Welcome. Hey everybody.
Welcome to this week's episode of dead cat.
This is Cam joined as always by Eric and Katie joined this week
by our very special, guest Alex Stamos, the director of the
Stanford internet Observatory, though, you may all know him for
his earlier work as the chief security officer.
Assert Facebook, where he oversaw Security on their
platforms at a time. That things got a little weird
over at Facebook spicen. Yes, by C.
So this week, we're going to go deep on Facebook and Russian
interference and more specifically if we can get
there. How the media reported on this
crazy brain breaking time that we probably will never recover
from before we get to that though.
Quick public congrats to Friend Of The Show.
Ken Griffin of Citadel Big Winners this week.
Dead cat sponsor chair. Auction to win.
Our in-house copy of the US. Constitution can beat out
constitutional Dao, better luck next time guys, and congrats to
Ken for winning. All right, Alex.
So this week we want to dive into a look back on Facebook and
Russia and the media. The reason it's interesting now
is that there was this recent arrest of I Gordon chanko an
analyst who was indicted in an investigation led by the doj
that's looking into all the Trump Russia 2016.
Ian, what have you? There's actually a great piece
about it from Eric when people in Washington Post that we can
link to in the show description. But to make this short, which is
never easy to do with Russia gate stuff.
This indictment essentially led to the collapse of the steel
dossier and a number of attractions for media
organizations but was never in doubt throughout all of the
investigations was that Russia did interfere in the election
and continues to interfere in elections as do many, other
countries around the world and there's probably no one who
Dance, that better than you. Alex, while at Facebook, you
were one of the first people, to grasp, really, how Russia use
the platform for their interference campaign.
And you work directly with the molar investigation to explain
that process. And then you got to see a
covered by the media. Basically, in real time poorly,
what's the score on? How is covered by the media in
real-time? I think that's what we're going
to discuss. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, Can you maybe walk us through?
What it was? You saw on Facebook's platform.
Yeah, we've got to get to check a launching Point here, the
weather. Yeah, what exactly did you see
while you're at Facebook? And how did you hear going to
cut right to the end? You guys gotta let me warm up
into the eggs. Like I don't want anybody to
actually know what happened. It's a special thing.
Nobody knows what happened. And it's all just hot.
Takes take first, smart blathers.
Yeah, maybe like, yeah, we will sit on the media center enough,
Eric, but we got to get a foundation here.
You can read all about it. Yeah, in an ugly truth by
Katie's colleagues which is soon to be a miniseries which means
all of my friends are to eating are texting me with who should
play me in the, the adaptation of what have you heard so far?
Can we get some casting rumors going?
Well, apparently exact Galifianakis is the current
leader, making a dramatic turn as a Surefire way to 1 win, an
award, but also reinvent your career, so it's it went out
every. I think it would be a great move
for him from a dramatic perspective.
I'm hoping for John Stamos, you know, even though he's like 10
years older, I feel like it's the same.
This on Stamos could be the name of your podcast.
When you talk about the right, I'll have to do a real-time
podcast with the episode recapture.
I was criticized for making the making this to light.
Now you guys are. Okay.
Kitty, ask a real question. Okay.
Okay, so tell us what you saw in
2016 so let's take. So look at the big picture.
There's like maybe four different themes of Russian
interference in the election, right?
And so the first is, when I'm not going to talk about, just to
mention is like all of the reach.
It's in relationship to the Trump campaign, right?
So, you know, all of that stuff of which the Steel dossiers part
of it. There's a lot of stuff in the
molar report and then the Senate Intel reports.
And so, there's the physical stuff right from a propaganda
perspective. Another part we won't really
talk that much about is, what is called, kind of white or gray
propaganda which is the propaganda that can be tied to a
government. And so that's like Russia Today,
Sputnik that's called White propaganda.
And then kind of the two darker more mysterious ways that they
influence. The election.
The first was the gru activity. So the gru is the main
intelligence, directorate of the Russian military.
The gru has existed for a long period of time.
It's Military Intelligence. They have a hacking side and
they have a propaganda side and the hacking and propaganda sides
work together. So this is what we see from kind
of the really high-end State adversaries is these kinds of
hybrid operations, where you have both a offensive computer
network intrusion capability, combined, with the propaganda
capability. And so, with the gru Was they
broke into the dnc's email server.
They broke into John, podesta is email, the email thousands of
other people. It turns out most of them didn't
have much to do with this but the campaign that they uncovered
Pizza gate, exactly right. We broke that thing out.
Eric's using this to spread disinformation.
Fortunately, if you have a whole podcast but this information
Spotify will give you a hundred million dollars.
So there may be this is the way for you guys to we're working on
it and so you have the gru activity T where they breaking
all that stuff, they steal all this information and then they
release it in a variety of different means, including via
Wikileaks, including via personas that they created
themselves. Their goal was to change the
conversation about Hillary Clinton, so that's the gru
activity and then there's the IRA activity.
So II RA in this context were talking about the Russian
internet research agency. That is a private group.
They belong to a guy named Ian vague deeper Goshen.
He is an was We considered an oligarch in Russia.
He has this troll Farm, which at the time was in this building
st. Petersburg, they've actually
moved since then, but this famous building in st.
Petersburg at which they would build propaganda and spread it
on social media, and they did that through the creation of
thousands of fake accounts of all of these personas that would
pretend to be from the countries where they spread it, and then
building up audiences and pushing it, part of that
includes advertising. And so, the internet research
agency were and about, Thousand dollars in ads on Facebook, the
ads were not really for the creation of the propaganda that
was for the creation of audiences.
