Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen On The ‘Chaos Era’ Of Social Media & The Future of Public Discourse

Determined to bring transparency and accountability to Big Tech, in 2021 Frances Haugen risked everything to blow the whistle on Facebook. She copied tens of thousands of pages of documents that revealed that the social media giant had accidentally changed its algorithm to reward extremism. Even worse, Facebook knew its customers were using the platform to foment violence and spread falsehoods—and refused to fix it. Frances testified to Congress and spoke to the media. She was hailed at President Biden’s first State of the Union Address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the documents showed. And she set an example for standing in truth and doing what is right for the greater good. Today we dive into the nuanced impact of social media on society. We talk about why algorithms prioritize extreme content and Facebook’s own complicity in radicalization and political violence around the world. We explore the tools available to combat these issues, including what Big Tech can do to prioritize user consent and reduce misinformation and hate speech. Note: If this exchange leaves you wanting more, Frances has written a compelling and comprehensive book about her experience entitled: The Power of One. Ultimately Frances left me with a surprising sentiment: the belief that we can have social media that brings out the best in humanity. This is a fascinating and important conversation. I hope you learn as much as I did. Show notes + MORE Watch on Youtube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: ROKA: roka.com/richroll On: on.com/richroll AG1: drinkag1.com/richroll Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:18Frances Haugen?

  Facebook was so much worse than I had any idea it could be. No one actually gets to see how Facebook is functioning. You know, if you start a fight in a post, you're gonna get much, much more distribution than someone who does a calm response. If your kid uses social media for more than three hours a day, they're at double or triple the risk of getting depression or anxiety. The average kid in the United States uses these products for three and a half hours a day.

• 1:42Rich Roll?

  Zuckerberg himself refused to address these major problems.

• 1:46Frances Haugen?

  Marcus had to be the CEO since he was 19. He's the chairman of the board, which means that he is also his own boss. He lives in an echo chamber. We're not citizens on our social platforms. We are subjects of a king.

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today, I'm joined by Frances Haugen, a data engineer, scientist, and former lead product manager on the Facebook civic misinformation team. But she is most widely known as "the whistleblower during the 2021 Facebook files." In an effort to stop Facebook's complicity in the radicalization and instigation of political violence around the world, Frances copied tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents, which revealed that the social media giant knew it had accidentally changed its algorithm to reward extremism, all while refusing to fix it, and knew its customers

• 2:45Rich Roll?

  were using the platform to foment violence, spread falsehoods, and more. Frances testified before Congress about this. She spoke aplenty to the media. She was hailed at President Biden's first State of the Union address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the document showed, and she set an example for standing in truth and doing what is right for the greater good. She has since written a compelling and comprehensive book about that experience entitled "The Power of One," which obviously provides the subtext and the basis for today's exchange. A few more things I want to say about Frances and the conversation to come, but first.

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  Okay, Frances. In this conversation, Frances shares the nuanced impact of social media platforms on society. We talk about how algorithms prioritize extreme content and lack proper moderation. We explore the tools available to combat these issues, as well as the need for intentional product design choices to prioritize user consent and reduce misinformation and hate speech online. Ultimately, Frances left me with a surprising sentiment: a belief that we can have social media that brings out the best in humanity. Now, that is a hopeful sentiment, and I think you will, in turn, also find this conversation surprisingly hopeful. It's fascinating. I loved having it.

• 4:19Rich Roll?

  I really enjoyed Frances. So, without further ado, here we go. This is me and Frances Haugen.

• 4:27Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you coming here to share. The book, The Power of One, is out everywhere, easy to find. We'll link it up in the show notes and all of that. Well, let's walk through the history of this a little bit for people that aren't super familiar with your arc, and begin with why you even joined Facebook to begin with. What was attractive about going to work at Facebook? Because at the time, it wasn't that long ago, it was 2019, right? There was already a lot of stuff, alarming things about Facebook at the time that, for the sort of uneducated person about your life, would make one think, like, well, why did she even go there?

• 5:11Frances Haugen?

  So, back in my late twenties, early thirties, so I went into the hospital in 2014. So, I was 29 years old. And my health had been declining for a couple of years. So, I went from being able to ride 125 miles on a bike in a day to being in a wheelchair in two and a half years. So, I go in the hospital, and I find out that I have a foot-long clot in my leg that's like the girth of like a cigar that's been growing there for like two years. I find out that I have not been actually being careful enough about my diet. So, I have something called celiac's, so I'm allergic to gluten. And I was so malnourished, my protein synthesis had stopped. So, I was starving to death, even though I'd gained 100 pounds, which sounds so counterintuitive.

• 5:56Frances Haugen?

  And I ended up, it took me, you know, 15 months to relearn to walk. And even when I went back to my job, I was still only just functional enough that like I could work all day, come home, and then sit on the couch. And so, I hired an assistant who was a friend of my younger brother's. And...

• 6:19Frances Haugen?

  He became like essential to my recovery. So he would take me like on long walks. He like liked to lift weights. So he like coached me about protein and macros and stuff like that. And in 2016, Bernie Sanders lost the primary. And and my friend, like he, he, he kind of like fell into the dark corners of the internet. Like he wanted to commiserate. He really felt that that Bernie had been wronged. And he began to have a lot of conspiratorial thinking. And I remember how painful it was. Like when, when the Facebook recruiter reached out to me in like late 2018, early 2019, and was like, hey, do you want to work at Facebook?

• 7:01Frances Haugen?

  The thing I said to her, it's like, I really didn't care if I got the job or not. Right? Like, like you said, Facebook had a bad reputation by the time I joined it. I said, the only thing I would work on is misinformation. Because like watching him divorce himself from our shared reality was just excruciating for me.

• 7:20Rich Roll?

  How deep did it go for him?

• 7:22Frances Haugen?

  And he ended up moving to Indiana with some people who I think are questionable. And it's interesting, like the thing that saved him was he, he met a nice girl. And he likes started going to church again. And like, he's fine today, but like, you know, he, he was definitely running with some people who have some pretty extreme political beliefs. And so I always try to slightly guard his privacy because it's not my story.

• 7:48Rich Roll?

  Right, sure, of course. So that experience with that close friend was a motivating factor in you being interested in the possibility of participating in the solution. Like Facebook's not going away.

• 8:00Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  If you're inside that machine, perhaps you can pull some levers and right the ship.

• 8:07Frances Haugen?

  I think it's also, it's also one of these things where like I talk about in the book, the idea, and I'm not trying to brag here, like the idea that we have hundreds, hundreds of people in the world who understand really how these algorithmic systems work and the intersections of it. When I make this product choice, you know, when I decide that a post should go to the top of your feed with every new comment, like, how do those two things interact with each other? You know, when the person said like, hey, we do have a job for you. You could do civic misinformation. It put me in like a really hard place because on one side, like I had felt like this really intense loss and it scared me, right? Like he was a smart, college-educated, funny,

• 8:47Frances Haugen?

  insightful, empathetic person and he still like spiraled off enough that like we would have fights over like, does George Soros run the world economy?

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:57Frances Haugen?

  Right? Like, like stuff that any reasonable person would be like, no, he does not. You know, there's no space lasers, like, you know, like, you know, there's no lizard people. And-

• 9:07Rich Roll?

  I'm envisioning the comments on YouTube below this, this video. There's gonna be a bunch of people who, who might disagree with you.

• 9:14Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, yeah. Good. We should have a conversation. We should have software that facilitates conversations, not screaming at each other. But, um, so I, I, I felt that on one side, you know, if you know that you're in a small group of people who can do something and that, that thing could actually impact a lot of people's lives and you don't want to do it, how do you navigate like feeling like you have an obligation to at least do a tour of duty? And so like, I never thought that like I was the only one that could save the day, but it was like, you know, there's a relatively small number of people. I'm not gonna go work in Washington, right? Like, I'm not gonna move there, but I'm willing to do, you know, two years, three years and work on this problem. And then I could say I, I at least did, did my part.

• 9:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:57Frances Haugen?

  And I ended up there and it was just so much worse than I had any idea it could be. Because like, like I said before, I had never really thought about the international implications of Facebook. Like, I, I didn't even think I was gonna work on the international stuff. I thought I was gonna work on the United States. And so it spiraled very quickly.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  So walk me through the progressive disillusionment and, you know, in, in specific terms. Like, what did you encounter?

• 10:23Frances Haugen?

  Sure. So I showed up and, you know, it was like a couple of different levels of where I was like, something is profoundly wrong. So like on the, the organizational level, you know, like I said, like you mentioned, I have an MBA from Harvard. I show up-

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  With a focus on organizational structures, like that's your jam?

• 10:42Frances Haugen?

  Organizational health, yeah. I, have you ever seen the TV show Silicon Valley?

• 10:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Frances Haugen?

  So I can't, I, I, I failed to watch all of season one because it's not a comedy, it's a documentary.

• 10:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:54Frances Haugen?

  Right? Like there's a lot of things they play for laughs where I'm like, oh, I watched that happen. That is not nearly as funny as you think it is. But the, um, but yeah, so I really care about how organizations function. And, um, and I show up and they tell me the very first week, so they put me in this bootcamp for product managers. And for people who are not familiar with technology, or how like software's written, you know, you have software engineers, and you have people who work with the software engineers, whose job is to kind of articulate, what is the problem we're trying to solve, and kind of segment that problem and the solution to the problem into like, the actual discrete set of steps, where like, we're gonna solve this, then we're gonna solve this, then we're solve this, and together,

• 11:38Frances Haugen?

  we're gonna ladder up to the thing we're trying to accomplish. And so I show up, and they say, hey, you know, you think you know how to do your job, but Facebook is enough different than how other tech companies work, that we have learned if we don't put you in this two-week bootcamp, the chance that you're just gonna like, burn out and fail in the next six months is too high. So, for the next two weeks, we're gonna teach you how to Facebook. And I get like, maybe four days into this bootcamp, and my manager's like, hey, we don't have time for you to go to bootcamp. You need to come and give us the plan for what we're gonna do with civic misinformation for the next six months. So I've just come in the company.

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  That's red flag number one.

• 12:16Frances Haugen?

  Red flag number one, right. I've just come in the company, I know nothing about Facebook's problems. My teammates have never worked in the space, right. So three of my only three engineers are front-end engineers. So that's like, people who figure out how to lay out the buttons and plumb it all together, so the information goes the right places. My data scientist is new to the company, my engineering manager's new to the company. We have no idea what's going on. But we are expected to come up with a plan in the next like, five days, that we're gonna present to like, all the leadership of the safety team. So that's the first red flag. Second red flag is, I hadn't really thought, so one, I had not thought about the idea of Facebook being the internet.

• 12:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:55Frances Haugen?

  But I hadn't really thought about the implications of, you know, when the internet comes to a new place, how does that change the place? Right? Like, when we got the, like, in the United States, when we got the internet, it started in the 80s, right? And it started at a few Ivy League schools, a few departments. You know, it progressively flowed down a gradient of privilege. You know, it went out to more and more universities. It went out beyond the universities into the public, you know, on and on and on. But it took, you know, a solid 20 years. And, and what's happening in a lot of other countries is, like, people are becoming literate to use Facebook. Right? That, that, that, one of the, the first experiences I had was, we were supposed to sit down and come up with how we were going to measure success.

• 13:38Frances Haugen?

  And we had, we had a hard problem because we were specifically not working on third-party fact-checking. So that's like, people who do, like, say, "This is, this is not true."

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:48Frances Haugen?

  Like, we were going to work anywhere in the world where there were not fact-checkers, which is actually most of the world. Facebook mostly goes in and does that, like, after the fact cleanup in, like, the United States and Europe. And so, someone suggested, "Well, what if we looked at expressions of doubt? So, like, if you see something that looks off, and you make a comment saying, 'I don't think that's true,' or 'I think that's misinformation,' you know, we could count up those, and if the number went down, we were doing a good job." And one of our researchers said, "You know, that sounds really obvious. Like, that sounds like it would be a thing that would work." Except for, when we went in and did interviews in India, people are coming online so fast that when we talk to people with master's degrees, so these are smart, educated people,

• 14:33Frances Haugen?

  they say things like, "Why would someone put something fake on the internet? That sounds like a lot of work." And, and so just imagine I'm in this context.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  So, smart people who are getting on-boarded onto the internet through the lens of Facebook and, and, and basically Facebook only, without adequate discernment tools to understand, to be internet literate.

