Of an effect we might have had. Narrator correspondent, james jacoby takes a hard look at the man who wanted to connect the world. Jacoby is he not recognizing the importance of his platform . He didnt understand what he had built. Narrator but is he accountable for helping divide it . There is something wrong systemically with the facebook algorithms. In effect polarization was the key to the model. Narrator tonight on frontline the facebook dilemma. Frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. And by the corporation for public broadcasting. Major support is provided by the john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information is available at macfound. Org. The ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. At ford foundation. Org. Additional support is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. The park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The john and Helen Glessner family trust. Supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. And by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. Corporate support is provided by. The zip code youre born into can determine your future, your school, your job, your dreams, your problems. At the y, our goal is to create opportunities no matter who you are or where youre from. The y, for a better us. birds chirping are we good . Should i put the beer down . Nah, no, actually, im gonna mention the beer. laughing hard at work. So im here in palo alto, california, chilling with Mark Zuckerberg of the facebook. Com, and were drinking out of a keg of heineken because. What are we celebrating, mark . We just got three million users. 11, 12, 13. Whoo tell us, you know, simply what facebook is. I think facebook is an online directory for colleges. I realized that because i didnt have peoples information, i needed to make it interesting enough so that people would want to use the site and want to, like, put their information up. So we launched it at harvard, and within a couple of weeks, twothirds of the school had signed up. So were, like, all right, this is pretty sweet, like, lets just go all out. I mean, its just interesting seeing how it evolves. We have a sweet office. Yeah, well, show us. Show around the crib. talking in background we didnt want cubicles, so we got ikea kitchen tables instead. I thought that kind of went along with our whole vibe here. Uhhuh. Whats in your fridge . Some stuff. Theres some beer down there. How many people work for you . Its actually 20 right now. Did you get this shot, this one here, the lady riding a pit bull . Oh, nice. All right, its really all ive got. Thats cool. Where are you taking facebook at this point in your life . Um, i mean. There doesnt necessarily have to be more. From the early days, mark had this vision of connecting the whole world. So if google was about providing you access to all the information, facebook was about connecting all the people. Can you just say your name and pronounce it so nobody messes it up and they have it on tape . Sure, its Mark Zuckerberg. Great. It was not crazy. Somebody was going to connect all those people, why not him . We have our facebook fellow, we have Mark Zuckerberg. I have the pleasure of introducing Mark Zuckerberg, founder of facebook. Com. applaus yo. When Mark Zuckerberg was at harvard he was fascinated by hacker culture, this notion that Software Programmers could do things that would shock the world. And a lot of times, people are just, like, too careful. I think its more useful to, like, make things happen and then, like, apologize later, than it is to make sure that you dot all your is now and then, like, just not get stuff done. So it was a little bit of a renegade philosophy and a disrespect for authority that led to the facebook motto move fast and break things. Never heard of facebook . laughing our school went crazy for the facebook. It creates its own world that you get sucked into. We started adding thinglike status updates and photos and groups and apps. When we first launched, we were hoping for, you know, maybe 400, 500 people. cheering toast to the first 100 million, and the next 100 million. Cool. So youre motivated by what . Building things that, you know, change the world in a way that it needs to be changed. Who is barack obama . The answer is right there on my Facebook Page. Mr. Zuckerberg. sup, zuck . In those days, move fast and break things didnt seem to be sociopathic. If youre building a product that people love, you can make a lot of mistakes. It wasnt that they intended to do harm so much as they were unconcerned about the possibility that harm would result. So just to be clear, youre not going to sell or share any of the information on facebook . Were not gonna share peoples information, except for with the people that theyve asked for it to be shared. Technology optimism was so deeply ingrained in the value system and in the beliefs of people in Silicon Valley. Were here for a hackathon, so lets get started. That theyd come to believe it is akin to the law of gravity, that of Course Technology makes the world a better place. It always had, it always will. And that assumption essentially masked a set of changes that were going on in the cultu that were very dangerous. From kxjz in sacramento. For monday, june 27. Narrator Mark Zuckerbergs quest to connect the world would bring about historic cnge, and farreaching consequences, in politics, privacy, and technology. Weve been investigating warning signs that existed long before problems burst into public view. It was my mistake, and im sorry. Narrator but for those inside facebook, the story began with an intoxicating vision that turned into a lucrative business plan. Well, the one thing that Mark Zuckerberg has been so good at is being incredibly clear and compelling about the mission that facebook has always had. Facebooks mission is to give people the power to