So their goal was to use ads to Target groups that might be
interested in their content and then pull them into liking pages
and then the most of the content was pushed via Facebook pages.
So those are the identities for these groups.
They would create like a pro-immigration group and
anti-immigration group a pro black lives matter, group and
anti black lives matter group, stuff like that.
Their content in the end with something like 80,000 piece of
content. Seen in the end by over 130
million Americans. That was the number one topic
that they were talking about and you're at Facebook when this is
happening or give us where you sort of fit into this time,
right? So I was at Facebook, when this
happened I joined Facebook in 2015 and as Chief security
officer my primary job was keeping people from hacking
Facebook, right? So actually feel pretty good
about succeed at my piercing, right, right.
So we actually did a lot of really good work on security
stuff while I was there. And So that's like my primary
job. But then I also had a number of
groups that worked on the abuse of the platform to cause harm,
most specifically there. I had investigators that worked
on child. Safety, that worked on
counterterrorism. So we had the counterterrorism
investigators on my team and then we had to this threat
intelligence team. And so the threat intelligence
team is mostly X us and then a couple of other from Western,
Government intelligence analysts work to NSA, what the CIA in
such whose job. It was to track different
government's activity, both attacking Facebook.
But then also, In Facebook to do bad things.
And so kind of a normal work week for them would be, we found
four accounts that we can tie to the Islamic revolutionary guard
Corps and they are spearfishing, State Department employees to
try to get access to their Facebook accounts, from which
they can then trick, Iranian dissidents into revealing
themselves and then arrest them. So, that's like an actual thing
that we found was this big attack by the Iranians because
the state department where we had machine learning that
detected the kind of activity, we figured it all out.
We worked with the state department and the FBI to round
that all up in to stop it. And so, that was their normal
activity. But we got pulled, we got pulled
into this from two different ways.
So first, we had a dedicated team working on a PT 28, which
is the, the hacking team. That's tied to the Gru.
And we saw in the spring of 2016 during the primary process
activity by Gru that look like they were interested in people
who work for the DN C and D Triple C.
If you're an intelligence agent, you've been told I want to hack
somebody. Want to hack this organization
with the first things you do is you try to figure out all the
people that work there and then you learn everything you can
about them from their public social media profiles.
So, we had a bunch of accounts that we had previously
attributed to GRU because their activity.
So we saw them doing stuff in the Ukraine and we saw them
doing hacks against the world, anti-doping agency, your
Facebook, and Linkedin monetize that well or do you make exactly
right? Yeah, we get ya LinkedIn.
I mean Facebook doesn't sell accounts, but LinkedIn could
probably sell some Premium Accounts to the gru.
I To most people that reach out to me on LinkedIn are affiliated
with some sort of foreign State actor.
So, yeah, it's not, it's not a bad Theory.
And, and so we saw this activity, we saw them kind of
snooping around and so they weren't do any actual attacks on
Facebook, but what they were doing reconnaissance, which is
the first step in this. The standard operating procedure
from that point, was you go and you tell the FBI if they're
targeting Americans and the FBI handles it, we now know FBI
didn't really do much. Like they had all this
information about different kinds of targeting of DNC and
there's all this crazy stories. Like I mean, you know, the
Hoover building is whatever four blocks from the DNC headquarters
or something, and somehow the message didn't make it, but
okay. And then later in the year,
after the hacks happen, which don't happen on Facebook.
They happen on Gmail and then they happen directly against the
dnc's infrastructure, which the DNC should never been running
their own email server. But that's a different issue.
They come back and they create these personas on Facebook
called DC leaks. So we'll Wikileaks is kind of a
useful idiot to them but they didn't have direct control over
Wikileaks. And so, they pretty clearly
wanted To have personas to leak information that were under
their direct control. And so they create these
personas, and then they start reaching out to journalists here
are stolen documents. I have, these are the stories
you should write, right? And that is effective, it turns
out. Now, they also release the data
in a bunch of different ways, right?
And in the end, they get the stories written that they want.
Now, the internet research agency stuff, came after of, you
know in the whole discussion of fake news and such that we had a
big project to kind of answer the question of all of this fake
news content. How much of it came from Russia
now in the long term. Just a very small fraction of
all that the vast majority of that content is domestically
created or family. We suck ourselves that we're
just right, right? And or it's created by like
financially motivated actors like the apocryphal but real
Macedonian teenagers, right? Like things like that.
But you know we did obviously found a big chunk of it.
We found the internet researching to see activity and
then announced that later in 2017, but those are kind of two
different things. So, on the gru stuff, we were
ahead of the curve on the IRA stuff.
We were behind the curve. And you went to the molar team
to say, we Found what led to the I re-indictment you reached out
to Jeanne re on the team. You know, what was her response?
What was that first conversation?
Like yeah. So so there's an interesting
back and forth between the big tech companies and Department of
Justice on all kinds of crimes. In that we have this this is one
of the interesting things that we haven't really figured out.
Even since 2016 is, how do we want this kind of law
enforcement to happen on these companies because the truth is,
is that doj and FBI don't have the ability to find the things
that the companies can because they can't access.
Us petabytes, and petabytes of data without lawful process,
they have lots of power to get data on specific individuals,
either in a classified or unclassified setting, but they
have to know who to grab in the first place.
And so, this is actually a pretty common model of the
company's notice something bad happening.
You go and you send your lawyers to go brief, somebody from the
right us attorney's office, you write sign out an Affidavit of
this. Facebook employee has witnessed
a crime being committed, so it's structurally.
This is the kind of conversation that happens all the time.
