pin, Robert and
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, I mean that definitely does sound like
Speaker 1: a scene that would make me have very specific physical reaction.
Speaker 1: And the best part about that scene is that the
Speaker 1: nurse never comes back and it's never addressed in the
Speaker 1: movie again. And that now that now you're speaking the language,
Speaker 1: the language of shoddy filmmaking, something horrible happens and then
Speaker 1: you just canonically have to forget in order to watch
Speaker 1: the rest of the movie. No, I'm on board with that.
Speaker 1: And you know, Jamie, now that you mentioned quitting a
Speaker 1: movie as soon as the person you want to have
Speaker 1: sex with dies, that may explain where I've never made
Speaker 1: it past the halfway point in the first Star Wars movie.
Speaker 1: Really wow, Yeah, once Alec Guinness is out of the picture,
Speaker 1: why even keep watching? You know? See? Well, yeah, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: the hottest person is gone. I don't want not a
Speaker 1: single fuckable face. And the rest of that film a
Speaker 1: bunch of ug goes Jamie. So you know who else
Speaker 1: is a bunch of ug? Gosh that we did it.
Speaker 1: It's so perfect. The people who run Facebook, it is
Speaker 1: it is. We're talking today about the Facebook papers, which
Speaker 1: is we'll talk about this a little bit more in detailed,
Speaker 1: but an enormous cash of internal Facebook documents that just
Speaker 1: got leaked revealing a tremendous amount of funked up shit.
Speaker 1: And I think we have to start with the uncomfortable
Speaker 1: situation that is everybody talking shit about how Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: looks like an android. I feel so mixed about it
Speaker 1: because on one hand, yes, the thing that's bad about
Speaker 1: him is not his appearance, but also yes, he does.
Speaker 1: He does hit the uncanny valley. There's something missing in
Speaker 1: his eyes. Look, there's something and and that's ivy league
Speaker 1: boy syndrome, right, Like, that's not just him, that's anyone
Speaker 1: who who graduates screen photos. I truly. I mean, even
Speaker 1: though we did just refer to the entire cast of
Speaker 1: Star Wars one as a bunch of ugos hideous, do
Speaker 1: feel that it's like the worst, the most lazy thing
Speaker 1: you could do is go after how someone looks when
Speaker 1: there are so many other evil facets of him. I
Speaker 1: will agree that there is no light in his eyes.
Speaker 1: There's certainly no light in his eyes. There's nothing like
Speaker 1: the pupils are very There's not that little thing that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be there is not there. Yeah, he could
Speaker 1: watch a kitten get murdered and it would just be
Speaker 1: a dial tone inside his soul. He looks like a
Speaker 1: character from the Polar Express. He looks he looks like
Speaker 1: Herbert West from the movie Rhianna of Matter, but less
Speaker 1: cares to check that he looks like Pin. Look up Pen.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to look up Pen. At this point
Speaker 1: in the history of the show, Jamie, we've recorded a
Speaker 1: lot of podcast episodes about Facebook. You have been there
Speaker 1: for what three of them? Um? Yeah, I forget. I
Speaker 1: forget entirely how many episodes we did on Facebook. We
Speaker 1: did three episodes on like the creation of Facebook, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of a brief list of its crimes. I
Speaker 1: think we did at least one follow up, maybe two
Speaker 1: follow ups. Um. And then we've mentioned Facebook foppery fakery
Speaker 1: in episodes of Like It could happen here in Worst
Speaker 1: Year Ever. Facebook is personal to me for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons. Number one, number of people who helped raise
Speaker 1: me have slowly lost their grip on reality and the
Speaker 1: face of viral propaganda spread be a via Facebook's engagement algorithm,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of bumped me out. Um yeah. And
Speaker 1: number two, my friends and I all lost our jobs
Speaker 1: in the company we built for a decade due to
Speaker 1: the fact that Facebook told criminal lies about video metrics
Speaker 1: that they have currently been find forty million dollars for,
Speaker 1: which also frustrating. Actually over it, it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: really over it. And you know, I I we've talked
Speaker 1: about this. I don't know if it was on micro net,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I also asked my job to that. I
Speaker 1: mean we worked at the same place. Yeah, worked it
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean they all the whole industry went
Speaker 1: up in flames. It's so sace. I'm still I'm still
Speaker 1: mad about it. Yeah, I am mad about it, even
Speaker 1: though like things have been going fine, great for me
Speaker 1: career wise. Um, it's just like kind of bullshit. It's
Speaker 1: kind of frustrating. It used to be. Did you catch
Speaker 1: that Robert's career is going great? Yea? In my head,
Speaker 1: I went, You're welcome. I'm a human rocket ship. I'm
Speaker 1: the iggy pop of talking about Facebook Welcome. It's kind
Speaker 1: of nice that we all just had to pivot to, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you can still talk about what you're passionate about, but
Speaker 1: just no one has to look at you anymore. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's actually not the worst thing. That's that ideal.
Speaker 1: And in my case, it was like you don't have
Speaker 1: to write articles. You just have to tell on a microphone,
Speaker 1: which involves writing an article. But I don't know, they're easier.
Speaker 1: It's true. You can, like you can really have a
Speaker 1: series of bullet points and be like, well, you just
Speaker 1: don't have to edit anymore. That's that's what that's what
Speaker 1: we that's what we got rid of in this pivot
Speaker 1: to podcasting. Editors were all, we're all green walding a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, it all worked out, but you know,
Speaker 1: but also Q and on stealing the fact that there
Speaker 1: will soon be death squads roving many of our neighbor
Speaker 1: Like there's there's downsides to it too, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: but then also meta, you know, and then yea meta,
Speaker 1: thank god, we're getting meta. We'll be talking about meta
Speaker 1: at some point. Um. But yeah, like it's it's Facebook's bad.
Speaker 1: I don't like Facebook. But in one of those episodes,
Speaker 1: and I forget which of those episodes, I said something
Speaker 1: along the lines of, at this point, there's no moral
Speaker 1: case for remaining employed by Facebook. Um. And earlier this year,
Speaker 1: a Facebook employee named Francis Hoggan came to the same
Speaker 1: conclusion on her own. Rather than jump out with her
Speaker 1: dock options or whatever perk she decrued, and then get
Speaker 1: another tech industry job, which is what a lot of
Speaker 1: people do. I know people who have done this when
Speaker 1: they were like, Facebook's kind of fucked up. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna go hop to another country company and make even
Speaker 1: more money. Uh. Instead of doing that, Francis spent weeks
Speaker 1: painstakingly photographing internal Facebook has its own internal communications network
Speaker 1: that is patterned off of Facebook, but it's for like
Speaker 1: the corporate the the employees to use. Um well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's like it's like Slack, but probably more
Speaker 1: all consuming and soul destroying. Um yeah, but she is.
Speaker 1: There's like nothing worse. I mean, personality wise, I can't
Speaker 1: stand someone who's like really killing it on Slack. That's
Speaker 1: one of my least favorite traits in a person, as
Speaker 1: if they're they're really giving it a percent on Slack.
Speaker 1: I'm like, just I'm I'm asleep. I hate it. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, Sophie barely hears from me when we need
Speaker 1: to work, let alone, when we don't need to work
Speaker 1: hardcent not true good stuff. So rather than you know,
Speaker 1: take the money and run, so she gets in this
Speaker 1: like internal communications app that Facebook has and because they
Speaker 1: have protections about like because like they know that this
Speaker 1: is a risk people leaking internal documents as a risk,
Speaker 1: they have like security things set up and to get
Speaker 1: past them, she just photographs a bunch of internal documents
Speaker 1: on her phone. Um a huge Like she gets a
Speaker 1: lot of shit. Uh, And then she didn't leaks those
Speaker 1: files to several news agencies and are good friends at
Speaker 1: the sec. UH. This week, we're going to go through
Speaker 1: some of those documents and all of the damning ship
Speaker 1: they reveal. The first and perhaps most important revelation is
Speaker 1: this many Facebook employees understand that their company is a
Speaker 1: force for evil. Some of them have vowed to fix
Speaker 1: it from the inside. Others are convinced the evil is
Speaker 1: outweighed by some nebulous good. But at the core of it,
Speaker 1: they know that what they were a part of is problematic,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them hate themselves for it. You
Speaker 1: can really see that coming across in some of these conversations,
Speaker 1: evidence of the yeah it's good stuff, don't you love? Yeah,
Speaker 1: when human beings compromise the very nature of their soul
Speaker 1: uh in the in seeking profit Yeah. And then and
Speaker 1: then you know, you watch the you watch the light
Speaker 1: leave their eyes, and then you're supposed to feel bad
Speaker 1: for them. Uh. Evidence of the struggle over the soul
Speaker 1: of Facebook can be found in the reactions of employees
Speaker 1: to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. After
Speaker 1: the murder of George Floyd by a cop that June,
Speaker 1: as protests reached their height, a Facebook employee posted a
Speaker 1: message to the company racial justice chatboards stating, get bright
Speaker 1: Bart out of news tap. He was enraged at the
Speaker 1: fact that the far right publisher was pushing this information
Speaker 1: about violence at protests, and included screen grabs of bright
Speaker 1: Bart articles with titles like Minneapolis Mayhem, massive looting, buildings
Speaker 1: and flames, bonfires exclamation point, and BLM protesters pummel police cars.
Speaker 1: Wonder how much more attention they paid the police cars
Speaker 1: than the man who was choked to death by a cop. Anyway,
Speaker 1: good stuff, good journalism, nailing it. This employee claimed that
Speaker 1: these articles were part of a concerted effort by Breitbart
Speaker 1: and other right wing media sites to quote paint Black
Speaker 1: Americans and Black lead movements in a negative way. He
Speaker 1: argued that none of those hyperpartisan sites deserved to be
Speaker 1: highlighted by the Facebook news tab, so Facebook's News tab
Speaker 1: consists of two tiers of content providers. Right, It's just
Speaker 1: like the tab that tells you what's going on in
Speaker 1: the world, and all of the people whose stories get
Speaker 1: in there have been vetted to some extent by Facebook.
Speaker 1: So there's a first tier of big publishers like the
Speaker 1: New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, like the big dogs,
Speaker 1: and they get paid. Facebook gives the money to be
Speaker 1: a part of the News tab. And then there is
Speaker 1: a second tier of news sites who are not paid
Speaker 1: but did have to get vetted as a reliable news
Speaker 1: source for Facebook to put them on their News tab.
