Pretty crazy idea. Facebook Ceo Mark Zuckerberg will testify. And im responsible for what happens here. Narrator can facebook be fixed . In light of recent revelations that the company may have covered up russian inference in the 2016 election. T problem is too big, because facebook is too big. Narrator tonight on frontline, part two of 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. I accept your nomination for president of the united states. I humbly accept your nomination for the presidency of the united states. Hey, everyone. We are live from my backyard, where i am smoking a brisket and some ribs and getting ready for the president ial debate tonight. Some of the questions for tonights debate will be formed by conversations happening on facebook. 39 of people get their election news and decisionmaking material from facebook. Facebook getting over a billion Political Campaign posts. I love this, all the comments that are coming in. Its, like, im sitting here, smoking these meats and, um, and just hanging out with 85,000 people who are hanging out with me in my backyard. Make no mistake, everything you care about, everything i care about and ive worked for, is at stake. I will beat Hillary Clinton, crooked hillary, i will beat her so badly, so badly. I hope that all of you get out and vote. This is going to be an important one. Tonights broadcast will also include facebook, which has become a Gathering Place for political conversation. cheers and applause thank you. Thank you. Facebook is really the new town hall. Better conversations happen on facebook. Poke for a vote. Poke for a vote. U. S. A. u. S. A. Hillary Hillary facebook is the ultimate growth stock. Facebook is utterly dominating this new, mobile, digital economy. Have you been measuring political conversation on facebook, things like the most likes, interactions, shares. Hillary clinton has evaded justice. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to, in my view, clarify. 2016 is the social election. Facebook getting over a billion Political Campaign posts. Narrator 2016 began as banner year for Mark Zuckerberg. His company had become one of the most popular and profitable in the world, despite an emerging dilemma that, as it was connecting billions, it was inflaming divisions. People really forming these tribal identities on facebook, where you will see people getting into big fights. Narrator weve been investigating warning signs that existed as facebook grew, and interviewing those inside the company who were there at the time. We saw a lot of our numbers growing like crazy, as did the rest of the media and the news world in particular. And so, as a product designer, when you see your products being used more, youre happy. Its where were seeing conversation happening about the election, the candidates, the issues. Narrator amid all this political activity on facebook, no one used the platform more successfully than Donald TrumpsDigital Media director, brad parscale. I asked facebook, i want to spend 100 million on your platform send me a manual. They say, we dont have a manual. I say, well, send me a human manual, then. James jacoby and what does the manual provide . You have a manual for your r. If you didnt have that for your car, there might be things you would never learn how to use in your car, right . I spent 100 million on a platfo, the most in history, it made sense for them to be there to help us make sure how we spent it right and did it right. With custom audnces, you can get your ads to people you already know who are on facebook. Narrator what facebooks representatives showed them s how to harness its powerful advertising tools to find and target new and receptive audiences. Now ill target my ad to friends of people who like my page. What i recognized was the simple process of marketing. I needed to find the right people and the right places to show them the right message. Microtargeting allows you to do is say, well, these are the people that are most likely to show up to vote, and these are the right audiences we need to show up. The numbers were showing in the consumer side that people were spending more and more hours of their day consuming facebook content, so if you have any best place to show your content, it would be there. It was a place where their eyes were. Thats where they were reading their local newspaper and doing things. And so we could get our message injected inside that stream. And that was a seam which was controlling the eyeballs of most places that we needed to win. Narrar it wasnt just politics. By this time, facebook was also dominating the news business. 62 of americans say they get their news from social media sites like facebook. More than a dozen developers have worked with us to build social news apps, all with the goal of helping you discover and read more news. Narrator facebooks massive audience enticed media organizations to publish raight into the companys news feed making it one of the most important distributors of news in the world. Im personally really excited about this. I think that it has the potential to not only rethink the way that we all read news, but to rethink a lot of the way that the whole news industry works. Narrator but unlike traditional media companies, facebook did not see itself as responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the news and information on its site. The responsibilities that they should have taken on are what used to be called editing. And editors had certain responsibilities for what was going to show up on the first page versus the last page, the relative importance of things that dont relate purely to money and dont relate purely