I'm from a political perspective, this was very
different right in that, you're not talking about reaching out
to like just the normal us, attorney's office in Kansas or
whatever because you found a child molester there, you're
talking to the special counsel's office, right?
And it was interesting, I think in the end, I mean, they were
great and they were very thankful.
But yeah, we went and privately told them you personally or who
is no. No, the lawyers went.
So, I was part of preparing all this stuff, but like, in at that
kind of level, you're not sending somebody like me in
there, all the big tech companies have Of X doj lawyers,
who are in-house, who handle law enforcement relationships.
So we had a relationship between our threat Intel team and their
counterparts and doj. So, for these big groups like
apt 28, the FBI actually has coordinator sitting in the
Hoover building because, you know, the FBI's like a
franchise, right? Just like McDonald's.
There's some of them that have, like, great play places and some
have the really clean bathrooms. So, like some FBI offices are
really good at doing cyber stuff.
Some are not so great, so you'll end up with 5 or 6 other Offices
looking at a campaign separately.
And so the FBI is little have coordinators who sit in the
headquarters whose job it is to watch all of this data being
gathered and say, oh, these four different hacks, against
different steel companies. In four different jurisdictions,
are actually the same actor right there.
So, we had Direct relationships, those those folks.
But when you get to this level in your talking, the special
counsel, it's like you're sending the lawyer.
So the lawyers go and brief her and them and then we send our
people to go talk. After we got lawful process to
go, fill them in and to give them all the data that we So
this investigation by the special counsel was probably the
most watched and reported on Investigation, maybe in my
lifetime as your team is speaking to members of molars
team. How did you sort of view the way
the media covered that? I mean, did you find that there
was fairly restrained and reasonable articles written
about it? I mean, what's the
sensationalism already surrendered?
Because we can talk about what happens after the fact because
that's when shit really gets crazy but even just in the
lead-up to the molar investigation, What was your
perspective from where you said right?
I mean, I think one, so we published a white paper, I think
it was April or something. So in 2017, in Spring of 2017,
we publish a paper on what the GRE you did.
This is the paper that famously doesn't say it's Russia, but has
a footnote that hints that it's Russia and there's almost no
coverage of it, right? Like we did media briefings, we
did this in that and there's only a couple of stories, right?
A hint that it's Russia but not. Not actually have it be Russia.
You just say a country and what All-Stars?
Backwards or something. So I can pull up the exact
footnote. But it says something along the
lines of our data is consistent with the attribution provided by
the US intelligence agencies in their January memo.
So if you remember like, before Obama goes, there's a joint
communique from the intelligence agencies, saying it was Russia.
Right? Like was clearly the
administration getting anywhere. You're worried about getting
sued for libel or why the game. No, I mean, so that was a big
political fight internally which I'm sure will be an entire
episode of this miniseries with Zach Galifianakis being yelled
at by by the queen. I was part of Facebook.
Except her to not get as much news.
So, Facebook, explain any other not the lack of news coverage?
I think it's, I mean, there was a bunch of different things, but
there's comfy people who did not want Facebook volunteering that
bad things. Had happened that Facebook had
any part of this, which was clearly not going to work,
right? Yeah.
Thatís a, and it worked perfectly and no one's blame
Facebook since, right? Exactly.
And so you have to calm people were pushing that, but then you
also have like the d.c. government Affairs.
People who don't want to take a side, right?
And so, I think that was one of the big things is like, if you
say Russia, you know, you got those new Trump Administration,
Didn't the right thing to do is to turn this over to the special
counsel and eternal all the data over to the people who are
investigating. And our job is not to get
involved in the public fight, which just happened to coincide
with the, like, coms goals of the company.
And not yet like involved in anything, right?
So, yes, there's a big fight. Like it was a lot, just to get
it out. Like the fact that we admitted
that anything happened, but everything in there is accurate,
just like the whole Rush attribution section was cut out
as in one of 85 different versions that went out, but it
got very little Coverage. Right?
And there's anything we've learned from the whole mother
thing. It is that the rollout of stuff
matters. Almost more than sort of all the
technical footnoted. It's not like, oh, the public
eventually consumes it the smartest way as long as it's in
there. It's that the the fucking
headline is the most important thing and you can say, oh is in
there, I don't know. That's that's no.
I think you're right. I think you're right and
certainly in so it didn't cover the much.
I mean, looking back it's not that great.
I think like the treatment of Facebook has to Seen in the
context of the overall coverage of trump in Russia, which I
think, you know, and Smith came up with this term resistance
journalism and I think there's a lot of that going on right in
that. There's a bit of a moral panic
and as long as you say stuff that is about the targets,
there's not a lot of pressure from other journalists to get it
totally right. And so there's a lot of kind of
logical leaping and I think that happened both before and after
our announcement September of 2017, obviously after we
announce people kind of lose their minds what we'll get to
that in a bit because II actually.
Yeah. We'll get to that in a bit
because I pulled some, some clips from that era which was a
great thing. I spent the, I spent like two
hours last night, rolling through articles.
We'll get to that in a because I definitely want your things.
So, so anyway, so you guys work with the council and it is being
reported on simultaneously, what will we briefed molar way before
the Public Announcement, right? And in fact, when things get
complicated, the Public Announcement is that we had a
gag order from the molar team, right?