Speaker 1: And bright Bart is in that ladder tier, which means
Speaker 1: Facebook isn't giving them money directly, but is institutionally pumping
Speaker 1: a shipload of of like traffic towards their propaganda and
Speaker 1: throwing a lot of their propaganda out into people's news feeds.
Speaker 1: In their public facing statements, Facebook claims to only include
Speaker 1: sites on their newstab who do quality news reporting. Sites
Speaker 1: that repeatedly share disinformation, it claims are banned. This functions
Speaker 1: on a strike system. In July, President Trump tweeted a
Speaker 1: Brightbart video claiming you don't need a mask to protect
Speaker 1: against COVID nineteen. The video also spread misinformation about hydroxy clarquin.
Speaker 1: Despite the fact that this video clearly violated Facebook stated standards,
Speaker 1: it was able to reach millions of people through the
Speaker 1: newstab before Facebook took it down from the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1: According to Facebook's fact checking rules, pages can be punished
Speaker 1: if they acquire too many strikes, meaning they published content
Speaker 1: deemed false by third party fact checkers. It requires two
Speaker 1: strikes within ninety days to be deemed a repeat offender,
Speaker 1: which can result in a user being suspended from posting content.
Speaker 1: More strikes can lead to reductions and distribution and advertising revenue.
Speaker 1: In a town hall, Mr Zuckerberg said Brightbart wasn't punished
Speaker 1: for video because that was its only infraction in a
Speaker 1: ninety day period. According to internal chats described to describe
Speaker 1: the Yeah, now that seems wrong, right, knowing Brightbart that
Speaker 1: they would have one strike and that's so I mean,
Speaker 1: and was the reason that that video reached so many
Speaker 1: people before it was taken down. It was that just
Speaker 1: like a delay in fact checking, does that mean that
Speaker 1: a certain number of people need to like? No? I mean?
Speaker 1: Trump tweeted it and it spread and Facebook didn't want
Speaker 1: to take it down until it had it had already
Speaker 1: kind of made them some money, I think. I also
Speaker 1: think it's just like they don't put a lot of
Speaker 1: work into checking on this stuff. They don't. They don't
Speaker 1: want to piss it. We're talking about all this, but
Speaker 1: like they also just don't want to piss any conservatives off.
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot of things going into why this
Speaker 1: stuff is not in fashioned to any degree. Now you
Speaker 1: express surprise at the fact that that Brightbart only had
Speaker 1: one strike in ninety days. Let's talk about why. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: thanks to Francis Hoggans leaked documents, we now know that
Speaker 1: Brightbart was one of the news sites Facebook considered managed partners.
Speaker 1: These sites are part of a program whereby the social
Speaker 1: network pairs handlers who work at Facebook with the website.
Speaker 1: These handlers give Facebook a back channel to sites that
Speaker 1: spread disinformation, which allows them to have content removed or
Speaker 1: altered without giving the content maker a strike. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, they put out the content it gets few
Speaker 1: millions of times. Facebook one employee like messages and editor
Speaker 1: and says like, hey, you need to change this now.
Speaker 1: It gets changed after it's spread around, and they have
Speaker 1: a way to strike and thus stay on the news tab.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to do a back channel. That's
Speaker 1: so dark, Okay, I mean that. I I guess if
Speaker 1: you're looking for a way to keep misinformation up, that
Speaker 1: is a logical way to go about it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do a perfect job. So it's actually you're saying
Speaker 1: that bright Bart is accurate. Yes, perfectly accurate. That is
Speaker 1: what we always say about Bridbart and Andrew Brightbart, a
Speaker 1: man who did not do cocaine to until he died.
Speaker 1: Um about someone who's who's got light in his eyes.
Speaker 1: Not anymore, It doesn't so actual strikes were automatically escalated
Speaker 1: for review by senior Facebook executives, who could decide to
Speaker 1: overturn the punishment and remove a strike. Through these methods,
Speaker 1: Facebook strike system for spreading disinformation actually proved to be
Speaker 1: nothing at all, and he sufficiently large right wing website
Speaker 1: was given numerous opportunities to avoid strikes without being delisted.
Speaker 1: This was a problem that went further than Breitbart, as
Speaker 1: The Wall Street General reports. In an internal memo, the
Speaker 1: engineer said that he based his assessment in part on
Speaker 1: a queue of three dozen escalations that he had stumbled onto.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of which were on behalf of conservative
Speaker 1: content producers. A summary of the engineer's findings was posted
Speaker 1: to an internal message board. One case he cited regarding
Speaker 1: pro Trump influencers Diamond and Silk, third party fact checkers
Speaker 1: rated as false post on their page that said was
Speaker 1: like porn stars Wait diamonded Silk? Oh do you not
Speaker 1: know about Diamond and Silk? Oh? They are? Are they banned?
Speaker 1: They're not great? No, no, but they're bad. They they're
Speaker 1: not not nice people, not good people. Um so they
Speaker 1: got yeah, it's a fact Checkers rated false a post
Speaker 1: a post that Diamond and Silk made stating how the
Speaker 1: hell is allocating million dollars in order to give a
Speaker 1: raise to House members that don't give a damn about
Speaker 1: Americans going to help stimulate America's economy. When fact checkers
Speaker 1: rated that post false, a Facebook staff are involved in
Speaker 1: the partner program, argued that there should be no punishment,
Speaker 1: noting the publisher has not hesitated going public about their
Speaker 1: concerns around alleged anti conservative bias on Facebook. So this
Speaker 1: is a pretty minor case, but it shows what's going
Speaker 1: on there. They post something that's not accurate. This raise
Speaker 1: is not something that's like going through UM and fact
Speaker 1: checkers flag it is inaccurate, which should mean it gets removed.
Speaker 1: But then someone at Facebook is like, if we remove it,
Speaker 1: they're gonna yell about us removing their post and it's
Speaker 1: going to be a pain in the asked for us.
Speaker 1: So just like fuck it. Yeah, this is I feel
Speaker 1: like this is always the route that Facebook does. It's
Speaker 1: just like this big, gigantic, bureaucratic style operation that people
Speaker 1: uh do shitty things so that they're not convenience or
Speaker 1: yelled at by someone else. Like it's also insidious and
Speaker 1: also so boring at the same time. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: the consequences that aren't boring. Um. And to some extent,
Speaker 1: this is true of a lot of the worst things
Speaker 1: in history. There were an awful lot of men intotalitarian
Speaker 1: societies who signed effectively or literally the death warrants of
Speaker 1: their fellow man because like, well, otherwise it's going to
Speaker 1: be a real pain in the ass for me, My
Speaker 1: day at the office is going to be terror I
Speaker 1: don't want to take this to the boss. I don't
Speaker 1: want to escalate this yet just kill them. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is so I like the most evil
Speaker 1: stuff is done in a very slow and boring way.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's just because if you can get
Speaker 1: people to, you know, fall asleep, you can get away
Speaker 1: with fucking murder. Like literally, Yep, it's good stuff. Loving
Speaker 1: these papers, Robert, Yeah, they're very fun. So Diamond and
Speaker 1: Silk were able to be the third party fact checker
Speaker 1: into changing the rating on their article down from to
Speaker 1: partly false, and with the help of the managed partner
Speaker 1: escalation process, all of their strikes were removed. Um the
Speaker 1: chat conversations that the general review showed that inside the company,
Speaker 1: Facebook employees repeatedly demanded that higher ups explain the allegations. Quote,
Speaker 1: we are apparently providing hate speech policy consulting and consequence
Speaker 1: mitigation services to select partners, wrote one employee. Leadership is
Speaker 1: scared of being accused of bias, wrote another. So that
Speaker 1: seems bad. That seem good. Now, that seems like the
Speaker 1: root of a lot of problems we've been having as
Speaker 1: a society. Then like, well, conservatives are loud when they're angry,
Speaker 1: so let's just let them lie and try to get
Speaker 1: people killed. Diamond and Silk was doing that in that case,
Speaker 1: but that that's a thing in writing media. Now when
Speaker 1: you're saying, I don't know what to picture when you
Speaker 1: say diamond and silk. So at first I was picturing
Speaker 1: porn stars. Then I was picturing hair metal band looked
Speaker 1: more like gospel singers. I was picturing two Springer sp annuals.
Speaker 1: Most recently, I don't think I'll stay there. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. I wouldn't. You should? You should look them up. UM, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're. There are two musicians who like opposed
Speaker 1: with Trump and have like a I think they're on TikTok.
Speaker 1: They're just like right wing media influencers, and they're they're
Speaker 1: they're not they're not great people. UM. In a farewell
Speaker 1: memo of colleagues in late one member of Facebook's Integrity
Speaker 1: team UM and the Integrity team, their job is to
Speaker 1: reduce harmful behavior on the platform, UH complained that Facebook's
Speaker 1: tolerance for Britbarts stop them from effectively fighting hate speech. Quote.
Speaker 1: We make special exceptions to our written policies for them,
Speaker 1: and we even explicitly endorsed them by including the mistrusted
Speaker 1: partners in our core products. Yeah, it's it's bad, and
Speaker 1: you can see, like there's this constant with the Facebook
Speaker 1: papers revealed, there's this constant seesaw and aggressive between the
Speaker 1: integrity team, the people whose job is to reduce the
Speaker 1: harm the site does, and everyone else who's only real
Speaker 1: job is to increase engagement on the site. Right. That
Speaker 1: is how you get your bonus, That is how you
Speaker 1: get the kudos from the boss is keeping people on
Speaker 1: the site for longer. So most of Facebook that is
Speaker 1: their job, and a small number of people their job
Speaker 1: is to try and make sure the site doesn't contribute
Speaker 1: to an ethnic cleansing, and the ethnic cleansing people like
Speaker 1: the people trying to stop that. The best way to
Speaker 1: do that is always going to be to do things
Speaker 1: that cut down on engagement with the site, and so
Speaker 1: they nearly always lose the fights they have with everybody else. Um,
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's great, Okay, okay, Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: the scariest extension of that logic, yep ye. One thing
Speaker 1: we know thanks to the Facebook papers is that the
Speaker 1: social network launched a study in two thousand nineteen to
Speaker 1: determine what level of trust its users had in different
Speaker 1: media organizations. Out of dozens of websites across the US
Speaker 1: and UK, Bright Bart was dead last. Facebook themselves rated
Speaker 1: it as low quality, which, again based on the company's
Speaker 1: own claims about how they decide who to include in
Speaker 1: the news tab, would disqualify bright Bart. And guess what,
Speaker 1: bright Bart is still a trusted Facebook partner. Oh hey,
Speaker 1: what's this unrelated news clip from a too in November
Speaker 1: one Washington Post article doing in my script? Quote? Right,
Speaker 1: Bart is the most influential producer of climate change denial
Speaker 1: posts on Facebook, according to a report released Tuesday that
Speaker 1: suggests a small number of publishers play an outsize role
Speaker 1: in creating content that undermines climate science. Good ship, Right,
Speaker 1: that's still number one after all these years. Good Isn't
Speaker 1: that a good thing? Isn't that a good thing? So
Speaker 1: they haven't said two inaccurate things in the last ninety days,
Speaker 1: which I find never Facebook's terrorists thought of offending conservatives
Speaker 1: by cracking down on hate speech and rampant disinformation started.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it started, but it really, it
Speaker 1: really hit the ground running in two thousands sixteen, during
Speaker 1: the only election that was even worse than this last election.