• 14:54Frances Haugen?

  I, the way I like to put it is, like, we don't realize that shit posters are actually, like, a cultural treasure. Right, like, like, our, our, like, 20 years of people saying random shit on the internet makes us have a certain amount of doubt of being like, "Oh, you, you can't, you can't just forward things."

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 15:10Frances Haugen?

  People will laugh at you if you just forward things. In a lot of these places, um, you know, people believe that the information on Facebook is more trustworthy because it came from a friend. Right, like, if your friend sent it, then it should, you should trust it because you have that connection. Um, and so that's just like-

• 15:25Rich Roll?

  And there's an understanding that we've gone through that maturation process-

• 15:30Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  -of, of kind of understanding shitposting versus reality-

• 15:34Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  -on some base level.

• 15:36Frances Haugen?

  On some base level.

• 15:37Rich Roll?

  Even if not great, at least some, right?

• 15:38Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:39Rich Roll?

  And when you think about the developing world and that very different picture, uh, in the context of, of Facebook proudly announcing how much money it's spending on, on third-party fact-checking, et cetera, but not understanding or appreciating that the gravamen of that, those resources are being poured into the developed world, right?

• 16:00Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Rich Roll?

  And, and for various reasons are not doing much of anything in the developing world, language barriers, resources, et cetera.

• 16:08Frances Haugen?

  I think another thing that is important for context for people is, like, I hadn't really thought about linguistic diversity. So, like, if you look at a country like Ethiopia, you know, in, in the abstract, it's like, "Oh, a country far away." They have 100 million people, 120 million people, uh, they have 95 dialects, six main language families. You know, you have a problem there where, where, when you have, when we focus on content moderation, instead of trying to make the systems a little safer by default, so that's things like, should you have to click on a link before you reshare it? Like, just that knocks down misinformation by 10 or 15%. Or saying, you know, "We don't have infinite reshare chains." We say, "It gets a few hops away from you, and now you have to copy and paste, you have to intentionally share it further."

• 16:53Frances Haugen?

  That's like 30% less misinformation.

• 16:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:57Frances Haugen?

  You know, those kinds of things are systematic. Everywhere in the world gets the benefit. When we instead focus on censorship, you know, content moderation-

• 17:06Frances Haugen?

  We have to rewrite those systems, language by language by language. And there's ways that we could do that hypothetically in a scalable way. Like, we could decentralize out how we generate the labels. But at least the way it's done today, places like Ethiopia just get left behind.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  I can't imagine, though, even in the best circumstances, that deploying human resources to, you know, to handle this job is ever going to be successful. It's an impossible task to do it that way. And I think the problem that comes up is the context in which this debate is framed, which is one of free speech versus safety. And a big part of what you talk about is the falseness of that binary.

• 17:53Frances Haugen?

  So, it's really interesting. Like, that, I think, is the thing that keeps us from moving forward in the United States, is that, you know, enough Facebook executives have gone in front of Congress and said, "Oh, everything you're talking about is so sad." But, you know, it's this fundamental divide between free speech and safety. Or, like, Mark Zuckerberg has gone on podcasts like this and said, "You know, I've really grown in the last few years because I've realized when you stand up for what you believe in, you know, it can be really hard." And I'm a defender of free speech. You know, the thing that's frustrating for me is, you know, this question of, you nailed it earlier. When we prioritize content from our family and friends, you spend a little bit less time on Facebook.

• 18:38Frances Haugen?

  You know, your family and friends are not quite as exciting as whatever that magical post is the algorithm found for you, right? Or, really tantalizing content keeps you on there a little bit longer, but also has more violence or misinformation. Having systems where we say, "Hey, you have to actually just be public about everything, like, about what's happening on your systems," then you can begin putting pressure on things, having protests, having boycotts, having divestment campaigns. And that provides a counterweighting balance beyond just profit and loss. Because right now, you know, we talked about cutting the reshare chains. And saying, "Hey, you know, if it gets more than a couple hops away, you have to start over, copy and paste it.

• 19:22Frances Haugen?

  Say whatever you want, but you have to do it, not just your instinct." You know, right now, you know, that's not a huge hit to profit. It's maybe 0.1%, 0.2%.

• 19:34Frances Haugen?

  But right now, there's no number value placed on reducing misinformation by 30%.

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:42Frances Haugen?

  You know, we don't have to quantify that as a societal cost.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  Right, and it is amazing how much energy there is behind this free speech argument, given that these are private entities.

• 19:55Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  And there's the town square argument, but that feels very porous to me. It just feels like...

• 20:03Frances Haugen?

  We're trying to document it all right now, but it's looking like they censored my book on Facebook.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 20:08Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. Like, my publisher usually can, like, mark up, like, with the buy button, all the other books they sell.

• 20:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Frances Haugen?

  And mine violated the commerce policy.

• 20:19Rich Roll?

  How so?

• 20:20Frances Haugen?

  Uh, because it's from me.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, my. Yeah, because as a data scientist, you're going to want to know, like, who's buying the book? Where are they buying it? And what platforms are they using to purchase it from? And if you're not seeing any traffic coming from Facebook, that's a pretty clear indication that they're throttling you.

• 20:40Frances Haugen?

  You know, this question, I have a lot of empathy for the idea of the town square, right? They are the primary place where people communicate. And in the United States, like, I actually really dislike it when, like, more societal elites say, like, "Does Facebook matter?" Because, like, there is a huge fraction of the American populace that still uses Facebook as their primary way of communicating with each other. And so I have empathy on the question of, like, what should you be allowed to take down or not? But for context, today, we don't get to see what they take down.

• 21:11Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 21:12Frances Haugen?

  There's no transparency on how any of these censorship systems work.

• 21:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:16Frances Haugen?

  We don't get to see what posts are being left up or taken down.

• 21:18Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's so interesting. So, on the one hand, we have evidence or a sense that you're being throttled on Facebook in terms of the word getting out about the book.

• 21:29Frances Haugen?

  At least the buy button. We don't know beyond that.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Right, okay, yeah. No, you can't get that buy button up there.

• 21:35Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Rich Roll?

  And then, on the other hand, and I have to believe this is a direct response to your work and the fact that the book has just come out. I think it was, was it yesterday or maybe even today, Facebook announced all these parental controls.

• 21:51Frances Haugen?

  Oh, really?

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Did you see this?

• 21:53Frances Haugen?

  No, I haven't seen it.

• 21:54Rich Roll?

  Meta just announced they're adding new safeguards and monitoring tools for teens across its social platforms. Parental controls on Messenger, suggestions for teens to step away from Facebook after 20 minutes, and nudges urging young night owl Instagrammers to stop scrolling. So this is good.

• 22:08Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Rich Roll?

  This is positive change. The timing is interesting.

• 22:11Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Rich Roll?

  This is, these ideas are not new. These are, these are ideas that you've spoken about and suggested. It's just interesting that they're happening at this moment.

• 22:20Frances Haugen?

  The, the thing that interested me so much was after I came out, they doubled the amount they spent on safety. Like they came out and they said, we've heard, we heard the criticism, we're going to spend twice as much on safety. And then in the last six months, you know, after Elon Musk showed that you could lose 75% of your employees and there were no consequences, you know, Mark himself came out and said, you know, Elon really set an example, like we, we can have a year of efficiency and fire 20,000 people. And, and I find it really funny that the thing that is making them start thinking, or at least publicly making gestures towards doing more safety is I started being noisier again.

• 23:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and Elon's cuts involved the safety teams, right? The safety teams got cut.

• 23:06Frances Haugen?

  They did the same thing at Facebook.

• 23:08Rich Roll?

  They did.

• 23:09Frances Haugen?

  I've had, some of my favorite researchers are no longer at the company and it wasn't because it was their choice.

• 23:14Rich Roll?

  So, but, so when they, when they, when they talk about these large investments that they're making in, in safety, then how does that match up against the layoffs or what does that actually mean?

• 23:24Frances Haugen?

  Well, if you'll notice, like a lot of those changes are relatively superficial, right? There, there, there's no way that took more than 10 or 20 engineers to build, right? And, and the second thing is we don't actually know the efficacy of any of those interventions. Like imagine a world where Facebook said, hey, We know that sleep deprivation is the single largest danger from our products for kids. Right. So, sleep deprivation, for those who have not dug into literature, it puts kids at big risks of academic deficits, which stays with them for the rest of their life. It puts them at higher risk for mental health issues, not just depression and anxiety, but also things like bipolar or schizophrenia. Increases the rates of substance use, uppers because they're tired, downers because they're depressed.

• 24:08Frances Haugen?

  And rates of death from accidents, like not just automotive accidents, but like all-cause accident rates. You know, Facebook could come out and say, "We acknowledge what a large role we play in kids' lives. We're going to start publishing a very simple set of data each week. It's going to take us 15 minutes to do, like, once, and after that, it'll just update over time. And we're going to say, 'How many kids are online at 10:00, 11:00, midnight, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 AM?'" And we're going to do it every week. If they were doing that, if they were really serious about these problems, you know, it doesn't violate anyone's privacy, but we'd be able to see, did those numbers move when they launched those things? And as long as they refuse to release even basic data, like, we should consider all of these moves marketing.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Otherwise, we're just taking them at their word.

• 24:55Frances Haugen?

  Well, it's also things like, um, and Tiffany Davis came and talked to Facebook, I think the week before I, excuse me, talked to the Senate, the week before I came out. And she bragged about how Facebook took seriously the issues around body image. And they had a little thing that would pop up if they thought someone was at risk for an eating disorder. And like, I intentionally, you know, took pictures of the dashboard that showed how often that triggered. And so globally, it was triggering a couple hundred times a day. Right? So it's one of these things where if you're going to get there and brag about how serious you take this problem, and then do an intervention that touches maybe 1% of kids affected,

• 25:38Frances Haugen?

  like, we shouldn't give you too much credit.

• 25:41Rich Roll?

  What do you make of Elon's Twitter?

• 25:44Frances Haugen?

  There are certain things that I'm super excited about. So things like he published the algorithm, right? And he didn't just publish the algorithm. He published the history of the algorithm. And for anyone who writes code, your code in the past was always worse than the code in the present. Right? The sad parts, though, is he's done things like cut off data access. So Twitter used to be significantly more transparent than Facebook.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  He turned off the API.

• 26:11Frances Haugen?

  Or he started charging cost prohibitive amounts for the API.

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  Sure. And then Reddit followed in suit with that. And there is an argument there, like, hey, we're sitting on all this data. You know, why should we make it open to, you know, all of these AI tools to crawl it? Like, this is our value as a company. They should at least be charged for it. Like, there is an economic argument for that.

• 26:34Frances Haugen?

  But I think that they could be making exceptions for critical public safety rules. So there are a handful of academics that we're actively monitoring for things like influence operations. So one of the ways in which social media is now used in warfare is you have networks of accounts that go and spread misinformation. And I worry a lot more about organized spreading misinformation than, say, your uncle believing odd things, right? There have always been people who believed odd things. They go to dinner parties. They say those odd things. We talk to them about it. When you have organized efforts with thousands of people spreading a lie,

• 27:16Frances Haugen?

  it changes the balance of power and they have a disproportionate impact compared to an individual saying something. It used to be academics could monitor for those coordinated efforts. And it was, the Twitter data was so important that influence operations on Facebook would get detected with the Twitter data, that they would see accounts with the same names operating on Facebook, or Twitter would send the IP addresses over. And Elon could be coming out and saying, hey, if you are doing one of these vital public safety jobs for free, basically, you can apply and get the same access you got before.

• 27:53Rich Roll?

  Right. So as a result, people like Renee DeResta, Tristan Harris, who have organizations dedicated to kind of reviewing all of this stuff and trying to make sense of it.

• 28:04Frances Haugen?

  I don't think Tristan's does.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  But Renee does, right? So now she doesn't have access to the information that she had prior.

• 28:11Frances Haugen?

  I'm a fellow at McGill this year. And they had a huge voter disenfranchisement monitoring effort, a bunch of other public health-related monitoring things. And they had to stop basically all their research because it's like $40,000 a month now to get access to that data.

• 28:30Rich Roll?

  Okay, so opened the algorithm, closed the API. What else has he done? And how are you making sense of it?

• 28:39Frances Haugen?