So like we go and tell them and then they hit us with a gag to
not talk about any of this. And so everything that Facebook
Okay, announced had to be negotiated with the special
counsel's office, which turns into this whole kind of
nightmare when we do the announcement, it doesn't come
with any of the data and that was specifically due to this
order from Miller's office. So you know and I'm not a lawyer
but like these lawyers were having some pretty honest and
big arguments both with molars team and then the lawyers in
Congress and side like you said, Eric the rollout is what
matters. And so you know Facebook ends up
putting out this mealy-mouthed blog post with my name on it.
That had pretty Much nothing to do with the first draft that I
wrote like every single word was changed by a lawyer.
A comes first. Before when I say every reporter
would tell you you can't let people put stuff on your byline.
The you know yes, I learned that too late.
Yeah, I should not have let them get my name on it.
Really you regret the whole thing?
Like I mean isn't it better something than nothing?
I don't regret the white paper I think getting the white paper
out. So on the white paper side I
wish it said Russia. This is the other part.
So when you talk about the treatment of the media, you
know, again there's two totally different.
Campaigns the IRA campaign. Absolutely.
The responsibility of Facebook and Twitter, right?
It is our responsibility to catch that and we did not my
team did not catch that. I did not catch that you didn't
stop it. The gru campaign was targeted at
the media and that absolutely worked, right?
I wrote. There's a there was a story
about John podesta as pasta sauce recipe, which one could
argue probably wasn't really relevant to the election issues
at hand. And yet, there was political ran
a live blog at start. We all know we all know that he
had risotto recipes, or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, like Luke. I ran a live blog of, like, what
embarrassing stuff can we find in these emails?
And maybe it's a Russian plot, but doesn't really matter
because it's newsworthy. This is where I spent most of my
evening yesterday reading through old articles because as
Facebook, gets closer to, I guess it was just delivering
testimony front of Congress about what you found in your
research on the IRA. There's kind of leaks that come
out did the day before hand and so just pulling through a
sampling of Articles, you know, this one from the New York Times
actually October 2nd 2017 headline Facebook's Russia link
ads came in many disguises and, you know, has a lead in there.
The Russians, who poses Americans on Facebook last year
tried on quite an array of disguises.
There's an article in CNN from Dylan Byers, September 28th,
2017 that refers to the IRA as a shadowy agency, which comes up
very frequently, describing them as a shadowy agency that's
extremely sophisticated in their ways of disseminating.
They're not necessary to visit of information things of that
nature. There's also So, a column from
Margaret Sullivan, I want to get to later.
But again, from your perspective, as these articles
are coming out in advance of Facebook employees testimony in
front of Congress. What's your sense as this is
being rolled out? Because it definitely fed a
frenzy happening in the public that.
Russia fucked everything up. They came in there.
They broke American democracy and they did it through to visit
Facebook posts. Yeah, I mean, I think so.
Facebook obviously takes a huge should take a huge amount of
blame on the way that all this information.
Was released and framed and the desire to keep everything
secret. And then to only allow things to
come out drips and drabs really hurt the company.
That being said, the overall reaction seemed crazy because it
was completely out of touch with the actual quantitative size of
this content because something like 80,000 post sounds big
Until you realize the denominator on that is in the
hundreds of millions, right? And so the vast majority, this
content had almost no reach like on the stuff where the Russians
posted the content themselves. All right, so II ra, they're
making propaganda, they're posting it.
So this is like a picture of people at a fence that is an
anti-immigration add or it's a pro.
Something that looks like it's Pro black lives matter.
But made by a fake group, right? For that stuff, its overall
reach compared to other, both organic, and paid content was
nowhere near, right? There's hundreds of millions of
dollars were spent on the election on Facebook and they
spent 150,000 dollars, right? Which it's like over the course
of two years, which do the math. That's what less than 5.
I was in a month. I mean like there are they are
like, you know, d2c makeup brands for dogs, that probably
spend more on Facebook and Instagram than the IRA did.
So the idea that this was a huge spend was was, was always a
fallacy and I don't know how many people that, you know, got
whipped up into a frenzy, about it, really understood that.
Well, because it also got combined completely without any
evidence with the Cambridge analytic issues, which is this
kind of imaginary world in which Cambridge analytical is this
magical Group of bond villains that have mind-control powers
based upon, right? Yo, people's likes that they
took yo, illegally via an API to be totally clear Cambridge
analytical themselves as a scam, right?
So they said they had these magical psychographic models of
people and there are quantitative metrics as to
whether online ads work. There's a whole set of people
whose entire job. It is to think about these
metrics and I know of those met none of those metrics is came a
general like a better than just any other kinds of AD targeting
that people do on Facebook, right?
And they had nothing to do with Ira to be clear, Kim Joon wook.
It had absolutely nothing to do with internet, research to see
the research internet research agency did zero data upload
custom audiences. So they didn't even do what we
consider micro-targeting. They targeted like you know,
young men in this ZIP code in Baltimore for pro black lives
matter messages, but none of that mattered to the narrative
which conflating these things at these Russians have kind of
magical mind control powers that they were able to use through a
hundred fifty thousand dollars of ads.
When Hillary Clinton campaign, spent like a hundred million
dollars, right answers? Like the idea that they were a
thousand times. But what about this idea that
you guys were like hand holding the Trump campaign in a way, you
weren't the cloaking campaign. So there's I think totally
legitimate arguments on whether Facebook ads had an effect on
the campaign. Almost certainly Facebook ads
had an effect on the campaign but they were to the
quote-unquote legitimate ads paid for by the campaigns and
the official committees and such using the money that our country
allows people. To give, right?
Yo, to two candidates in the parties, for which there are no
legal controls, I had nothing to do this.
So all of this I know from the investigation afterwards, right?
