Transcripts For CSPAN2 After 20240704

Today. And i really want to start by bringing our viewers back to fall of 2020. What would you release . The facebook of a series of stories that really sparked this this global conversation and about about the company and in how a lot of it a lot of what it was communicating to the public was not how it was working internally. Can you take us back to that moment, those stories and what that was like . Yeah, sure. So, you know, the book came out of initially the documents that were provided to us by francis horgan, a former facebook employee, who in final stint, final months at the company, began talking with the journal and documenting some of the things she was concerned about internally. And she ended up taking more than 20,000 screenshots, lots of internal work product, and that was kind of the basis for the Facebook Files and the stuff covered just kind of a really wide range of how facebook interacted with society from like the special dispensations it gave to powerful individuals on their own, on their platform to violate its rules and not get punished to teen Mental Health and instagram issues to the sort of the companies failure to combat Human Trafficking on its platform. Until apple threatened to remove apps from the app store unless it did something about it to covid and so it was kind of a pretty and then also to politics, right. How the platform changed the tenor of political conversations worldwide by favoring really vitriolic, you know, kind of firebrand content over and over a sort of more moderate voices. So all of that, like kind of this big, massive documents that we got and that sort of suggested the company was far from the neutral platform that matter had it Facebook Meta had always spoken of it as and i think that that was kind of the basis of that stuff. Obviously, those documents ended up going to congress and to a whole bunch of other news outlets as in the end, and from there, i think the goal was to write a book that both went deeper into those records than a newspaper could ever do, and also could explain the story of how it came to be. Francis howe again only touched on a small piece of her work. You was only a tiny piece of the overall sort of collection of information and i kind of wanted to write the story of how facebook came to be aware of its role in the world and how it affects human interaction. And in some instances distorted it and, you know, kind of the people who made those discoveries and the internal fight to to get facebook to address some of the things that its own safety staff discovered. The thing that is so stunning about all of this is is not just what you were able to reveal through those documents, but also just the contrast, the constant contrast between how facebook was presenting itself and its goals to the public and what it was doing behind the scenes. So can you paint a picture for us of what things facebook says, what it now at the company is called meta . Well, what what does zuckerberg say about the companys goals and about its attention to these difficult problems . And how does that contrast with what youve seen behind the. Yeah, so i mean, i think one of the things that sort of paved the way for the difficulty facebook had after 2016 and sort of the internal reckoning was that they had 2016 president ial election on is that theyve been pollyanna ish about the platforms role in the world. The idea was that they were going to connect everyone and that it was going to make the world better in every possible way. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg at one point talked about how the spread of facebook would literally end terrorism in the middle east because, you know, young, disaffected youth that were online and were connected via social networks to, you know, young guess views on the other side would lose the capacity to hate. Right. Obviously, that didnt work out very well. And so they kind of just had this like everythings going to be great all the time. Expectation. And i think they didnt put much work into safety at the beginning. You know, it was just kind of well deal with the worst possible stuff if it breaks the law and it comes to our attention, then well take it down. But they didnt really do much on that front. And i think one of the things that was really important here was that the company was in the you know, for basically the last decade was sort of leaning heavier and heavier into algorithmic Recommendation Systems. The platform stopped being kind of the original version of facebook and social, where it kind of you just followed your friends and you saw the things they posted and it became much more heavy on recommendations and as you know, this is true of instagram as well. And so that sort of taking a more active role in promoting content, but they never liked the idea that they were responsible for what they promoted. You know, the whole idea was that the platform was completely neutral, that Mark Zuckerberg, you know, wanted humans to be completely out of the loop. But at the same time, i think one of the things that it the safety staff found was that not making choices about what content thrives in your platform and what content you promote is still making a choice right. It was turned out to be very easy to gain the platform that bad actors didnt matter if they were russians or macedonian high students or you know, just about anybody who was committed could easily gain the algorithm and they just sort of i think they just didnt assume. I mean, for a company that set out to change the world. Right, which was kind of facebooks thing, they to some degree were shockingly unprepared for actually changing it. That makes sense, right . It seems to me that, you know, just from from your book and from my own conversations, they have this idea that, you know, as people become connected, they generate empathy. Theyll theyll build friendships that all connection is good and all conversation is as good as an extension of that. Right. And as you lay out, in many cases of facebook groups with recommendations or to follow on instagram with virality and its sort of like often those those recommendations or just giving the people what they want turns into disaster or harm. Can you give us a few examples . Yeah. Yeah. So, i mean, i think i actually would question a little bit one thing you said there, which is that its giving the people what they want right. They have this like extreme only rudimentary system in some ways for determining what people want its like called if you get a response, then send more of whatever got a response right . Unless like literally seeing a post caused people to close out of the platform if they respond in any fashion, thats a good thing. And you know, engagement is the industry term for that, right . Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, they they one of the really interesting things is that they did user surveys and very clearly the users wanted them to do far to address misinformation, to you know, reduce kind of disturbing content to address clickbait and engagement efforts to. Just basically game the system to boost more reliable news over, you know, fly by night publishers were either making things up or just, you know, stealing other peoples work and making it more aggressive. The users wanted this stuff and they told the company that no in no uncertain terms, but at the same time, the engagement metric right, which is like do they use the product for and longer. That was always with the Company Trusted as what users really wanted right and i think that was a to degree its a pretty unfortunate choice and one that does disrespect. You know, peoples actually stated choice. Its like, oh, you know, you know, you say you dont want this, but you cant your eyes away. So clearly you do want it right . Thats thats i dont think a particularly healthy approach for or a respectful approach, if that makes sense to the presiding officer the senate will come to order. The clerks clerks read a communication to the senate. The clerk february 23, 2024. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable thomas r. Carper, a senator from the state of delaware, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed patty murray, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until way. Ds adjourned until right. Like, i mean, how many times have you have you heard the phrase, you know, we connect you with the people and things you know, you love or like, you know, kind of these extremely vague things that acknowledge that theres a lot on, but dont really say what the company was doing and know. And i think that a lot of the choices when you start looking at them a little more closely, start looking, i would say. Morally suspect, you know, is it a you know, just because people tend to respond to vitriolic political stuff, does that mean you should send them more vitriolic political stuff . You know, i think thats an you know, thats not something that i think is an obvious. Yes, but it always was at mita likewise. I think, you know, some of the design changes that theyve made things like allowing people to invite literally thousands of people into groups per day, like send bulk invites to thousands of people. You know, the safety researchers did plenty work on this. They were finding that, you know, the speed at which facebook groups grew made them complete ungovernable. If, you know, even a wellintentioned Group Administrator possibly keep up. And, you know, in some instances you had literally a single user that invited 400,000 people into a queue. And on Conspiracy Group over the course of four months. Right. Like anything i think the company had a hard time suggests staying or accepting that there be anything that was such a thing as usage. Right. Other than like kind of the most obvious and fake account stuff beyond that, you know, people wanted to use the platform to, you know, try to manipulate Public Opinion if people wanted to, you sort of build hyper aggressive almost a misinformation base. So social movements that, you know, that was something that the company just didnt really want to touch. Top touch was a little bit about, you know, ever since elon musk acquired twitter, turned into x, there has been this this drumbeat and and even before that, with facebook, this drumbeat of people calling free speech like facebook shouldnt manipulate what what we think. And the do. And i guess im gathered from what youre saying is there was never a world in which facebook didnt manipulate we think and do. Can you explain that a little bit to those who might not understand how al rhythms work . How recommendations work, that there is no National News role . Yeah, i mean, i think, look, there is a natural neutral which is called facebook. In 2004 people post things and you can visit other peoples profiles and you can look and see what they posted right after that. Things start getting a lot more complicated and i think, you know, conversation that we had about social media for a lot of years was based, you know, pretty much limited, like what should they take down, right . You know, is this such a bad thing that it needs to get removed and . You know, so it was just kind of this binary censorship type question and, you know, that doesnt really account for how the platform works. As you were saying, the way i mean, american, the way that things that post make it into peoples feeds, whether thats instagram or facebook, that is a combination of Design Choices in terms of, you know, what the Company Believes users are most likely to do and then just kind of some straight algorithmic black box work in which literally you were turning over to a computer. The goal of maximizing engagement, however it sees fit, and so itll serve whatever content it predicts is most likely to yield engagement. And, you know, one thing that they did, i think very intentionally was dial up virality, right . They constantly made the platform faster. They constantly, you know tried to make it easier for, you know, just sort of massive amounts of activity. I think one thing in the book that really touches on kind of where, you know, not everything is algorithm, right . Like what you know, where the company went wrong was it was it was the friending team, right. So this is the team thats