Back at this particular moment and talk about facebook the inside story couldnt be more timely. I am just going to start off we have a lot of places to go with this kind going to start with something timely. This morning as we came to the show you heard about the hacking of her and the fact trump has gone to facebook to get his message out. Facebook got a lot of criticism for things over the years and i actually wrote a column recently about why Mark Zuckerberg hasnt fact checked. Tell us about your relationship with facebook and free speech. Im going to throw a big question to launch this off. Guest it is good to be here again with some virtuosi. Like a lot of things you cannot just tease out any one problem of facebook dna in its origins. In the case of trump obviously it wasnt something they talked about but by the time the campaign got rolling in 2015, this became an issue for facebook blather on top of the way that it dealt with controversy and it first came out in 2015 when he posted something antimuslim and it did violate the companys Community Standards for facebook decided not to mess with that even though it might have violated the standards because it was newsworthy and they were not going to tamper with that and then thats when he started on the path he made explicit. Now he believes politicians should be able to say whatever they want to judge them by their speech even if its harmful speech. As time goes on it becomes tougher and tougher for facebook to defend because it becomes a bullhorn for toxic speech. Host its so interesting. In recent months and one of the companies decided to take different paths. Its been a very divisive issue and im curious when i wrote my own book i focused on the loophole which was t the carveot from the mid1990s so it was a tiny startup entity to be and say whatever they wanted and not be held liable. But we all know as journalists these are giant Media Companies and a sewing curious as you dug into this issue, are these guys the town square or Something Else, how should we think about them . Guest 230, as you mentioned the regulation and the wall that was passed in 1996 before we had these giant platforms i dont think that is the main issue here. The main issue is what are these platforms going to do to police the speech and make a safe environment for their users. I think it gives them the opportunity to do that and its a question of where they draw the line to do that. He always says you dont want me to be the arbiter of the speech of now 3 billion people. Hes not the ideal arbiter of hebrekeen to this platform and s the arbiter. Hes the person who decides where the line is and what cant be said on his platform. This is toxic. We are not going to have pornography on here and we are not going to have misinformation about things like what took facebook a long time to ban or information about voting because facebook still doesnt do that great a job even though it says it is trying or things like dog whistles like trump often sends out what makes people uncomfortable and the platform itself somewhat toxic. So it is a tough line to draw but that is what he built and he has to own up to death so i think that is the issue and the fact is he is not doing a great job of it because it just feels wrong and he has more and more difficulty than ie and that is why he is constantly taking steps back with the consequences of where his decisionmaking is. Host i want to come back to the disinformation, free speech and election. At the beginning of your took this picture you are always getting right into peoples lives and the picture you painted is that it would be adoring the entrepreneurs around him, almost seeming ahead of date and this is something i always think about how this point at which you decided you wanted to write about it in one day. Now we know they got more than the largest countries in the world so these companies are what did that mean . Guest as you mentioned i decided to write this book the inside story when zuckerberg posted at the end of the summer that a billion people had walked into facebook in a 24 hour period and even back then it was larger than any country now the number is bigger than any country like 3 billion. When i started doing the book is host we will come back to that. Guest we went to africa and he came from italy where of course he met with the Prime Minister and this is what you would expect him to do and a few months before that he came to facebook on a visit and they had a policy and almost like some sort of god there was a tight community of entrepreneurs. It was a surprise visit in a little start up but they couldnt believe what it was and i realized later that wa it was kind of peak facebook because later that was the moment it flipped and went from a revered company and from that point on it wasnt disputing that these issues but it was an answer for all the things it did that for toxic and cause people problems and compromised peoples data and privacy and that is when it flipped into the book became an exercise in understanding how that happened. Going back to the early days of facebook to understand how this happened. Host i can relate that its a tough thing when the story changes in the middle of the book cycle you have to scramble. Guest it gave me the advantage of covering facebook and interviewing the people with hundreds of interviews while this was happening, while the companys reputation was unraveling and watching the process in realtime. Host what did you learn about his childhood that could infer or help us understand where the company is to a . Guest i talked to his parents, and his mother told me a story which i found really resonated with the way facebook unfolded. He grew up in Westchester County and the Public School he went to didnt have a whole lot of advanced classes. So he wanted to go to private school. He was interested in the classics. His mother wanted him to go to a nearby school. The oldest sibling was going off to harvard that year and didnt want to lose two kids in the same year but he heard about the program his mother