But, my understanding is that both campaigns, just like any of
the, if you're a Procter & Gamble, you get a personal, you
get a Facebook employee whose entire job it is to help your
campaigns run. And so these campaigns are
spending tens hundreds millions of dollars.
So they got offers of these people will help you do it and
the Trump campaign not knowing what they're doing said, yes.
And the Clean Campaign was like now we At this and said no.
And so it is true and it is quite possible that trumps
campaign was way better than Clinton's campaign because of
that, we partially don't have this data because the data is
kind of Legally locked up and it's never come out and there's
never been any changes to the law to allow it to come out.
I'm actually think this is where Congress has failed.
The most is that there have been zero changes to online
advertising law, since 2016. I would like to ban
micro-targeting for political ads, because I think it's
innately corrupting because it both drives campaigns just All
this information but it also drives them to Target message
different messages to different audiences.
Both political parties. Do this in both political
parties, think they're better. So they will make all these
noises publicly about how horrible ads are incorrigible
lake or river. It's all Bs right?
In private, all of these senators and congressmen are
being told by their Consultants were getting paid to run
political ads. They're being told by their
Consultants were better, do not unilaterally disarm, and so they
won't pass any laws. Europe.
Europe is starting to make some moves here, but in the United
States, there's been nothing Kim.
Can we take a quick Step back for a second to to the IRA stuff
because I mean you sort of brought it up and I have this
column here. This is again for that.
Same time period in 2017, this is from Margaret Sullivan, who
is a great media columnist. This is not a slam on her at
all, but I think it looks very interesting in retrospect and
really is a good summary of the era.
So the headline is collusion, who needs it?
When Facebook was allowing Russians to help Trump.
This is a key paragraph from this column much of that
content. This is the IRAs content was
expressly designed to widen the cultural divides, the United
States to Of wedges among its citizens and in doing so, to
help elect the Russian, government's preferred candidate
Donald Trump. It worked.
And while those more recent numbers are astonishing, I'm
assuming this is the numbers. Unlike reach the reality is
probably far worse research from Columbia University's Tau Center
suggests that Russian, linked information or disinformation
with shared hundreds of millions of times on Facebook.
The numbers Boggle, the mind of what here.
No, let me, let me read the key paragraph here because this is
where I think it really gets to the point.
We need to admit the obvious. If there had been no Facebook
spreading, Russia propaganda. There might as well be no
President Trump. Now looking at this.
Now from 2021, I don't want to seem too much smarter now
because it's easy to be critical in hindsight.
But is that an insane conclusion to reach based on everything
that you saw from the IRA? And is the fact that a major
newspaper is publishing this, in some way, a failure on the part
of the media, or the interaction between the media and these tech
companies to accurately, assess the role that the I replayed in
the 2016 election. Yes, that's wrong from my
perspective, the two kinds of online propaganda that were most
effective was one legitimate Facebook ads.
The ads that were run by the candidates in, which Trump did a
better job than the Clinton headed.
Straight up above board, using custom audiences and all the
Procter & Gamble shit. Which again, I would like laws
to change that but we need laws to change it, right, right.
And then the second was the gru activity because the gru
activity completely changed the tenor of the coverage of Hillary
Clinton, that was incredibly effective because what they used
was. Olin emails that allowed them to
create stories that were based upon a kernel of Truth.
Where the story itself was not accurate and be frank.
The US media has never ever ever looked inside of itself of the
fact that every major news are, you know, the New York Times The
Washington Post, CNN MSNBC, not just Fox, which like, we'll just
have to write off Fox of like what we can do about Fox.
But for all the, what I considered the legitimate media,
every single one of them was played by the gru they wrote
exactly the stories of Gru wanted and they Done.
No soul-searching on that at all.
And so at, yes, we screwed up like I will absolutely admit
that we screwed up but the idea that a hundred thousand dollars
in ads is as important as the entire legitimate, American
Media changing the way it covered Hillary Clinton is just
ridiculous. I want to just to say Tom
response to your comment and then it was must Alex in a
minute. That Margaret sullavan column is
so interesting because it kind of erases history, you know,
Russia 'He had used propaganda to widen the divisions between
Americans before there were very active in the 60s and 70s the
United States when the country was going through an
extraordinary Civil Rights Movement.
This is not the first time that Russia and other countries but
especially Russia have used internal divisions in a country
to try to destabilise the country itself.
So I think that, what is missed in that column is that this is
not a new strategy, it's simply a new tool and I think we could
debate whether or not the tool is more.
Active than any other tool they've had before and that is
an interesting debate but certainly this is not new.
I mean, if you're a student of history and you've read anything
about Russia's efforts to cause the collapse of the United
States in the 60s, you know, this isn't new.
Yeah. Tom Tom ridge book on this is
fantastic right. Active measures like absolutely
CIA invented AIDs that whole thing.
Yes, I think this is a good because we're now promoted
Cecilia and share has book and soon-to-be TV show.
Ow. And now, this really great book
after measures were really more of kind of like a marketing, a
marketing agency owner. Do you guys have a code that
unites discount on these books? You need to you need to line
that up before this goes. Yeah, but I think that on the
question of whether or not newsrooms have really reckoned
with this idea of being played by the gru, there were moments
where at least Dean baquet at the times, he came out different
panels. He was asked about this and he
did say that it had led to some soul-searching.
I You know, the internally certainly this conversation
husband had an is being had and those are really important and
ongoing conversations, especially we saw going into the
2020 election, will see you again going to the 2022.
Midterms like this, this is an ongoing conversation.