responsible trying increase the number of connections people make the platform a reasonable goal in principle. Problem is is they realize that for several years the way theyd been hitting their targets was by encouraging people were already friending more than 50 people a day to friend. Even more people. Right. And like as soon i read that or i suspect as soon as you you know that anyone hears that they would think, oh god, nobody makes legitimately 50 friends a day on a regular basis like what sort of activity are you actually boosting because they had you know like bam. I mean like it sure sounds it right. I just have a hard time. Maybe you know, theoretically one person could one day after joining facebook brand new find 50 people they know and friend albut lik thats a one time thing you know like the quality of connection know and thats something that theoretically facebook was supposed to be working on the quality of connection is obviously going to be trash if youre sending out 100 invites per day and the company just like just didnt want to hear it. Even when its own staff was raising this. And so, you know, theres a combination of two things, right . One is the algorithm, because theres that people, you know, people you may know was what it turns out they were recommending the people who send hundred friend request a day because guess those people accept every friend request. They get. So theres the algorithmic part of it. But then theres also the design choice, which is like, should you really be able to send out hundreds of friend requests per day and, you know, meta could never bring itself to say maybe thats unhealthy in these metrics matter for a couple of reasons to facebook, right . First being, if youre on the friend team trying to make more friend connections, maybe if you hit that goal, that number you a bonus, you get a raise, you get promoted. And two, if you more connections for people on facebook more content is to show up in their newsfeed, which then makes for more slots potential advertising, which is great for full cash cow, correct . Yeah. And i think that that was another thing that was really fascinating to realize was just how much users were being manipulated into certain of behavior. Right. They would also try manipulate users into posting more by say, for example, showing them when they would launching reels. They would try to show people, you know, five or six versions of videos in a row the same audio being used, different videos in a row because that increased did increase the number of times that. People then went out and used that same audio. It was like they were trying to basically create an impression of extreme and getting get people to join on the bandwagon. And so like i think the search was, the metrics were are all important to that company, right . You know, if you cant measure it as a problem, it doesnt exist. It is, you know, i think a frequent complaint of a lot of people who were trying to argue for kind of more intervention and more ways to mitigate some of the known issues. And so, you know, they would just, you know, whatever was going to hit the numbers, they would kind of bang that drum. And to some degree, i think it sense right you know that move fast and break things things ethos that the Company Early on was kind of the reason why it beat out its other competitors is that like if something was going increase usage they would just hammer on it until number went up and they never really sort of lost that approach even after they were running something. I think by their own acknowledgment was a near indispensable public utility, right. You know, something that people relied on around world to have conversations and to, you know, discover information were still running as if they were just trying to get the you know, get the quarterly number up. And after 2016, president ial it was we we talked about earlier where facebook realized that there was there was manipulation on the platform by by actors like russia, where they they pledged to do more. Zuckerberg goes on this crosscountry tour. Hes basically a politician and promises that hes really about Building Community and empathy, that 2018 year. Thats when francis haggard joins in. Why does she join facebook . Yes, i think francis is a fascinating human being and a remarkable source. You know, this is a story that like candidly, the people at mit had a hard believing because it was so like almost like scripted, good. And candidly, i did, too when i first met her and heard all about this stuff, i was like, i think persons gilding the lily. I had to do a lot of research. So her background is that had she had a friend who was radical ized on the internet and it wasnt met platforms that did it but, this guy went from, you know, sort of being a, shall we say, you went down a rabbit hole that began with politics and ended up with some version of White Nationalism and the singularity, which is when computers overtake human beings as you know, the more intelligent and dominant force. It was all very weird. But point being, is this this guy just lost his marbles, actually, by his own admission. I tracked him down later. And so she facebook and tried to recruit her for years because, you know, thats not sign that she was like necessarily, you know, the most valuable person in the world it was just that this was a company that had an insane appetite for anyone who was good at data data science and sort of had a track record of able to do this sort of work. I mean, they were doubling in size every 18 months. So she finally basically bit on a recruiting offer and told them that bau of her friend and, you know, having the experience, having lost a friend to radicalization, she wanted to on misinformation. She wanted to work on on that sort of stuff and so she was like very transparent about she was coming in, which is that, you know, she believed that social media was potentially a risk and that she needed to address it, needed to do her part, to address it. And she then a couple of years, i think, growing increased angry, disillusioned because. You know, one of the things that anyone through meadows internal documents