said was sais invite him to just interview interviewed the people and maybe you will like it. He said im going to interview the people im going to exeter and that reminded me a lot of the decisionmaking that i learned took place at facebook through all of history where quite often something would come up like this isnt good for the users. Sometimes they would say this isnt right, this is kind of long and he would say lets go do it and as i thought, exeter. Actually that is where he first became familiar with the program but the idea that when he makes his mind up that said so he has total power and controls the majority of the voting stock and is in the board of directors that cannot overrule them and when he says lets do it, they go to exeter. Host that is fascinating. Speaking of total power, this wonderful anecdote, tell us about the eyes of the fou thero. Guest it was probably unnerving that you could ask him a question and he wouldnt answer it he would just stare at you. I think that human beings have he seems to sort of defy that sometimes when he looks at you and a lot of people say they have the same problem. The first time i met him in 2006 i asked softball questions about facebook, how many students etc. If you look at me and wouldnt answer the questions, like whats going on here am i in the twilight zone. He got better and minimizing that over the years but every so often you get to that stare. They described it to me. Host thats something. I encouraged him to and encouraged him on that. For those that dont know he was sort of an early mentor and an elevation at stake. Guest the elevation passed and roger invested personally. Host thats right. Guest roger benefited greatly in a way that host he was out talking against his own book at that stage saying i became concerned about what i was seeing on facebook. I felt there was something wrong here. He apparently wrote a letter and this is sort of like a kind uncle coming to you and saying i think we have a little bit of a problem and according to this day went verthey went a very con him quickly, shut him down. Its hard for me to kind of metabolize how someone can get that information from a trusted figure and not take it seemingly more seriously. What conclusion did you come to about this . Guest facebook downplays the degree to which roger was an influence. In rogers book i think that he had a more accurate account of his degree of influence. They have been described as zuckerbergs main mentor. Some of the stories he tells are true. They did tell me he did connect roger with mark and he did have a meeting with him when yahoo was trying to buy facebook and they did have a role among others in helping to connect despite the time he was contemplating, he wasnt a regular advisor and so basically they were getting a letter summed up to maybe it was important earlier in the days of facebook is now someone in close contact a false comfortable to the head of partnership and so these things he was complaining about were indeed under discussion at facebook and they had already decided that he was going to not do anything about the misinformation circulating in 2016. So it wasnt a new thing he was bringing up. It was something that they have already made a decision. It was a disruptive decision and he was right to call it out but it wasnt like he was saying heres something you dont know about it was something they knew and decided not to do anything about. That misinformation was happening during the election but by and large helped trump and hurt clinton. Host i want to get to this in a minute, what made them make that decision . Is a big decisio decision they o particularly if they are liberal or libertarian, but we are not going to do anything about it. Guest three things are happening with the election. First thing, trump is using facebook in a way that its supposed to be used he told me he was in all of it and he shared it with me during the course of the book that it was beautiful and essentially the Trump Campaign played facebook where the clinton people played it like cardboard in the street. The Trump Campaign accepted and hope to shohelped show them thed outs of how to use it. They did thousands of ads every day. Hundreds of thousands whereas the Clinton Campaign didnt use it while at all. Part number two is misinformation. People found they could make money by circulating fake stories that didnt exist that make Hillary Clinton look bad, supposedly in a child trafficking ring the final had as much exposure to the users as the misinformation campaign, but there were hundreds of thousands of people who sell this stuff and its super disturbing that they are using facebook to help metal within election. As for the unrolled facebook really late and so i think after, and we can talk about how they treated them, but the second thing, there was a big debate about facebook. In a meeting they described, the person running the meeting was told n. , the head of the dc operations, and his dna was he was a republican, and a lot of people in the Washington Office felt he told his job wa thoughto carry water for the republicans. He had a very close relationship and used to date her in college. Back from the tough period that she had to recover from her husband died she was back then, but it shifted where people knew and took responsibility during the period. They were pretty much operating with new authority and they won the argument. That would be like the Playing Field to help one candidate and that was wrong. The Playing Field was tilted. The rest is history. Host lets talk about the revelations posted 2016. We want to get deep into that as well. How did you view all of those characters . Guest it was an amazing story in and of itself. It was in a way a comedy and a sense of errors but there were crazy characters involved and what became the biggest scandal in that narrative in history you argue whether other things they did was more damaging but this is the one with the most traction. That scandal happened not only in 2018 at cambridge and a look at how they got the