Even if it's not necessarily happening as publicly as it is
for Facebook and whether or not that's fair, I think is very is
a very good question, really? I mean, there are there are
great journalists at All of these organizations who I've had
private conversations with where they absolutely recognize all
this. And I know that they are part of
the internal conversations of. Like, let's not get played again
on D McKay, I remember very distinctly a week because I
wrote something about this, where Mark Zuckerberg gave his,
like, the speech were like, he changes history.
That Facebook was invented because of the Iraq War, which
is, yeah, yeah. I was not in that Harbor Group
which is why I don't own an island, but like, that does not
seem accurate to me, but the same week Dean Beck a was on
Michael Voris podcast, which I'm a huge fan of the times podcast.
And borrow to his credit is like interviewing his boss's boss's
boss, and ask them. These really tough questions.
And Bouquet says, if it's newsworthy, we will publish it,
right? And so I saw both Zach and Decay
or kind of actually to me similar figures in that from
bekay everything is about newsworthiness right?
And even if you're getting played, even if the leaked
documents were leaked from hacking from a Russian hacking
group, they're going to run. It whereas duck was all about
kind of free speech. In the freedom of individuals
and I saw them as like in this parallel that both of them are
getting played, both of them have like this deep belief in
what they're doing. And can't understand how that
deep belief is being used against them, so they Facebook,
like we at least published I? Yes, I failed to get the company
to put Russia into that paper. The New York Times wrote nothing
right. The York Times has never ever
written anything. About we got played by the
Jerry, you were sorry. And so yes, did I fail?
Yes, but I, at least will say it.
We need to realize, we need to rely on media columnist for
that. We need to rely on Margaret
Sullivan for those sorts of Articles anymore.
But Margaret Sullivan is as subject to the, you know, the
whims of the moment. And that means like in general,
right? Sure.
It's really hard to get the media to write a story saying,
we messed up. And I think the red and many
moments where various people have said, don't you think that
BuzzFeed should apologize for publishing raw unvetted
intelligence that completely changed the course of how we
think about Donald Trump, that's falling apart.
These questions have come up again.
And again, Multiple media organizations and I'm not
excusing them. I'm just going to agree with you
that we haven't seen the equivalent of a white paper
where a media organization comes out.
And says, this is, this is how we messed up and this is what we
want to do better. So I think, because of the way
the media works, we are all really dependent on columnist.
Whether it's a Margaret sullavan or whether it's a Columbia,
journalism review, some sort of outside forcing function to say
this is important to recognize for sure.
For sure. I mean the handling of like the
hunter by knee males Joe His daughters diary.
I mean those would seem to be early signs that the media is
having a much more command and control approach which is also
criticized. Well I mean it is sort of a
no-win case where if there's information out there that seems
it's absolutely no win and it's no win for both the tech
companies in the media. I mean, there's no direct hit
both sides screwed up right and sort of the government.
So, like you're asking about what is like, so what did it
feel? Like for us inside Facebook,
what it felt like was there. Three?
Three people, there's Mark Zuckerberg in the hoodie,
there's, you know, the FBI G-Man in his suit and there's, you
know, a New York Times Reporter with like the Press hat on like
the little, you know, the Fedora or whatever and both the
government guy in the Press car. Like, oh man, that guy in the
hoodie screwed up, right? We did nothing wrong, but they
really messed up. All these things were in bed,
Facebook are accurate and true. And it is the mistakes of the
company that need to be fixed, but they are in the context of
an overall, failure of American society to deal with this new Of
attack by one of our adversaries.
And unless you look at the big picture, you can't solve it.
And that's like one of my lessons come out of the 2020.
Election was the context of propaganda.
Mind is completely changed in the vast majority of it.
Now comes from verified American voices.
Tuna, we know exactly what they are.
They're not being Amplified by Russians are not fake accounts
and they have the ability to control the media context as
well as to get their messages out on social media.
And until we kind of deal with the fact that this is a
multimedia issue, That that it flows between kind of the
traditional media and the online platforms.
We're not really gonna be able to do anything.
I don't think any of us would make this case.
But some you could say that it was in the media's interest to
put the blame on Facebook to shift the blame from the media.
If the bigger hack was in retrospect about using the media
to spread disinformation pointing the finger at Facebook,
was in the media, is like Financial corporate interest.
I mean, obviously I disagree with that.
Really, really the only reason I disagree with that is because
you're talking about a period when the media was so beloved
that nobody was shifting blame. Well, bye.
If you want to Kratz. So loved by the left, if you
were walking down the street as a Washington reporter, you went
to an airport and somebody recognized in Washington, not
just in Washington like all over the country.
People were thinking you were getting letters.
This. I'm talking about the period
right after Trump was elected. Oh, I know what you're talking
about. Look my mom.
I signed up for a subscription to The Washington Post just to
support them. She's like right now.
I'm no, I'm not. I'm talking about the Trump, the
Trump term of his presidency. I mean, people are wearing
democracy dies in darkness shirts, and DC.
Yeah, there is no blame to shift who was blaming the media for
Trump at that point. Now, people are now might be the
time when that thesis would make sense, but literally in the days
months after the election, basically, from the time, Donald
Trump was elected through the issuance of Of the molar report.
They'll nobody was blaming the media for anything, just like
nobody is blaming the FBI another group with its hated but
suddenly was not hated for like a couple of years.
I just want to ask what this social psychological story for
the media is if it's not that sort of narrative, like this is
a good way to deflect it. Like what is your mental model?
Is it just like the media is not top down enough and there isn't
enough like command-and-control, it's like sort of that it's an
organ or just like do you have a thesis on like where the media
fails on this? Stuff.
