In the Company Canteen or something but as you know im a big fan of yours and a huge fan of your first book on google, now to come back at this particular moment and talk about facebook, the inside story couldnt be more timely and am going to start off we have lots of places to go with this, im going to start off with something timely, as we came to do the show you heard about the hacking of twitter the fact that trump is going to facebook to get the message out, facebook has had a lot of criticism for a lot of things over the years and i actually wrote a column recently questioning why Mark Zuckerberg has not fact checked the president. Kalisher take on this, what is this relationship between facebook and the white house between facebook and free speech, im gonna throw your big question along to off. Thank you for doing this now and its good to connect with you again. Like a lot of things, you cannot tease that one problem of facebook from the sea dna in its origins in the case of trump, obviously he was not a factor in the early days and it wasnt something that they talked about in the dorm room when they started it, by the time the Trump Campaign got rolling in 2015, this became an issue for facebook, it was lathered on top of the messy way it dealt with controversial content in the first came up in 2015 when he posted stuff that was antimuslim and it did violate a lot of people inside facebook, the companys community standards, facebook decided not to mess with that, leave it up even though it might violate the standards and Mark Zuckerberg himself thought it did but it was newsworthy and they were not going to tamper with them, that is when Mark Zuckerberg started along the path that he made explicit but he believes the politicians by their speech. Even the harmful speech. As time goes on, it becomes tougher and tougher for facebook to defend because it becomes a bullhorn for toxic speech, thats the point that he paid in himself. It is so interesting and front and center, in recent months, a lot of the companies have taken a different tact on this, this is been a very big issue and im curious when i wrote my own book, dont be evil, cva 230 which was the carveout from the mid1990s that gave the platform tiny startup entities with the freedom to be and say whatever they wanted to be to be the town square cannot be held rival, we all noise journalist, these are giant Media Companies and im curious, as you dug into this issue in your previous book on google and on facebook, where you come out, are these guys the town square or are they Something Else, how should we think about them . I think the truth as you mentioned, the regulation in the law that was passed before we have these giant platforms, i dont think thats the main issue. The main issue, what is the big platforms going to do or any of them going to do to make a safe environment for their users, i think 230 gives them opportunity to do that in a question of where they draw the line, Mark Zuckerberg always said you dont want me to be the arbiter of the speech of 3 billion people and hes not the audio auger, but he is arbiter, hes a person who has to decide where the line is and what big said on his platform, this will make people feel comfortable, this is we will not have pornography on your, were not going to have misinformation about important things like antivax information, took facebook a long time to ban or information about voting because facebook does not do that good of job even though its trying or like dog whistles like trump sends out, and makes people uncomfortable in the platform itself toxic. It is a tough line to draw, he has to own up to that, that really is issue and hes not doing a great job the more the speech is exposed, it feels wrong and has more difficulty denying it, thats what hes taking these many steps back when confronted with the consequences of where his decisionmaking is at any given moment. I want to come back to disinformation and free speech and election, i want to note i love the beginning of your book, its painted this picture, i called you that euro is getting in peoples lives in getting the details but youre also painting a big picture in the picture you painted was zuckerberg in africa would be a boring entrepreneur around him, almost in the antidote like a head of state, this is something that i always think about when i think about facebook, you get this point when you decided to write about facebook, billion users on monday, now we know they have more users than the largest country in the world in many cases. So these companies, facebook in particular they seemed Like National entities and i think about somebody in the economic history, did you find that what does that mean. I found that and as you mentioned i decided to write they might inside story when zuckerberg posted in 2015 that a billion people have logged into facebook, active users in the 24 hour period and as you mentioned, the total membership of facebook even back then was larger than any country, now they logged in numbers bigger than any country in their approaching 3 billion people. And when i started doing the book, it took me a year to sign off to give me cooperation with no Strings Attached. I want to hear about that, will come back to that. We went to africa and he was the head of state and he came to italy with the Prime Minister and he never went home. This is what you would never expect Mark Zuckerberg to do, the head of india came to facebook on a state visit, facebook had a Foreign Policy and he was greeted like the head of state and almost like a god on the geeks of nigeria and nigeria has a very active community of entrepreneurs and him coming there blew their minds, it was a surprise visit, it was a start of community where he popped in into a surprise they cannot believe where he was. And i realized later that was peak facebook because only a few months later, the 2016 election occurred and that really was the