information but in 2010 when facebook gave away information about the users and tha the demand when a facebk user signed up to use a survey or application for a thirdparty date would give that developer not only the information of the person or persons whole social network so we could argue that user signed up for a survey and was responsible because he or she clicks off on a plate saying General Information but they gave away the information. They had no idea this was happening. They complained this was too much so they went ahead and did it anyway but by then they could get access and they figured out you could get that information by doing this innocuous survey so that is how the information fell into the hands of one of the biggest funders of the far right and then donald trump used it to. Host but think of it more dramatically are you worried they could let donald trump . Guest which parts of that are going to be used, i think the Biden Campaign is going to use it better than the Clinton Campaign. The Trump Campaign has a big head start from 2016 and building on it over the last four years. But the Biden Campaign could never close and they stop the campaigning. This is all part of the conversation but i think its into the economic conversation about the fact that there is an incredible information on either sides. Weve got large entities into doesnt have the same amount of information. Adam smith, markets dont work properly or fairly if there isnt access to information or shared understanding of the transaction and the value of what is being exchanged. Lets delve into that and what is coming up for possible regulations and how it might play out. Guest right. Well, zuckerberg said its money that motivates me. I think obviously the finances are important and he sees it as a way that they can continue to grow and maintain its users. That is what is important to h him. The advertising models there is a moment where is that i dont understand, you dont charge money. How can you make billions of dollars and he sai that he saide run ads. Facebook says these are good for people because we know a lot about you and we can show you relevant ads which are things youd like to see and that can be of service to you. In some cases that happens and they will send you an ad for things you like that you wouldnt have known about otherwise. They also know so much about cuba advertisers can use that information to sort of prove your weak points and that is something people dont want but it is part of facebook. Thats where things run into problems and people learn about and become alarmed about it and i think that is the way the Trump Campaign used facebook in 2016 and i think it is th that y political advertisers in general want to use facebook. They feel youve got an underlying bias they will exploit that and try to get you to vote for their candidate. Host i want to connect a few dots politically i want to talk about 2016 and monopoly power and the evolution that lead back to sheryl sandberg. She remains a figure that has come into some criticism, but she is good at not being in the spotlight and get i know from the close reading of the first she was right there in the middle of the golden goose that created and help monetize that targeted advertising and was the basis of what we call surveillance capitalism. She then took that and so im always struck and have to say i am rather cynical when i hear her in particular in these many congressional testimonies say when they are confronted with this or that latest scandal, we couldnt possibly know and we did this we could. So anyone held for the chief economist for the playbook for this is all there is a should we be blaming sheryl moore she is there for the liberalism and everything we are talking about now. Guest she was a major participant in that and a Major Business model. I found someone who was with sheryl the day of her orientation. Usually for many years it was chris cox and now again i think the chief officer in early employee who is the person who would probably take over facebook if Mark Zuckerberg were not a ceo. He gave the speech to inspire people and when she was in the session it was kind of unusual here is the person coming in to be the chief operating officer whos the new employee they have to say a few words and talk about how facebook previously had been about discovering where to express your intent to search for something. I want to do something in this category, and google would know that because you are searching for it and they give a much more targeted ad. She thought facebook was there and they could know enough about you if they had the data to be able to do not only what they were doing before but thats what she built with other things which got more and more information about not only the behavior and facebook but throughout the website as you search the browser that information would be reported and they ended up buying other databases to get a complete picture of you so she definitely had a hand in math and was the person in charge of lobbying washington and made a deal early on. Those include that kind of lobbying washington policy stuff and Business Model so definitely she is responsible for a big chunk of facebook and eventually he admitted this probably was an error of not monitoring that stuff more closely because when things went awry and a lot of the things we are talking about were in that category, it was the vote the radar and he was able to marginalize. Host interesting. Cheryl was the chief of staff for Larry Summers who was the basic economic adviser in the Clinton Campaign and architect of a lot of regulations in the Financial Sector. What was done in the Financial Sector and what has been done in the technical sector is a little bit of okay lets keep the market open. Its great for america to have giant software companies, yet at another level there wasnt a lot of awareness not everybody can be a Software Developer that conversation in your book you go back and you did look at some of the regulatory battles that weve seen in 2011. So far it seems