  I think his efforts around subscription models is super interesting. So for context for people, if Facebook had had a subscription model back in 2010, we probably would have never diverged from that version of Facebook. The version of Facebook in 2010 was about our family. It was about our friends. It was much more human scaled. Because there wasn't, but because it's an advertising-supported business model, they had an economic incentive to get us to view more and more and more content. And I'm very interested in how his subscription experiment will play out. Because it is having the side effect of it is,

• 29:21Frances Haugen?

  the level of conversation is definitely not as rich as it used to be. And the fact that he biases towards subscribers distorts that again. But the flip side is, I like where the incentives are aligned. But the secondary thing is it also creates a larger buried entry for accounts. Like you don't have to pay eight dollars a month for that account.

• 29:43Rich Roll?

  Right, so on the one hand, you know, political dissidents in non-democratic regions who need a level of anonymity and access are gonna have a more difficult time

• 29:54Frances Haugen?

  Exactly.

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  You know, getting the word out in the way that they need to. On the other hand, I like the subscription model and it makes one wonder what would have happened if at the onset or the inception of the internet that that became the primary model as opposed to an advertising model. The internet would be completely

• 30:13Frances Haugen?

  Very different.

• 30:13Rich Roll?

  Different and we would have a better incentive structure that would not have created a lot of the problems that we're contending with today. And I don't know how you unravel such a massive knot. I mean, advertising is how this whole operation functions. But to the extent that, and it's hard to reverse engineer it. Once that's out of the bag, how do you go to subscription? You capture a small percentage of the audience that's interested in that. But I guess with a large time horizon here, maybe that can tip in the right direction.

• 30:44Frances Haugen?

  And to give your listeners context, like right now in the United States, or the United States and Canada, the average user on Facebook generates for Facebook $55 per quarter. So I always ask people, like, would you be willing to spend, you know, $200, $250 a year on Facebook? And it's interesting, most people claim they would not, but Facebook has run experiments where they bribe people not to use Facebook. And people actually value Facebook a lot more than like $20 a month. It's fascinating to see that kind of cognitive dissonance.

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  And when you say Facebook, are you including Instagram, WhatsApp?

• 31:19Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Rich Roll?

  In that, yeah.

• 31:21Frances Haugen?

  But what's interesting is that's $55 per user in the United States and Canada. It's only $1,450 in Europe. It's $450 in Asia and it's $250 in the rest of the world. And so it's one of these interesting things around, you know. I think it'll be super interesting to see how things play out as we see the demographic changes in the United States. Because if more and more young people leave Facebook, you know, as those things change, the place that Facebook makes its money from is the United States.

• 31:53Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 31:53Frances Haugen?

  And so they'll be left with these users that are locked in because, you know, it is the internet in their countries, but Facebook doesn't generate very much revenue from them.

• 32:02Rich Roll?

  Netflix.

• 32:03Frances Haugen?

  Totally.

• 32:04Rich Roll?

  Happy to pay for Netflix. I actually like that the algorithm is, you know, paying attention to what I like. So it serves me up interesting things that I might be interested in. And it's effective and it doesn't feel predatory or pernicious because it's not based on an ad model that's trying to get me to... I mean, obviously, engagement is important to them. They want you on their platform as much as possible. So that's not great, but...

• 32:28Frances Haugen?

  They do, but they don't, right? So like, they want...

• 32:30Rich Roll?

  Once you've subscribed, yeah. But the more you watch, then maybe the more you share it with other people and that allows them to onboard more subscribers. I don't know.

• 32:38Frances Haugen?

  They want you to watch enough Netflix that you want to subscribe again next month, but no more than that. Because every minute more you watch, they have to pay for the computers, they have to pay for the bandwidth, you know, and you know, think about it like...

• 32:52Rich Roll?

  But there was that thing about like, well, how do we get people to not sleep? Like, the whole thing about like, how do we maximize engagement? Yeah, well, the nighttime is the big problem here. Like, how do we get into that? You know?

• 33:03Frances Haugen?

  The line is something like, the thing that he's competing against is sleep.

• 33:09Rich Roll?

  Right, that's what I mean, yeah. More concisely said, yeah.

• 33:11Frances Haugen?

  So one more thing to just keep in mind from the business model perspective, like, where do the incentives lie? There's a big push from investors away from subscription-based models to advertising models because the ceiling of value of your company is much higher with an advertising-based model. Because over time, you can get higher and higher value advertisers, you can get better and better at targeting the ads as you accumulate more and more data.

• 33:37Rich Roll?

  And that becomes the real value.

• 33:38Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. It's the future value of your company.

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Frances Haugen?

  Because there's a finite amount more, like Netflix always faces this, like, people don't want to pay for the subscription to go up. You know, they're like, $14 was okay, but $16?

• 33:50Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 33:59Rich Roll?

  All right, well, let's go back to you as a whistleblower, walking towards this, you know, Rubicon moment where you decide you're going to share what's happening. So you're becoming progressively disillusioned. Was there a certain inflection point where you decided, I just can't, I have to go public with what I'm discovering here?

• 34:21Frances Haugen?

  So it's interesting, I, you know, like the saying bankruptcy happens slowly over time and then very suddenly. So I lived with my parents during COVID. And one of the things that I'm super, super grateful about is because I lived with them, as I saw things unfolding that over that period of time, you know, I could go sit at dinner and be like, I saw this thing today, it feels really weird, you know, like I, I said this and they like, they gaslit me, you know, is it, is it me or is it, is it them? And, and part of what I was really, I'm really grateful for in retrospect is most, most whistleblowers don't get that level of support. You know, they hold secrets alone and it eats away at them.

• 35:06Frances Haugen?

  And they go to work each day and they, if they try to raise their issues, you know, people tell them things that make them question their own reality. And I was able, over that period of time, to like, become more and more confident that what I was seeing was real. And that meant that when we reached December of 2020, so this is about a month after the US 2020 election, when Facebook dissolved the team I was on, so they dissolved a team called Civic Integrity, it meant that I had already, I had already gone through my period of agonizing, and I saw that it was time that, that, that Facebook could not heal itself. To give you a little bit of context, so one of the classes I took at Harvard Business

• 35:47Frances Haugen?

  School is called Change Management, which sounds like a, like a, like a cliche business school class. It's like, oh, you want to be a consultant when you grow up. But change management as a field is a really interesting academic field because think about how hard it is for an individual to change a behavior, like a habit. Once you put a group of people together because they all have conflicting, they have a vested interest in the status quo, it becomes even harder to shift, say, a company. And there's a playbook of maybe four or five things you have to do. Like, they are not optional if you want to change an organization. And one of them is you have to appoint a vanguard. You have to say, this group of people is the future. They're going that way.

• 36:31Frances Haugen?

  We have to join, like, you either join them or you get out of their way. Because the leadership's going to guard them. And for four years, Facebook did that. Right, so they got in a huge amount of hot water after the 2016 election. Because there were things where, it's not, it's not like Russian misinformation, where they are asleep at the wheel. It's like, there were these misinformation entrepreneurs out of Macedonia that had far bigger impact than the Russians. Because they were just kind of running wild monetizing on Facebook. You know, Facebook spent four years building out civic integrity to be that vanguard. And right after the 2020 election, they dissolved the team.

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  And what is your sense of why they made that choice?

• 37:15Frances Haugen?

  I think part of it was that, you know, they made good investment decisions over a long period of time. Like, it was the only part of Facebook.com that was growing was the civic integrity team. But the problem was, you know, as the team grew, I think they just accumulated more and more liabilities for the company. Because they, it went from having an amorphous problem to having a concrete problem. You know, every time a researcher did a project, now there was a record that Facebook knew there were problems here. And they weren't willing, like, you have to remember, Facebook can't change the circumstances of their external constraints unilaterally. Right, like, Facebook can't come out and say, hey, all software,

• 37:59Frances Haugen?

  all social platforms need to be transparent in the following ways so that we can do the right thing. Or at least, they didn't think they could do that. And so as they accumulated more and more of this documentation, I think it was just creating conflict for the company because they weren't willing to actually go and address those problems.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  Right, so they're getting a sense of just how broad and complex the problem is. And there's a lot of documents piling up accounting for that. And without solutions, maybe better to just go la, la, la, la, la. I don't, I don't, you know, it's better to not see.

• 38:32Frances Haugen?

  Well, it's not a question of there weren't solutions. Like, over and over again, solutions were being proposed. But each of those solutions, you know, would hurt profitability by 0.1%. You know, if you, if you stacked together the 30 most important things, 50 most important things, you know, Facebook might be 5% less profitable. But they also have like 35% profit margins. So it's this question of where does that trade off of cost come from?

• 38:58Rich Roll?

  Right, so if you go from 35 to 33, is that really a problem if we're actually addressing these social issues?

• 39:05Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, if you could, if you could save the lives of 100,000 people in some country where Facebook is the internet, is that worth 0.1% of profit?

• 39:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:13Frances Haugen?

  0.2% of profit?

• 39:14Rich Roll?

  And, and part of what you reveal in disclosing the documentation that you, that you, that you collected was that Zuckerberg himself refused to address these major problems despite a lot of well documented pleas from employees.

• 39:31Frances Haugen?

  One of the stories I tell him there is, is to kind of benchmark how Mark views himself within the company, or at least how he portrays how he views himself, which is in the spring of 2019, the president of India began making a lot of comments about Muslims that are considered red flags for ethnic violence. You know, he was comparing them to rodents, other kinds of vermin, which is like a classic kind of step on the dehumanization kind of ladder. And people started, and so people started having conversations about, you know, what should, if, if he started calling for violence against Muslims,

• 40:15Frances Haugen?

  you know, what should Facebook's policy be around that kind of violence incitement? And a task force of 30 people with, you know, deep expertise in these issues from all over the company, you know, from every single part, slice of the company that would be affected, you know, from communications to the ads team to the social cohesion team, which is like the genocide team, you know, all over, got together and did a task force for months to figure out what should Facebook's approach be to this, should it happen? And Mark came in, looked at the work of this group of 30 people and said, "I can write a better policy," and wrote one over the weekend.

• 40:58Frances Haugen?

  And when they announced it on Monday, or Tuesday, the policy was, "We will not touch the speech from politicians." And the problem was, he had never consulted the advertising team or the misinformation team. And so he didn't know, that Facebook didn't know who the politicians were in the world.

• 41:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 41:17Frances Haugen?

  Right?

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  So it was a wrong-headed decision and ill-informed at the time, and he didn't consult the teams that actually knew what were going on, which speaks to a larger issue around control and authority within Facebook.

• 41:31Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, totally.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  Like, Mark sits on, what, like 54% of the voting stock?

• 41:37Frances Haugen?

  It's more than that.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  Or something like that?

• 41:39Frances Haugen?

  So Facebook buys back a huge amount of shares every quarter. And it was like 53-ish when I came out, and I, at least the last time I checked, it was up to 55.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  55, right.

• 41:49Frances Haugen?

  So like every quarter goes up a little bit.

• 41:50Rich Roll?

  Right. And so, and it's structured such that there's all these different classes of stock, right?

• 41:57Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  But he's always sort of notching up his voting rights shares so that he can exert, basically, you know, authoritarian control.

• 42:06Frances Haugen?

  Unilateral.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, unilateral control over the company, which is problematic, right?

• 42:13Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, the

• 42:15Rich Roll?

  I'm the CEO, bitch.

• 42:16Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, that was his business card.

• 42:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Frances Haugen?

  So he's the chairman of the board, which means that he is also his own boss because he's the CEO. At Microsoft, you know, one of the inflection moments when Microsoft started being a little bit more of a pro-social actor was when Bill Gates stopped me allowed to be both the chairman of the board and the CEO. And so these questions around, you know, one of the things I learned in business school was this idea that that we think of corporations as these like behemoths. You know, they they they're eternal. They've never changed. They have all this power. But the reality is like even what we conceptualize as a corporation has changed over time. And there are checks and balances on those corporations, even if they don't necessarily

• 43:03Frances Haugen?

  take into consideration enough social costs. In the case of Facebook, all those checks and balances are gone. Right? Because he controls the majority of voting shares, it doesn't matter that over and over again, you know, 80% of all the non-management votes say things like, you know, we need to look at the costs of Facebook. You know, we need to do a security audit. You know, we we should have only one class of votes because like, you know, you shouldn't be allowed to demand to be CEO forever. It doesn't matter because he has that, you know, outsized influence of the company.

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  And what is the composition of the board? Does he have objective feedback? Is there anyone who's in his ear who is pushing back on what it is that he wants to do?

• 43:52Frances Haugen?