Speaker 1: In May of that year, Gizmoto wrote an article reporting
Speaker 1: that Facebook's trending topics lists suppressed conservative views. A handful
Speaker 1: of ex employees made claims that seemed to back these allegations.
Speaker 1: Up now. Reporting later in the year by NPR it
Speaker 1: made it clear that this was bullshit quote. NPR called
Speaker 1: up half a dozen technology experts, including data scientists who
Speaker 1: have special access to Facebook's internal metrics. The consensus there
Speaker 1: is no statistical evidence to support the argument that Facebook
Speaker 1: does not give conservative views a fair shake. But truth
Speaker 1: never matters when you're arguing with conservatives. They needed a
Speaker 1: reason to threaten Facebook with regulation, et cetera. When Trump,
Speaker 1: and when Trump won later that year, the social network
Speaker 1: decides these threats may have teeth, and so we're going
Speaker 1: to spend the next four years allowing them to say
Speaker 1: whatever the funk they want, no matter how racist, no
Speaker 1: matter how conspiratorial, no matter how many shootings it may
Speaker 1: help to inspire, no matter how no matter how many
Speaker 1: shootings may be live streamed on the platform, like the
Speaker 1: christ shoot shooting. Um, we're gonna let it all in
Speaker 1: all because yeah, money, well, because otherwise they yelled at
Speaker 1: and maybe regulated. The conservatives are good angry. I don't
Speaker 1: want the conservatives to get angry. The funny thing is
Speaker 1: they're no stopping them from getting angry. Right, you know
Speaker 1: how this works. I know how this works. They're gonna
Speaker 1: be angry, and they're going to claim bias no matter what,
Speaker 1: which is what they do. And so as Facebook gives
Speaker 1: them a free pass and their content is consistently the
Speaker 1: most influential stuff on the entire site, allegations of anti
Speaker 1: right wing bias continue to spread, even though again like
Speaker 1: eight of to nine out of the tin top shared
Speaker 1: post on any even day are from right wing media.
Speaker 1: But you know what's not from right wing media? Jamie?
Speaker 1: What all these products and services that you're not at
Speaker 1: all sure? You can't at all, not at all. We
Speaker 1: have a different we have a different brand of brain
Speaker 1: pills than the ones Alex Jones sells, and ours have
Speaker 1: less than half brain pills, less than half the lead.
Speaker 1: That is that. That is a promise, Jamie, every much
Speaker 1: lad you think a post should have it's less than that.
Speaker 1: Because we care, I'll take your sick little centrist brain pill.
Speaker 1: See if I care, which I can start watching MSNBC
Speaker 1: at any moment. Okay, take brain cooked, get brain cooked. Uh,
Speaker 1: here's some other products. All right, so we're back. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we're back, So we're back. Are think it's gonna
Speaker 1: get happy. Are think he's gonna get happy? I think
Speaker 1: it's gonna get funny. Not really, okay, just checking, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not really. I mean Mark Zuckerberg will like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, fall down a man hole someday. Maybe we're lucky.
Speaker 1: That would be funny. That would be funny. In two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, if Facebook engineer claimed on an internal message
Speaker 1: board that the company was intolerant of his beliefs, the
Speaker 1: reality is almost certainly that his co workers found him
Speaker 1: to be an obnoxious bigot. I say this because he
Speaker 1: left the company shortly thereafter and hit the grifting circuit,
Speaker 1: showing up on Tucker Carlson's show. He just he does
Speaker 1: the thing that like you remember two eighteen nineteen, a
Speaker 1: bunch of these guys were like leaving big tech companies
Speaker 1: and like going on the Alex Jones show. There was
Speaker 1: one guy left Google and claimed like brought a bunch
Speaker 1: of leaks, but they weren't in a thing because it
Speaker 1: was never anything that people being like this guy kind
Speaker 1: of seems like it sucks. It's very funny. Those press
Speaker 1: tours were Yeah, that was truly that feels like it
Speaker 1: was ten years ago, but yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 1: funny because like I think the first one of these
Speaker 1: dudes did all right money wise, but after that, like
Speaker 1: this Spiggott dried up and so they were just like
Speaker 1: detonating their careers in the tech industry for nothing, going
Speaker 1: to work for gab afterwards. To watch after the election,
Speaker 1: and I apologize for the rate that we're jumping around
Speaker 1: here on the timeline, but it's unavoidable. Facebook became the
Speaker 1: subject of bad pr from the left as well. The
Speaker 1: Cambridge Analytic a scandal broke, and the outrage in the
Speaker 1: wake of Trump's election meant that Facebook was being pressured
Speaker 1: to do something about bigotry and disinformation spreading on their platform.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the Republicans are in charge now,
Speaker 1: so they can't actually do anything otherwise they'll be attacked
Speaker 1: for being biased and maybe regulated. So they tested a
Speaker 1: couple of different changes. One was a tool called sparing sharing,
Speaker 1: which sought to reduce the reach of hyper posters. Hyper
Speaker 1: posters are exactly what they sound like. These are users
Speaker 1: that have been shown to mostly share false and hateful information,
Speaker 1: and so reducing their virility was seen as potentially helpful.
Speaker 1: This seems like a sensible change, right. Oh, these people
Speaker 1: are are sharing at an incredible rate and it's all
Speaker 1: violent trash. Let's reduce the number of stuff. I guess
Speaker 1: that's like, that's a that's a real band aid just
Speaker 1: be like, Okay, we're gonna have them. They can still
Speaker 1: share stuff, but just less hateful stuff. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: not less garbage. It's not even a shadow band because
Speaker 1: the shadow ban would imply that, like you are actually reducing,
Speaker 1: like artificially the spread, You're no longer artificially inflating their
Speaker 1: reach because their stuff gets great engagement, right, because it
Speaker 1: pisses people off even though it's untrue, and the algorithms
Speaker 1: the default is, oh, this pisses people off. Let's let
Speaker 1: everybody see what this asshole saying. And they're just being like, well,
Speaker 1: let's not do that for these specific assholes, right, that's
Speaker 1: all they're doing. Um, it's not a band, it's a
Speaker 1: we're going to stop inflating these people's reached to the
Speaker 1: same extent that we were. Seems like a sensible change.
Speaker 1: You know who disagreed with that, Jamie Loftus, who Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff to George W.
Speaker 1: Bush and Facebook head of Public Policy UM famous right
Speaker 1: wing ship had Joel Kaplan, who is huge at Facebook
Speaker 1: UM and is a major driving force behind don't piss
Speaker 1: off Conservatives. That's that's the guy that he is. That's
Speaker 1: his whole job. How are we supposed to work together
Speaker 1: if we're pissing on the conservatives? It actually at rising tide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Kaplan's like, most of these hyper posters are conservatives.
Speaker 1: This is this is you know, unfair, and he convinces
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg to weaken have his engineers weakened the tools so
Speaker 1: that they do kind of reduce the influence that these
Speaker 1: hyper posters have, but not by as much as they
Speaker 1: wanted to, and it doesn't really seem to have a
Speaker 1: much of an impact. As we will talk about later,
Speaker 1: this is still the way Facebook works. So however, to
Speaker 1: whatever extent they did reduce the harm, it was not
Speaker 1: by much. Another attempt is also like way too cool
Speaker 1: of a word to describe what that is, which is
Speaker 1: spreaders of hate speech. Why give them a cool name
Speaker 1: like that? Yeah, why give him a cool name like that?
Speaker 1: Although I don't know that might have that sounds like
Speaker 1: something we might have said as like an insult to
Speaker 1: people when I was young and on the internet. You're
Speaker 1: a hyper poster. I don't know, dude, you're like hyper
Speaker 1: posting right now. You need to chill the funk out.
Speaker 1: I'm picturing someone sitting at their a filthy keyboard in
Speaker 1: a Power Ranger suit. I am. I am imagining a
Speaker 1: filthy and the filthy Power Rangers suit, Jamie. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: really dirty and it doesn't fit either way too big
Speaker 1: or way too small. Yeah. They they have soiled themselves
Speaker 1: in it on more than one occasion because they can't
Speaker 1: stop posting, Robert, because they're post too much. It was
Speaker 1: It was not an accident. It was a choice they
Speaker 1: made in order to finish an argument. I'm going to
Speaker 1: make an oil painting of that exact image, Jamie. I
Speaker 1: swear to you, I will put that up in my
Speaker 1: living room. I will put it on my roof like
Speaker 1: the Suesteem chapel. Really absolutely, don't underestimate how much free
Speaker 1: time I have, Robert, I would never do that. You
Speaker 1: work for the Internet. So another attempted tool to make
Speaker 1: Facebook better was called informed engagement. This was supposed to
Speaker 1: reduce the reach of posts that Facebook determined were more
Speaker 1: likely to be shared by people who had not read them.
Speaker 1: This rule was instituted, and over time, Facebook noticed a
Speaker 1: significant decline in disinformation and toxic content. They commissioned to study,
Speaker 1: which is where the problems started from. The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1: The study, dubbed a political ideology analysis, suggested the company
Speaker 1: had been suppressing the traffic of major far right publishers,
Speaker 1: even though that wasn't it's an tint. According to the documents,
Speaker 1: very conservative sites it found would benefit the most if
Speaker 1: the tools were removed. With bright parts traffic increasing and
Speaker 1: estimated Washington Times is eighteen percent, Western Journal sixteen percent,
Speaker 1: and Epic Times by eleven percent. According to the documents,
Speaker 1: the study was designed that's why you never conduct a study, Robert, Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They find basically, hey, if you don't let people, if
Speaker 1: you reduce the amount by which people share, like, by
Speaker 1: by which posts shared by people who have not read
Speaker 1: the article, if you if you make those spread less
Speaker 1: bright parts, traffic drops. I still I still think that
Speaker 1: that those like um, the tools that have developed over
Speaker 1: time to be like, are you sure to read the article?