will realize is that a lot of the problems that the company describes as being intractable are ones that there were, in fact, plans drawn up for to address. And, you know, the plan wasnt to censor everybody, right . Like it wasnt you know, this wasnt to kind of a free speech based thing, if anything, i think the people who did integrity, work, safety work at the Company Really tried to get away from individual content calls. The whole idea was maybe you make things a little less viral, maybe you are more careful with what you recommend. In other words, if you recommend something, it has to not be bad news, right . You have to be confident that. And if you cant be confident of that, maybe you shouldnt be recommending content. These were things the company just simply wouldnt do. And i think, you know, a thing that was always frustrating to the people who did integrity work was. They were clearly trade offs between growth and integrity. Right after a certain point, the only way for the company to maximize usage was to sort of start encouraging less behaviors, whether that was like consuming a ton of like body image related content for young women or whether that was like encouraging people to like join 400 rabid political groups on facebook that many of which were run by overseas actors. You know, there was always sort of it turned out the way the company hitting its growth targets was like frequently had a dark side and company did not want to listen to that. So they did have all these smart people working on these problem, proposing solutions. But every time that would trickle up to the top, they would get shut down perceptually. And thats why francis yeah, and this was, this was true everywhere. But i think, you know, and i had a hard time believing this at first when i saw these stats, it essentially anything that damaged growth or daily usage and when i, say, damage, i mean literally reduced. By 0. 05 . That was dead on arrival. You could not change the platform in ways that reduced usage. That was just simply not allowed ever. And in fact, facebooks growth slowed those got even more stringent right. Like anything that would decrease any metric that was related to usage was just dead on arrival. And, you know, the company talked about hard tradeoffs, right. Between various things. But the one thing that it never traded off its own growth and, you know, i think a pretty challenging environment work in. And i think one of the reasons why not just francis but a whole bunch of other employees got disaffected and walked i mean, i think to some degree. The book that i wrote is was only possible because Facebook Meta brought in a whole bunch of extremely sma people, told them to work on things that were clearly societally important where lives were at stake and you know, ask them for solutions. They came up with solutions and i met, i said, thanks, but we dont really want to do that. And you know, you break people way. Its like one thing if you know your boss want to take your opinion about, you know, how to boost ad sales a fraction of a percent, its another thing when you know your, boss is unwilling to do that might address the Mental Health and wellbeing of of teenagers or. The you know, a genocide in myanmar or, you know, the safety of the u. S. Elections. Those are things that i that, you know, understandably had a really hard time being told to stand down on and when all of this information came out in fall of 2021. Did the company then acknowledge that it that its been, you know, making these missteps. You know, it was interesting they almost started to acknowledge with teen Mental Health there were problems. And i think they determined that that was not a good strategy. This was i think, a very calculated decision. And some of the emails that have come out since and various state litigation to demonstrate that is that, you know, they said it was all cherry picked and misrepresented in the work. You know, the Research Documents that we obtained, you know, they kind of threw the researchers under the bus and said that the research wasnt very good and, you know, it wasnt credible. And, you know, the people internally, even senior, seemed to acknowledge the reality. This stuff, you know, mean you have, you know, instagrams form of head former head of policy, you know stating that the platform just simply wasnt built for younger teens and that, you know, it was going to be harmful. You have, you know, saying, oh, my god, were putting these ai based beauty filters on which, you know, were offering these up. They make both the people who post pictures in which they are their their appearance is sort of improved. And the people see those pictures feel worse about themselves. But you know what . People use them. So like, lets do it. I mean, they and then that finally came out and some attorney general actually. And yeah. And i mean, i think they really did have a sense of of the potential harms. But, you know, they obviously did not respond well to having their documents made. And the company was, you know, said that it was, you know, the other companies might, you know, dial back on research under those circumstances. It certainly wouldnt. And, you know, there is no question that that was not true. You know, reporting in the book, because it turns out people on providing documents demonstrated that that they were just cracking down massively on what researchers could say, on how they could express themselves. I mean, one thing that i loved is they they made very clear that at no point should an employee ever know that the Company Might be breaking the law or doing something unethical or it was never in writing because it might be misconstrued right. And so you know i think there was kind of a in some ways its been really gratifying to see some of the state ag stuff come out because, you know i think a lot of the pushback the company gave when Facebook Files first came out, i think its nice to be able to see that internally. They didnt believe it either. How does it feel . You know, as a reporter with all of these employees who risked a lot theyve signed ndas, theyve theyve had these these professional