share. Give people the power to share. In order to make the world more open and connected. More open and connected. Open and connected. More open and connected. applause james jacoby how pervasive a mission was that inside of the company . Give me a sense of that. It was something that. You know, mark doesnt just say it when we do, you know, ordered calisthenics in e morning and we yell the mission to each other, right . We would actually say it to each other, you know, when mark wasnt around. Jacoby and that was a mission that you really believed in . I mean. How could you not . How exciting. What if connecting the world actually delivered a promise that weve been looking for to genuinely make the world a better place . Jacoby was there ever a point where there was questions internally about this mission being naive optimism . I think the short answer is completely yes, and i think thats why we loved it. Especially in a moment like when we crossed a billion monthly active users for the first time. And marks. The way i recall mark at the time, i remember thinking, i dont think mark is going to stop until he gets to everybody. I think some of us had an early understanding that we were creating in some ways a digital nationstate. This was the greatest experiment in free speech in human history. There was a sense inside the company that we are building the future and there was a real focus on youth being a good thing. It was not a particularly diverse workforce. It was very much the sort of harvard, stanford, ivy league group of people who were largely in their 20s. I was a big believer in the company. Like, i knew that it was going to be a paradigmshifting thing. There was this, definitely this feeling of everything for the company, of this, you know, worldstirring vision. Everyone more or less dressed with the same fleece and swag with logo on it. Posters on the wall that looked somewhat orwellian. But, of course, you know, in an upbeat way, obviously. And, you know, some of the slogans are pretty wellknown move fast and break things, fortune favors the bold, what would you do if you werent afraid . You know, it was always this sort of rousing rhetoric that would push you to go further. Narrator Antonio Garcia martinez, a former product manager on facebooks advertising team, is one of eight former facebook insiders, who agreed to talk on camera about their experiences. N Silicon Valley, theres a, you know, almost a mafioso code of silence that youre not supposed to talk about the business in any but the most flattering way, right . Basically, you cant say anything, you know, measured or truthful about the business. And i think, as rhaps with facebook, its kind of arrived at the point at which its so important, it needs to be a little more transparent about how it works. Like, lets stop the little bleep parade about everyone in Silicon Valley, you know, creating, disrupting this and improving the world, right . Its, in many ways, a business like any other. Its just kind of more exciting and impactful. techno music playing narrator by 2007, zuckerberg had made it clear that the goal of the business was worldwide expansion. Almost a year ago, when we were first discussing how to let everyone in the world into facebook, i remember someone said to me, mark, we already have nearly every College Student in the u. S. On facebook. Its incredie that we were even able to do that. But no one gets a second trick like that. Well, lets take a look at how we did. cheerg and applause jacoby what was the growth team about . What did you do at growth . The story of growth has really been about making facebook available to people that wanted it but couldnt have access to it. Narrator naomi gleit, facebooks secondlongest serving employee, is one of five officials the company put forward to talk to frontline. She was an original member of the growth team. One of my first projects was expanding facebook to high school students. I worked on translating facebook into over a hundred languages. When i joined, there were one million users, and now theres over two billion people using facebook every month. Jacoby some of the problems that have reared their head with facebook over the past couple of years seem to have been caused in some ways by this exponential growth. So, i think mark and mark has said this, that we have been slow to really understand the ways in which facebook might be used for bad things. Weve been really focused on the good things. So who are all of these new users . The growth team had tons of engineers figuring out how you could make the new User Experience more engaging, how you could figure out how to get more people to sign up. Everyone was focused on growth, growth, growth. Give people the power to share. Narrator and the key to keeping all these new ople engaged. To make the world more open and connected. Narrator . Was facebooks most important feature. News feed. Narrator news feed, the seemingly endless stream of stories, pictures, and updates shared by friends, advertisers, and others. It analyzes all the Information Available to each user, and it actually computes whats going to be the most interesting piece of information, and then publishes a little story for them. Its your personalized newspaper, its your the New York Times of you, channel you. It is, you know, your customized, optimized vision of the world. Narrator but what appeared in users news feed wasnt random. It was driven by a secret mathematical formula, an algorithm. The stories are ranked in terms of whats going to be the most important, and we design a lot of algorithms so we can produce interesting content for you. The gl of the news feed is to provide you, the user, with the content on facebook that you most want to see. It is designed to make you want to keep scrolling, keep looking, keep liking. Thats the key. Thats the secret sauce. Thats how. Thats why were worth