to popularity. So they took over the role of editing without ever taking on the responsibilities of editing. Narrator instead, facebooks editor was its algorithm, designed to feed users whatever was most engaging to them. Inside facebook, they didnt see that as a problem. Jacoby was there a realization inside facebook as to what the responsibilities would be of becoming the main distributor of news . I dont think there was a lot of thinking about that, that idea. I dont think there was any, any thought that news content in particular had, had more value or had more need for protection than any of the other pieces of content on facebook. Narrator andrew anker was in charge of facebooks news products team, and is one of eight former facebook insiders who agreed to talk on camera about their experiences. I was surprised by a lot of things when i joined facebook. And as someone who grew up in the media world, i expected there to be more of a sense of how people interact with media and how Important Media can be to certain peoples information diet. applause we have a video from davida from napoli. No. laughter you know, were a technology company. Were not a media company. The fact that so many big, wellknown news brands really pushed into facebook pretty aggressively legitimized it as a place to get, kind of, information. And i think that also strangely created the opportunity for people who werent legitimate, as well. Because if the legitimate players are there, and youre not legitimate, all you need to do is set up a website and then share links to it, and your stuff on facebook is going to look similar enough that youve just gotten a huge leg up. Hillary clinton is the most corrupt person. Narrator but as the 2016 campaign heated up. And ill tell you, some of what i heard coming from my opponent. Narrator . Reporter Craig Silverman was sounding alarms that facebooks news feed was spreading misinformation what he called fake news. Fake news just seemed like the right term to use. And i was trying to get people to Pay Attention. I was trying to get journalists to Pay Attention. I was trying to also get facebook and other Companies Like twitter to Pay Attention to this, as well. Narrator silverman traced misinformation back to some unusual places. We started to see this small cluster of websites being run, the vast majority, from one town in macedonia. How pular is it . About 200 people, maybe. 200 people . Yeah. Are making fake news websites . Yes. Most of them didnt really care about who won the election. They werent in this for politics. If you put ads on these completely fake websites, and youve got a lot of traffic from facebook, that was a good way to make money. There are some people who made, like, 200k or Something Like that. 200,000 euros . Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember one guy, i think he was 15 or 16 years old, telling me, you know, americans want to read about trump, so im writing trump stuff. Trump earned them money. We saw macedonias publishing Hillary Clinton being indicted, the pope endorsing trump, Hillary Clinton selling weapons to isis, getting close to or above a million shares, likes, comments. Thats an insane amount of engagement. Its more, for example, than when the New York Times had a scoop about Donald Trumps tax returns. How is it that a kid in macedonia can get an article that gets more engagement than a scoop from the New York Times on facebook . Jacoby a headline during the campaign was pope endorses trump, which was not true, but it went viral on facebook. Was it known within facebook that that had gone viral . Um, im sure it was. I didnt necessarily know how viral it had gotten, and i certainly didnt believe that anybody believed it. Jacoby but would that have been a red flag inside the company, that something thats patently false was being propagated to millions of people on the platform . I think if you asked the question that way, it would have been. But i think when you asked, then the next question, which is the harder and the more important question, was, which is, so what do you do about it . , you then very quickly get into issues of not only free speech, but to what degree is it anybodys responsibility, as a Technology Platform or as a distributor, to start to decide when youve gone over the line between something that is clearly false from something that may or may not be perceived by everybody to be clearly false and potentially can do damage . Jacoby over the course of the 2016 election, there was a lot of news about misinformation. I mean, there was, famously, the pope endorses trump. Do you remember th . Absolutely. I, i wasnt working on these issues at the time, but, but absolutely i, i do remember it. Nartor tessa lyons was chief of staff to facebooks number two, sheryl sandberg, and is now in charge of fighting misinformation. She is one of five current officials facebook put forward to answer questions. Jacoby was there any kind of sense of, like, oh, my goodness, facebook is getting polluted with misinformation someone should do something about this . There certainly was, and there were people who were thinking about it. What i dont think there was a real awareness of, internally or externally, was the scope of the problem and the, the right course of action. Jacoby how could it be surprising that, if youre becoming the worlds information source, that there may be a problem with misinformation . There was certainly awareness that there could be problems related to ns or quality of news. And i think we all recognized afterwards that of all of the threats that we were considering, we focused a lot on threats that werent misinformation and