Well, I think Ben Smith was right about resistance
journalism, right? Which is like we end up in a
situation where as long as you publish something that fits
preconceived notions about, who the bad guy is like, if you can
tell something in the in the Arc of this is this is the bad guy
and they did bad things then getting the details, right?
Isn't that important, right? Like, there's not push back and,
and we see that with Facebook all the time, we're seeing that
now with the Hagen documents, we're about to the media reports
about those documents, do not match up to the documents
themselves. Once they are released which is
one of the reasons. I am quite upset that this is
the way. These documents were released is
like in a way to create kind of a Feeding Frenzy only for the
headlines. There's a bunch of stuff in
there. That's going to be super
important for academic, study of social media.
In the long run. This is going to be great
because this is going to kick off, kind of a much more
rigorous. Empirical study of the things
that happened on line that is going to see a lot of great
work. But in the meantime, we have to
deal with the headline grabbing of like the Wall Street Journal,
writing the story about the Instagram slides that did not
match. If the slides once the slides
came out, the Washington Post had a headline about Facebook.
Uprating, the, you know, the angry Emoji, which was
intentionally misleading in that in the story.
If you read it, all of the Emojis were upright, all the
reactions other than, like, were up ranked and then, and then
there is an internal study and that turned out to be causing
harm. So they fixed it, which is
exactly what you want. People who wrote the read The
Washington Post story where, less educated about how faithful
camels these issues, than before they read the story.
And so that is resistance journalism to me, because Nobody
pushed back on them, the Wall Street Journal.
The Instagram one is been, I mean we've talked about a lot.
What's your case? You just quickly articulate.
Now your objection though. So there's a couple things.
One, this is like very initial work by an Instagram team to try
to ask people how they feel in different circumstances to then
lead to more research into your talking about a very small
sample size. And this kind of just asking
people how they feel is not that great, and it's known.
And then the second is, there's Parts where it's much more
positive, and it's great makes people really happy, right?
When you read this, you know, Okay.
It turns out that, yes, there are problems with teenagers and
social media and that is something that needs to be
studied. And this is the beginning of
that. The best part of this was like,
there was an article in Wired Magazine, which is owned by
condé Nast, who are the people who publish Vogue, which is like
to get lectured by condé Nast on, you know, beauty standards
for teenage girls is is amazing and just kind of encapsulate.
The overall problem here, which is, there is a problem, both in
social media, and media, in a bunch of these areas, but only
one of those sides ever gets looked at in the media, never
looks them. Condé Nast will never ask
itself, have generations of our publishing, but they're really
obviously doesn't work that way. A reporter at wired isn't even
connected, to what the editor-in-chief of wired things.
Let alone with somebody it voted but nobody writes it.
Nobody will write any of these things in the bigger context.
No, but I understand the argument in part, because the
media companies themselves aren't doing those studies to.
So, we're in an unusual situation, we're probably for
the first time. We have studies about how media
products. If we want to call, you know,
Instagram and meteor product. We want to call copy of Vogue
and media product, how they're actually making people feel, you
know, Vogue does reader surveys all Publications do reader
research but it's really mostly about subscription.
How did this convert a subscription or did this not
convert a subscription? What are our most loyal readers
do? And how do we get more of them?
I think to your point about why the Facebook research will
continue to be important beyond the stories is that we'd have
never seen really this much research done on media products
before and I think would be great.
More was done. I think it'd be great if the
media itself, didn't more of that kind of research.
But right now, it does 0 of it. So, right.
Well, which is why the big irony series, it's coming out the
Wall, Street Journal, a Murdoch property, and the idea of Rupert
Murdoch, having like a Civic Integrity team looking at his
impact on Democracy is kind of hilarious.
I sort of realized that, you know, when Ben wrote that column
and by the way, it must be said that.
If you want to talk about the various purveyors of resistance
journalism, the release of the steel, dossier could easily fall
within that category, that was Ben's decision.
It's amazing. Yeah it was and look he can
defend himself and I'm sure he will on any has several times.
So he has, yeah, there's no reason to call him out.
He's a friend of the show but it absolutely was friend of my,
friend of up, he was a great cast and we like, then it was a
great guy love, but I started fighting people Eric, you are
more like been than any of the other people on this show.
And this is why you can't get all of those Farm on side
Channel. My Discord thread.
I write, I wrote it like, multi, A screed defending Ben Smith
owning shares. I've written on Twitter.
I'm I'm the most Ben Smith Toady around.
I agree with Ben Smith on the steel dossier.
The only reason you're the only reason you're ambivalent is
because you guys are the same person.
I'm just saying. Yeah.
They if you playing the banker is more fun.
If he's a friend of me then he's just a blind friend.
Yeah. Weirdly Eric was not there that
week, we interviewed been. So you make your own decisions
on what that? I know I missed out.
I've talked to many, many ways. Oh, I just mean you're the same
person, but that's not going to make a substitution.
Stack joke aren't you supposed to make some tax jokes like
every 20 minutes or something? And that required traditional
journalists. But no in my mind everything has
become resistant journalism, not everything.
A lot of things have become resistant journalism now because
I think people recognize that as subscriptions have driven, you
know, to be the predominant, business model of many things of
many of these news organizations, there is real
need to serve that audience. Do you think that that has
gotten to be more and more the case, you know, post, Teen
post-2020. And if you agree with that Alex,
what role do you think? The tech companies and Facebook
specifically play in in that being the way things are?