relationships to come and talk to you and say, you know, please put this out there in the public. I want to see something happen. And then that Company Response does that. How does that how do you even have that as a journal . From my point of view, as a reporter, its good this is basically meta, almost radicalizing its own staff by you know theres more will come talk to you. Yeah what exactly when when your company is saying oh no that research doesnt exist we dont believe it and everyone knows other otherwise and your staff you know youre really creating a kind of a delta between reality and the companys position. And i think that employees tend to not respond well to that. So to some degree, that has in continued internal sourcing from that company. But i mean, its i think, look, you know this too, from your work. And incidentally, i should probably note here and theres actually a whole questions i want to ask you about about no filter, but, you know, my my interrogator here did write the definitive book on instagrams rise and, you know, tenure early tenure at that meta and early to mid tenure, id say. And, you know, i guess if i can briefly turn the table here, i guess i would i would to ask if. I guess in terms of sort of things that because i wasnt even company covering media, i think in a lot of the time when you were, you know, covering instagram and doing really good work, there. But i would love to know a bit sort of how you think the meta philosophy shaped instagram and particularly given that that is of met as platforms arguably still the most the hottest and most culturally relevant. Well, i one thing that big shock is in my book as i was reporting it out, is that, you know, despite what we know about how how driven Mark Zuckerberg is towards growth and how much he cares about accelerating that in any way possible, instagram had a lot of opportunities grow that zucker didnt want to pursue because he thought that it would cannibalize facebooks gross so tied into all of these ambitions is also a lot of ego around being an inventor being a technologist being the one who solves the problem and makes the the product that wins and you know Kevin Systrom the founder of instagram ultimately the company as his but his cofounder mike krieger. Same thing happened with the cofounders of whatsapp this this way that they were they were growing their products where they they didnt want growth for the sake of of you know manipulating people because they thought that that would be low quality growth that that was just something that that that philosophy didnt. Well the simplicity of an app and now i think that instagram is pretty much just another version of facebook just like facebook with a different skin. All the data is connected all of the the algorithmic modeling is connected doing and the the platform itself is getting a whole more complicated, much as facebook has over the years and diluting its power. And so even though it continues grow, i think that it is losing that that meaning and i think you and i would probably agree on on this this fault of the grow at all costs which is that at a certain point when you give people more of what the data shows, they engage with the quality, the content that they see degrades. Even if you have people befriending more people, then then you as an individual dont want to share as many meaningful things and that could actually hurt the platforms growth in a way and thats why they had this turn now to real. Yeah i think that this is actually a this is a really good point and one that it also does come up in the book is that the Company Just Found itself deeply uncomfortable ever considering questions of quality and to some degree, i think it alienated a lot of the entities that, you know, made it succeed and especially goes for instagram, right. They never had an appreciation for original content. I mean, they said they did. Right. You know, the way to succeed in the platform to post good original content thats actually not correct. Everyone internally understood that the way you on the platform is to steal content from other sources, possibly even other facebook users that has already succeeded because one thing, one saw, something went viral. They would almost certainly go viral again. And so rather than rewarding people who were actually like creating culture, right, as the instagram, you know, sort of model goes they rewarded people who, you know, paid freelance groups like freelancers in bangladesh, 20 to compile dirt bike accidents. Right. And like, i think it was a very hard thing to explain to creators who were like earnestly trying to produce good material for the platform, you know, like why they should do that when. You know, they were just getting slaughtered by kind of cheesy algorithm amplification tactics, right . And, you know, i think from a a lot of people internally were just sort of screaming stop. Like, you know, youre basically in the process of killing the golden goose. They never listen to. I mean, the top posts on the platform and were frequently pretty vile. There is a scene in the book in which you have to kind of phrase this one. It is a close up of someones expose is nude posterior is the the top post on facebook for an entire day they just didnt even notice right they didnt Pay Attention to content quality and you know at some point theres kind of a baby to pay there. And i think you know, im sure some of your sources from instagram would say that they probably are it to some degree in the cultural relevance and kind of the future of the app that theyve a hit. Am i wrong about that . I dont think youre wrong. I think i think in order to to drive culture, you need to have who are doing something that others are are following or envious and people are young people arent going to join a platform aspiring to the person who compiled the videos of viral accidents. Right. They want to join tiktok to be the next charlie develops so so think that that you when facebook tries to replicate an instagram tries to replicate whats worked elsewhere theyre missing that secret sauce of the original content creators that drive culture and and make a difference and