Hey, it's Eric Newcomer. Welcome to the Newcomer Podcast.
A really exciting episode this week.
We're talking to a whistleblower, Francis Haugett,
the Facebook whistleblower is on the show.
I feel like we've been building to this for a literal years.
I've been talking about Facebook's content moderation,
the implications of her release to the Wall Street Journal of
the Facebook Files, and her decision to go public.
And we really got into the substance of it.
I feel like so much of the discussion around social media.
Moderation is sort of built for a simplistic public consumption,
and I really tried to get into the meat of these issues and
what potential policy solutions there are.
So give it a list. Francis Alga and Facebook
whistleblower, Welcome to the Newcomer podcast, author of The
Power of 1. Thanks for joining me.
Thank you for inviting. Happy to be here.
I have followed your story, the Wall Street Journal reporting
now the book super closely. So really excited to have the
conversation. You know, the Facebook Files
series and sort of the complaints about Facebook can be
so sprawling, like there's so much to it.
So I just wanted to start off the conversation.
If you had to sum up the top Facebook sin or you're like main
core objection, what is your top?
Facebook objection. So I would say the through line
that goes through all of the different kind of shocking, you
know, headline, exclamation mark type things that came out of the
Facebook files. And to remind people who maybe
don't remember exactly what happened about two years ago,
you know, it ranged everything from Facebook.
We knew they were human traffickers on the platform and
worried more about offending the buyers than the people being
sold. Or Facebook had lots of research
on their products, making kids unhappy, making them depressed.
Facilitating eating disorders, refused to hand it over to the
Senate when asked. You know what On and on and on.
But the thing that was the common through line, I would say
through all those things is we live in a world where Facebook
has to report publicly it's profit and loss numbers, It's
expenses like how it got to that profit and loss, but it doesn't
have to report a social balance sheet, you know, like what's the
social costs of making those dollars and for most other
industries. Those public costs, those
externalities are very obvious. You know, it's pollution in a
river, it's pollution in the air, it's forced labor.
You know, we can see what's going on with digital products.
You can take from the social side of the balance sheet and
make your economic balance sheet look a lot better.
And that's the core problem that is repeated over and over again
across all of these, all these harms.
Yeah. And I mean, that really sort of
comes through in the book. I mean, you make the point that
like, you know, Apple, it would be sort of visible with a
hardware device, whereas with this social media company like
Facebook, it's less visible. Is it a matter of the fact that
Facebook is customizing feeds from person to person or is it
more than that, what makes Facebook's products so much,
like, less visible than something more tangible?
The point I make in the book is if you go search for Apple
whistleblower, you don't find a lot.
Like, there are occasionally Apple whistleblowers, but
they're not like Facebook whistleblowers.
Like I I always kind of bristle when people describe me as the
Facebook whistleblower because there's a new Facebook
whistleblower every two weeks, you know, often with really big
revelations. It's not like there's one person
in the company that's feeding all that out there.
It's like a whole range of conscientious people who know
the public need to be brought in.
So you can ask the question, like, why is that?
Like, why is it Apple isn't producing the same volume or
intensity of whistleblowers, But I think it's that when Apple
launches a new iPhone, you know, within a couple of hours of that
iPhone going on store shelves. Don't be YouTube videos live
like already live where people have taken apart those phones
and confirmed like yes that processor is in there.
Right. They'll be like, oh, they added
a hard drive and now the hard drive slightly slower because of
it. Yeah, exactly.
It's very visible to people. But when it comes to what I call
opaque systems. And more and more of our economy
is going to be run by opaque systems.
So that's things like a large language model that lives on a
data center and all you see is the outputs, you don't see the
inputs, you don't see out there manipulated.
It could be a social media site. So like you said before is the
problem because we all see something slightly different.
That's definitely a huge part of it.
So if we were talking about Google, have you ever programmed
before? No, I'm not a programmer.
I know you're not going to believe me when I say this, but
if you and I sat down for three weeks, I could teach you enough
programming that you could ask real, meaningful questions about
how Google works. You know, what's getting
distributed? What's not getting distributed?
How prominent are different kinds of things?
What kinds of answers does Google give if we want to do the
same kind of accountability? 101 for Facebook?
Free Instagram. Don't even mention tick tock,
tick tock. It's way harder because it's
video. Right.
It's bandwidth intensive. You know how much hard it is to
a video podcast than an audio podcast?
We'd have to recruit 20,000 volunteers and convince them to
install software on their phones that would send back what they
saw on these platforms. It's a an entirely different
order of magnitude in terms of difficulty, and Facebook knows
that. With TikTok, sort of.
I really understand it right where it feels so tailored to
the human being. And it's.
Sort of machine learning driven where it feels like is there
even someone over at TikTok who really gets exactly why I'm
getting what I am? I mean but Facebook at least in
the beginning was supposed to be more like network based and like
friend based. Which?
Felt like, yeah, easier to trace.
Do you think it's totally moved away from that or why?
Why is Facebook so much harder to follow than at Google?
So by the time I got to Facebook in 2019. 60% of everything
people in the United States viewed came from a Facebook
group. It wasn't content from your
family and friends anymore. It's one of these things where
one of the projects my nonprofit is going to work on, let's go
beyond the screen because we help people see beyond their
screens, is doing a simulated social network.
Because, you know, it's like you brought up before a lot of
people if you were to stop them on the street and say, what is
Facebook for? And they would say it's about
connecting with my family and friends.
But if you were to actually go and look under the hood that
products, you know, that product where the only things you saw in
your feed were things that your family and friends posted, that
world is long gone. And the reason why it changed
was Facebook is an advertising supported business.
You know, as you scroll, you see an ad, they make money, you
click on that ad, they get money.
They have a motivation to get you to conceal more and more
higher value ads every single month.