moment where the flip for facebook and it went from a revered company, they did not have issues in the past that skated by them, but it was not skating by the issues, it was not the answer for all the things that it did that were toxic, gay people problems, startle peoples attention, cop peoples data privacy and thats when it flipped and the book became exercised in understanding how that happened and it made me go back more than i thought to the early days of facebook and even the childhood of Mark Zuckerberg to understand how this thing happen. That is fascinating, for starters i can relate as an author, that is a tough thing when your story changes in the middle of your book cycle, you have to scramble. Thankfully it was not in the middle, it took me a few years to do it in a few months and it gave me the advantage of interviewing the people at facebook, hundreds of interviews while this thing was happening, the companys reputation was unraveling and watching that process. What did you learn about Mark Zuckerberg and his childhood that could inform or help us understand where the company is today. I talked to his parents and his mother told me a story which i found really designated with the way facebook unfolded, he grew up in westchester county, one of the nice suburb in the Public School he went to did not have a whole lot of advanced classes and Computer Programs, he wanted to go to a private school and get a better Computer Program and he was interested in the classics and like alexander the great, his mother wanted him to go to a near by private school where he could commute, the oldest sibling in the family was going off to harvard, he did not want to lose two kids at the same year but he heard about the program which would require boarding and he wanted to go there. So his mother said listen, why dont you interview the people and maybe a like it and he said i will interview the people, i will do that for you so he went to exeter, that reminded me a lot of the decisionmaking that ive learned in facebook through all of history where quite often something would come up and his tenants might move him against it, sometimes they would say this is not right, this is morally wrong and he would say lets go do it and i thought exhibitor. It came from there. Thats when he came from a you with a program called facebook in the context but the idea when he makes his mind up, that is it. Since he has total power of facebook, he controls the majority of the voting stock, even the board of directors cannot overrule him and when he says lets do it, when he says exhibitor they go to exhibitor. That is fascinating, speaking of total power, think about the antidote of the eyes of sauron. He particularly when he was younger he had a habit, and unbelievably unnerving that you could ask him a question and he would not answer, he would stare at you and i think human beings have to blink a certain way, but he seems to defy that when he looks at you and steers that you and a lot of people told me they had the same problem, they describe it in his account, the first time i met him in 2006 i asked him some softball questions about facebook and how many students and et cetera, he would look at me not answer the questions that i thought what is going on in my in the Twilight Zone and he got better at minimizing that over the years but every so often you will get the stair in one of his lieutenants, andrew known as boz described the eye of sauron. That is really something. You mentioned roger, he was also a source for me and i encouraged him to write and he connected with andrew on that, it is interesting. Im sure hell thank you for that. Exactly, it is interesting when i first met roger, he was going into the media all hes a veteran capitalist and investor and lots of big important Tech Companies in early mentor to mark and elevation and through elevation has stayed . They passed in roger investor personally. That is right, they put money in but roger benefited greatly in a way that his company boug bought. He was out talking against his own book at that stage to the media and saying i became concerned, pre2016 about what i was seeing on facebook, i felt that there was something wrong, he apparently wrote a letter to mark and cheryl and this is sort of like your uncle coming to you insane, hey guys i think we have a problem and apparently cording to his telling they went very corporate pr very quickly, shutting down, it is hard for me too metabolize how someone can get that information from a trusted figure and not take it seemingly more seriously, and your reporting, what conclusion did you come to about this . Facebook downplayed a degree to which roger was an influence and i did look into this, it is interesting, and rogers book he is a more accurate account of his degree of his influence in facebook then maybe some of the media appearances that he did, and have him describe as Mark Zuckerbergs mentor, i dont think if you pin into the world he would claim is overblown. I did find that some of the stories, facebooks privacy officer chris kelly told me that he connected roger with mark and he did have a meeting with him with yahoo was trying to join facebook and he did have a role but a role among others in helping connect sandberg to facebook but by the time he was complaining, he had faded from the picture, he was not a regular advisor and basically they were getting a letter from someone who maybe was important in the early days of facebook but now is not someone who they were in close contact with, so they feel comfortable snuffing off his concerns to the partnership dan rose in the specific things he was complaining about were indeed under discussion at facebook and facebook attorney decided that it was not going to do anything about the misinformation that was circulating in 2016, it was not a new thing he was bringing up, it was something that they already made that decision, disruptive decision and