Speaker 1: Our soul? Goofy? I I do like when Twitter, um,
Speaker 1: I feel like they're like I just picturely a little
Speaker 1: shaking person. Are you Are you sure you don't want
Speaker 1: to read the article before you retweet it? What do
Speaker 1: you think? I was like No, I felt so bad
Speaker 1: because there's been times when I've like retweeted, like shared
Speaker 1: my own articles that I've written, and because like I
Speaker 1: wrote them, I didn't necessarily click the link before sharing.
Speaker 1: I just like woke up and I like shared it,
Speaker 1: and it's like, are you sure you don't want to
Speaker 1: read this? And I just click to share because it's
Speaker 1: like nine or ten in the morning and I haven't
Speaker 1: had my coffee yet. But I feel bad even though
Speaker 1: it's like, well, I wrote the motherfucker, like I know
Speaker 1: what's in there. Usually by the time I share something,
Speaker 1: I have already read it. But I do I think
Speaker 1: that that function. I think it has a good purpose
Speaker 1: and it like pains something in your brain that is
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I think it is a good thing.
Speaker 1: It's just funny. It's this little Oliver twist that appears
Speaker 1: in front of you and it's like, are you sure
Speaker 1: you don't want to read the article for your share?
Speaker 1: We're following like like I'm good I can read it's
Speaker 1: all good. Would you like to maybe read the article
Speaker 1: before suggesting that an ethnic group be slotted for their crimes? Right,
Speaker 1: And that's where he really comes in. Handy, isn't those Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy shouldn't be British. Um. So, so the study, like,
Speaker 1: the reason they conduct this study is in the hopes
Speaker 1: that it will like allow them to say that it's
Speaker 1: not biased. But then it turns out that, like, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't call it biased. But this change, which is unequivocally
Speaker 1: a good thing, impacts conservative sites, which are lower quality
Speaker 1: and more often shared by people who haven't read the
Speaker 1: articles but are incensed by a shitty, aggressive headline like
Speaker 1: the brightbart ones. We just read those get shared a
Speaker 1: lot and they don't read the article, and that's great
Speaker 1: for bright part um. But they decided, like, oh shit, actually,
Speaker 1: this study, the results of this study were absolutely going
Speaker 1: to be called out for bias. One of the researchers
Speaker 1: wrote in an internal memo, we could face significant backlash.
Speaker 1: We're having experimented with distribution at the expensive conservative publishers.
Speaker 1: So the company dumps this plan, they kill it. It
Speaker 1: is bad for Brightbart, good for the world if it's
Speaker 1: bad for bright part. If it's bad for the Bart,
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta. Can the plan bad for the Bart?
Speaker 1: Can you have always said that Facebook? Yeah, I say
Speaker 1: you are Cheryl Sandberg. Actually not a lot of people
Speaker 1: know that. Um yeah, I you know, listen off of
Speaker 1: making fun of Cheryl's very share eff So the good
Speaker 1: news is that Facebook didn't just make craven decisions when
Speaker 1: threatened with the possibility of being called out for bias.
Speaker 1: They were also craven whenever a feature promised to improve
Speaker 1: the safety of their network at the cost of absolutely
Speaker 1: any profitability. In two thousand nineteen, Facebook researchers open to
Speaker 1: study into the influence of the like button, which is
Speaker 1: one of the most basic and central features of the
Speaker 1: entire platform. Unfortunately, as we're discussing more detail later, likes
Speaker 1: are one of the most toxic things about Facebook. Researchers
Speaker 1: found that removing the like button, along with removing emoji
Speaker 1: reactions from posts on Instagram, reduced quote stress and anxiety
Speaker 1: felt by the youngest users on the platform, who all
Speaker 1: reported significant anxiety due to the feature. But Facebook also
Speaker 1: found that hiding the like button reduced the rate at
Speaker 1: which users interacted with posts and clicked on ads. So
Speaker 1: now this is more of yeah, yeah, no, this is
Speaker 1: I will say, more of a mixed bag than the
Speaker 1: last thing because removing the like didn't like, it made
Speaker 1: one group of young people feel better, um, but not
Speaker 1: other groups of young people like. It didn't reduce it
Speaker 1: reduced like kids social anxiety, but it didn't have as
Speaker 1: much of an impact on teens really, so it's not
Speaker 1: as clear cut as the last one, but still a
Speaker 1: protective effect had been found among the most vulnerable people
Speaker 1: on Instagram in particular. Um, but they don't they don't
Speaker 1: do anything about it because you know, that's so frustrated.
Speaker 1: That is genuinely, very very valuable interesting information where I
Speaker 1: don't know, I mean, I I feel like it probably
Speaker 1: didn't affect teenagers because by that point it's like, I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't want to say like too late, but by
Speaker 1: that point you're so hardwired to be like, well, I
Speaker 1: can tell what is important or like what is worth
Speaker 1: discussing based on likes, and once that that's just such
Speaker 1: a sticky I mean, I still feel that way, even
Speaker 1: though it's like you can objectively know it's not true,
Speaker 1: but once you've been kind of pilled in that way.
Speaker 1: It's it's very hard to undo. Yeah, it's Um, I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is, Jamie, it's not great. Um
Speaker 1: upsetting that. Yeah, it's not great. Uh So, as time
Speaker 1: went on, research made it increasingly clear that core features
Speaker 1: of Facebook products were fundamentally harmful. From BuzzFeed quote, time
Speaker 1: and again, they determine that people misused key features or
Speaker 1: that those features amplified toxic content, among other effects. In
Speaker 1: August and in August two, nineteen internal memos, several researchers
Speaker 1: said it was Facebook's core product mechanics, meaning the basics
Speaker 1: of how the product functioned, that had let misinformation and
Speaker 1: hate speech flourish on the site. The mechanics of our
Speaker 1: platform are not neutral, they concluded. So there's Facebook employees
Speaker 1: recognize internally, we are making decisions that are allowing hatred
Speaker 1: and other and just unhealthy toxic content to spread, and
Speaker 1: we're not. The bias is not in us fighting it.
Speaker 1: Our biases in refusing to fight it, like we are
Speaker 1: not being neutral because we're letting this spread. The people
Speaker 1: making the site work recognize this. They talk about it
Speaker 1: to each other. Um, it makes it. They feel guilt
Speaker 1: over it. They talk about it. You know, we know this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we've discussed that before. Of just like the
Speaker 1: existential stress of working at Facebook. Not the most empathetic
Speaker 1: problem in the world, but not at all. A lot
Speaker 1: of them are making bank but clear paper trail though
Speaker 1: of deep existential guilt and distress. Now, uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. So, rather
Speaker 1: than expanding their tests on the impact of removing the
Speaker 1: like button on a broader scale, Mark Zuckerberg and other
Speaker 1: executives agreed to allow testing only on a much more
Speaker 1: limited scale, not to reduce harm, but to quote build
Speaker 1: a positive press narrative around Instagram. So not not to
Speaker 1: actually help human beings, but to have us something to
Speaker 1: brag about. Right, for him to be like, we're so nice,
Speaker 1: We're so cool, We're gonna have fucking rad we are
Speaker 1: I'm the guy site to stop the dated slang. He's
Speaker 1: going to be like, yeah, this is gonna be uh,
Speaker 1: we gotta get some lit press around Instagram, know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Yeah, in three years, someone's going to tell
Speaker 1: him the word poggers and then he's gonna say it
Speaker 1: like thirty times in a week to all of his
Speaker 1: imaginary alien friends on meta'd like that's bro sucker, I
Speaker 1: hate that, screaming into avoid. In September of Facebook rolled
Speaker 1: out a study of the share button. This came in
Speaker 1: the wake of a summer of unprecedented political violence, much
Speaker 1: of its stoked via viral Facebook posts and Facebook groups. Uh,
Speaker 1: the ship at Kenosha started on Facebook in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. Uh, we're tracking it that night. A hell
Speaker 1: of a lot of that ship got started on Facebook.
Speaker 1: A lot of the like let's get a militia together
Speaker 1: and protect businesses. You know, it's good stuff. Company research
Speaker 1: identified reshare aggregation units, which were automatically generated groups of
Speaker 1: posts that you're so they identify one of the problems
Speaker 1: leading to all of this is what they called reshare
Speaker 1: aggregation units. And these were automatically generated groups of posts
Speaker 1: that were sent to you that we're posts your friends liked, right,
Speaker 1: and they recognize this is how a lot of this
Speaker 1: bad shit is spreading so right, right, that's creating a
Speaker 1: feedback loop on purpose. Yes, in part because users are
Speaker 1: much more likely to share posts that have already been
Speaker 1: liked by other people they know, even if those posts
Speaker 1: are hateful, bigoted, bullying, or contain an accurate information. So
Speaker 1: if somebody gets the same post in two different ways,
Speaker 1: if they just like see a bigoted article pop up
Speaker 1: on their on their their Facebook feed, but they're not
Speaker 1: being informed that other people they know have liked it
Speaker 1: or shared it, they're less likely to share it than
Speaker 1: if like, well, my buddy shared it. So maybe now
Speaker 1: I have permission, right, and you can think about how
Speaker 1: this happens on like a societal's level, how this has
Speaker 1: contributed to everything we're dealing with right now. Um, so
Speaker 1: I feel like everyone knows someone who has probably was
Speaker 1: very very influenced by that exact function. That's yeah, God,
Speaker 1: that's awful. So company researchers in September like these research
Speaker 1: aggregations the fact that we don't have to do it
Speaker 1: this way, right, we can only show people that the
Speaker 1: articles that their friends comment on at the very least
Speaker 1: as supposed to just like or just share without much commentary. Like,
Speaker 1: they have a number of options here that could at
Speaker 1: the very least reduce um um harmful content because when
Speaker 1: every like I think the numbers like three times as
Speaker 1: likely to share content that's presented to them in this way.
Speaker 1: So in May of that year, um, while you know,
Speaker 1: so this is actually months before Facebook researchers find this out.