You know, the more time you spend on the platform, the more
content you view, the more ad dollars come in.
They had a huge motivation to figure out how can they make
sure your feed is always full of really stimulating content.
What's interesting about TikTok is TikTok said.
Hey, we don't want to wait to get critical mass.
You know, in the case of Facebook or like creating a
Facebook competitor, when the expectation from the user is the
things that I see come from my family and friends, you have the
like a chicken and egg problem where you need to get all of the
person's friends before the person wants to join, right?
Like how do you make that happen with something like TikTok or
now Threads? Threads has a very similar
model. And that's Facebook's new
Twitter competitor. There's much less of a user
promise of what you're going to see.
So when you show up, they don't have to wait for critical mass.
They just need to entertain you. But at the same time, now you're
putting yourself in the hands of an algorithm you know, You
better understand what the biases are in that algorithm,
what it shows you and doesn't show you, because now the
algorithm is in control, not your friends and family.
You brought up threads and I I too see the similarity with
TikTok where it's, you know, it's bite size.
You know, it's not as tied to even like a follower network as
Twitter because they needed it to work right away.
So it feels like, oh man, this is going to be really powered by
machine learning pretty quickly. Like as you know a reporter.
It's funny to see sort of the reporter class sort of embracing
threads at the moment when I feel like.
You know two years ago or more than that, they would have been
so negative and apprehensive about trusting Facebook.
I'm just curious like watching the sort of pretty upbeat
response to threads, what do you take from that?
And like, are you surprised that there seems to be some Media
Trust of Facebook right now? I.
Think that's probably a sense where the trauma the Twitter
community has faced in the last year?
It's pretty intense. You know, it's one of the things
where, you know, Twitter never really went down that often, now
goes down regularly. It used to be, you know, as Jack
Dorsey, the former CEO, has pointed out recently, you know,
it used to be basically when you posted, things went live
instantaneously. And now they're, you know, he
flagged that they were now, you know, a minute or two delays
between when you posted and when it went out to people.
I think Elon Musk really gave himself an incredibly hard hill
to climb when he bought the company using so much debt.
Because when that happened, it meant that he put a clock on
himself. You know, he has to make a
billion dollars of profit a year and a product that was maybe
breaking even before he bought it, It was really hard.
And he's had lots of advertisers flee.
So I think there's further the positive reporting on threads is
that people really liked having a space to discuss ideas, to
discuss issues and the idea that they could have a space again.
Feels really good. Just to say another way, it's
like people were so frustrated with Twitter that give them some
openness to trust Facebook again.
Or Meadow, whatever we're calling it these days anyway.
Continue. It's interesting, like this is
still true, but people were reporting the, you know, the
first day to of threads. You weren't even given the
option to just receive content from people you chose.
Like it really is like talking that way where you have to put
yourselves in the hand of the algorithm.
And be like algorithm. May I please?
Yeah, there's no follower feed. Does that mean you haven't
downloaded it? Are you personally?
I have not. I have not.
Isn't that I'm unwilling to download it.
I just haven't got around to download it yet.
And I as someone who worked on Google Plus.
So for your listeners who may not remember, you know tech 12
years ago. Yeah, Google said, hey, there
are flaws with Facebook, like we should make a version of
Facebook that doesn't have those issues.
And in reality, you know, they were trying to go after the
personal social media market that's like you can actually
with people, you know, but they because they wanted to grow so
fast, they basically made something very similar to
Twitter. And you know, growing too fast
is actually a problem because it means that when people go and
take that chance on you, they don't land in a functioning
community. They land in chaos.
And they don't really understand what the point is.
They don't understand what the point of this place is, doesn't
feel like a place and they move on.
And at least some of the initial data around engagement, It seems
like that's a very similar problem to what Facebook is
facing right now. People were willing to download
it with threats, yeah. I mean, one thing Facebook did
differently is they, like, prepopulated it with all these
celebrities. Yeah.
So they had that. And they had obviously the
Instagram sort of connection to flow people in.
But I agree there's a lot of similarity, especially and, you
know, I mean, what's is it Google Plus, man, I can't even
remember the name. You just said it.
Google Plus. Yeah.
They like, I mean they got a ton of users in the beginning I, you
know, I was on it for a second and then it sort of faded.
So it's very possible. I mean Threads takes that same
arc, I don't think that's my personal view.
I mean is that a prediction or do you think this will be like a
Google Plus situation? I think one of the things that's
interesting about Twitter is the way Einstein's like to frame
Twitter is. Twitter is fueled by content
from a relatively small fraction of its users.
Who are most interested in the thoughts of that other small
fraction of users? So I talked to a law professor
who is regularly cited in tech discussions and she was like I
use Twitter to hear from 300 other people and just happens to
be that those people talking to each other and caring about what
each other says everyone else gets to kind of be a fly on the
wall and follow along for the conversation.
There are people like Elon Musk who love like raising up their
followers and like having direct conversations with a wide spot
that people. But I'd say the fuel, the real
core of Twitter is those, you know, communities of connection
and it'll be really interesting to see if threads can maintain
that. Like is it just going to end up
kind of a brand safe By brand safe, I mean for, you know even
sell Tide, Washington, GA. And Clorox, you know, bleach
one. Yeah, they're very programs,
definitely. Really.
Is it going to be just a space that is, like innocuous?
Or is it going to be a space that really does cultivate
community the way Twitter did? I mean it also, you know, it
feels like you could have one community on threads and one on
Twitter, especially with the part, you know, like I mean
you're seeing Elon right now, he's like making these payments
out to. Twitter personalities, it feels
like extremely conservative. I mean you could just see sort
of more left wing liberal, sort of, you know, people on threads
and sort of a right wing Twitter world.