and it could be killing them. What does your facebook feed look like right now . Oh god, you dont want to ask that. Ive been doing work related to child safety recently. Okay. That ive been doing to do that is a hideous like was the, you know, the work related to the 2024 elections. I think this is something that is just like profoundly sad to me is that to some degree things havent changed since 2016. It is still a successful for overseas content farms to like videos of you know stolen content, shocking content you know like were people with deformities like, you know, like slash, like, you know, like literally parasitic worms coming out of their skin, you know, things that are just, like, kind of hideous to look at. You can build up a huge audience that way and then theyll run overlap and pages that promote this stuff and so know i think as a something i have to remind myself from time to time is that as a person researches the platform, it doesnt all look like this. But at the same time you clearly this stuff is wildly its you know you can a half million followers on facebook very easily by just like posting awful content of like our awful videos of people presumably dying in car accidents. Right. That is a really successful strategy still. And to some degree, i think the platform just sort of still open for business for who has, you know, half a brain in the will to manipulate it. What are your concerns looking ahead to the 2024 president ial election, given that we know a lot of these problems havent been solved, that a lot of the same viral are at play it plus the new addition of api. Yeah, yeah i mean to some degree isnt new the platform. Right. I mean i understand the generated content is kind of a bit of the focus, but the idea that have ai systems that are just acting in chaotic, unpredictable ways and promoting weird stuff thats, you know, hey, i think facebook sort of pioneered that. I think one concern ive got for us and 2020 for, you know, any other is that the company has never really confronted or settled permanently the question of whether it is for a domestic actor to attempt to manipulate the algorithm by, you know, whether its by promoting the same content from 50 different accounts simultaneously, which, you know, is a known problem, causes the algorithm to think its actually really popular when its just being posted by like one guy with 50 accounts or whether its, you know, sort of certain of content that seem to be extremely good at riling people up, you know, things that, you know, company refers to as hate bait. Theyve never really figured out how to deal things that are coming from us actors now. Right, if its like the russians. Yeah. Okay. Theyll take them down, right. And they will issue a press release. But if its a superpac or or, you know, some sort of party or theyre, theyve they are technically rules against it, but they dont necessarily enforce them in any way that be a deterrent if that makes sense. And so and i do have some concern that like weve kind of moved on from kind of the core of the platform to a. I. And, you know, a generative ai is kind of the concern. I do think that some of the core mechanics that just sort of remain unresolved are are still pretty scary, particularly. I mean, the companys issued ruling saying that, you know, at this point, you can say the 2020 election was stolen. You cant the 2024 election will be stolen and necessarily current. But like this is one of those things where theyre splitting hairs in a way where its very easy to. Think about how youre going to have the exact same sort of thing led to stop the steal and some degree that drove the drumbeat of attention that preceded january 6th. Its going to be very easy for someone to do that again if they choose or even have a coded phrase like stop the steal. That is specifically like i think the election was stolen, but yeah, exactly. And so in that sense, yeah. And so i think thats thats the thing is that theyve always tried to focus on just like rules based enforcement. You know, like metta wants to like live in a world where only choice they ever make is do we take things down or do we kind of quietly suppress them via you know Automated Systems and . And i think that its the platform at this point has certainly grown into both both platform is really have grown into curatorial functions and you know i think there is a they havent really address the that whoever screams loudest wins and they seem to be really reluctant to take that on as a challenge so on the other factors at play, of course is that metta has different stated priorities now right is the company is called metta now its its all about a. I. The metaverse they spoke about any of these issues on their most recent earnings call. Does that concern you mean that plus the recent layoffs, the sort of restructuring of the company . Yeah, they have moved that plan. 2024. They have absolutely moved on from governing the platforms. I mean, i think youre totally right about there was a period of time in which instagrams growth was almost seen as threatening to Mark Zuckerberg because, you know, facebook was the thing he cared. I think it would be very hard to make the case that Mark Zuckerberg is deeply about facebook in any way other than that it continued to reform because thats still the work workhorse for money. Right . Where like 60 less of revenue is coming from. Still is the blue app. But i mean, hes of said as much right that that you know theyll continue to do some things on it but like as you note they have slashed a lot of staff there and. Theyve moved a whole bunch of people first into Virtual Reality and then into sort of generative. I related work. I very clearly the Core Platforms that still account for like 90 high 98 of of revenue is just not that interesting anymore to them and there an element of neglect here certainly on safety front and i think theres an element like to some degree the Facebook Files kind of accelerated this. They were already starting to treat researchers and data scientists who are looking at societal issues as potential fifth column. And i think, hogan, to some degree made clear that there was a