Speaker 1: Myself and a journalist named Jason Wilson published what I
Speaker 1: still think is the first proper forensic investigation into the
Speaker 1: Boogaloo movement. Um. It noted how the spread of the
Speaker 1: movement and its crucial early days was enabled entirely by
Speaker 1: Facebook's group recommendation algorithm, which was often spread to people
Speaker 1: by these reshare aggregation units. You see, oh my buddy
Speaker 1: joined this group where everybody's sharing these like Hawaiian shirt
Speaker 1: photos and pictures of maybe I'll hop in there, and
Speaker 1: you know, the cycle goes on from there. When you've
Speaker 1: joined one group, it sends you advice like, hey, check
Speaker 1: out this other group, check out this other group, and
Speaker 1: it starts with like we're sharing memes about like Hawaiian
Speaker 1: shirts and and you know, the boogaloo. And then five
Speaker 1: or six groups down the line, you're making serious plans
Speaker 1: to assassinate federal agents or kidnap a governor. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that he's uh, you know, I remember where
Speaker 1: I was when I read it, because the how steep
Speaker 1: the escalation is and how quickly it like, it's not
Speaker 1: I guess not completely surprising, but at the time I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, that that is a very short timeline
Speaker 1: from yeah, so I don't like it. It's not good.
Speaker 1: It's not good, and in fairness, um, there are actually
Speaker 1: some face like it kind of becomes accepted the stuff
Speaker 1: that Jason and I were writing about in May by
Speaker 1: a lot of Facebook researchers around September of that year.
Speaker 1: But there were people within Facebook who actually tried to
Speaker 1: blow the it on this earlier um in fact, significantly earlier.
Speaker 1: In mid two thousand nineteen, an internal researcher created an
Speaker 1: experimental Facebook account, which is something that like certain researchers
Speaker 1: would do from time to time to see what the
Speaker 1: algorithm is feeding people. This experimental account account was a
Speaker 1: fake conservative mom, and they made this acount because they
Speaker 1: wanted to see what the recommendation algorithm would feed this account.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read from BuzzFeed again here. The internal research,
Speaker 1: titled Carol's Journey to Q and On, detailed how the
Speaker 1: Facebook account for an imaginary woman named Carol Smith had
Speaker 1: followed pages for Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting. Within days,
Speaker 1: Facebook had recommended pages and groups related to Q and On,
Speaker 1: the conspiracy theory that falsely claimed Mr Trump was facing
Speaker 1: down a shadowy cabal of democratic pedophiles. By the end
Speaker 1: of three weeks, Carol Smith's Facebook feed had devolved further.
Speaker 1: It became a constant flow of misleading, polarizing, and low
Speaker 1: quality content. The researcher wrote, Yeah, how did so so
Speaker 1: some some some jerk was like, let's call it Carol,
Speaker 1: like they Carol stereotype. Statistically not unlikely that it could
Speaker 1: It could have been a Carol that is. I mean
Speaker 1: that that's interesting that we also all know a Carol.
Speaker 1: A Carol. Yeah, unfortunately. So they're in They're in the
Speaker 1: they're the Duncan Donuts drive through. I I walk among them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they live among us. They are dating you walk among them.
Speaker 1: That's so funny. You eat hot dogs next to all people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're in mine. I think that hot dog eaters are
Speaker 1: maybe more politically astute bunch. But the Dunkan Donuts line
Speaker 1: is just absolutely unmitigated chaos. There could be the politics
Speaker 1: of the Dunkey Donuts line are all over the place.
Speaker 1: They are they are anarchists. In the line. You have
Speaker 1: you have the scariest people you've ever met in the line.
Speaker 1: You have been Affleck in the line looking like his
Speaker 1: entire family just died in a bus crash, but Afflex
Speaker 1: in the line and you can see his little dragon
Speaker 1: back piece. Oh my god. So Phoenix, Jamie, come on,
Speaker 1: come on, sorry, that was disrespectful. That was disrespectful. And
Speaker 1: you're right and you're right, thank you, thank you. So
Speaker 1: this this study with this fake account that immediately gets radicalized.
Speaker 1: This study, uh we it comes out in the Facebook
Speaker 1: papers right this year, but it was done in two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. And when this year, like information of this
Speaker 1: dropped and journalists start writing about it, um, they do
Speaker 1: what journalists do, which is you you, you put together
Speaker 1: your article and then you go for comment. Right. And
Speaker 1: so the comment that Facebook made about this experiment that
Speaker 1: this researcher didn't two thousand nineteen was well, this was
Speaker 1: a study of one hypothetical user. It is a perfect
Speaker 1: example of research the company does to improve improve our
Speaker 1: systems and helped inform our decision to remove Q and
Speaker 1: on from the platform. That did not happen until January
Speaker 1: of this year. They didn't ship for two years after this.
Speaker 1: They only did ship because people stormed the fucking capital
Speaker 1: waving Q and on banners. You motherfucker's sounds like them,
Speaker 1: sound like that. They're like, Oh, let's wait until things
Speaker 1: get so desperately bad that the company will be, you know,
Speaker 1: severely impacted if we don't do something. The huge amount
Speaker 1: of the of the radicalization Q and on gets supercharged
Speaker 1: by the lockdowns, right because suddenly all these people, like
Speaker 1: a lot of them, are in financial distress, they're locked
Speaker 1: in their fucking houses, they're online all the goddamn time.
Speaker 1: And they knew they could have dealt with this problem
Speaker 1: and reduced massively the number of people who got fed
Speaker 1: this poison during the lockdown. If they've done a goddamn
Speaker 1: thing and do that's a nineteen. They had the option,
Speaker 1: they did not. Yeah, okay, so no surprises here that
Speaker 1: researcher side. Nothing bad happened, right, It did not name
Speaker 1: one did nothing happened? Well, all happened actually and was
Speaker 1: pretty heavily tied to this. Uh. In August of that
Speaker 1: researcher left the company. She wrote an exit note where
Speaker 1: she accused the company Facebook of quote knowingly exposing users
Speaker 1: to harm. We've known for over a year now that
Speaker 1: our recommendation systems can very quickly lead users down a
Speaker 1: path to conspiracy theories and groups. In the meantime, the
Speaker 1: fringe groups slash set of beliefs has has grown to
Speaker 1: national prominence, with q and on congressional candidates and kean
Speaker 1: on hashtags and groups trending on the mainstream. Out of fears,
Speaker 1: out of fears over potential public and policy stakeholder responses,
Speaker 1: we are knowingly exposing users to risks of integrity harms.
Speaker 1: During the time that we've hesitated, I've seen folks from
Speaker 1: my hometown go further and further down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: It has been painful to observe. Okay, okay, and I
Speaker 1: mean it is I mean, no arguments there. It is
Speaker 1: very painful to observe that happen to people who are
Speaker 1: not Yeah, that's a Facebook employee who's not going to
Speaker 1: get any ship from me. Um. She identified the problem,
Speaker 1: she did good research to try to make clear what
Speaker 1: the problem was, and when she realized that her company
Speaker 1: was never going to take action on this because it
Speaker 1: to produce their profits, she fucking leaves. And she she
Speaker 1: does everything she can to let people know how unacceptable
Speaker 1: the situation is within the company. You know, I mean
Speaker 1: that is good that's what that is the minimum. That
Speaker 1: is the minimum, right, Yeah, I mean it is a
Speaker 1: little silly to be like, and I just recently realized
Speaker 1: that I don't think Facebook is ethical. You're like, like,
Speaker 1: shut up, no way, I don't. I don't know when
Speaker 1: this person started, but like, yeah, there they she got
Speaker 1: there and she's clearly horrified by what she like realized
Speaker 1: the company was doing. Like again, we've all been where
Speaker 1: she is. Where you just see these people you grew
Speaker 1: up with lose their goddamn minds and it's bad. It's bad.
Speaker 1: And you're like, oh and I'm I'm and I work
Speaker 1: in nucleus at the problem of the problem. Interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's why I had to quit working at
Speaker 1: Preduce Pharmaceuticals. Yeah. I do miss the freedom, la. I know,
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I know all those I was
Speaker 1: a great salesman. You're so good plays a produced pharmaceuticals salesman.
Speaker 1: Or no, maybe it's that Will Poulter. Oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: You know who didn't is Alec Ginnis. Because he never
Speaker 1: loved He never lived to see opiate's become what they
Speaker 1: are today. Tragic. He never lived to taste the sweet
Speaker 1: taste of tramadol or delatted and we don't talk about
Speaker 1: that enough. We don't talk about that enough. What a shame?
Speaker 1: What heartbreaks? Say I will what if Alec Ginnis had
Speaker 1: access to high quality, pharmaceutical grade painkillers an essay? I
Speaker 1: think it would have been sweet. I'm pitching it. I'm
Speaker 1: pitching it. Okay, Um, someone who's better at movies than
Speaker 1: I could have made a train spotting joke there because
Speaker 1: he and McGregor in the Heroin movie than he played on.
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's some joke there, but I didn't
Speaker 1: come up with it. Okay. Someone Yeah, someone figure that
Speaker 1: out in the reddit, and then don't tell us about it.
Speaker 1: Do not tell us because I've never seen train spotting.
Speaker 1: I'm just aware that woggin. Yeah, I haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: but like, you know what it's about. I'm so really yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what it's about. I also get so stressed
Speaker 1: out when I anytime it's not often, but anytime I've
Speaker 1: had to say even McGregor's name, I say, it's so weird.
Speaker 1: It's the worst thing in the world. Saying when McGregor's
Speaker 1: name is the most frightening experience a human can have.
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't make my mouth make that shape.
Speaker 1: It's embarrassing. I think what he has to live with.
Speaker 1: Thankfully he's gorgeous. That must make it easier. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean being sexy has to help. It has to help. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know who does know how to pronounce Ewan McGregor's
Speaker 1: name and never feels any anxiety over it because their
Speaker 1: friends they hang out on the weekend? Oh nice? Who
Speaker 1: who's at the products and services that support this podcast
Speaker 1: are all good buddies with Ewan McGregor hangs out with
Speaker 1: the highway patrol. Ah, we are back. As the election
Speaker 1: grew nearer, disinformation continued to proliferate on Facebook, and the
Speaker 1: political temperature in the United States rose ever higher. Facebook
Speaker 1: employees grew concerned about the wide variety of worst case
Speaker 1: scenarios that might result if something went wrong with the election.
Speaker 1: They put together a series of emergency break glass measures.
Speaker 1: These would allow them to automatically slow or stop the
Speaker 1: formation of new Facebook groups if the election was contested.