It's very possible. I can totally imagine that
happening. It makes me nervous because like
when we do move into a space where we are entirely dependent
on an algorithm like, I have no idea if I post on threads like,
will my posts even get distributed?
You know, like my publisher couldn't even tag it to sell the
book, right? So it's things like that.
Wait, you think Facebook is like actively suppressing your book
on their platforms or? I know that for events I've
done, they couldn't use the word Facebook to describe the event.
So I can't be the Facebook whistleblower.
I can be a whistleblower. Like, you know, they'll have to
sit there and try a bunch of different variation of ads to
run an ad I was told by my publisher was, you know.
They sell lots of books. They post about lots of books on
Instagram. They went through and tried to
tag my book and they got back an e-mail saying that it violated
the commerce policy for Instagram.
And they paint their like, concierge because they spent
enough money on ads that they get, you know, a human shot to.
And the person was like, I don't know why this would violate the
commerce policy. I mean, there's not white
community. There's no violence, you know,
whatever. And yeah, so they they don't
know why. I mean, do you think Facebook
just has a blanket ban on people using the word Facebook?
Ooh, I don't know. I've had other experiences, like
the Nobel Peace Center had an event that I spoke at, and they
had never had an ad blocked for being a political ad until they
advertised my event. So think about that.
Like, do you think the events at the Nobel Peace Center are
political? I think most of all are.
Right. So.
It is what it is. Have you interacted much with
Facebook otherwise or like? Have you had any direct
engagement since you left? I think if I was more of a
troll, you know I have a little bit of troll, not like a huge
amount of troll in my heart. I have like a enough troll for
spark, right. I would totally promote them
more because they so aggressively will not
acknowledge that I exist. So if like for example, if you
ever get to be in a Q&A session with a Facebook executive like
at a conference. Ask them about me because they
will not use my name. So that's the kind of thing
we're like. If I was a bigger troll I would
see more questions at their events, but you know, I have
other things to do so. Back to sort of the core
disclosures, you know, in the book and I mean clearly you talk
about sort of them lying and I'm just curious like what you think
sort of the core or like great examples of like Facebook's
deceit? Have been because I mean there's
obviously they have such an information advantage where it's
like, yeah, they can just run circles around anybody trying to
scrutinize them because they understand the platform so much
more. But the cases where they were,
you know, lying. Flagrant so I'll give you an
example. This is one of the core parts,
and I complain. Back in 2018, Facebook faced a
business problem. You know, they could see over
time people were making less and less content.
This is a normal phenomenon on social networks like some people
get really into it. Most people slowly start to self
edit self censor and they tried a bunch of experiments on you
and I to see could they induce us to produce more content.
And one of the things I know, it's like guess what your
experiments are on every day every time you're on one of
these platforms. So it turns out if they
artificially. Get you twice as many likes and
the way they do this is they just keep showing your your post
to more and more people until you get to that number of likes.
If they can get you up to you know twice as many likes you
produce more content. You know it's a very clear like
dose response that if you feel more social rewards more little
hits of dopamine you make no. So they came out and said we
don't want people mindlessly scrolling.
You know, mindlessly scrolling, that's bad for people.
So we're no longer going to prioritize content on Facebook.
They start how much time you're going to spend on the platform.
That's like, you know, it could be a prophecy for like how much
you enjoy consuming things. Instead, we're going to reward
meaningful social interactions. So I think about a phrase like
that, it's like, what is a like to you?
What is a meaningful social interaction?
Something that, you know, like a day later I'd reflect on and
say, oh, that was like a good thing.
And I'm like glad it happened you.
Know. Or maybe like your friends
shared something really revealing and you wrote a
comment saying, you know, that's hard.
I'm really glad you shared that. You like that sounds like a
meaningful social interaction. In reality it was just was there
any social interaction, right? So you could put bullying or
hate speech in a comment and that would be considered
meaningful social interaction. And within six months of this,
researchers across Europe on the left and the right, local
parties, local parties on the left and the right were telling
Facebook researchers, we know you changed the algorithm.
It used to be we could post like a white paper on our
agricultural policy and we get it.
It's like, not the most thrilling thing in the world.
Didn't get a lot of comments. Well, we could see from the
stats that people spend time with it.
They read it. Now if we post that same kind
of, you know, bread and butter content, nothing.
It's crickets. Like, we're being forced to run
positions that are so extreme that we know our constituents
don't support them. But like, our job is to run
social media. Like we have to, like, put stuff
out there and it has to work or we'll lose our jobs.
And what's kind of crazy about this is in some ways Facebook
acknowledged implicitly they had a problem.
Because they put out, excuse me, Mark Zuckerberg put out a white
paper, probably one of his employees.
It's like 5000 words long. I really doubt Mark wrote it.
It said, hey, this engagement based ranking thing we just
launched, there's a problem, which is people are drawn to
engage with extreme content. But don't worry, don't worry.
And you know, we ask people afterwards, did you like it?
They say, no, we're going to protect you from the lowest
extreme content by taking it down.
We're going to have these magical a I systems.
And even their solution to their first lie was another lie,
because those systems that they claimed we take down all the bad
stuff, they were only successfully removing 3 to 5% of
things like hate speech were less than 1% of violence, right?
It's kind of crazy when you think about it, but they told
everyone from Congress to, you know, the, you know, teachers
unions, like we're protecting people, But in fact, it was all
kind of smoke and mirrors. I think this is the policy
solution you want, or at least the one that would seem to sort
of come from what you're saying is like okay, some sort of
disclosure where, you know, outsiders can sort of track how
this is all happening. I mean, how possible is that?
I mean, every social media network is so different.
You know, I'm a capitalist. I want companies to be able to
change and react and like, you don't want a bunch of laws that
like, say, oh, you need to disclose things this way and so.