portion of the company that seemed to be more loyal to. Their principles than they were to the company. And i think thats a very dangerous thing if youre a potential app. And so, yeah, you know, they got rid of a lot of people. And i think that, you know, its its kind of hard to see how the company would perform much better given that it hasnt addressed some of the design issues and yet it has cut some of the staff right. The civic team doesnt exist anymore. You know, so, so much for that. So you see the cracks forming. You see this neglect of the main platform, neglect of a potential, even instagram dependent on those platforms is still gross so that zuckerberg can can pursue these other goals. I just looked up the stock returns this year. Its up 176 . So far. Absolutely so. So, boy, that more than doubled. A lot. Do you think that there is ever a moment reckoning that will actually take to facebook. Do you think that that you know these these returns like what is it what does that mean to when you see governments trying to push back and the Companies Still so bright. Yeah i mean i guess i would say that i think that the pushback so far has been pretty limited right. I mean, in the us there was on child safety in particular, there was back in 2021, there were a lot of hearings, there was promise of legislation coming soon. There was bipartisan agreement. Some of this stuff was really problematic. Nothing ever happened in the eu. You do have the Digital Services act in a little more in terms, way and in the way of regulatory action happening over there. But i do think that right now pretty muted and i think that, you know, to some degree, the stock price reflects the recommending content in an aggressive fashion is possible. And then running ads next to it is still a truly fantastic business. You know the externalities are not ones that are captured by the stock price. That makes sense. And i think something that is really notable is that the Company Really has kind of. A lot of the Ideological Mission that, you know, they initially pursued. Like, you know, i think, you know, back in the day, people used to pride themselves and they wouldnt look consider the revenue impact of things. Right. It was all supposed to be about what was best for the user, what usage. Right. And i think again, what increased usage and what was best for the user is sometimes perhaps not as overlapping as the company would like to think, as we discussed earlier, but like the whole idea was you dont talk about well, i mean, this year have had the year of efficiency, right where Mark Zuckerberg has cut around a quarter of all staff, even though the margin that theyre running is you know, its always been around the 40 range. Right. This is a truly incredible business. There is no shortage resources yet. All the same. And i think one of the things its fascinating to me is that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg as sole control of the company, right. He wants to spend more on safety work or he wants to do something. Might not be in the near term growth interests and growth. You know, he absolutely can. He set up the company in that way. But i think the interesting thing is that it seems like they dont want to write like they are now into making money as a as an activity, you know, making money and funding new basically new product thats the actual like kind of were going to connect and make the world a better place. I think theyve sort of withdrawn from that territory to some degree. Why do you why do you think that . I mean, do you think that the what am i here is is just like the stock falling and. In 2021 was a real shock to the system. They grown and grown and grown. And that was the first year that they really had a revenue shortfall and everyone freaked out and employees saw their net worth drop. Now they realize what they care more. Or do you have another theory . I mean, what is what is the reason that mit is sort of abandoning its do do gooder, external things . There are a few things have occurred that i think are notable. One of them is, if you notice, the Leadership Team has just contracted over and over again in particular, a lot of women have left. You know, sheryl being the most notable. But there are a lot of them and, i think this point, its tends to be a group of people that are extremely loyal to mark and you know tend to be advocate. Its for his approach, i think to some degree internal discussion and debate has really taken a hit over the last few years. You know, this is a very much a Mark Zuckerberg production, right. And i think it is, you obviously the i think my sense is that like its not that theres a concern as much that Mark Zuckerbergs personal net worth is falling too much at any point. Its that to some degree, there is a belief that if the companys stock isnt doing well, then it wont be able to attract talent. And if it can attract talent that it cant build the next big thing. And so, you know, its i think its interesting because this is a company that was set up to post to be to be, you know, kind of immune to stock price concerns. But at the end of the day, it seems like its acting. You know, it tracks very closely with moral. Exactly. And tracks this in silicon valley. So when you see the these dynamics at play, we also see that looks like the metaverse isnt really catching right at the end of your book that the metaverse is not super clear if wants that. But id say its starting to get or whether anybody wants that. But but you know, if you notice that theres a lot of the Company Going yeah. I mean, its i think this is like kind of one of the fascinating things, right . Is like the engine of this company is still facebook and instagram, you know, again, the revenue breakdowns weve seen 60 facebook, 40 instagram, instagram growing a little better than facebook. But its actually even greater than that. I think it might have been like 65 facebook, but you know, its its like they have this legacy product that is certainly not the center of attention anymore other than in the mouth, sort of like. Execution based, you know, continue. You know, weve got to keep growth going sort of way you