x billion dollars. Narrator the addition of the new like button in 2009 allowed news feed to collect vast amounts of users personal data that would prove invaluable to facebook. At the time we were a little bit skeptical about the like button we were concerned. And as it turned out our intuition was just dead wrong. And what we found was that the like button acted as a social lubricant. And, of course, it was also driving this flywheel of engagement, that people felt like they were heard on the platform whenever they shared something. Connect to it by liking it. And it became a driving force for the product. It was incredibly important because it allowed us to understand who are the people that you care more about, that cause you to react, and who are the businesses, the pages, the other interests on facebook that are important to you. And that gave us a degree constantly increasing understanding about people. News feed got off to a bit of a rocky start, and now our users love news feed. They love it. Narrator news feeds exponential growth was spurred on by the fact that existing laws didnt hold Internet Companies liable for all the content being posted on their sites. So, section 230 of the Communications Decency act is the provision which allows the internet economy to grow and thrive. And facebook is one of the principal beneficiaries of this provision. It says dont hold this Internet Company responsible if some idiot says something violent on the site. Dont hold the Internet Company responsible if somebody publishes something that creates conflict, that violates the law. Its the quintessential provision that allows them to say, dont blame us. Narrator so it was up to facebook to make the rules, and inside the company, they made a fateful decision. We took a very libertarian perspective here. We allowed people to speak and we said, if youre going to incite violence, thats clearly out of bounds. Were going to kick you off immediately. But were going to allow people to go right up to the edge and were going to allow other people to respond. We had to set up some ground rules. Basic decency, no nudity, and no violent or hateful speech. And after that, we felt some reluctance to interpose our value system on this Worldwide Community that was growing. Jacoby was there not a concern, then, that it could be become sort of a place of just utter confusion, that you have lies that are given the same weight as truths, and that it kind of just becomes a place where truth becomes completely obfuscated . No. We relied on what we thought were the publics common sense and common decency to police the site. Narrator that approach would soon contribute to realworld consequences far from Silicon Valley, where Mark Zuckerbergs optimistic vision at first seemed to be playing out. crowd chanting the arab spring had come to egypt. crowd chanting it took hold with the help of a Facebook Page protesting abuses by thgime of hosni mubarak. Not that i was thinking that this Facebook Page was going to be effective. I just did not want to look back and say that happened and i just didnt do anything about it. Nartor at the time, wael ghonim was working for google in the middle east. In just three days, over 100,000 people joined the page. Throughout the next few months, the page was growing until what happened in tunisia. Events in tunisia have captured the attention of viewers around the world, and a lot of it was happening online. It took just 28 days until the fall of the regime. And it just created for me a moment of, maybe we can do this. And i just posted an event calling for a revolution in ten days, like we should all get to the street and we should all bring down mubarak. Organized by a group of online activists. Theyre calling it the facebook revolution. crowd chanting narrator within days, ghonims online cry had helped fill the streets of cairo with hundreds of thousands of protesters. crowd chanting 18 days later. translated president Muhammad Hosni mubarak has decided to step down. cheering they have truly achieved the unimaginable. Man its generally acknowledged that ghonims Facebook Page first sparked the protests. Jacoby there was a moment that you were being interviewed on cnn. Yeah, i remember that. First tunisia, now egypt, whats next . Ask facebook. Ask what . Facebook. Facebook. The technology was, for me, the enabler. I would have not have been able to engage with others, i would have not been able to propagate my ideas to others without social media, without facebook. Youre giving facebook a lot of credit for this . Yeah, for sure. I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually. Had you ever think that this could have an impact on revolution . You know, my own opinion is that it would be extremely arrogant for any specific Technology Company to claim any meaningful role in, in those. But i do think that the overall trend thats at play here, which is people being able to share what they want with the people who they want, is an extremely powerful thing, right . And were kind of fundamentally rewiring the world from the ground up. And it starts with people. They were relatively restrained externally about taking credit for it, but internly they were, i would say, very happy to take credit for the idea that social media was being used to effect democratic change. Activists and Civil Society leaders would just come up to me and say, you know, wow, we couldnt have done this without you guys. Government officials, you know, would say, does facebook really realize how much you guys are changing our societies . It felt like facebook had extraordinary power, and power for good. Narrator but while facebook was enjoying its moment. man shouting, crowd chanting back in egypt, on the ground and on facebook, the situation was unraveling. Following the revolution, things went into a much worse direction than what have anticipated. Theres a co