Now you're forced with a certain type of the same network you've
had, Instead of evolving, how would you see a disclosure
regime working that still allows companies like Facebook to be
flexible and to change? Let's actually unpack for a
second something you just said, which was, I think a lot of
people don't sit and think about what's the menu of options when
it comes to intervening in a problem as complicated as this,
right? I'm really glad that you brought
up the idea that these companies grow a change.
Where that, well, you know the next one to come along might not
fit the exact same walls of this one.
One of the ways the European Union handles that flexibility
and and to be really clear like this kind of way of doing
regulation of saying disclosure and transparency is in instead
of something like what's happening in say Utah, where
Utah is coming in and saying this is how you will write your
company. If people are under 18, they
have to have parent supervision no privacy for kids.
Their parents can see everything.
We're like Montana coming out and just flat out banning
Tiktok. Those are kind of we'll call
them building fences, type rules where we're like, oh, this is
the fence you can't cross. And the thing about technology
is they it moves and changes and they're very good at running
around fences. So the alternative is something
like what the European Union passed last year, which is
called the Digital Services Act. And the Digital Services Act
says, hey, if the core problem, you know we started at the
beginning of this conversation, if the core problem.
Is a power imbalance, right, Like the fact that you can know
what's going on and I can't know.
Let's address that core problem because a lot of other things
will flow downstream from it. So they say, hey, if you know
there's a risk of your product, you need to tell us about it.
You know, if you discover one, if you can, you know, imagine
one, you need to tell us about it.
You need to tell us your plan for mitigating it, because it's
going to be different for every platform.
We want to unleash innovation. And you need to give us enough
data that we could see that there was progress going on to
meet that goal. And if we ask you a question, we
deserve to get an answer, which sounds really basic but is not
true today. You know, I've been asked
questions by governments around the world that are very basic,
like how many moderators speak German.
I've gotten that question but for different languages all
around the world. And it's because Facebook
doesn't have to answer. They don't even have to answer
things like how many users are there in your country?
Which is extremely frustrating given that Facebook stance has
always been where their move has been like, regulate us.
Like, you know, not all these decisions should be made by a
private company, like. And then it's like, oh, well,
then why don't you give at least the governments around the world
or the information they would need to write good regulations?
So, I mean, obviously you're talking to a journalist, so
disclosure is always gonna be something I'm gonna cheer for,
but certainly a frustrating situation.
To provide a road map, though, so my nonprofit, it's called
Beyond the Screen. One of our core projects is
called Standard of Care where we are working to build out a wiki
that people can contribute to around identifying the problems
of social media. What are the surface areas or
what we call the levers for preventing or mitigating harm
and then what are the strategies for pulling those levers.
So just to give context on that, you know a lot of the problems
around kids. A lever that is common across
them is let's keep under 13 year olds off these systems.
But when the kids advocates talk about technology, they often
don't know what's possible and so they'll settle on solutions
that might seem obvious but have problems.
So for example, in the case of the lever of keeping under 13
year olds off the platform, they'll say let's check ID's,
which I don't think you want, I don't think I want.
It also just doesn't work. But if you've gone to a
technologist and said, hey, I have this lever.
Let's keep under 13 year olds off the platform.
That technologist could come back and say here's 10 or 15
different ways to find under 13 year olds.
You know, some of it's really basic, like kids will say I'm a
fourth grader or things like I learned this one from my
principal. Kids report each other, like to
punish each other. So like you're mean to me on the
playground and I'll report your Instagram account and as soon as
you find 10,000 kids, you can find all the other ones.
And so the way I think this could tie into transparency.
Is once we have a menu saying these are the harms, these are
the surface areas, the levers for addressing each of those
harms. You can come in and say okay.
Then we at a minimum like I think there should be raw data
assets for researchers. But if you don't want to go that
far, at a minimum you can say we need data on how bad each of
those harms are and how hard you're pulling the levers to try
to reduce those problems. You can figure out lots of
different strategies to pull those levers.
But you need to show U.S. data on things like under 13 year
olds, how late are they on the platforms at night, that kind of
thing. I mean, a core response that
Facebook would give in this situation would just be, they
might not say this outright because it's probably not
political, but like some of these problems that you've
identified are just human problems, right?
If you talk about sort of the Instagram critique with it
potentially making sort of. Young teenage women, sort of,
some segment of them unhappy. I mean, you could say, like, was
that so different from Vogue? Is this really an algorithmic
problem, or is this just like how humans are?
I mean, and I would probably attach more on the a lot of the
sort of Democratic liberal sort of anger at Facebook was about
just what Trump supporters are like and like their views and
the fact that there's like an audience for them.
And not always the fact that Facebook would give them
distribution. So I guess across a lot of these
categories and we can get into the particulars of totally I
mentioned. But yeah, what would you say
about the just like some of these things people are mad
about are just things that human beings do that happen to happen
on Facebook. But it's not necessarily their
levers that are moving people to do those things.
So I think one way to think about this is technology can
either. Amplify and bring out the
worstness. Or it can act as a bridge that
helps us seek our best and happiest selves.
So I totally agree with you that you know there are always been
teen girls that were unhappy about their bodies or how nice
their clothes were, but there are a limited number of pages of
Vogue every month. You know, the second time you
read Vogue, you're going to have a different impact on you than
the third time you read Vogue, or you're going to get bored of
it. And in the case of something
like Instagram, you know, Instagram progressively pushes
you towards more and more extreme content.
So I'll give an example. I had a journalist reach out to
me for an interview and he explained to me that he had just
had a new baby. So this is a healthy, happy baby
boy. He's a modern father.
He made an Instagram account for the baby.
That baby had maybe five or six baby friends.
Everyone here is healthy, happy, cute baby.