  Not not really. Like, if you really aren't anywhere near Mark if you're critical.

• 43:58Rich Roll?

  So this is yet another in a string of events and incidents that tiptoe you towards the edge of the cliff here.

• 44:05Frances Haugen?

  So when when I so when they announced they were going to dissolve civic integrity, that was the moment where I was like, oh, they've given up on the playbook. You know, very clearly, someone had come in and guided them and said, hey, if you want to change the course of Facebook, this is how you do it. When they when they told us, you know, your team is so valuable, we're going to integrate it into other parts of the company. That was the moment for me where I was like, Facebook can only save itself if it gets help. Like, it's not gonna be able to do this alone. And so that was the moment where I knew that I was gonna have to figure out how to do something.

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  And the dissolution, I have to believe, on some level, because it came in the aftermath of the election, it feels like, well, the heat's kinda off because we're now on the other side of the election.

• 44:52Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't blood on the streets.

• 44:53Rich Roll?

  The pressure wasn't as intense as it was leading up to the election.

• 44:56Frances Haugen?

  I think what's so interesting about it is, you know, so the, the fear at Facebook was genuinely that there was gonna be violence in the United States in the rounds to the election. And I think Facebook kinda felt like, oh, good, we dodged the bullet. Like, that, the situation was resolved. There's, there's no future danger. But that meant that when the buildup to January 6th happened, there was now no longer, like, a single person whose responsibility was to raise their hand and say, hey, you know, maybe we should turn back on the safety systems that were on for the election.

• 45:28Rich Roll?

  So what's your sense of Facebook's culpability in the January 6th events?

• 45:34Frances Haugen?

  So when you look at how the movement that culminated in the riots at the Capitol, you know, it's, it's very interesting how those, that those social movements grew. Because it wasn't like a broad, organic swell. It was a very, very small number of people inviting hundreds or thousands of people to these groups that they didn't know. Right? There were people who were very actively understanding what the weak points were in Facebook. And then going out there and spam friending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. Or making lots of twin accounts so they could do it over and over again. And I, I think there's real questions around, you know, even, even in, I'll give you an example of a safety feature

• 46:17Frances Haugen?

  that, that might have changed how some people made decisions. When you sit in interviews with the people who got arrested at the Capitol, they say things like, I thought it was real. Right? When I looked at my Facebook feed, all I saw was that there was a coup and that I, I, a patriot, needed to come save the country. Part of why that was happening was if you have a post and every time there's a comment on it, it goes to the top of the feed, very rapidly, you can have a feed that gets completely swarmed with this kind of mass panic. And one of the things that was on, on January, before the election in 2020, was if you had

• 46:59Frances Haugen?

  a Facebook group that had too many calls for violence, they would do things like say, "Hey, you need to appoint your own moderators." Which sounds like, well, what's that gonna do? Like, aren't they just gonna approve all their own posts? It turns out, getting people to care about a group enough that they are willing to volunteer to do tedious work like that, you automatically kind of rate limit that group. Or they said things like, "If there's too many calls for violence, we'll turn off commenting." Right? Now that means those posts don't go up to the top of your feed 100 times. And so there's things where, you know, the heat could have been turned down on Facebook for the, you know, six weeks, eight weeks before January 6th.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  So you, you make this decision that you're gonna start collecting documents, and you, you kind of tap into this history, this background you have in, in debate, and how you formulate arguments, and that informs how you start to collect information, right? And so we all have this vision of, you know, Edward Snowden and thumb drives, and how do you sneak this stuff out? But you were basically taking photographs of documents on a laptop, and then organizing them on a, on a gapped laptop. Is that how it went down?

• 48:12Frances Haugen?

  So the, the, I think one way to think about it is like, when Snowden did what he did, because he was an engineer who worked on an archiving system, he had a lot more awareness of what the security protocols were. And in my case, I didn't know how vigilant they were being. And so like, I had to be careful in terms of saying, you know, what's the worst-case scenario? Like, if they were really surveilling me, you know, what would, what would look like I was doing nothing? And taking pictures of your screen, like, one of the things that's, is, is interesting about it from like, a threat modeling perspective, is there's no way for a company to know you're

• 48:54Frances Haugen?

  doing that, other than maybe like, the cadence at which you're, you scroll. And so I was being as cautious as I could be because I knew that there would only be one chance to do this, that, you know, whatever I got out would be the thing that was the record for history because they would lock it down afterwards.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  But you came out with, how many, like 20,000 documents?

• 49:19Frances Haugen?

  22,000 pages.

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  22,000 pages.

• 49:20Frances Haugen?

  It's like 1300 documents.

• 49:21Rich Roll?

  So that's 22,000 camera snaps?

• 49:24Frances Haugen?

  Yes, yeah.

• 49:25Rich Roll?

  So that must have taken quite a bit of time.

• 49:28Frances Haugen?

  Or you get very efficient. It's interesting, a huge fraction of everything that was captured was captured in the last month I was at Facebook. So it seems like, how is that possible? But it's one of these things where I did a lot of like very, very long days for a number of weeks.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  You make this decision, well, you get in touch with this writer for the Wall Street Journal and that kind of...

• 49:50Frances Haugen?

  He had reached out to me.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  He reached out to you and that initiates kind of the momentum behind this. And ultimately, you know, you decide to trust him and he becomes your sort of co-collaborator in all of this. And you make the decision that the government entity with whom you're going to share all of this was the SEC, which I think is interesting. Like, I think most people would think, why didn't you go to the DOJ?

• 50:13Frances Haugen?

  So in the United States, there's only two organizations that have whistleblower protections. So one is the SEC and one is the FTC. The DOJ doesn't have by default whistleblower protections. And so usually the way you do is you go to the SEC, you get whistleblower protections, and then they work with, say, the FBI or the DOJ. You also have the right to give information to Congress that you believe is essential for Congress to fulfill like their constitutional role in oversight. And so that was the strategy for my lawyers.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  And you're somebody who, despite doing all of this, you weren't looking to be in the spotlight. Like, you're a reluctant whistleblower on some level?

• 50:52Frances Haugen?

  That's part of why there's so many documents.

• 50:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you really didn't, you wanted to be anonymous. Like, the whole kind of public-facing aspect of this, I wouldn't say it's an afterthought, but it wasn't your first choice. You had to be cajoled into that role.

• 51:07Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, then, I think the thing that I had not really thought about... Like I was enough in the zone of, you know, I talk about part of why I did what I did was, I felt like Facebook took my future from me. Like, once I knew the magnitude of the problem, you know, I had this fear that I would, you know, 20 years in the future, see a catastrophe in an African country, or in Southeast Asia, or five years from now, and say like, "I didn't do anything. Like, I could have done something, and I didn't do something." And I feared that I would lay in bed and just feel guilty about it. And so, I had not really thought about what was gonna happen next,

• 51:48Frances Haugen?

  after I gave the information to the government, right? Like, I, it wasn't really, my, like, my horizon of crisis, if you will, was like, not that far into the future. And after I left Facebook, and like, we got closer to the actual publication date, you know, it became this thing of having to confront the idea that Facebook knew who did it, right? They could look at the data, they could figure out. And, you know, I think anyone, if you go and look at your life, there's a version of you that you could spin facts in certain ways, and make you look very unsympathetic. And my lawyers were just very clear. They were like, you know, even not coming forward, you can actually endanger people, right?

• 52:32Frances Haugen?

  So like, in the case of the Ukrainian whistleblower, which was also represented by my whistleblower lawyer, some of the people the media was suggesting it might be, weren't the person.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Right, you're endangering other people as a result of that. And also, it's easier to cast doubt and aspersions on an anonymous, you know, face. It's more difficult if you're out in front of it. And the choice to go on 60 Minutes and, you know, reveal your identity, I think was the right choice. It had to be terrifying, though.

• 53:07Frances Haugen?

  It was terrifying, yeah.

• 53:08Rich Roll?

  So, in the background, the Wall Street Journal is compiling-

• 53:12Frances Haugen?

  I'll give you the context.

• 53:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 53:14Frances Haugen?

  Like, total number of times in my life I've had hairspray, like, in my hair, prior to going on 60 Minutes. Maybe two, maybe.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  You said you had like Texas hair.

• 53:24Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, and I like imagine you're sitting there and you're someone who like, like my mother's a scientist, so like I only would get to see her with any makeup on like maybe once a year for like a Christmas dinner kind of thing.

• 53:35Rich Roll?

  And a priest.

• 53:36Frances Haugen?

  And she became a priest in her 50s, yeah. My grandmother became a lawyer in her 50s. My mother became a priest in her 50s. And so I want to be, I've joked about becoming a psychiatric nurse practitioner in my 50s.

• 53:50Rich Roll?

  There's a pivot up there at some point for you, I guess.

• 53:53Frances Haugen?

  You know, help people deal with all the trauma that we've accumulated from social media. But like imagine, you know, like I've never, I've almost never worn makeup. Like maybe I've worn makeup 10, 15 times before in my life. I've had hairspray in my hair maybe two times in my life and I'm sitting in this makeup chair and they are like doing stuff to my hair. And it's just like, like I talk about this moment in the book where, where I was almost grateful that there were so many people on the set because it made me feel like I had no option but to continue forward, right? That I was like so overwhelmed in that moment. I was like, well, I guess I, I don't want to send all these people home if I don't like, if I chicken out like right now.

• 54:36Rich Roll?

  In reflecting back upon that moment and seeing those Wall Street Journal articles and watching the 60 Minutes interview, part of me was like, yeah, like it's not like, like this was, it's shocking that an insider came out and said it, but what you were actually revealing wasn't all that surprising to me, but it seemed like it was to a lot of people. And the, the point that got the most attention was the impact of Instagram on teenage girls, which was only one of kind of many revelations and perhaps maybe not even in the top three of the most cataclysmic things that you were sharing.

• 55:21Frances Haugen?

  I think this question of, you know, when I say to you, an algorithm could incite violence, right? Or, or one of the key revelations was Facebook made a change to the algorithm in 2018 where I, they went from just maximizing how long you're on the site.

• 55:39Frances Haugen?

  To trying to maximize how much you would react because your actions incentivize other people to create content. But within six months of that, you had political parties on the right and the left across Europe saying, you know, we're being forced to run more extreme content now, like stuff we know our constituents don't like because it's what gets distributed by the algorithm. Right, like, think about how abstract that kind of revelation is. Or like saying, when you apply a system like that to a country in Africa where they don't have any safety systems written in their language, what happens? You know, most people have trouble emotionally connecting to something that is that, that foreign.

• 56:21Frances Haugen?

  But most people have at least one child in their life who is, you know, either a tween or a teenager. And they, many of them have seen kids suffer. And so I think part of why the revelations around teen mental health were so resonant is people are really seeing the magnitude of the harm today. And I think, you know, you're saying before, like, people had brought this up before. When you have, it was kind of like a tobacco moment, that prior to when the tobacco whistleblower came out, you know, scientists had known for a couple decades, like cigarettes cause cancer. The thing they didn't know was that the tobacco companies knew that.

• 57:01Rich Roll?

  Knew that, had documentation to that effect, right? Yeah, that's the big differentiator there. What was your expectation going into that whole experience? And how did that match up to what actually transpired in the aftermath?

• 57:20Frances Haugen?

  It went way better than I ever could have imagined, right? Like, I came into it and they, I think part of, because they had dealt with, you know, whistleblowers like the Ukrainian whistleblower, you know, that, that person had death threats. Even the lawyers involved had death threats. You know, they had people showing up at their homes and screaming at them. We didn't know. How the internet, how like the public would respond to the information I brought forward, because there was like a real chance that, you know, the conspiracy theories that spread about me were relatively innocuous, you know, it was things like, she's a crisis actor, like, there's no way she could be that good.

• 58:02Rich Roll?

  Which is a big part of what I would imagine was a motivation in front-loading your book with like, actually, like, here's all this stuff that I did, like, I am good, like, I am smart.

• 58:13Frances Haugen?

  Well, or like, I had a lot of people help me, right? Like, my debate coach was good enough that he became the head of the national debate.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  You were like a top 25 in the country debater, math wizard, you were like, you're like, reading at like, a college level in kindergarten or something like that?

• 58:29Frances Haugen?

  My parents are both professors and I had a college-level vocabulary.

• 58:33Rich Roll?

  Vocabulary, right, yeah.

• 58:35Frances Haugen?

  So I was a little obnoxious.