roger was right to call it out, it was not like roger was saying heres something you dont know about, it was something they knew about and already decided not to do anything about, that his misinformation was happening during the election that by and large helped trump and hurt clinton. Why do you think going deep, and cheryl who i want to get to in a minute, what made them make that decision, thats a big decision particularly and another liberal or libertarian but thats a big decision to say we see that some were not going to do anything about it. You have to reconstruct 2016, three things are happening with the election on facebook, the first is trump is using facebook and the way its supposed to be used almost better than anyone else has in history, and he told me he was in all and it later came out in the memo that he shared during the course of the book that it was beautiful and essentially the Trump Campaign played facebook and the clinton people played it like the corporate banjo you would find in the street, the Trump Campaign accepted and in bed from facebook that helped show them the ins and outs on how to use it and they made a bigger bet on it and they did thousands of ads every day, sometimes hundreds of thousands. And where is the Clinton Campaign did not use it well at all, that was part one but part to his misinformation that people found they could make money by circulating fake stories by publications that did not exist that were basically making Hillary Clinton look bad and sometimes a criminal like pizza gate or supposedly she was running a child trafficking ring in washington and that would get people to go to the ads in a financially motivated campaign and the third was russian involvement, this i dont think had as much exposure to users as a Misinformation Campaign but there were hundreds of thousands of people who saw the stuff in super disturbing that the russians were using facebook to help metal with an election. In this unrolled to facebook late and they did not process until after the election and we could talk about how they treated it then. But the second thing, there was a big debate about facebook and at one point there is a meeting i describe, the weekly meeting and the person who is running the meeting was joe kaplan he was ahead of the d. C. Operation, the lobbying operation and his dna, he was a republican and a lot of people in the Washington Office felt that his job was to carry water for the republicans, he had a very close relationship with cheryl and used to date are in college and cheryl was coming back from a tough period that she had to recover from when her husband tied, is a tragic situation and she was back but thing shifted but where people took on a responsible leader in that. And were pretty much operating with more authority and he won the argument that they should not do anything about the misinformation, he said that would be like tilting the Playing Field to help one candidate by removing this information. That was wrong, the Playing Field was tilted by the misinformation and he was leveling it by taking it out. But he won the day and the rest is history. Lets talk about the revelation post 2016, the kee yu get deep into that which is interesting that how did you get those characters . I think it was an amazing story in itself and tell it like a story, the chapter in the contra because it was economy in some sense of airs on facebooks part and there is crazy characters involved in that led it to what became the biggest scandal and that narratives in facebooks history, you could argue whether other things that facebook did were more damaging but this is the one that got the most traction and i believe that scandal really happened not in 2018 is revealed or 2016 during the election or 2014 when analytically got the information of 78 million facebook users but in 2010 when facebook gave away information about users to developers and when facebook users signed up to use some survey or an application from the thirdparty that brought on facebook, they would give the developer or the survey maker not only information of the person who signed up but that persons whole social network, all their friends, you could argue that the user signed up for a survey is responsible because she has a plate saying we got a look at your information but they give away all the information of the persons friends, we anointed this is happening, people who have facebook, they complained to zuckerberg, they say this is too much, we should not do this and he went ahead and did that anyway in the api as a way to dig into facebooks database it opened up in 2010. They close the loophole in 2014 but by then they can get access to that because its one research from Cambridge University that was figured out you can get the information by doing this innocuous survey, thats how the information fell into the hands of one of the biggest founders of the far right who then donald trump used it in the election. Are you worried that facebook could have an effect on november . Facebook will have an effect in november,. Let me put it more dramatically, are you worried that they could reelect donald trump . Again which parts of it are going to be used, i think the Biden Campaign is going to use facebook better than the Clinton Campaign, they are not quite to dismiss it like that, they know what happened in 2016, but the Trump Campaign has a big head start and already collecting the data from 2016 and building on it over the last four years, now facebook is indicated that they are considering cutting off political advertising, if that happens thats going to be a giant win for the Trump Campaign because they have a big lead that the Biden Campaign could never close if they stop the campaigning. Cutting off political advertising or labeling it, this is part of a deeper conversation which sends us into an could come about the black box, there is incredible information of symmetry on eit