Speaker 1: This was never stated, but you get the feeling. They
Speaker 1: were looking at Kenosha and how Facebook groups had led
Speaker 1: to spontaneous and deadly militia groups to form up due
Speaker 1: to viral news stories. My interpretation is that they were
Speaker 1: terrified of the same sort of phenomenon that it would
Speaker 1: lead to Facebook like fueling a civil war. Like I
Speaker 1: think that we're literally worried that like something will go wrong,
Speaker 1: people will form militias on Facebook and there will be
Speaker 1: a gun fight that a shipload of people die, and
Speaker 1: that escalates to something worse, and everyone will say it
Speaker 1: started on Facebook because that happened in Kenosha, Like, this
Speaker 1: is not a thing. It happened with the Boololoo stuff
Speaker 1: after Yeah, it happened several times last year at a
Speaker 1: fair anxiety. We've seen it happen. Yeah, it was never
Speaker 1: a massive exchange of gunfire, thank fucking god. Um, but
Speaker 1: they were they thought they saw that possibility. This is
Speaker 1: the thing. I was worried about the entirety of um um,
Speaker 1: and we got really close to it several times. I
Speaker 1: was there for a few of them. It sucked. UM.
Speaker 1: So they're worried about this and they start coming. They
Speaker 1: try to figure out like break like emergency measures they
Speaker 1: can take to basically like shut all that ship down,
Speaker 1: like stop people from joining and making new Facebook groups.
Speaker 1: If they have to write if like it becomes obvious
Speaker 1: that something needs to be done. Um and yeah, so
Speaker 1: they they uh yeah. In September, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on
Speaker 1: an internal company post that his company had quote and
Speaker 1: obligator had quote, a responsibility to protect our democracy. He
Speaker 1: bragged about a voter registration campaign the social network and funded,
Speaker 1: and claimed they'd taken vigorous steps to eliminate voter misinformation
Speaker 1: and block political ads, all with the stated goal of
Speaker 1: reducing the chances of violence and unrest. The election came,
Speaker 1: and it it all right. From Facebook's perspective, the whole
Speaker 1: situation was too fluid and confusing in those early days
Speaker 1: after the election. You know where we're getting the counts in.
Speaker 1: Everything's down to the fucking wire. It was all too
Speaker 1: messy for there to be much in the way of
Speaker 1: violent on the ground action to occur. Wow, like that
Speaker 1: was getting sorted out because people just didn't know where's
Speaker 1: it going to land. Um, so they think, oh, we
Speaker 1: dodged a bullet. Everything was fine because they're dumb. Oh baby. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The reality, of course, is that misinformation about election integrity
Speaker 1: spread immediately like wildfire. On November five, one Facebook employee
Speaker 1: warn't colleagues that disinformation was filling the comments section of
Speaker 1: news posts about the election. The most incendiary and dangerous
Speaker 1: comments were being amplified by Facebook's algorithm to appear as
Speaker 1: the top comment on popular threads. On November nine, a
Speaker 1: Facebook data scientists reported in an internal study that one
Speaker 1: out of every fifty views on Facebook in the United States,
Speaker 1: and fully ten percent of all views of political information
Speaker 1: on the site, was content claiming the election had been stolen.
Speaker 1: Temper into Facebook's political posts are the election was stolen? Yeah,
Speaker 1: one out of fifty views on Facebook is someone saying
Speaker 1: the election stolen. This ship is out of controlsutably, everyone
Speaker 1: engaging to agree. Wow, Okay, I honestly, honestly, I would
Speaker 1: have guessed that it would have been higher. But but
Speaker 1: one intent is still there's a lot going on on Facebook. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The researcher noted there was also a fringe incitement to violence.
Speaker 1: And I would quibble over the word fringe because I
Speaker 1: don't think it was very fringe. Um, But otherwise the
Speaker 1: data is interesting, you know, like, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ten people. It's not the fringe. He's saying. The incitement
Speaker 1: to violence was a fringe of the posts claiming the
Speaker 1: election had been stolen. I disagree with his interpretation of
Speaker 1: that based on my own amount of time that I
Speaker 1: spent looking through these same posts. But whatever, maybe we're
Speaker 1: looking at different posts. You know, there's a lot going
Speaker 1: on on Facebook. In those days. Facebook did not Yeah,
Speaker 1: Facebook did not blow the whistle or sound the alarm
Speaker 1: or do anything but start canceling. It's some agency procedures.
Speaker 1: They were like, we get it. The critical periods over.
Speaker 1: Everything's gonna be fine and dandy, baby. Um. They thought
Speaker 1: the danger of post election violence was over. And most
Speaker 1: of all, they thought that if they took action to
Speaker 1: stop the reach of far right propaganda users, then conservatives
Speaker 1: would complain. As we now know, the most consequential species
Speaker 1: of disinformation after November two would be the Stop the
Speaker 1: Steel movement. The idea behind the campaign had its origins
Speaker 1: in the election, as essentially a fundraising grift from Roger Stone.
Speaker 1: Ali Alexander, who is a ship head, adapted it in
Speaker 1: the wake of the election, and it wound up being
Speaker 1: a major inspiration for the January sixth Capital riot. As
Speaker 1: we now know from a secret internal report, Facebook was
Speaker 1: aware of the Stop the Steel movement from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Quote from Facebook. The first stop the Steel group emerged
Speaker 1: on election night. It was flagged for escalation because it
Speaker 1: contained high levels of hate and violence and incitement V
Speaker 1: and I and the comments. The group was disabled and
Speaker 1: an investigation was kicked off looking for early signs of
Speaker 1: coordination and harm across the news stop the Steel groups
Speaker 1: that were quickly sprouting up to replace it. With our
Speaker 1: early signals, it was unclear that coordination was taking place
Speaker 1: or that there was enough harm to constitute designating the term.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until later that it became clear just how
Speaker 1: much of a focal point the catchphrase would be, and
Speaker 1: that they would serve as a rallying point around which
Speaker 1: a movement of violent election delegitimization could coalesce. From the
Speaker 1: earliest groups, we saw high levels of hate, v and
Speaker 1: I and de legitimization combined with meteoric growth rates. Almost
Speaker 1: all of the fastest growing Facebook groups were stopped the
Speaker 1: Steel during their peak growth. Because we were looking at
Speaker 1: each entity individually rather than as a cohesive movement, we
Speaker 1: were only able to take down individual groups and pages
Speaker 1: once they exceeded a violation threshold. We were not able
Speaker 1: to act on simple objects like posts and comments because
Speaker 1: they individually tended not to violate even if they were
Speaker 1: surrounded by hate, violence and misinformation after the Capital insurrection. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is such garbage. I mean, it's like, and I
Speaker 1: know that you have examined far more of these posts
Speaker 1: than I have in depth, but it's just the fast
Speaker 1: and looseness that people interpret like just it's like free
Speaker 1: form jazz of the way people interpret Facebook community rules.
Speaker 1: Because I feel like in groups like that and in
Speaker 1: groups like less inflammatory than that, there is just constant
Speaker 1: breaking of the Facebook community rules. It's just uh, it's yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not really moderated at all. Um. Yeah, So this
Speaker 1: is interesting to me for a few reasons. For one,
Speaker 1: it lays out what I suspect is the case these
Speaker 1: researchers and Facebook employees needed to believe and be able
Speaker 1: to argue in order to not hate themselves. Um, the
Speaker 1: idea that like, we just didn't recognize it was coordinated.
Speaker 1: We thought it was all it was. It was all
Speaker 1: kind of grassroots and happening like organically, and so it
Speaker 1: was much more complicated for us to try to deal with.
Speaker 1: I think they need to believe this. I'm going to
Speaker 1: explain why it's not a good excuse. Starting in December two,
Speaker 1: nineteen and going until May, the boogleoo movement expanded rapidly
Speaker 1: in Facebook groups. Incitements to violence semi regularly got groups nooped,
Speaker 1: and members adapted new terms in order to avoid getting
Speaker 1: deep platformed. It became gradually obvious that a number of
Speaker 1: these groups were cohesive and connected, and this was revealed
Speaker 1: throughout the year in a string of terrorist attacks by
Speaker 1: boogleoo types in multiple states. When these attacks began, Facebook
Speaker 1: engaged in a much more cohesive and effective campaign to
Speaker 1: ban boogaloo groups. The Boogaloo movement and Stop the Steel
Speaker 1: are of course not one to one analogs, but the
Speaker 1: fact that this occurred earlier in the same year, resulting
Speaker 1: in deaths and widespread violence, shows that Fate's book fucking
Speaker 1: knew the stakes. They could have recognized what was going
Speaker 1: on with the Stop the Steel movement earlier, and they
Speaker 1: could have recognized that it was much likely more cohesive
Speaker 1: than it may have seemed. A decision was made not
Speaker 1: to do this, not to act on what they had
Speaker 1: learned earlier that year, and I would argue, based on
Speaker 1: everything else, we know that the reason why this decision
Speaker 1: was made was primarily political, like they didn't want to
Speaker 1: piss off conservatives, you know. Yeah, I mean, and that's
Speaker 1: that is like a criminal level of negligence. I would argue,
Speaker 1: that's leaving a did gun with a six year old,
Speaker 1: you know yeah, and being like, well, I was pretty
Speaker 1: sure it had a safety. Yeah. I just I'm like
Speaker 1: they like, God, there's just I miss when they were
Speaker 1: radicalized by farm bill. Yeah, white supremacy. Yeah. So my
Speaker 1: critiques aside, this internal report does provide us with a
Speaker 1: lot of really useful information info that would have been
Speaker 1: very helpful to experts seeking to stop the spread of
Speaker 1: violent extremism online if they had had it back when
Speaker 1: Facebook found it out. So it's rad that Facebook absolutely
Speaker 1: never intended to release any of this. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 1: And that they were never going to put any of
Speaker 1: this out? There's like really useful. Dad. I have a
Speaker 1: quote in here. I don't think I'll read it because
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of numbers and it's only really interesting
Speaker 1: to nerds about this, but about like how many of
Speaker 1: the people who get in to stop the steel groups
Speaker 1: come in through like invites, and like how many people
Speaker 1: are actually responsible for the invites. What the average number
Speaker 1: of invites for a person is? Like, it's really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: I'll have the links for it in there. You can
Speaker 1: read these into and on Facebook post. But like you
Speaker 1: know what, I'll read the quote. Stop the Steel was
Speaker 1: able to grow rapidly through coordinated group invites. Sixtent of
Speaker 1: stop the Steel joints came through invites. Moreover, these invites
Speaker 1: were dominated by a handful of superinviterstent of invites came
Speaker 1: from just three point three percent of inviters. Invits also
Speaker 1: tended to be connected to one another through interactions. They
Speaker 1: comment on tag and share one another's content. Out of
Speaker 1: six thousand, four hundred and fifty high engagers, four thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty five of them were directly connected to one another,
Speaker 1: meaning they interacted with one another's content or messaged one
Speaker 1: another when using the full information cord or seventy connected
Speaker 1: to one another. This suggests that the bulk of the
Speaker 1: stop to steel application was happening as part of a
Speaker 1: cohesive movement. This would have been great data to have
Speaker 1: in January, right, That would have been really good to know. YEA.