• 58:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're very precocious, you know, intelligent child, so, you know, all of that kind of gets vetted out in the book, but yeah, crisis actor, interesting.

• 58:47Frances Haugen?

  But think about it, like, that is way less bad than like, you know, she's like, part of a network of pedophiles or something, right? Like, it could have, it could have gone real weird and...

• 58:57Rich Roll?

  Did you get death threats?

• 58:58Frances Haugen?

  I never got death threats. Like, I don't, I don't even get harassed, like, that's part of what I've been totally blindsided by, is because like, most women who speak publicly get harassed pretty seriously. And I have like, one or two people who message me occasionally on Instagram and tell me, like, that dress was really cute, but compared to like, what happens to most women on the internet, like, that's, that's like a walk in the park.

• 59:23Rich Roll?

  What do people not understand or appreciate about the experience of being a whistleblower?

• 59:28Frances Haugen?

  That is a great question. So, one of the things, you know, I mentioned before, my gratitude that I lived with my parents. People often ask me things like, if I could give one piece of advice to whistleblowers, like, what would that be? And the thing I always say is, you need to find at least one person in your life that you really, really trust, that you can be fully honest with, because carrying a secret alone, it destroys people. And I realized... You know, I got really lucky that my whistleblowing experience was much less traumatic than most people's whistleblowing experience. And part of that was that I didn't go on the journey alone. Or I was in Puerto Rico when I came out.

• 1:00:11Frances Haugen?

  And so it meant, you know, there was, it was very difficult for someone to like get in a van and drive 12 hours and scream at me.

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  Right, I'm sure that was helpful. But you had a lot of help. The Wall Street Journal, you had this whistleblower law firm, you know, you had a team of people who were counseling you. You had people preparing you for 60 Minutes, you had people preparing you to, for, you know, appear before the Senate, and you're a debater, like this is your thing.

• 1:00:36Frances Haugen?

  So it's interesting, I'm a product manager, so like product managers don't code. Like, we are not, like, we can code, like, I can code, like, on hobby things, I code. But, you know, when the product moves forward, it's not because I did it directly, it's because I helped Marshall help in that direction. Or like, I helped other people unleash their ability to make impact. And I think part of it was that, like, most whistleblowers don't have MBAs. Like, most whistleblowers are not product managers. And, you know, I have never needed to be the star, right? Like, I don't believe that I uniquely am the one who's going to save things. And so it makes it a lot easier to say, I need help.

• 1:01:20Frances Haugen?

  And it's interesting, I had this experience, speaking of debate, so if you were a professional dancer, you take like a lot of dance classes where you like show up and they teach you some moves and like that's the dance class for the day. And the reason you do that is that when you audition for a job, they're going to come out and they're going to teach you some moves and they're going to see how fast you learn them. Because that's going to be a measure of like, how easy is it going to be to work with you? When we did the prep for the Senate, we spent two days. So imagine there's like 15 people in a room, or on like Zoom. And you spend two days them throwing questions at you and you try to answer them and they say that's a horrible answer. Like, do it this way because it's cleaner.

• 1:02:02Frances Haugen?

  Like, that's like, the content's good, but like, it's not, you know, you're not communicating cleanly enough. And I talked to one of the people who was in that room, um, I don't know, a year later, and he's like, you know, Francis, when we left at the end of the second day, we were all convinced this was going to be a disaster.

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:20Frances Haugen?

  Um, but you like incorporated the feedback that you got. And so when you actually showed up at the Senate, you know, you'd done enough dance classes through doing debate and having your coaches yell at you and say like, that's a bad answer, that you knew how to like take the feedback.

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you'd done enough reps.

• 1:02:35Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Rich Roll?

  Growing up, that, that you had a comfort level.

• 1:02:38Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Rich Roll?

  With that type of dynamic. Um, when you were before the Senate and also sitting with Scott Pelley, did, did, in either of those cases, was a question thrown at you that caught you off guard? Or were you fully prepped and like had a answer for everything that was asked you?

• 1:02:56Frances Haugen?

  I'm sure there was a bunch of stuff that I didn't expect. There were like, I remember there were moments at the Senate. Uh, there was a moment at the Senate where one of the senators asked me about like quantitative measures on Instagram. Like, you know, did I believe we need to take quantitative? So this is like how many likes a post has. He's like, do you believe we need to take quantitative measures off of Instagram? And I was like, well, you know, it sounds obvious, but we actually have documents in the disclosures saying Facebook tried this. As long as you leave comments on there, kids can still tell who's more popular than whom. Like, it doesn't really do anything. And, um, the, the Senator clearly, clearly had not been given a large enough bench of questions.

• 1:03:37Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:38Frances Haugen?

  Cause he just asked.

• 1:03:39Rich Roll?

  He didn't have a follow up to that?

• 1:03:40Frances Haugen?

  He just asked me a second time.

• 1:03:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:42Frances Haugen?

  So I would say that's probably the moment that I was like most surprised.

• 1:03:44Rich Roll?

  It's still a better question than, you know, how does Facebook make money?

• 1:03:50Frances Haugen?

  The moments that will live in infamy.

• 1:03:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:52Frances Haugen?

  Or the internet is a series of tubes.

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right, that's a good one. The difference between when Mark Zuckerberg, you know, appeared before, which committee was it?

• 1:04:06Frances Haugen?

  The Senate Committee.

• 1:04:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, and then when you appeared, the sophistication of the questions and the kind of knowledge base was pretty evident, like they're playing catch-up, obviously, in the regulatory landscape and the legislative landscape is just miles behind what's actually happening because the pace at which tech is iterating upon itself, it's impossible for bureaucratic systems to keep pace and even understand what's happening. And I think that makes it all the more important and prescient when someone like yourself comes along, who not only understands the technology deeply, but also has this skillset in debate and communication, and you're able to translate these things in a meaningful way that is impactful.

• 1:04:52Frances Haugen?

  Can I challenge you on something you just said, though?

• 1:04:54Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:04:54Frances Haugen?

  You said, like, it's impossible for them to just keep up at the same pace. And one of the things that, like, I'm founding a nonprofit right now, and one of the notions we're actively challenging is the idea of, you know, if we stopped accepting the idea that they can't keep up with pace, how would we fix that? And I think the question is, like, we definitely are seeing an acceleration in technology. And if we continue trying to execute regulatory systems at the same way we did it before, it's not going to be fast enough, right? Technology's running way too fast. But you could say things like, we've unlocked organizational technologies through things like wikis, other ways of bringing large number of people together and synthesizing their attention over the last 20 years.

• 1:05:35Frances Haugen?

  What if we could just recruit exponentially more people to pay attention and synthesize that knowledge so that we could help the regulators stay at pace?

• 1:05:43Rich Roll?

  Right, and that's, so your nonprofit, be on the screen, part of the premise there is... Is onboarding as many people as possible, particularly young people with education and like kind of running, you know, walled off social media experiments so that they're fluent in what's happening. So it's a ground up sort of thing, a populist movement of sorts. But how does that translate into regulatory and legislative change? Because you are pushing up against these gigantic systems that move glacially, if at all.

• 1:06:22Frances Haugen?

  Well, we have, we have three main projects right now. And two of them are really aimed at what I would call the ecosystem of accountability. So it's like regulators, it's litigators, it's investors, it's concerned citizens. And the second one is this question of how do you have like millions more people feel fluent in how the choices that are being, being made behind the scenes of these systems? And that's like for mass democracy. So we have one that's targeting, one might say the elites and one saying, hey, how do we do mass scale of culture change? In the case of the one that's targeting more the expert class, you know, we're working on building out a wiki right now where we say, hey, let's actually document the harms, kind of like how Jonathan Haidt has done it for kids' mental health. So, so one of the really transformative things that happened in the last, you know,

• 1:07:07Frances Haugen?

  five years was this psychologist at NYU said, hey, you know, we keep throwing around the same like one liners about social media. Like there's this famous line from a paper that said, "Social media has the same impact on kids' mental health as eating potatoes." So like every time he would try to bring up like, you know, hey, something's happening with the kids. People would be like, "Social media has the same impact as eating potatoes." And he was like, "I got, I have, I have to like unpack this paper." And the reality is it's very poorly designed. Like it's, there's just the statistical analysis used is ridiculous. But he said, "Hey, let's start organizing collectively. Let's come together and do a collaborative literature review of everything we know about kids' mental health.

• 1:07:50Frances Haugen?

  And then say, where are the weak spots in this literature?" So imagine you took up an approach like that, that has been so helpful in crystallizing and, and catalyzing the conversation on kids' mental health. What if we expanded it across the problem set for social media? Because now it's not just like a few regulators like sitting and trying to understand things. It's we can bring thousands of people to the fold and say, hey, let's synthesize together.

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:14Frances Haugen?

  And then one of the things that we think can be potentially extremely helpful is we're trying to make the conversation about how to move forward a little more productive by separating the concept of we have levers that might prevent or mitigate harm. And then we have many, many, many strategies for pulling each lever. And the example I usually use is on kids' issues. So it doesn't matter what the problems with kids. A common lever across those problems is let's keep under 13 year olds off these products.

• 1:08:43Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:44Frances Haugen?

  Like allegedly, that's what it's supposed to be already. Let's actually do it. If you talk to the people who understand kids' social issues, they usually are not technologists. And so they'll say things like, we should check IDs. You know, every social media account should have a passport or driver's license associated with it. And then my work in China, but it would not work here. And we could have a conversation on that, but just trust me. And there's like all kinds of implications for things like civil liberties. But if you instead said, hey, I have a lever. I need to keep kids under 13 off. As you said to a technologist, how could I pull that lever? They'd be like, here's 10 or 15 different ways you can find an under 13 year old. You know, it's everything from kids, say, I'm a fourth grader at Jones Elementary, to kids report each other to punish each other,

• 1:09:27Frances Haugen?

  like on the playground. It's like, you piss me off, and I report your Instagram account.

• 1:09:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:30Frances Haugen?

  I know.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  That opens up, that's a sticky wicket.

• 1:09:33Frances Haugen?

  Isn't that interesting? But the thing is, once you get like 1,000 or 10,000 examples, you can find all the other kids. You don't have to check IDs. And so our hope is, right now, there is no regulator in the world that can sit and look at a menu of what is possible. We can't have community discussions saying, what should the floor be? Like, we're not saying do it all. Like, we're saying there's something down here where we're saying, this is what's being done today.

• 1:09:59Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:00Frances Haugen?

  This is what should be the floor, and this is what's possible.

• 1:10:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:03Frances Haugen?

  And so we need to think about organizationally, how do we move faster and faster?

• 1:10:07Rich Roll?

  It reminds me of something Senator Cory Booker said when he was on the show, which was that change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington.

• 1:10:17Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Rich Roll?

  Which, to your point, is all about establishing a groundswell of awareness and education that puts pressure on legislators and regulators.

• 1:10:27Frances Haugen?

  I talk in the book about the idea that we like to think laws are where change comes from. That like laws are so clean. It's like, oh, the law got signed, change happened. But in reality, like laws don't happen until we come up with norms. We say, hey, that's actually wrong. Like, we believe that's wrong. And we come up with standards for what it means to transgress that norm. And, and that process is, is slower, right? And, and I think there are ways that we can catalyze that conversation. And it should be a conversation, you know, it should be a public argument about what, what do we want our social media to do? Or what does social media owe us? Because so much is possible.

• 1:11:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, there's so many threads to pull on that. I mean, I think that, um, on the one hand, there's a call to action or a need that you identify in the book and have spoken about many times to interject the humanities and philosophy into the tech space. Because when you think of these tech behemoths in your boots on the ground and have been at, you know, employed by many of these places, you're looking at very smart, intelligent math wizards like yourself and data scientists and coders, et cetera, who are suddenly making decisions at extraordinary scale that are impacting society, but are not fluent in certain, you know, kind of, uh,

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  ideas around like ethics, for example, right? And so, young people making big decisions, doing the best that they can, well intentioned, but perhaps, you know, divisions and, and teams within these entities, not staffed with the appropriate people to make those decisions.

• 1:12:08Frances Haugen?