underinvested in this one. Narrator but there was another problem that was going unattended on facebook beyond misinformation. One of the big factors that emerged in the election was what started to be called Hyperpartisan Facebook pages. These were facebook pages that kind of lived and died by really ginning up that partisanship were right, theyre wrong. But not even just that, it was also, theyre terrible people, and were the best. And the facebook pages were gettintremendous engagement. A million migrants are coming over the wall, and theyre going , like, rape your children, you know . That stuff is doing well. And the stuff that was true would get far less shares. The development of these hyperpartisan sites i think turned the informational commons into this trash fire. And theres some kind of parable in that for the broader effects of facebook. That the very things that divide us most cause the most engagement. barking, laughing which means they go to the top of the news feed, which means the most people see them. Narrator this worried an early facebook investor who was once close to zuckerberg. I am an analyst by training and profession. And so, my job is to watch and interpret. At this point, i have a series of different examples that suggest to me that there is something wrong, systemically, with the facebook algorithms and business model. In effect, polarization was the key to the model. This idea of appealing to peoples lowerlevel emotions, things like fear and anger, to create greater engagement, and in t context of facebook, more time on site, more sharing, and, therefore, more advertising value. I found that incredibly disturbing. Narrator ten days before the election, mcnamee wrote zuckerberg and sandberg about his concerns. I mean, what i was really trying to do was to help mark and sheryl get this thing right. And their responses were more or less what i expected, which is to say that what i had seen were isolated problems, and that they had addressed each and every one of them. I thought facebook could stand up and say, were going to reassess our priorities. Were going to reassess the metrics on which we run the company to try to take into account the fact that our impact is so much greater now than it used to be. And that as facebook, as a company with, you know, billions of users, we have influence on how the whole social fabric works that no ones had before. cheers and applause ive just received a ca from secretary clinton. Clinton has called trump to concede the elecon. The Clinton Campaign is. Really a somber mood here. The crowd here at Trump Campaign headquarters. Narrator trumps targeted ads on facebook paid off. Did things like Facebook Help one of the nastiest elections ever . Narrator . Leading to complaints that Facebook Helped tilt the election. Facebook elected donald trump, thats basically. Narrator . Which the Trump Campaign dismissed as anger over the results. There has been mounting criticism of facebook. No one ever complained about facebook for a single day until donald trump was president. The only reason anyones upset about this is that donald trump is president and used a system that was all built by liberals. When i got on tv and told everybody after my interview of what we did at facebook, it exploded. The funny thing is, the Obama Campaign used it, then went on tv and newspapers, and they put it on the front of magazine, and the left and the media called them geniuses for doing that. Accusations that phony news stories helped donald trump win the presidency. Narrator trumps victory put facebook on the spot. Facebook even promoted fake news into its trending. Narrator and two days after the election, at a tech conference in northern california, zuckerberg spoke publicly about it for the first time. Well, you know, one of the things postelection, youve been getting a lot of pushback from people who feel that you didnt filter out enough fake stories, right . You know, ive seen some of the stories that youre talking about, around this election. There is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. You know, personally, i think the, the idea that, you know, fake news on facebook, of which, you know, its, its a very small amount of, of, of the content, influenced the election in any way, i think, is a pretty crazy idea, right . If i had been sitting there in an interview, i would have said, youre lying. When he said, we had no impact on the election, that. I remember reading that and being furious. I was, like, are you kidding me . Like, stop it. Like, you cannot say that and not be lying. Of course they had an impact, its obvious. They were the most important distribution, news distribution. There are so many statistics about that. Like, i dont know how you could possibly make that claim in public and with such a cavalier attitude. That infuriated me. And i texted everybody there, saying, youre kidding me. Jacoby is he not recognizing the importance of his platform in our democracy at that point in time . Yes, i think he didnt understand what he had built, or didnt care to understand or wasnt paying attention, and doesnt. They really do want to pretend, as theyre getting on their private planes, as theyre getting. Going to their beautiful homes, as theyre collecting billions of dollars, they never want to acknowledge their power. Theyre powerful, and they have. They dont. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, guys. I think it was very easy for all of us sitting in menlo park to not necessarily understand how valuable facebook had become. I dont think any of us, mark included, appreciated how much of an effect we might have had. And i dont even know to