Speaker 1: That is speaking as a guy who does this professionally.
Speaker 1: That would have been great to have. But this is
Speaker 1: all just internal Like, okay, so we know, so we
Speaker 1: know this, let us never to speak of it again.
Speaker 1: Problem is, yeah, now we'll deny it to anyone who
Speaker 1: alleges this while we have this excellent data that we
Speaker 1: will not hand out because we're pieces of ship. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: called January six. Facebook employees were as horrified as anyone
Speaker 1: else by what happened in the capital. This horror was
Speaker 1: tweaked up several degrees by the undeniable fact that their
Speaker 1: work for the social network had helped to enable it.
Speaker 1: Was that it was their fault. Yeah, in that Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the same way that like when I finish having
Speaker 1: a gasoline and match fight in my neighbor's house and
Speaker 1: then inexplicable tragedy ensues, I can't help but feel somewhat responsible,
Speaker 1: you know. Wait, hold on, I'm feeling this vague melan
Speaker 1: and I know it's not my fault. Don't worry. I
Speaker 1: know it's not my fault. Um, but I feel that way. No,
Speaker 1: you just lit a match. I mean, I think we
Speaker 1: can hold the match accountable. The match was responsible, the match,
Speaker 1: the neighbor for having a house A lot of people
Speaker 1: are to blame here them, That's on them exactly. So
Speaker 1: they're all horrified. Everybody's horrified. Much of the riot itself
Speaker 1: was broadcast in a series of Facebook live streams as
Speaker 1: Mike Pince's secret service details scrambled to extricate him from
Speaker 1: the Capitol grounds. Facebook employees tried to enact their break
Speaker 1: the Glass emergency measures, and originally conceived for the immediate
Speaker 1: post election period, this was too little, too late. That evening,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg posted a message on Facebook's internal messaging system
Speaker 1: with the title employee f y I. He claimed to
Speaker 1: be horrified about what had happened and reiterated his company's
Speaker 1: commitment to democracy. Chief technology officer Mike Schrepfer, one of
Speaker 1: the most internally respected members of Facebook's leadership, also made
Speaker 1: a post asking employees to hang in there while the
Speaker 1: company decided on its next steps. The theme from the
Speaker 1: Trolls song like what Jeffrey Tatsenberg fired the entire hang
Speaker 1: in their folks, hang in there, you're hanging in there.
Speaker 1: Here's an amazing song by misss Anna Kendrick. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's what he did. Uh. So he tells them us
Speaker 1: uh and an employee responds, we have been hanging in
Speaker 1: there for years. We must demand more action from our
Speaker 1: leaders at this point, faith alone is not sufficient. Another
Speaker 1: message was more pointed, all due respect, but haven't we
Speaker 1: had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse
Speaker 1: without enabling violence. We've been fueling this fire for a
Speaker 1: long time, and we shouldn't be surprised it's now out
Speaker 1: of control. The Atlantic. Yeah, fair, the Atlantic the poster
Speaker 1: with a little kitten hanging from the branch that says
Speaker 1: we have been hanging in there for years? Yea? Or
Speaker 1: how about we have been fueling this fire for a
Speaker 1: long time and shouldn't be surprised now it's now out
Speaker 1: of control. We could do that with the this is
Speaker 1: fine meme. Guys sitting in the fire. This is on us.
Speaker 1: You know, we shouldn't be This isn't surprising. We had
Speaker 1: ample warning of the fire. But hang in there, Hang
Speaker 1: in there, kiddos. So I think The Atlantic has done
Speaker 1: some of the best reporting I found on this particular
Speaker 1: moment when Mark and shreppor get up and like say,
Speaker 1: don't we like hanging there? We love democracy and like
Speaker 1: people go off on them January six, like there are
Speaker 1: people were like a little more open about the frustration
Speaker 1: they felt about all this stuff then and then they
Speaker 1: stopped being that open um. It's frustrating, and everybody's treating
Speaker 1: these people with kid loves whatever. The Atlantic has done
Speaker 1: really good reporting on this, on this exact momentum, which
Speaker 1: seems to have been kind of a damn breaking situation
Speaker 1: for unrest within the company. One employee wrote, what are
Speaker 1: we going to do differently to make the future better?
Speaker 1: If the answer is nothing, then we're just that apocryphal
Speaker 1: Einstein quote on the definition of insanity. Another added to
Speaker 1: Mike shrep for please understand, I think you are a
Speaker 1: great person and genuinely one of the good people in
Speaker 1: leadership that keeps me here. But we cannot deal with
Speaker 1: fundamentally bad faith actors by using good faith solutions. Um,
Speaker 1: that's a good way to but yeah, yeah, I would
Speaker 1: also like democratic leadership to know that. But well, let's
Speaker 1: not set the bar too high. They're they're not going
Speaker 1: to figure that out now. In the wake of January six,
Speaker 1: an awful lot of people me included exhaustively documented Facebook's
Speaker 1: contribution to the attack and criticized company for enabling political
Speaker 1: violence on a grand scale. The company responded the way
Speaker 1: they always respond with lies. Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in
Speaker 1: March that Facebook quote did our part to secure the
Speaker 1: integrity of our election. Cheryl Sandberg, boss girl and a
Speaker 1: chief operating officer for the company, claimed in mid January
Speaker 1: that the Capitol Yeah claimed in mid January that the
Speaker 1: Capitol riot was quote largely organized on platforms that don't
Speaker 1: have our abilities to stop hate. I mean, Robert, first
Speaker 1: of all, as you know, as a big Sandberg advocate,
Speaker 1: you can't talk about her that way because she told
Speaker 1: women that they should negotiate their own salary. You fucking loser.
Speaker 1: Did you ever think about negotiating your own salary? Fucking
Speaker 1: dweeb dollars? And I love that. I do love that too.
Speaker 1: That's my favorite thing that she did. So Sandberg is
Speaker 1: a lot smarter than Mark Zuckerberg, and her statement was
Speaker 1: the very clever sort of not technically a lie that
Speaker 1: spreads a lot more disinformation than just a normal lie. Whatever, man,
Speaker 1: Because it's technically true that more actual organizing for the
Speaker 1: riot was done in places like Parlor as well as
Speaker 1: more private messaging apps. But it's also a lie because
Speaker 1: the organizing of the actual movement that spawned the riot
Speaker 1: to stop the steel ship that was almost entirely Facebook.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, people didn't like go and open Facebook
Speaker 1: groups and do like most of the people didn't like
Speaker 1: go in there and be like, Okay, we're doing a caravan,
Speaker 1: although some people did and we have quotes of that. Um,
Speaker 1: a lot of that happened in other apps, but like
Speaker 1: the overall those other apps if they had not first
Speaker 1: been on Facebook. No, yeah, that's what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 1: that's why it's smarter than her, because Mark Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: just lying to Congress, um, because they didn't Cheryl Sandberg
Speaker 1: is being very intelligent um, and also kind of backhandedly
Speaker 1: complimenting Facebook in its hour of most blatant failure within
Speaker 1: the United States. At least not most blatant failure. That
Speaker 1: would be far. I mean, check the date that year, listen,
Speaker 1: you know, check the date record at this we may
Speaker 1: have had an ethnic cleansing enabled by Facebook by the
Speaker 1: time this episode drops. Yeah, as of this recording of
Speaker 1: the non ethnic cleansings and also the things that have
Speaker 1: been done in the United States that were worse than
Speaker 1: Facebook did, this tops the list, does not top the
Speaker 1: list of their overall crimes, which include the deaths of
Speaker 1: tens of thousands us. True, ye, good stuff, good stuff.
Speaker 1: I just I felt like the need to celebrate I do.
Speaker 1: Oh those were nice. Those are nice. My crush used
Speaker 1: to send me those in high school. And now that
Speaker 1: website is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah, it's it's good stuff. So what I
Speaker 1: find so utterly fascinating about the leaks we have of
Speaker 1: Facebook employees responding to their bosses on the evening of
Speaker 1: January six is that it makes it irrevocably, undeniably clear
Speaker 1: that Zuckerberg and Sandberg and every other Facebook mouthpiece lide
Speaker 1: when they claimed the company had no responsibility for the
Speaker 1: violence on January six, The people who worked for Facebook
Speaker 1: on the day it happened immediately blamed their own company
Speaker 1: for the arnage quote. Really do appreciate this response, and
Speaker 1: I can imagine the stress leadership is under, But this
Speaker 1: feels like the only avenue where we opt to compare
Speaker 1: ourselves to other companies, rather than taking our own lead.
Speaker 1: If our headsheets shocked, if our headsets shocked someone, would
Speaker 1: we say, well, it's still much better than PlayStation VR
Speaker 1: and it's unprecedented technology, which I felt otherwise, but it's
Speaker 1: simply not enough to say we're adapting, because we should
Speaker 1: have adapted already long ago. The atrophy occurs when people
Speaker 1: know how to circumvent our policies and we're too reactive
Speaker 1: to stay ahead. There were dozens of Stopped the Steel
Speaker 1: groups active until recently, and I doubt they minced words
Speaker 1: about their intense intentions. Again, hugely appreciate your response and
Speaker 1: the dialogue, but I'm simply exhausted by the weight here.
Speaker 1: We're at Facebook, not some naive startup. With the unprecedented
Speaker 1: resources we have, we should do better. Yeah, but I've
Speaker 1: that's like part of the Zuckerberg eathos is to continue
Speaker 1: to behave like he's fast and yeah or well or
Speaker 1: more iconically, Um what if what is the quote that's
Speaker 1: on my shirt? Um? Oh and that's how I live
Speaker 1: my life? Ha ha the key And he's still like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and I feel like that is whatever. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that does say so much about him, because like
Speaker 1: a good person can say, you can break the law
Speaker 1: and not be unethical, and that's how I live my life.
Speaker 1: And that's fine because the laws generally trash. Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: specifically saying, I get to be a piece of ship
Speaker 1: as long as I don't technically break the law. And
Speaker 1: because I have money, I'm never technically breaking the law.
Speaker 1: Is that not sweet? And then don't forget ha ha
Speaker 1: ha ha. You can be an ethical and still be illegal.
Speaker 1: That's the way I live my life. Ha ha. I'll
Speaker 1: never forgaw, I'll never, never, never forget. I'm getting that
Speaker 1: tattooed right above my comeback with a warrant tramp stamp.