  Unquestionably. Let's say you were a 19-year-old and you knew you wanted to work in a big tech firm. And I'd say of people who get CS degrees, a pretty large fraction of them have aspirations of something like that. You know, you already have a much larger set of requirements usually than most other majors. So you have less flexibility off the bat to take things that are outside of just your CS education. But there's also the reality that every class you take that is not a CS class makes you less likely to be able to pass the interviews to get in at Google. Because someone else will have doubled down. And so we have this very, um, part of why I wrote the book is I want people to understand when I talk about the incentives are not aligned with the common good, it's not just at the point of Facebook writing their quarterly earnings statement, it's

• 1:12:52Frances Haugen?

  like every step along the way because we're getting more and more godlike powers, but the people who have the skills to wield them or choose what problems to solve have very, very little context on what the implications of that technology could be.

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  You said recently, you told the Sunday Times that tens of millions of people will die if social media isn't overhauled. So what do you, that's a, I mean, that's obviously a headline grabbing quote. What do you mean by that?

• 1:13:30Frances Haugen?

  So when I joined Facebook, and I want to fully admit, I'm in the same pool as lots and lots of other technologists that went down this road. When I joined Facebook, I had not really thought about the implications of Facebook being the internet for some of the most vulnerable places in the world. Right? So Facebook, you know, surveyed the scene in the late 2000s, early teens and said, hey, we came to prominence because we killed MySpace. You know, we came to prominence because we killed Friendster. You know, these were social networks, for those of you, your listeners that are too young to remember the glory days of the early 2000s. You know, these were the social networks that people were on in 2003. You know, we came to prominence because we surprised

• 1:14:15Frances Haugen?

  those legacy networks. You know, we don't know what corner of the world the thing that will come from will surprise us. So we're going to go into other countries and say, if you use Facebook, we'll pay for your data. If you use anything else on the open web, you're going to pay for yourself.

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  So de facto, that means, the translation to that is that for gigantic swathes of the developing world, Facebook is the internet. It is the, it is the primary interface, if not the only interface, by which people are interacting with each other online, which creates a tremendous amount of power. And with that power comes responsibility. And a big part of your work has been kind of pulling the covers on the lack of responsibility or the gaps in, in, you know, what should have, could have been done.

• 1:15:03Frances Haugen?

  Unquestionably. And one of the things that I want to be clear is this book isn't actually just about Facebook. It is about opaque systems that are in similar positions. Because we're actually seeing now TikTok, and notice, TikTok came from the only corner of the world where Facebook couldn't play, right? Like, it came from China. I thought when I came out that we had five years before there would be violence caused by TikTok. Because, you know, video takes more bandwidth, you need a nicer phone. And within a year after I came out, there was violence in Kenya around the elections that was fanned by TikTok. And if you look at the drivers, you know, they're actually related. So I talked to someone at TikTok, and they said, when the violence was taking place, there were no

• 1:15:46Frances Haugen?

  moderators at TikTok that spoke Swahili. And that is the recurring theme, right? So for Facebook, they went into these vulnerable places in the world, they prevented an organic internet from forming. So an internet that was based in companies that were local, that spoke the local language, that understood the local culture, that had vested interest in the success of those countries. They came in and displaced that, made sure it didn't get to grow up. But then, they had these systems where, because the algorithms give more distribution to more extreme content, you know, if you start a fight in a post, you're going to get much, much more distribution than someone who does a calm response. You

• 1:16:29Frances Haugen?

  know, Facebook has set up a system where unless you are actively kind of turning the knobs, or the same for TikTok. TikTok's even worse, because they push things towards being hyper viral. Unless you have people in there going in there and kind of blunting the sharpest edges, you can have systems that fan ethnic violence. And we've now seen that for Facebook twice, Myanmar and Ethiopia, and smaller incidences in places like Sri Lanka.

• 1:16:55Rich Roll?

  When we talk about the tools that are available currently for purposes of staving off misinformation...

• 1:17:05Rich Roll?

  Disinformation for combating violence, et cetera, that is incited online. What are those tools? We have content moderators and we have the ability to toggle the algorithm. Is that still the case? What does that landscape look like?

• 1:17:24Frances Haugen?

  I'd say we actually have a third one also, which is you can make intentional choices about how your products are designed. So if we were to roll back in time to 2010. So in 2010, Facebook had a feed. It looked quite similar to what it does today, but that feed was not algorithmic. It was chronological. And because of that, you couldn't have mega groups. You couldn't have a group that had 5 million people in it. Because to have a group with 5 million people, that group might make 5,000 pieces of content a day. You have to have an algorithm that will cherry pick out 10 things to show you. We can make choices around, do we want social media that's about our friends and family? Do we want to have social media that prioritizes choices we make? So I'll give you an example.

• 1:18:08Frances Haugen?

  This doesn't even touch the algorithm, or it does a little bit, but it's more like a product design choice. Facebook has done experiments where they say, hey, let's divide all the content on Facebook into two pools. One is content you consented to. So this is the friends and family you picked, the pages you followed, the groups you actually joined. And one pool is content you did not consent to. So this is someone invited you to a group, Facebook started putting content from that group into your feed for 30 days, you wrote, "That's misinformation" on a post, in a comment, and they said, "Ooh, you like it," and they made you remember that group. Or your friend commented on something and now the post shows up in your feed. If you just say, "Hey, we're going to give priority to the content that you selected,

• 1:18:52Frances Haugen?

  that you consented to, over content you didn't consent to," you get less misinformation, less violence, and less hate speech. Your friends and family aren't the problem.

• 1:19:00Rich Roll?

  Right, but you get less engagement and you get lower revenue because you're not able to serve up as many ads. And so the incentive structure is upside down. And a big part of your work in the book is talking about the importance of changing those incentives in partnership or in lockstep with the urgency around transparency.

• 1:19:25Frances Haugen?

  So, right now, we have laws that say, you know, if you're a private company, you're publicly traded, you have to report your profit and your loss. You know, how much money did you expend, your expenses, to get that profit? You don't have to report the consequences of your products, right? One of the major ways in which our economy is changing, and we have to talk about this because it's only getting more and more dramatic, is it used to be, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, most of our economy was run by systems where you could buy the product and you could take it apart. You know, you could test it for, does it have lead in it or heavy metals? You could put sensors outside the factory and see what kind of pollution is being imposed on society. We are moving now on to opaque systems,

• 1:20:09Frances Haugen?

  where the important choices, the important consequences, happen behind a curtain. You know, they live on data centers. Facebook has to report the profit and loss, but no one actually gets to see how Facebook is functioning. And I'll give you kind of an example to give a sense of why the world has changed so much. And I talk about this some in the book. You know, I know this is going to feel like a reach. You and I could sit down and spend three weeks, and I could teach you enough coding that you could ask meaningful questions about Google. You know, like, you could ask questions about what does Google distribute, what seems to be like, what their preferences are, that kind of thing. Because we all see, basically, the same version of Google.

• 1:20:52Frances Haugen?

  If you wanted to do that same level of, like, accountability 101, we would have to recruit 20,000 people and convince them to install software on their computers or their phones to send us what they saw. You know, it's a much, much harder problem. And so, the kinds of laws that I think really shift the playing field, like, you know, you're saying change comes not, like, from Washington, it comes to Washington? You know, for things like cars, and I talk about this in the book, by the time we met our watershed moment in the mid-'60s, so, like, the fatality rates on cars had been going down for years. In the '60s, they started going up again. You know, there were 100,000 automotive engineers who could confirm what unsafe at any speed was saying.

• 1:21:37Frances Haugen?

  Or, there was an insurance industry that didn't want to pay out claims, and so they would spend money on research so that they could say, no, it was actually the automotive company's fault. Or, there were lawyers who'd been looking for victims and could give you representative data. You know, if we wanted to enable an ecosystem like that, that could go and begin challenging these opaque systems, we would need to pass laws that say, hey, we need a baseline level of transparency. Like, you can't hide information on like, how many kids are binge-watching YouTube at 2:00 a.m.? You can't hide information on how many kids are getting overexposed to self-harm content. Because even just a little bit of transparency,

• 1:22:19Frances Haugen?

  it can be privacy-protected data, aggregated data. Suddenly, moms can organize. Suddenly, parents can make different decisions about what products they let their kids use. You know, advertisers can say, "I'm not willing to invest in your product." But we can't do any of those things without baseline data.

• 1:22:35Rich Roll?

  In addition to being called a crisis actor, the other criticisms that were levied at you were, there's a bunch of them, but one was, you weren't high enough up. You were never in the room. You're not in the C-suite. You don't really know what was happening at the highest level. And, you know, Mark, right after everything was made public, kind of came out and said, "She's mischaracterizing everything. She doesn't really understand what's happening. I take this personally." It was sort of an emotional appeal.

• 1:23:05Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. So, part of, I totally anticipated that that would be said about me. And so, one of the things I did was, I didn't just get the documents. I got all the comments on all the documents. So, you could see Facebook employees talking about each of these documents in real time. So, you could see that people didn't believe that these were crazy, that they thought these were true. And one of the things I really hope is going to happen is, Harvard is right now releasing the documents. I hope when... So, like, if there's tens of researchers that have access right now, hopefully in the future, like, the public will be able to access most of them. You know, the thing that is sad for me about how things rolled out, like, we had to do it this way

• 1:23:49Frances Haugen?

  because we needed to protect people's privacy. You know, if you could see the names on the comments, or you could see the names on the documents, like, who wrote what, I think the disclosures are 10% to 20% more scary.

• 1:24:03Frances Haugen?

  Because right now, when you read through them, you occasionally see things and you're like, "That can't be right." Like, there's no way that could be true. And if you could see the thread of like, "This person said this and this and then this, and they've been at Facebook for 10 years."

• 1:24:15Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:15Frances Haugen?

  You would be like, "Oh, this is actually much more scary than I thought it was."

• 1:24:18Rich Roll?

  Hmm. What would be an example of that?

• 1:24:20Frances Haugen?

  I think just things around things like the algorithms. Like, the idea that there are biases in what gets distributed. And that, you know, these things don't have... They don't have to operate this way, but they are operating this way in... To a really extreme extent.

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  And to have the comments in the documents also...

• 1:24:39Frances Haugen?

  Or stuff about things like cartels operating on the platforms in Mexico, or the terrorism things. Or how Facebook's censorship systems take down counterterrorism content. Like, there's just a bunch of stuff along those lines.

• 1:24:54Rich Roll?

  And the comments validate the legitimacy of the documents. To have those comments on there makes one realize, like, "Oh, this is a real document, and there were multiple people engaged in discussing the ramifications of it."

• 1:25:07Frances Haugen?

  Or I'll give you another example. There are documents criticizing that they have brought multiple safety interventions and that, say, the policy team has intervened to protect the speech of certain political actors. Right? Like, that there were things brought forward that would have made things safer. Would not have cherry picked. Like, they weren't picking ideas that were good or bad. It was just changing how the system was tuned. And that, you know, the policy team would intervene because it would have implications for certain actors.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  What about the argument that you cherry picked documents?

• 1:25:41Frances Haugen?

  Great question. One of the things that I did very intentionally as I documented things was I actually documented the order in which I captured documents. So you can walk beside me as I wander through the documents. And you can see that it's not like, you know, there are random things here and there. It's like there are... I was clearly searching and just doing arcs. And pulling things as I found them. And so I just got whatever, whatever I found when I searched for, you know, teen depression or that kind of thing. But I do agree that like, I didn't get a complete view. I only got, the stuff in the documents is just stuff that I had access to. And some of that access was privileged in that I worked on threat intelligence. Um, so I had access to a broader set of things.

• 1:26:24Frances Haugen?

  But, you know, for a lot of stuff on, on like, say teen mental health, like, that was just was freely available to anyone in the company.

• 1:26:32Rich Roll?

  One of the things that, that, that comes across in the book and when I listen to you speak is, is that you're not attempting to vilify Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg. Like, you're, you're, it's quite the opposite, actually. Like, you seem to have a lot of empathy and compassion for not just that organization, but for the people that work there and the position that they're in. And I, I think that's interesting. I think it would be easy to just point fingers and, and create villains.

• 1:27:03Rich Roll?

  So what is your, your perspective on, on Mark?

• 1:27:07Frances Haugen?

  Oh, you know, Mark is so interesting. So, so think about it, like, you know, what were you like when you were 19 years old?

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  I was a, I was a knucklehead.

• 1:27:20Rich Roll?

  I was a drunken, out of control.

• 1:27:23Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Rich Roll?

  Disaster.

• 1:27:24Frances Haugen?