I mean, yeah. So the Dynamics of like the
change way from the advertising model towards subscriptions that
is obviously being driven by the tech companies taking up so much
revenue and I think, and I've said this probably for I think a
huge failure by the tech companies was never to figure
out a way to revenue share with legitimate media, whatever you
call legitimate media, right? Like a bunch of The stuff has
happened and it happened kind of too late.
After media was hollowed out, especially local.
I saw some stats of like, 10% of people who work in journalism
work for the New York Times. Now, it's like four percent of
the actual reporters and 10% of people overall.
Officially Wonder, like how much support staff in your time,
says, I'm skeptical that I would need to see ya insulted Dean
McKay, I talk about that your time.
This is like the game Katie fire, well, that would get rid
of one employee at the, I mean, that, like, consolidation, Is
clearly both from advertising being taken up by the companies
as well as the decisions of some journalistic Outlets.
Plus just the success of the times of building up an audience
that is willing to pay all this money but is a smaller smaller
audience, right? So that's what sub s
demonstrate. I mean, the New York Times thing
is the same as the subject demonstration, which is if you
have a small number of people who love you, then, that is way
more profitable than making it, you know, trying to make it in a
per click on an ad basis, right? But our subscription base is
growing. It's not a small number of
People who are subscribing so it's hardcore.
Dedicated you mean compared to like the entire universe of
people who use Facebook for TV? What I'm saying is like you have
a there's a small number of people who really all of these
media outlets and moved to subscription are absolutely
motivated to keep their small number of subscribers have.
Okay. I think we have more than 8
million subscribers. I don't think it's like the
tiniest number and I was just trying to be clear.
I get the times I'm you know but like I just have to like we're
all liberal Elites Coastal Elites, right?
And don't you trust At the most, this is what I want to ask.
What do you trust like, what if not the times?
What, you know, like oh I do trust the times most of the time
except like, I'll read the story.
I mean, again, there's a difference between like things
being factually accurate or not and things being applied in the
right context or the amount of coverage they get.
Right? Yeah, I understand.
I mean, like, this idea of resistance journalism, I'm
opposed to it just in practice, just, that's just me.
I mean, if you look at most of the things that came out of the
Frances Hogan stuff, you can agree or disagree with the
conclusions and, and either they, you know, illustrate a
completely fucked up company. Or the question is, like, what
should they just have released that information publicly?
And we could have seen, oh, there were research internally
at Facebook, showing that there a percentage of young girls that
use Instagram that are unhappy. Obviously, you don't want to put
out the internal deliberations at the New York Times, but some
sort of public discussion of a decision as to why they chose
not to run certain things would sort of benefit people to
understand what the process is that, you know, Separates a
mainstream news organization from one that has no
credibility. I mean, the Facebook side.
I think absolutely, they should publish it.
We go two directions from this one either.
Tech companies start to publish these things because they
realize that doing it themselves.
Makes it not a scandal like a bunch of these reports are just
reports in like there are good things and bad things like the
Instagram one. Honestly is both sides and so
Facebook, published that it would not be seen as like this
huge Scandal for what you need. All these investigations.
We actually launched a journal at Stanford which was totally
coincidental at the hog and stuff but I It's pretty the
Journal of online trust and safety specifically.
Because we want to get platforms to published peer-reviewed
research in places that they can interact with academics and
others. So I think that's a good thing.
There's also the possibility from here is that companies just
don't do the research because the truth is that Facebook has
more people working on this than the rest of the industry
combined and is now being punished for that fact.
And so there's a possibility that if you're at Tick-Tock,
you're like, oh no, never look, never create a document that
says anything is bad because eventually if it leaks it
becomes a scandal and it's better not to look to go.
Also to like kind of the 2016 story.
Facebook is not the largest Advertiser on the internet, it
turns out, not even by a long shot, and there's another large
company. I'm sure smoogle that had lots
of stuff going on that quietly found, it never told the public
never told molars team never told anybody because they're not
legally required to what you think.
Google is worse than Facebook and Russian interference in the
2016 election. I don't I don't know because we
don't know anything and And since then their playbook has
been to not share anything, right?
So like Facebook has crowd tangle which might get killed.
So I like crowd angles is fantastic platform.
That is super useful and was incredibly key to our 2020 work
and all the signs look, like Facebook's going to kill it.
But as of right now, Facebook has incredible transparency.
Twitter has incredible transparency.
YouTube is almost impossible to study as an outside researcher.
Tick-Tock is almost impossible to say, he's outside researcher,
and so, I think we're going to need to have mandated.
Here. Because what's happened so far,
is that the companies have opened up.
Have had a huge amount of criticism and there's never any
criticism the companies that have decided not to open up.
And as long as that Dynamic continues to exist, I think
we're going to have this lopsided coverage but also the
inability to fix some of these problems.
So guys, I'm sorry. I have the time out.
My daughter, schools about to call her the rubble.
So we're about 15 minutes so I can continue this conversation.
15 minutes or we've got to wrap it up.
I'm so I think we've gone long. Sure I give it like a little
goodbye. See ya.
Yes thanks so much for having me.
All right. We're like what's a concluding
Point earlier that's not to say? Well Alex I think we've all
agreed that Facebook and the media companies are all the same
that we all need to get in the same ship together and and and
figure it all out. They're not all the same.
I think what we have write my conclusion would be we have
fundamental weaknesses in our media environment as well as
like the psychology of Americans and we have to look at the big
picture if we're going to understand or deal with any of
these problems. Thank you so much for having me.
I'll send you guys the recording.
Sounds good, thank you. Thank you so much Alex.
We really appreciate it. Goodbye,
goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,
goodbye. Goodbye.