He's only ever clicked on or commented on happy, cute,
healthy babies and yet about 10% of his feed with children who
were visibly suffering. So kids who had gone horrible
accidents and were just figured disabilities and deformities
that looked really painful. Kids died of cancer in hospital
beds with tubes coming out of them.
And he was like, Francis, how did we get from healthy, happy
babies to this? Like, what happened?
I've only ever clicked on the Happy Fun tent.
And I was like, well, the A I knows very clearly you like
babies. You know you've made this whole
little baby centric world. So it's showing you content and
knows that people who like babies have trouble not engaging
with. And I want to be honest, even if
you're not clicking like on that content or sad or whatever you
probably are lingering and a lot of these A I's have dwell you're
just you're the fact that you paused is a single signal that
you like that content. And so, you know, he's old
enough and, you know, cognitively mature enough to see
something weird is happening with a 13 year old girl.
You know, she might start out by looking for something like
healthy recipes and just by clicking all the content get
pushed over time towards more and more extreme materials.
And we see these reports from things like child psychologists
who say I have these kids in my practice.
They come into their appointments and say I'm trying
to make better choices. Like I'm trying to follow the
program, but it follows me around Instagram.
And right now we live in a world where we don't have consumer
rights to really basic things like should you be allowed to
reset an algorithm without losing all your past.
So like, those kids are being forced to choose from their
past. You know, all their memories,
their friends and their futures. Because an algorithm wants to
keep them from moving away from something that was hurting them.
I'm sure you saw. You know if you want to delete
threads, they say. You delete.
Instagram too, which is just like insanity.
I mean, it's like, oh, we know you love this other thing.
I'm much more supportive of the we should regulate tech through
laws that, like correct it rather than the sort of huge
antitrust push. I mean to me like things as
simple as just like then push notification hacking.
Like we need to escape a world where like.
Tech companies are allowed to use sort of little badges that
psychologically drive us crazy that don't show, like actual
alerts. But the problem is you write
that rule, you know, like I'm sitting here like I'm frustrated
with like Facebook. And I'm like, why is Facebook
showing me this group that I never use?
But it knows I love to clear algorithms.
We should ban it. But then, you know, for the next
startup that's trying to build and doesn't know anything about,
you know, it's just like, it creates a huge regulatory
burden. They could end up helping
Facebook. So this is part of why we want
to do our standard of care project, right.
Like right now Facebook has a really huge advantage in that
they have done research in this space for decades and decades.
15 years, 17 years somewhere in there I guess they are coming up
on 20 years cuz it's 2023 and they were founded in 2004.
But you want to talk about real deep cuts.
Do you remember Friendster or you not quite old enough?
Yeah, that's. So Facebook was my first real
social media I graduated. You weren't a life spacer.
In 2009 so, but I'm aware of sort of the history.
Of yeah, the first web crawler. So that's a thing for
downloading data off the Internet so you can analyze it
that I ever wrote. I wrote Friendster because I was
using really early graph mapping algorithms because I guess I've
always loved graph based problems.
But yeah, part of why we're doing standard of care is we
know we want to make sure that the next generation of social
platforms and you know, social platforms take lots and lots of
different forms, things like roadblocks.
Roadblocks is a social network. You know, we're going to always
have new social platforms. How can we make sure that people
have the best head start, you know, the best platform to build
off of to be like, oh interesting, we can get a very
robust education on what we should be worrying about.
Very quickly and an understanding of like what
options exist for being able to afford all those problems.
Is privacy a big part of your advocacy?
Or like how optimistic are to me, I'm sort of like, oh man,
privacy sort of lost in this world once you're on them.
Like, I'm just not like a privacy that's I'm much more
aligned on this sort of like, oh man, them hacking our brains and
like, using actual, like, psychological tricks to get us
to engage with them. That's really troubling.
But like, yeah, I don't know how much time are you spending on
sort of privacy advocacy and what's your sort of view on on
that part of? It so privacy is not what I
would say, one of my tentpole issues, I'm very open to it as a
technique in terms of, you know, people emotionally connect with
privacy as an issue and it is a way of decreasing the ability of
algorithms to be able to act towards you.
Like if they're not allowed to record information about you,
it's harder to manipulate you. At the same time, like, you
know, we're developing AIS that are getting better and better at
doing implicit inferences. And so it's this question of,
you know, how little data do you need in order to actually still
see a lot of these phenomena. And also, I think it's only
things where it's like, I don't think you can write privacy laws
that are going to strip enough data to actually neutralize the
problems that we're talking about.
Here. I'll give you a really basic
example. One of the big ways you reduce
misinformation on something like WhatsApp, which is end to end
encrypted, it's private chat is he's saying, hey you know, as
something gets reshared, so there's a chain of reshares.
So I got it, I reshared it. My friend reasshared it on and
on. One is a chain of reshares.
Once it gets 5 hops away from the person who created it, say
to them, hey, you can totally spread this further, but you
have to copy and paste it. You have to make an affirmative
action to continue forward. That kind of change doesn't, you
know, you know, allowing that, not allowing.
That's not really a privacy topic, but it's one of the most
impactful things for safety. So I'm very pro privacy
legislation. If people want to push it, I
think it can have a really positive impact on a lot of the
problems I talk about. But it's not being trinsically
solve all the things that we're talking about here.
No, that makes a lot of sense. I sort of alluded to the
political piece of this sort of digging into that section.
I mean the political asymmetry in the United States and like
how that affects conversations about Facebook.
Like to me it's like pretty obvious that like Trump
supporters, Republicans like are behaving in sort of different
ways than Democrats and spreading generally more false
information. And like, it's very awkward.
For Facebook, certainly. And for politicians or, well, I
don't know, journalists can sometimes sort of have trouble
sort of highlighting that asymmetry.