  I, I was a disaster when I was 19. You know, a lot of, and a lot of 19 year olds are disasters. Like, Marcus, Marcus had to be the CEO since he was 19. Right? Like, he's, he has been surrounded by people. Remember, he's had control of all the votes since he was 19. So everyone around him, he has to decide if they're around him. Because he's in control. And, and, you know, I became who I am today because I made lots of mistakes and I got lots of feedback. And I had to live with consequences of my actions. And Marcus had very little of that feedback cycle. And I, I really worry about, you know, what, what life has he ended up in?

• 1:28:04Frances Haugen?

  Because I, you know, he's going on podcasts and saying things like, when I wake up in the morning, it feels like, and I look at my phone, like I look at my email, it feels like I'm getting punched in the face. You know, like how, like if that's not a cry for help, like I don't, I'm not really sure what it is. And, and it's one of these things where, um, you know, he's the last of the original big tech CEOs that's still in charge of his own company. And I think part of that is that he lives in an echo chamber. You know, he, he lives on a, um, an estate in Hawaii half the year, the other half of the year, he's at Facebook. Like, he can't go out anywhere in the Bay Area without people grimacing at him.

• 1:28:43Frances Haugen?

  You know, like it's, it's not like, um, if I had crossed Twitter, the Elon Musk fanboys would have come for me. But like, there are no Mark Zuckerberg fanboys.

• 1:28:54Rich Roll?

  That feels like it's changing a little bit with this cage match thing.

• 1:28:57Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Rich Roll?

  Which makes me just, just from my perspective, this Elon, Mark, like cage match. It's like, are, we really are living in idiocracy. Like, I don't care about this. Like, what is happening? People want to see it, it probably, and if it happens, I'm sure I'll watch it, but like, it's very strange.

• 1:29:19Frances Haugen?

  My heart breaks watching this whole thing play out because Elon is trolling.

• 1:29:24Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:29:25Frances Haugen?

  That's Elon is being Elon.

• 1:29:26Rich Roll?

  And Mark is, is earnest. Yes. He's training.

• 1:29:31Frances Haugen?

  And the part that I, I like breaks my heart is like, he's leaning into this because he's like, oh, I'm going to show I'm serious. Like, I'm going to show I'm a tough guy. And it's like, he, he's in a lose-lose situation. Like, if he wins, it's going to be like, dweeb, like everyone, like people liked Elon more, you beat up the more popular guy. And if he loses, that's just going to be like, oh, you're, you're a nerdy, you know, white belt in jujitsu. You know, it's, it, I, he, you have to remember, if we rolled back in time to 2016. So this is right before the election, right? In April of 2016, Mark was in Africa getting parades thrown for him. You know, he was visiting Africa and people were saying, you are the savior of Africa.

• 1:30:14Frances Haugen?

  You brought internet to Africa. You changed the lives of all these people. And six months later, people are like, you're destroying democracy. Like, imagine Facebook is your identity. Like, everything you've done since you were 19 years old is this company. It is almost impossible for a rational human being to be like, oh, the thing that I've spent my life doing actually is hurting people.

• 1:30:38Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:38Frances Haugen?

  And so it feels desperate.

• 1:30:40Rich Roll?

  The psychic toll of that, yeah. And being in this gilded cage and not, you know, having people in your life who can

• 1:30:47Frances Haugen?

  Give real feedback.

• 1:30:48Rich Roll?

  sort of check you, yeah, is a really interesting thing. And the fact that he is the last of these people where everybody else has sort of realized time for a new chapter, or let's move on, he's holding on to it. Do you think that's because he needs to, you know, evolve it past this narrative so that he feels good about it again?

• 1:31:08Frances Haugen?

  I think like the metaverse stuff is right there.

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  Then you would think that he would invest in all of these things that you're talking about to rectify them.

• 1:31:14Frances Haugen?

  Well, he has invested, you know, more than we spent to go to the moon on the metaverse.

• 1:31:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:20Frances Haugen?

  Right? Like, he clearly is like, oh, the thing, if I can pull off the metaverse thing, then that will be the thing that I'm known for. I won't be known for, you know...

• 1:31:28Rich Roll?

  Well, early indications are that that was unwise. But, you know, on a longer timeline, you know, that bet may pay off, I don't know. But those headlines got eclipsed by the, you know, the advent of AI, which I want to put a pin in for a minute because I want to come back to that. But, um, yeah, he shifted the narrative away, but this is his hail mary.

• 1:31:51Frances Haugen?

  It's his hail mary.

• 1:31:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Frances Haugen?

  And that's, and part of what I, my, again, my heart goes out to him on is like, you know, one of my favorite thing about talking to journalists is journalists gossip like no one else, right? Like, that's the kind of professional gossips in some ways. And back when the metaverse stuff was really blooming, I had multiple journalists tell me, you know, Mark is going out there and saying, people are going to spend all day in the metaverse, you know, they're going to work in the metaverse, they're going to hang out in the metaverse, like, this is going to be like the next town square, was because he spent all day in the metaverse. And if you think about it, like, if you're a person and you can't go out in public without people grimacing at you, or without eating a restaurant, without being afraid of people coming up and telling you they think you're a genocidal, like, you know, someone who's going to hurt humanity.

• 1:32:39Frances Haugen?

  Like, the metaverse might be really attractive.

• 1:32:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:42Frances Haugen?

  Because like, you can go out with whatever avatar you want. Or at a minimum, if people recognize you, they can't grimace at you. At least until the new headsets come out.

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. That's a very compassionate, uh, perspective.

• 1:32:54Frances Haugen?

  Well, hurt people hurt people. And he's just gonna keep causing damage until we like, help him go on to greatness. He's gonna go do something else. And he is so young, and he's so smart, and he has so much resources. You know, I've joked before that like, if I ever write another book, which I don't think is in the future because the PTSD of writing one is too close. Um, you know, I want to dedicate it to Mark, that like, I am convinced you can accomplish greatness, and I will not give up till you do.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's sort of, that's sweet.

• 1:33:25Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Rich Roll?

  Has he reached out to you?

• 1:33:27Frances Haugen?

  He's never reached out to me.

• 1:33:28Rich Roll?

  Have you had any communication with him? Even by proxy through somebody else?

• 1:33:32Frances Haugen?

  No. They, they pretend-

• 1:33:34Rich Roll?

  By anyone at Facebook?

• 1:33:35Frances Haugen?

  Nope, they pretend I don't exist.

• 1:33:37Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh. Interesting. But you've said-

• 1:33:40Frances Haugen?

  They won't, they won't comment on the book.

• 1:33:41Rich Roll?

  They won't? Well, that's a, talk about a no-win situation for them. But you have said that, under certain circumstances, you would go back and work at Facebook.

• 1:33:52Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, we, we can't give up on Facebook. Right? Like, I think the most important, the most important work I could do is, if they actually wanted to fix it, is like, work on like, how do we, how do we make sure it can function safely? You know, in the places where it is the internet.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:09Frances Haugen?

  Because I think there are strategies where even if you, even if you didn't want to necessarily do it the way I would suggest doing it, which is like, let's go in there and add the friction, like, add the intentionality around sharing, that kind of thing. Um, you know, even if you did want to keep a content moderation strategy, you know, beginning to work on decentralized content moderation. Like, imagine if, and like, um, there's a scholar named Ethan Zuckerman at UMass Amherst, who talks about the idea that right now, we are subjects of a king on our social platforms. You know, we can follow the laws, we can not follow the laws, we can go to another place. But we're not citizens. You know, in a democracy, you know, it's not just that we have rights, we have responsibilities.

• 1:34:51Frances Haugen?

  You know, we do jury duty, we have other obligations to our communities. You know, you know, there's a way that we could be scaling up even the current ways of doing safety. Into these places, but we have to say you have to do some of the labor too.

• 1:35:05Rich Roll?

  The evolution beyond decentralizing content moderation would be decentralizing the entire social network. I mean, this is Jack Dorsey's whole thing, right? Like in his dreams, Twitter would be a decentralized system. Is that something that you see emerging in the near future?

• 1:35:23Frances Haugen?

  I think there's really

• 1:35:24Rich Roll?

  A new player?

• 1:35:25Frances Haugen?

  I think there's really interesting opportunities around things like creator-owned social networks. So like, you know, we talked about before the idea of these are advertising-supported platforms. If people don't create, they don't get, there's no ads to, you can't run ads against them. I think a world where people who participate have the ability to influence how the system is governed is a thing that I think will very likely happen at some point in the future because people value these spaces so much. And if people knew there could be a world where they would have a say in these spaces, I think that would be compelling for them.

• 1:36:00Rich Roll?

  Well, we're in a bit of a chaos adolescence phase right now with the emergence of all of these smaller kind of Twitter analogues and the emergence of the substackification of journalism. And I feel like we're, we're sort of trying to find our feet in all of this, but it's a little strange right now to not really know, like, do I subscribe to this or this? Or how many subscriptions am I actually going to, am I actually going to be up for? And how is this all going to play out? Is there going to be a consolidation? Or is there going to be a clear winner that's going to emerge from all of these, you know, nascent little networks that are popping up right now?

• 1:36:38Frances Haugen?

  One of the ones that I'm really excited by is called PostNews. And like if I, if we have, let's say we pass transparency laws tomorrow, like the one I would want to work on is PostNews.

• 1:36:48Rich Roll?

  Why is that?

• 1:36:49Frances Haugen?

  So one of the things I worked on at Facebook that I talk about is we did influence modeling. You know, we said, hey, like, we can actually model human relationships and like, how does influence percolate between people? And it's actually really important for detecting like a fake person versus a real person, right? Because it's very hard to fake the constellation of relationships that real humans exist within. PostNews is founded by the guy who did Waze. And part of why Waze was successful in literally having just the crowd map the world. Was it thought about the idea of credibility and the idea that credibility can percolate? You know, it can propagate out amongst the graph.

• 1:37:31Frances Haugen?

  And so they're taking into consideration this question of how do people have influence? And how can we have credibility that grows and evolves over time? So you're not having a centralized authority say you have credibility. It's saying, hey, can we watch how this person interacts with the ecosystem? And how other people validate them? Can we build systems that are, you know, truth from the ground up instead of truth from on high?

• 1:37:56Rich Roll?

  And not based on an ad model?

• 1:37:57Frances Haugen?

  I think, I think they're not based on an ad model. I think they're subscription based.

• 1:38:01Rich Roll?

  So, so beyond that, if you were designing the ultimate social network for the future, what else would be built into that?

• 1:38:10Frances Haugen?

  Hmm. So that, that, so I think it's always important to, there's, people talk about social media as a thing. Like, it's really kind of two, two main worlds. It's, it's broadcast social media. It's like Twitter, you speak on Twitter not because you care about, or like TikTok, for example. Creators create on TikTok not because they're trying to reach grandma. It's because they're trying to reach as many people as possible. And so they'll repost their videos onto YouTube or onto Instagram.

• 1:38:39Rich Roll?

  And people watch TikTok not to follow any particular person, but to see what's popular.

• 1:38:46Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, be entertained. But on places like Facebook, it's, it's personal social media. Like you, you post your baby photo, not because you want a random person to see it. You want grandma to see it. And so we, I think we always have to be a little bit careful when we say like, what would the ideal social media be? Because it's a question of ideal for what? And, and I think in the case of personal social media, I really like human scaled personal media. It's like my, or social media. Like my, my primary social media right now, I was about to hold up my phone, but my phone is not over here. I, I My is Signal. It's like a group chat. You know, I have maybe 50 group chats. They have

• 1:39:26Frances Haugen?

  different themes. Like I have one called Doom News, and it's like about war and destruction, you know, global warming and all those things. And people spread news on those themes versus like ones that are like your local pub. They're like one of my friends hosts for, you know, 40 of us or something. And this is this question of like, what do we want to get from social media? And we want connection. We want to have a lens on the world. We want to stay in touch with people. And we don't need to have half a million person groups to do that. And so I think for me, good social media is at the scale that the institutions that humans have evolved over time can function at. So like, we have the concept of a dinner party. We have the concept

• 1:40:11Frances Haugen?

  of a cocktail party. We have the concept of a church parish, of a university. Like, these are concepts of communication, like a convention, right? We have scale that goes up to maybe 25,000 people. Beyond that, it gets a lot more complicated. Like, you do have to have these much longer conversations about governance.

• 1:40:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Frances Haugen?

  And I think most of the things that we want to get out of social media can be accomplished in communities that have less than 25,000 people.