know, i think the metaverse stuff im not saying that Virtual Reality is not still a future i but it has an uncanny knack of being the future and never becoming the present. And, you know, i think, you know, the meta rebranding and kind of the focus on launching horizon worlds, which was their kind of metaverse showcase, it just really didnt go well. You know, one of my colleagues, megan bobrovsky, spent a few days in the metaverse and you know, we had got some internal usage statistics as well. I mean, for a company that has global ambitions, it was talking how the metaverse would soon be at a billion users. You know, horizon worlds is kind of all but defunct, like very, very clear. They didnt get that right, obviously. Now theyre very focused on generative ai, but again, so is everyone right . And and i think there is a element of this where some of it does come down to marketing and seeking a legacy like this. As you know, there was a point in time when, you know, he was actually doing public polling. You know, you get a pollster that was asking theyre not still doing that. I love those polls. Yeah. Yeah. Whether whether Mark Zuckerberg was an innovator. Right. Was like, yes, questionable. And so its like kind of the a a very weird little. Yeah, its a very its a its a, you know, i think there is some degree of a legacy question that hes working on. And right now it seems its less based on you know kind of running the existing products than it is on creating something new. They also have those is facebook good for the world polls that they had actually killed that one internally because at least you know like they used to have a metric, a survey metric where they would ask people whether they thought content was good for the world and they stopped that because the implication then that perhaps facebook might be promoting things that were not good for the world was viewed a little to awkward of a question to have in your hands if that makes sense this is all part of the kind of the post research crackdown that happened after i think francis has again demonstrated how much dante material there was internally. The final question say im lawmaker reading your book and i want to do something about this and i want to to, you know, instill in this company that they have built this incredibly powerful tool that is shaping peoples lives. Then maybe maybe those lives are even at stake. And and i agree with some of the employees ive spoken with you. What could i do that . That hasnt been attempted or even, you know, what could i say . How can how can this to get results, if at all, from the outside . Does it have to come from within that . So that i mean, the debates internally or debate about this company has, i think, frequently been mired down in politics. Right. The idea being that one party wants to change it in a way that would be detrimental to the other party. And therefore, everyone must fight about it. And, you know, thats kind of a recipe for gridlock, obviously. You know, i think the. I have always the question of response ability for Recommendation Systems and they do to be an interesting one. I think its a pretty, you know, section 230. Right. Is the law that sort of shields internet responsibility for User Generated Content was built a prodigy Bulletin Board mind right not a you know a Recommendation System and so its always been again i dont get into the legal side of things, but i do think in terms of public appreciation and something that would be good for lawmakers and everyone else to think about it is what responsibilities platforms have for what recommend and whether it is acceptable to be recommending things that literally dont understand what youre recommending whatsoever. You know, i think very rarely can you think a circumstance in which like unleashing a machine and then saying, oh, well, its driven by itself now, you know, not my responsibility for what it does right, that that doesnt sound like a thing that one would be able to do. But to some, that is the way we approach social media regulation. And i think thats an interesting thing to talk about. Again, you know, section 230, what laws are these are beyond my you know, beyond my scope. But but i do think that that looking at Design Choices and whether those are, you know, say fair and reasonable to users and then looking at what recommendations, what Recommendation Systems do and how they function, those are things that that would be really. And then finally, i think just transparency like no one will ever be able to get that many internal records out of matter again as francis. How did they have tightened down to the best of their ability . And i think, you know, waiting for reporters to get their hands on on things is a pretty terrible way of circulating information. The public, i think its better than nothing like its not, you know neither that sort of, you know, kind of selfreporting via the platform seems like a particularly useful approach. Talking more about just meta here, right, is that it seems like there needs to be some level of standardized disclosure of what these platforms doing and if there was anything thats i think really optimistic coming out of the book project and just sort of all of the Facebook Files stuff its that there are like at this point there is a large body of former employees who have been training and in truly circumstances with truly incredible data access on how this stuff works right. There are at this point sort of the technocrats of platform mechanics out and and, you know, a lot of them are a lot more of them certainly are speaking their minds these days. Right. Like its just pretty easy to find someone wants to talk rex systems Recommendation Systems these days and has some experience with it whereas when you know i started this be it in 2019 that was those people were very few and far between and they were much harder to find. Well, its a fascinating book, broken code by jeff horwz. Thank you so much all your time today. Its been a really great discussion. Oh, thank you so much for hosting this thing. Thanks, sara. Really appreciate it. And also, no filter by sarah frier released while back but still