I don't know. What's your view on it?
Do you agree with me that there's like a sort of partisan
asymmetry there and that that is sort of creating some of the
problems about how Facebook is able.
Facebook doesn't want to target Republicans because then they're
going to get a lot of heat from Republicans.
And so then they're not willing to do sort of things that would
have. Asymmetric outcome, I guess.
Do you agree with that is sort of the question.
Facebook has spent a lot of money trying to frame the issue
of what can be done about any of these online safety bras in
terms of freedom of speech versus safety.
And they get up there, and this is a real quote.
Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and he was like, you
know, I've really grown a lot in the last year.
This was like, I don't know, a year after I came out nine
months. I know I've really grown a lot
in the last year because I've realized sometimes if you stand
up for what you believe in, you're going to be unpopular.
And I'm a defender of freedom of speech.
And what I found so aggravating about this is like, you know,
that thing we just talked about with WhatsApp, You know, when
you cut the research chain at 5, You know, if you do that same
thing on Facebook when you cut the research chain at 2:00.
And has the same impact on misinformation as the entire
third party fact checking organization.
And you're not picking and choosing what are the good ideas
and the bad ideas. And I think right now, you know,
a pattern we see across the world is if you are a political
party that is not in power, you have more of a motivation to
figure out new technologies, new ways of reaching people because
you're the party that's out of power.
You know you don't have the advantages of being an
incumbent. And so if we were to roll back
in time to say, the Obama presidency, like the first one,
you know, when Obama got elected, he did a lot of
techniques with technology that no one else was doing.
You know, they were monitoring, you know, what's not as a, B,
testing emails. So they would say, you know, if
Obama holds a puppy, how much money do we make?
If Obama is their first wife, how much money do we make?
You know, do people sign up for the XYZ thing?
He had a a motivation to do that because he was the scrappy
incumbent. And so I think when we think
about these things as like there is a partisan lean that you know
one side is maybe playing the game a little harder than the
other side. I think when I think of it is
that it's just a question of like who it is or isn't in
power. And So what I always try to say
when I speak with right leaning voters or right leaning
podcasters, if you have any suggestions for ones I should go
on, I'm always trying to reach out to a more and more diverse
audience. If your listeners can think of
great ones for me to go on, e-mail me at
francis@francishogan.com. What I would say is, if you care
about freedom of speech, you should be demanding transparency
about these censorship systems. You know, when I talk to women's
rights advocates around the world, all of the have been
kicked off Facebook because these A I systems are so crude
that if you talk about violence against women, the A I thinks
you're committing violence against women.
Like, if you really care about for no space, you should be
marching on the streets for transparency.
And I think that's a space that we should all be willing to work
at. I totally get sort of the
messaging there and that you want everyone to be sort of on
board with these issues. I mean, you look at even the
threads roll out when they launched it, they had some, I
think, tools in there early on that said, oh, you know, this
person, I forget what the exact language was, it was like.
Oh, you know, they, I forget if it was the past false things or
I'm not going to get it totally right.
But there were warnings before people reshared them, which then
like can have sort of a perceived sort of partisan
focus. And obviously, I mean, Elon
Musk, whole campaign on Twitter was the idea that Twitter was
sort of shadow banning, you know, people and the replies and
all that. Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
I guess the question there is like.
Clearly what we're seeing is there is some sort of right wing
backlash to cases where social media companies try to do what
you're saying, which is sort of either flag or not sort of a
size things that violate their policies.
I think this again, it's funny since I actually worry about
this a lot for AI safety. If you already feel distressed,
you know you feel like you have been left behind or you're a
marginalist. And, you know, I grew up in
Iowa. Like, I have a lot of empathy
for Republican voters today. You know, Iowa has been left
behind economically in a pretty dramatic way.
That if you already are feeling a little that anxiety about the
idea that people with power don't really care about you,
it's very easy to read into when a moderation system takes an
impact that you're being singled out.
And I think this is also true for, say, African American or
less affluent people who participate, only that you have
very similar things where like African Americans will get
sanctioned for hate speech because these systems are not
very well done. And so I think there's a fear,
and this is a fear that could be addressed by being more
transparent of saying, hey, we're going to actually let you
see what we're doing because you know the case of a I safety,
you're already seeing people come out with calls of saying I
don't want. Systems that have been aligned
with the public good. I want true or real AI.
And I think that in both cases, either what conservatives are
saying about content, moderation on threats, or AI safety, you
know, when people feel like it's out of their control, when they
feel like something's being done behind the scenes, they object
to it. So giving the user control
basically. Or having enough transparency
that you can build trust on these things.
Right. Like it should be possible for
researchers to come out and say, like, hey, actually, or if you
yourself. So right now, if your content
gets taken down on Facebook, the only people you can appeal to or
you can send your thing off to is the oversight board.
Imagine if you would say, I'd like to be put in a public
research data set. Like, I would like reporters to
be able to look at this and say, oh, interesting, you know, this
whole political candidate is getting taken down at a much
higher rate than this other one. Like that would be a very
different world. Facebook would have to work
harder to make sure that its systems were objective and
effective. In the book Power One which
everyone should go read and you talk about like the rise of
COVID and like I mean COVID sort of is a great way to get into
the misinformation question and I think like how misinformation
like the view on sort of that word and sort of the ideas
there. What is your view on like how
Facebook. Handled COVID, like, are you
supportive of, you know, tamping down on people who were like,
you know, skeptical about the origins of the vaccine or
skeptical about the vaccine? Because that fits right into
this sort of partisan thing where in there end up being sort
of sides that align with parties that fit onto these.
So yeah, how do you score Facebook's handling of COVID
misinformation? Oh, great question, God.