Speaker 1: Yeah and yeah and then and I would also recommend
Speaker 1: getting it on on the other side, right next to
Speaker 1: your phoenix that I know you're you're planning out. Oh
Speaker 1: full back. It's actually gonna be a perfect replica of
Speaker 1: the tattoo that Ben Affleck has. And then over my
Speaker 1: chest a perfect photo realistic tattoo have Ben Affleck picking
Speaker 1: up Duncan Donuts and looking like he's just watched his
Speaker 1: dog shoot itself. No, I don't I like appreciate his
Speaker 1: devotion to Duncan Donuts. I don't know how he I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess he's just tired, because I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: look that way at Duncan dunt picture I've seen of
Speaker 1: myself at Duncan Donuts. I look so happy to be there.
Speaker 1: How could you not be thrilled? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, i'd say it's Boston, but you're
Speaker 1: from Boston, right, I'm from Boston and I'm so happy
Speaker 1: to be there. Yeah. People keep saying, No, he doesn't
Speaker 1: look miserable. He just looks like he's from Boston, and
Speaker 1: I think he just as to that. I don't go
Speaker 1: to other girls, Robert. I don't know if you know that.
Speaker 1: I'm not like other girls. So I'm I'm happy at
Speaker 1: the Duncan Donuts. Okay, okay, fair enough? Um so yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. At the beginning, I talked about the
Speaker 1: fact that I have said I think working for Facebook
Speaker 1: is an a moral activity today given what's known. That said,
Speaker 1: there were some points made during this employee bitch session
Speaker 1: that do make me kind of hesitant to suggest employees
Speaker 1: just bounce from the company. In mass quote, please continue
Speaker 1: to fight for us, shrep. This is the person talking
Speaker 1: to the I'm sorry you care you're hearing. I know,
Speaker 1: I know, I know. Facebook Engineering needs you representing our
Speaker 1: ethical standards in the highest levels of leadership unless uck,
Speaker 1: what's is products built by a cast of mercenaries and ghoules.
Speaker 1: We need to employ thousands of thoughtful, carrying engineers, and
Speaker 1: it will be difficult to continue to hire and retain
Speaker 1: them on our present course. That's not a terrible point, Okay,
Speaker 1: that feels like a half step. Yeah. Yeah, It's one
Speaker 1: of those things where like, on one hand, it is
Speaker 1: bad to work for a company that's entire job is
Speaker 1: to do harm at scale, which is what Facebook does.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, if they are replaced by people
Speaker 1: who don't have any ethical standards at all, that also
Speaker 1: probably isn't great. Now I don't agree with that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's complicated because, like I guess you could argue that, like, well,
Speaker 1: if all of the good engineers leave and they have
Speaker 1: to hire the ghouls, like, it'll fall apart eventually. And
Speaker 1: I guess it's the question of like when does the
Speaker 1: damage done by Facebook, like fading in popularity hopefully eclipse
Speaker 1: the damage done by the fact that everyone working there
Speaker 1: is the blackwater equivalent of a guy coding a fucking algorithm.
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, it's yeah, it's whatever, it's a
Speaker 1: it's just something to think about. I guess, um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Facebook is having a hiring crisis right now. I think
Speaker 1: it's gotten a little better recently. Um, but they've had
Speaker 1: massive shortages of engineers and failed to meet their hiring
Speaker 1: goals in two thousand, nineteen twenty. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they're gonna if they have, if it's gotten better this
Speaker 1: year or not. Um, I don't know how much any
Speaker 1: of that's gonna like help uh matters. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It seems unlikely that anything will get better anytime. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the real solution is to make the company
Speaker 1: run by even worse who are less qualified that I
Speaker 1: don't know. That doesn't that doesn't sound great either. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think there are volcanoes and that probably
Speaker 1: has part of the solution to the Facebook problem in it.
Speaker 1: There you go cast their servers into the fires. So
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Nerd horsemen of the Apocalypse
Speaker 1: have basically built a gun that fires automatically into a
Speaker 1: crowd called society every couple of seconds. The engineers are
Speaker 1: the people who keep the gun loaded. It's good, yes,
Speaker 1: So the engineers they keep the gun loaded, but also
Speaker 1: sometimes they jerk it away from shooting a child in
Speaker 1: the face, and if they leave the bull, the gun
Speaker 1: might run out of bullets. But it's just going to
Speaker 1: keep shooting straight until the crowd until that point. So
Speaker 1: maybe it's better to have engineers. Yeah, I had to
Speaker 1: end with a metaphor um. I don't know, it's complicated
Speaker 1: whatever I want to end this episode. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: just a mess. It's a messy thing to think about.
Speaker 1: We should never have let it get this far. We've
Speaker 1: been putting fuel on the fire for a while. We
Speaker 1: shouldn't be surprised that it's burning every thing. Truly, it
Speaker 1: has become It feels like it is slowly becoming, just
Speaker 1: like an annual document drop of like, yeah, things have
Speaker 1: steadily gotten worse. Yeah, the Hell Company is pretty shitty here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hell Companies bad stuff at Nightmare Corp. Bad. It is
Speaker 1: really bad. It's funny how bad it is. I want
Speaker 1: to end this episode with my very favorite response from
Speaker 1: a Facebook employee to that message from ct O Shrepp
Speaker 1: Facebook employee, if you happen to be listening to this episode,
Speaker 1: please hit me up because I love you. Here it
Speaker 1: is never forget the day Trump wrote down the escalator
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen called for a ban on Muslims
Speaker 1: entering the US, and we determined that it violated our policies,
Speaker 1: and yet we explicitly overrode the policy and didn't take
Speaker 1: the video down. There was a straight line that can
Speaker 1: be drawn from that day to today, one of the
Speaker 1: darkest days in the history of democracy and self governance.
Speaker 1: Would it have made a difference in the end, We
Speaker 1: can never know, but history will not judge us kindly. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing,
Speaker 1: and we get an annual reminder, we get an annual
Speaker 1: little Pelican summit drop of documents saying that no, they
Speaker 1: still know what they're doing. They have not forgotten what
Speaker 1: they're doing. I might suggest that overtake. Are we the
Speaker 1: batties as like the moment you know things need to change?
Speaker 1: When when you're like, boy, I think history might judge
Speaker 1: me from my employment decisions. I think I may be
Speaker 1: damned by like the historians of the future when they
Speaker 1: analyze my role in society. Right, And it's like, if
Speaker 1: you're at that place, Uh, that's not good. That we've
Speaker 1: passed the point of no return. You know, like five
Speaker 1: years ago with with Facebook, it's just good Laurd. I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, and I and I do like applaud the
Speaker 1: whistleblowers and the people who are continuing to drop documents.
Speaker 1: And at this point it also does just feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, getting punched in the face repeatedly because it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad that there is the paper trail, I'm glad
Speaker 1: that there's the evidence, but it's who at this point
Speaker 1: is surprised, like there's like when people it's whatever. I mean, technically,
Speaker 1: I think by the definition of the word, these are revelations,
Speaker 1: but they're also very much not They're just confirmations of
Speaker 1: things that appeared very obvious based on the conduct of
Speaker 1: this company already. Yep, yeah, Jamie, do you have any
Speaker 1: plugables for us? Do you do you perhaps have a
Speaker 1: Facebook owned Instagram meta thing? It don't We don't need
Speaker 1: to call it meta. I I think no one needs
Speaker 1: to call it what. There's only one meta and it's
Speaker 1: a metal world piece. Wow. Basketball player basketball player Ronald
Speaker 1: has changed his name a matter world Piece, like many
Speaker 1: years ago, so he did the meta first. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: the metaverse was already taken. I you can you can
Speaker 1: listen to my podcast. I got a bunch you listen
Speaker 1: to Bechtel Cast, My Year and Men to Act Castle
Speaker 1: Lead to podcast or none. I won't know. I'll know
Speaker 1: in so actually Sophie will know. So maybe you'd better
Speaker 1: listen to them, or I'll lose my livelihood, which would
Speaker 1: be which would be interesting? Uh? You could follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter Jamie Lofts Help, or Instagram at Jamie christ Superstar,
Speaker 1: where I bravely continued to use uh Zuckerberg's tools of
Speaker 1: having Yeah, isn't it funny Jamie that we call it
Speaker 1: our livelihood, which is just a nicer way of saying
Speaker 1: our ability to not starve to death in the street. Yeah? Yeah, whoever,
Speaker 1: whoever back in the day rebranded survival to livelihood. Really
Speaker 1: real genius, sleight of hand. Incredible. This is why I
Speaker 1: think we should have a program in schools where we
Speaker 1: determine which kids are going to be good at marketing,
Speaker 1: and then we shipped them to an island, and we
Speaker 1: don't we don't think about it after that point into
Speaker 1: the island. If they go, it's a nice island, like
Speaker 1: a good one, like a solid island. Marketing the island
Speaker 1: you're marketing to the island. That's good. I think we
Speaker 1: put them on an island and we divert all of
Speaker 1: the world's military forces to making sure that nothing gets
Speaker 1: to that island that isn't a marketer or leaves it,
Speaker 1: and then make sure that and and make fucking sure
Speaker 1: there's no WiFi signal on the Oh good god. No,
Speaker 1: would absolutely not absolutely fun. Once a day they can
Speaker 1: watch Shark Tank together, but that's all they're getting. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's sounds that actually kind of sounds nice living on
Speaker 1: an island and watching one episode of Shark Tank day.
Speaker 1: That's like, that's my like dream lobotomy. That's kind of nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's the episode, Paul Robert Jamie. How are you doing?
Speaker 1: How are you feeling? I feel like, you know, I
Speaker 1: am feeling just kind of a low thrumming of despair,
Speaker 1: but but I have good Yeah, that's right, that's how
Speaker 1: you're supposed to feel. I have felt worse at the
Speaker 1: end of this show, which I don't know if that
Speaker 1: says more about like my threshold for despair or you know,
Speaker 1: happens to be a coincidence, but you know, I'll say
Speaker 1: I'm hanging in there. But also I've been hanging in
Speaker 1: there for years. Yeah, that's all you can do is
Speaker 1: hang in there. Yeah, keep hanging in Are you hanging
Speaker 1: in there? Robert allegedly Yeah. I mean, by all accounts,
Speaker 1: you're hanging in there. But like internally, there's no who
Speaker 1: could say no. No, I'm I'm, I'm. I'm as unmoored
Speaker 1: and adrift as the rest of us are in these
Speaker 1: I'm gonna when I visit, I'm going to show you
Speaker 1: pin and I really think you're gonna like it. Oh good, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: how's