additional we could say about facebook. i was thinking since then, winston churchill described never having so much for so few. have any two individuals made more money while doing more damage to the united states? than sheryl and mark? look, contaminated our elections, our teens are depressed. teen suicide is skyrocketing. and the playbook is the same here. and you articulated it brilliantly in your piece. it s faux concern, right? this is a big issue. mark and i are concerned. and then there s delay and obfuscation. and we seem to eat it up. and i think guilty party here is us. we won t hold this company accountable. sheryl sandberg is a protected class on top of a protected class. that s because we re addicted to eating junk food! you re saying it s i mean, like, that s what we ve turned into. but the issue here, scott, isn t just, the problem got so big, mark never knew the company would get this large and golly
distracted by personal projects and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives. drawing on interviews with more than 50, that s 5-0 people, the times says problems began way back in december, 2015, when a post by then-candidate donald trump about a muslim ban prompted a conversation about hate speech. and whether trump s post violated facebook s terms of service. well, facebook s d.c. rep reportedly feared a conservative backlash, telling the company leadership, quote, don t poke the bear. the new york times reports that zuckerberg and sandberg were basically absent from that all-important debate. trump s posts stayed up, and after that, it seemed the floodgates were wide open. by the spring of 2016, facebook was reportedly finding signs that they were being infiltrated by russian trolls, but they didn t disclose what they were finding. this morning, the company defended its actions at the
throughout all of it, the times says facebook s ceo, sheryl sandberg oversaw, quote, an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat facebook s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies, and ward off damaging regulations. facebook employed a republican opposition research firm to discredit activist protesters in part by linking them to liberal financier george soros. it also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-semitic. facebook said today that it did work with a pr company to look into protesters, but said that suggesting it was an anti-semitic attack is, quote, reprehensible and untrue. sandberg herself took the lead on damage control in september, telling congress that facebook s leaders are doing the best they can. finding the line between what is hate speech and what is misinformation is very, very difficult, especially if you re dedicated to expressing free
hundreds still missing. while those who did survive are trying to pick up the ashes of what was their life. we re going to begin this morning with new claims surrounding facebook. the media behemoth, now pushing back against allegations its leaders were asleep at the switch or even worse. even worse, trying to mislead the public about fake news and misinformation on its own platform. i have a fantastic panel here to break all of it down. but first, i want to lay out specifically this situation, because there s a lot to k discuss. this comes from a new york times extraordinary investigation out this morning, said to give a brand-new inside look at facebook s purported multi-year campaign to deflect criticism and downplay issues with russian hackers and hate speech, all across the social media network. the times says, quote, bent on growth founder mark zuckerberg and ceo sheryl sandberg ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. at critical moments over t
he said, back off. separately, his daughter works there. and so there s no basic protection for anybody, except what the companies choose to give us. so our model in this country is facebook says, hey, here are our rules or google or twitter. here are our rules, this is your privacy, take it or leave it. that s what we have in this country. not what they have in europe. now we have a chorus of people saying, you know what, maybe it s time we have some type of basic protection in place for consumers. and it sounds like it s not connected to kind of bots and misinformation, but it really is. because as we said, the same thing that makes them so profitable and so good at spreading the bad stuff is their ability to take all the information they can find about you and monetize it. so then let s talk about sort of the genius of how facebook did this. we re very quickly to call organizations like fox news public enemy number one when guys like sean hannity spread misinformation or we sa