It's interesting. My criticisms on Facebook are
much more like the part of the book that I I think you're
alluding to is, you know, when they went and divided up the
United States into 600 communities.
So think of a community as you enjoy the same kind of groups,
You follow the same kind of pages, you post on the same
kinds of topics, you click on the same kinds of topics.
You know, imagine you put people into communities that were
between 500,000 people and 3 million people.
If you went and said, you know how many of these communities
make up 80% of all the received COVID misinformation, it turned
out that 4% of the US population fell into communities that got
80% of the COVID misinformation, right?
So you and me, average person gets maybe one piece of COVID
misinformation every couple days, once a week.
For a small fraction of people, they were getting whole streams
of it. That's what happened with the
January 6th people, but for different groups, different
ideas. And and part of that was because
the way Facebook was designed was if you have a post that is
really controversial, you know has a big fight in the comments,
Every new comment makes that post new and can show up at the
top of your home feed again. And so there were a few
communities where, you know, COVID had a really intense
emotional balance. Those communities actively
censored out voices that said anything different and they
became these kind of echo chambers.
And so I think there's interesting conversations to be
had around, like how do phenomena like that occur and
like what other contexts are they happening in?
And so like, let's imagine you're seeing something like
that where you know, the algorithm and the product design
are pushing people towards. These kind of parallel
realities. And like, that's why you had
people showing up and like, you know, threatening teachers with
guns or like people showing up at school board meetings
screaming because literally when they looked at their Facebook
feeds, all they saw was stuff about how teachers were trying
to kill their kids, Right? So that's kind of the
environment we're entering into when we have to say, like, what
is Facebook's role or what should Facebook's policy be?
And I think it's really complicated.
Like, I think they did a bad job.
In that they had, you know, these blacklists, they had the
concepts that you couldn't talk about, but they never told
anyone, you know, They never let us see how well these systems
performed. And it meant that you had people
feel like they weren't, like it was a hidden truth and hidden
truths are very alluring. And so, you know, effective
social software should be designed such that if I write a
thoughtful reply, if I go do research, if I come back to your
allegation with. Something meaningful for a
conversation. I should get similar amounts of
distribution to your inflammatory statement, and that
just doesn't happen today. Like, the systems aren't
designed to reward extreme ideas.
They're not designed to reward thoughtful, moderate ideas.
So. Your solution there would be
just to. To give more distribution to
sort of counter messaging basically.
So like, they've done research inside of Facebook, and one
thing that's kind of exciting about the next few months is
like Harvard has an archive of most of the Facebook files and
they're starting to make access for those documents to academic
researchers. One of the papers in there talks
about how, if you are good at writing such that people diverse
from you different from you. Can engage with that content.
Are those ideas You're doing a very complicated thing, right?
You know, if I can write a political post that Republicans
and Democrats can like instructively have a
conversation in the comments, you know, people are thumbs up
and each other. It's like a positive
conversational template. I should be rewarded for that
because it's not obvious. Like I might not get the most
comments, I might not get the most likes.
But if I can get a diverse community of people, a diverse
audience to engage with it, that should be rewarded.
If you come in there and say, hey, we're going to boost
content from people who can successfully reach across the
aisle, you end up getting less hate speech, less violence for
free, less misinformation. So it's a lot of these things
where if you start making transparent, what is distributed
versus what is created on these platforms.
And you start saying, hey, like right now what you're giving
distribution to is very different than what's being
created. Can we get those a little bit
more in line? I have a feeling what would end
up happening as you'd start finding more techniques like
that where you could come in and say, hey, people who are fear
mongering, you know, they shouldn't be the only ones who
get to stand on the stage. And that's kind of what's
happening today. So it's still a world where like
there's like sort of? A hand on the till in terms of
what's getting reach and like it's just sort of in some ways
just doing things that are less oriented around sort of their
business interests necessarily, which are Max engagement, right.
I mean it's certainly not saying like don't sort of weigh certain
things differently than others, right, Because if you just tried
to create this sort of like neutral algorithm, you would
just then be deferring to sort of.
Negative aspects of humanity potentially.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Yeah, algorithms can only capture the level of complexity
that you put in the algorithm. So if you come in there and say,
hey, people developing compulsive behaviors, right?
So in the case of kids, you know, something like 8% of kids
say that they take control of usage and it's hurting either
their employment, school or their health, right?
Think about that 8%. How selfaware are 14 year olds
like, not super selfaware. How honest are they with
themselves? Not super honest.
It's probably a lot more than 8%, right?
They're suffering like that. You know, if you don't have a
system that says, hey, sleep deprived kids are a longterm
harm to society, you know, they do worse in school.
They are at higher risk for developing mental health issues
that will last so long throughout their life or put
them at higher risk of recurrence.
They're more likely to use drugs, both uppers because
they're tired, Downers because they're depressed.
You know, if you have an algorithm that just is like, how
many clicks can we get? Like how much ad revenue can we
get? You don't capture those kinds of
social costs. And so I think there's a huge
opportunity where if you just come in and say like, hey, with
cars, if you have a car accident, everyone gets to see
the car accident. You know, everyone gets to see
the body on the ground and see that your, you know, your seat
belt didn't work. We don't have a similar feedback
cycle. On these social platforms, and
they can keep kind of having their problems and they don't
have anything that brings them back to center.
For the last part of the conversation, just talk about,
you know, the decision to release information and to go to
the Wall Street Journal. And, yeah, the reporter, it's
Jeff Horowitz, right? He reached out to you on
LinkedIn. Or tell the story a little bit
about how this happened. Like, did you see yourself?
Sure, like as a whistleblower before you heard from him?
I had been contemplating for quite a while.
Like, would I have to go forward at some point?
Like, I had a chance to talk to my parents about it a large
number of times, just because, like, what I was seeing on a
daytoday basis while I lived with them during COVID was just
so different than what the Facebook public narrative was on
these issues. But the moment where I was like,
OKI have no other options was right after the 2020 election.
So this is in December. It's like less than 30 days
after the election. They pulled us all together on
Zoom, and they said, hey, you know how for the last four
years, the only part of Facebook that was growing was the civic
integrity team. So it's the team that was for
facebook.com, at least. So civic Integrity's job was to
make sure that Facebook was a positive force in the world,
like a positive social force in the world.
You know, it wasn't going to disrupt elections.
It wasn't going to cause any more genocides, because by that
point there'd been 2. You know, it was going to be a
positive force. And they said, hey, you are so
important, we're going to dissolve your team and integrate
it into the rest of Facebook. And when they did that, that was
kind of the moment where I realized Facebook had given up,
that the only way Facebook was going to save itself was if the
public got involved, that the public had to come and save
Facebook. And so by chance, so that day I
went and opened up LinkedIn because, you know, I was kind
of. When you have instability at
work, that's what you do. You know, you open up LinkedIn.
And I saw that I had a message from this guy, Jeff Horwitz, and
he did a lot of reporting for the Wall Street Journal about
the violence that Facebook had facilitated in India,
particularly like Muslim Hindu violence.
And, you know, he said, do you want to talk?
And I was like, oh, interesting, like of all the places that I
would want to work with. I wanted to work with the Wall
Street Journal because I really view all of these topics as
bipartisan. You know, they're not left,
they're not right. They're like basic rules of the
road. And I knew that if the reporting
had come from the New York Times that there would be a large
swath of right leaning voters that would never be able to
trust it. But if it came from the Wall
Street Journal, it was likely that they would be able to at
least consider it. And I think that's part of why
the Senate hearing was so bipartisan because.
It was something that came out of, you know, it was trusted
like that. A lot of the things that were
said in those articles sounded crazy.
They sounded super. There's like, no way, there's no
way the company could be this bad, like the human trafficking
thing of the Facebook employees being worried about offending
buyers over the people being trafficked.
But because it came from a very, you know, center of the road,
cautious publication, people were like, oh, maybe this is
actually true. And yeah, I mean, I think this
journal is so credible and sort of careful and how they present
things. Initially, you were not going to
come out, right? Like what motivated your
decision to go public? So wondering why the disclosures
are so large. So I want them to be able to
stand on their own like I always expected to do.
Like closed door briefings but like governments to be able to
explain them. But I never intended to be like
part of the story. And right before I came out, so
maybe a couple months before, my lawyers started really putting
pressure on me where they were saying, you know, Facebook knows
it's and they can look at all the different documents, right?
They know it's you. You know, the report is going to
get started. They're going to figure out real
fast or as soon as they start going to ask for comment,
they're going to figure out real fast.
And the Wall Street Journal, they said here's the deal.
Like either you can wait for the rest of your life for Facebook
to present you to the public. You know, every day you're like
open, you know Google News. You're going to open your
newspaper and be like, is today the day that Facebook is going
to introduce me in the worst possible way?
Or you can take responsibility for what you did.
You know, I know that you don't want to be out.
You don't want people looking at you.
You don't want to be out there. Like, you know, go and take
responsibility because if you do, close door briefings.
Every single briefing you do will expand the circle of trust,
and you're going to be like the juiciest story for some reporter
to break. Like if they can.
Find post or somebody would have just.
And one of my friends joked, like, after I came out, they
were like, I don't understand how this story stayed quiet for
so long. I thought, everyone in San
Francisco, I knew Francis was doing this.
And I was like, everyone in our circle of friends knew I was
doing this. Not everyone in San Francisco.
But still, it's one of those things, like, someone brags to
their friend about how I know where the Facebook whistleblower
is and, you know, I just goes. And so I decided to step out
into the light. And it's actually been a really
transformative experience. You know, it's one of these
things where I spent a lot of my life, like, really trying to
avoid being seen. You know, like, I've gotten
married twice. I eloped both times.
The idea of standing in front of a crowd, having them just, like,
stare at me for my wedding sounds very stressful.
You know, I've had two birthday parties in the last, like, 20
years. Like, it's just not my jail.
But it's been really interesting having to, like, stand up and
try to educate people on these issues.
Because, you know, I really believe in democracy and the way
the world changes is we change it.
You know, we get out there and we say, hey, you know, I'm going
to keep repeating this until I see something different in the
world. And having to show up in my own
life has been a huge blessing. And I, something I never
expected to be one of the things that I would walk away, you
know, two years later and say I'm so grateful for this.
Awesome. That is a great ending to the
podcast. Thank you so much for coming on
and I really appreciate talking to.
You. My pleasure.
The honest thing I leave people with is if you think all these
things are too complicated, you know, like these are, you know I
couldn't understand a technical book.
The whole point of power of 1 is that democracy requires an
informed population. So it is written so that if you
could follow along today, I guarantee you'll be entertained
and follow along the power of 1. And there's lots of fun stories
and, you know, crazy hijinks along the way.
Because I've always got into trouble.
You know what? I didn't mean to.
And so I hope you come along on this journey too.
Thank you so much. That's our episode.
Thanks so much to Tommy Herron, our audio editor.
I want to shout out. Annie Wen, our intern for the
summer, has been helping me prep for the podcast and working on
punching up the show. Shout out to Riley Kinsella, my
chief of staff, and young Chomsky for the theme music.
This has been the newcomer podcast.
Please like comments, subscribe on YouTube, give us a review on
Apple Podcasts, and most importantly, most important,
subscribe to the Sub Stack newcomer.co Become a paid
subscriber today. It makes this all possible.
Thank you so much. See you next week.
Goodbye. Goodbye.
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.