• 1:40:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting, though. I, when I hear you saying that,

• 1:40:42Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  the missing piece for me, as somebody who creates on the internet and has built a career, you know, premised upon this free distribution, you know, model and access to lots of people and this whole influencer economy that's kind of emerged from it, is the democratization of the voice, which has its positives and negatives. But I think there-

• 1:41:06Frances Haugen?

  I think you could still host content. So something like YouTube, you host the content. And this question of like, where people discuss the content, you know, do you have half a million person groups? And how, what kinds of information end up propagating in a world where you have a megaphone that goes to a million people? Versus a megaphone that goes to 25,000 people.

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  Right. Depth versus breadth.

• 1:41:27Frances Haugen?

  Because like, when you have a 25,000 person community, like you can have like a Discord server and you don't need an algorithm. Like, humans mediate what information you receive. Once you get above that, you know, you end up in a, you know, when you have a single channel, you know, like a Facebook group that has one stream and has half a million people, the only way you can actually navigate that content is with an algorithm.

• 1:41:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Frances Haugen?

  And now you have to have conversations around, what are my rights to resetting that algorithm? What are my rights to seeing that algorithm? You know, that kind of thing.

• 1:41:59Rich Roll?

  As a data scientist, a lot of people, you hear a lot of people saying, "Well, we don't even know how these algorithms work." Is that true?

• 1:42:07Frances Haugen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  What parts of it do you understand? And which parts of it elude even someone like yourself?

• 1:42:13Frances Haugen?

  So it's one of these things where, you know, this is a very young field. Like, this is one of these things where I talk about in the book. And, and we can design a system and say, this is the data we put into it. Like, we can, we can describe that, we can see it. And we can, you know, when Elon published the algorithm, like, he can see what provisions it says. But the problem is that all these things work together in ways that are unexpected. Like, no one at Facebook, when they made the shift from saying, "Can we keep you on this platform as long as possible?" To, "Can we get you to react as much as possible?" No one said, "I think this is going to lead to more extreme content." Like, no one, no one set out to do that. And, and I, I want to validate the things that Facebook has said. You know, they say, "We don't recognize these allegations. We would never intend to do that."

• 1:42:58Frances Haugen?

  I don't think they did. But the problem is that when they learned there were these side effects. And, and, and right now, the only people who get to ask questions about, "Could there be side effects?", are the people inside the companies. Um, you know, people who have a vested interest in not knowing.

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:15Frances Haugen?

  You know, when they learned that there were these consequences, um, and, and to be clear, like, the, the shift was big enough that, like, the CEO of BuzzFeed wrote to Facebook and said, "I think something's broken."

• 1:43:28Rich Roll?

  Jonah Peretti?

• 1:43:29Frances Haugen?

  Um, I don't, I don't remember which, which gener-, it was, would have been in like 2018 or 2019, so I don't know which, which era that is.

• 1:43:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's, it's, it's wild.

• 1:43:38Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Rich Roll?

  And it's getting wilder, right? Like, when we think about, um, what went down in terms of election interference in 2016 and in 2020.

• 1:43:48Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Rich Roll?

  It feels kind of very, you know, kind of...

• 1:43:53Rich Roll?

  Not that big of a deal in consideration with what we're contending with as we careen towards the 2024 election. Everything is now suddenly infinitely more complicated due to the release of these various LLMs, the rapid growth of generative AI, deep fake technology, like the tools that are now available on the disinformation battlefield are just extraordinarily powerful. So how do you think about how those tools are going to be deployed and what we can expect as we move towards November?

• 1:44:32Frances Haugen?

  So I think there's two areas that we need to really pay attention to. So one is when Elon Musk fired a lot of his safety teams, it really shifted the information environment. So my husband and I like to watch YouTube together because we're nerdy, and there's a guy named Peter Zeihan who follows a lot of the politics in Russia. And he was talking about how it used to be one of his best data sources was Twitter. And when Elon came in, he ended up blocking a lot of people who were in Russia. But because he fired the teams that were looking for the coordinated behavior, you

• 1:45:14Frances Haugen?

  can really obviously tell the trolls on both sides of the conflict now just outweigh the real voices. And so one is we are investing less in catching bad actors. But the second is the way the tools have changed what's even possible with misinformation. So for context for people, one of the ways we used to catch those bots or like catch the networks of people who were pushing an information operation was we look for repetition. So there's always this interesting trade off between How much distribution can you do? And how much unique content can you do? Right? So if you, you really don't want to get caught, you write a different thing every time. Before the large language models came out, you, you were limited. You know, you, you weren't going to reach a ton of people

• 1:45:59Frances Haugen?

  if every single thing you posted was unique. So you could start looking and saying, interesting, you keep sharing the same links, or, or this group of people keeps saying very, very similar things, or maybe even the same thing.

• 1:46:11Rich Roll?

  Right. And it becomes clear that this is a bot farm.

• 1:46:13Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:14Frances Haugen?

  Um, or like China was particularly egregious at this because they would do things like, they would have brigades of tens of thousands of people who would just like flood the comment threads on dissidents' posts with like just the Chinese flag. You know, like, like if you can tell this is all the same thing. When you start having large language models, it's now possible to go and generate tens of thousands of unique pieces of content that all basically say the same thing, but say it in slightly different ways. And that makes it a lot harder to see that coordination. Or for example, you know, um, part of what makes misinformation so pernicious is consensus reality is like a channel. You know, there's, there's not like a huge continuum of what you can talk about.

• 1:46:58Frances Haugen?

  There's like, you know, we can sit and come to a view of like reality if we talk long enough.

• 1:47:05Frances Haugen?

  When it comes to misinformation, it can play in the entire field of ideas. And whatever is like the most seductive or like, uh, most incendiary on the algorithm, that's the thing that gets distributed. In a world with large language models, you can generate 10,000 different variations and send them to lots of different nooks and figure out what meme, like what idea is most seductive. And that, that just supercharges what can be done with a misinformation campaign.

• 1:47:34Rich Roll?

  It's terrifying.

• 1:47:35Frances Haugen?

  It is.

• 1:47:36Rich Roll?

  And that, that doesn't even get into all the deep fake stuff. When you can mock somebody's voice or their likeness in a compelling way that's indistinguishable from reality, then our footing in what is real and what isn't real vanishes.

• 1:47:51Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Rich Roll?

  And things get really scary very quickly.

• 1:47:54Frances Haugen?

  So this is, you know, when I talked about the idea of the post news is like a really interesting approach in my mind. Um, you know, we, we, part of why I think we need to step away from content moderation as the solution, or like censorship as the solution, is it presumes that we can go in there and establish true and false. Right? A different approach is to come in and say, hey, you know, information operations promoting lies is much more dangerous than most things.

• 1:48:25Frances Haugen?

  It is very hard, if you are an information operation operative, to have a robust, real set of relationships with people. Like, one of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of, how would you catch a fake person? Or like, how do you catch someone who is behaving in an authentic way? And so, if you are really acutely modeling and saying, hey, you have friends. You have a family. You have people you regularly interact with who interact with you back. We can tell you are an organic human. If you have a fake human, you know, it's like an LLM, they can try to guess what do real people look like, but they're not going to be perfect.

• 1:49:08Frances Haugen?

  And if they, if your whole network uses the same assumptions, now your network will stand out as being a clump of people who act in a slightly anomalous way.

• 1:49:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I like that. I mean, the idea being, traditionally, if you wanted to see whether someone's a real person, go to their Twitter account. Oh, they just created the account last week. They don't, you know, they don't follow anybody that I know, or none of their followers are anybody that I know. They, this all seems manufactured. You can kind of get to the bottom of it pretty quickly. What you're saying is, create a matrix of credibility.

• 1:49:42Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Rich Roll?

  That establishes this person is real, with a history of, you know, deep relationships and interactions with other credible people that, over time, establishes somebody as a worthy distributor of information.

• 1:49:58Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, this person looks like they are a real person. They're having real conversations. And even if I disagree with them, the idea that they are a real person means they are less dangerous than they are part of an operation.

• 1:50:07Rich Roll?

  But at the same time, it's like, we're having a conversation about just trying to figure out who's a real person or not. Like, it's insane, right?

• 1:50:14Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. We are living, and this is part of why we have to start having more transparency. Because we have tools where we can start saying, hey, we gotta, we gotta move this ball down the field. But there is no economic incentive today to do those things on their own.

• 1:50:31Rich Roll?

  So what are we gonna do, Francis? Like, what's the solution here? How do we, how do we put a better foot forward?

• 1:50:37Frances Haugen?

  So, part of, I think, the first step is, is, is just, and this is a big part about why I wrote the book. Like, I'm, I think, of the things that I regret the most about the rollout of my book is, is no conservative media has, has offered to, like, talk to me, right? Like, I haven't been on Fox News, I haven't, we've reached out to a number of, of

• 1:50:56Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. I would think they'd be happy to talk to you.

• 1:50:58Frances Haugen?

  I would think so, too. Because, like, I've been saying consistently since the beginning, you know, content moderation is a flawed strategy. But Facebook spent a huge sum of money on a whisper campaign saying, you know, she's a dark horse for censorship. And so, I think the place we start from is an idea that people have the right to see how these systems work. Right? Like, I should have the right to know I am not allowed to sell my book on Facebook. Right? We, the public, should be able to see what content gets taken down. Right now, the only avenues that we have are you can appeal to the Facebook Oversight Board, but it disappears into a black hole. Right? Things can really change if we have transparency.

• 1:51:42Frances Haugen?

  And, and, and so, we need to first work on how do we make that a bipartisan issue? That we cannot have an information environment that is run by a private company in the dark and have a democracy. And the second thing is, like, so, how might we actually do that? So, Face, Europe passed a law called the Digital Services Act last year. I talk about it in the book. That, basically, it, it sounds, it sounds pretty blah. It's like, you know, if you know there's a risk to your platform, you gotta tell us about it. Like, we know you get to operate behind the curtain, but we can't see. We'll never catch up with you unless you tell us what you already know. You have to tell us what your plan is for reducing that risk. And you need to give us enough data that we can see that you're making progress.

• 1:52:26Frances Haugen?

  And if we ask you a question, you have to give us an answer.

• 1:52:28Rich Roll?

  And if we don't comply?

• 1:52:30Frances Haugen?

  So it's, I think it's like 10% of global revenues.

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:33Frances Haugen?

  Is the penalty.

• 1:52:34Rich Roll?

  That's for real.

• 1:52:36Frances Haugen?

  A real one. Though, when you have a 35% profit margin, it's possible Facebook would come out and say, we are now 25% profitable.

• 1:52:42Rich Roll?

  It's just a business expense.

• 1:52:43Frances Haugen?

  Business expense, yeah.

• 1:52:44Rich Roll?

  What is your, your sense of the viability of something like that passing in the United States?

• 1:52:49Frances Haugen?

  You know, it's interesting. If you'd asked me two months ago, I would have given you a much more negative answer. But the Surgeon General came out with their advisory, you know, about a month ago. And just for context for listeners, there's been like under 15 Surgeon General advisories since the 60s. You know, there are things like cigarettes cause cancer, seat belts save lives, breastfeeding is good for babies, like stuff that we kind of take as duh statements today. But there was ambiguity before those advisories came out. And historically, when an advisory has come out, within two to three years after an advisory, something happens on average. And so I think there's a good chance that something's going to happen around kids.

• 1:53:34Frances Haugen?

  And my hope is that we can scaffold towards a broader transparency law from there.

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  What do you mean something's going to happen around kids?

• 1:53:42Frances Haugen?

  I don't know.

• 1:53:42Rich Roll?

  Meaning there will be like a sort of political will to do something because of our shared concern of how these things are impacting young people?

• 1:53:51Frances Haugen?

  Impacting mental health of kids, yeah. For, for context, like there, there have been laws that have been starting to pass. So like Montana banned TikTok, which I don't support. Or like Utah came out and, and passed a fairly extensive law about parental oversight of these systems. You know, these are conservative states. And, and the way I usually frame this for people is every societal issue has some finite number of kids that we're willing to harm. So in the case of cars, we put eight-year-olds in car seats. Like eight-year-olds in car seats saves like... Tens of kids, it's like 60 kids a year versus like having a six year old in a car seat.

• 1:54:33Frances Haugen?

  Think of how many fights with eight year olds about car seats take place every day because we put eight year olds in car seats or like how much money is spent on eight year old car seats. But we, we as a society say those 60 lives are worth a huge amount to us. When it comes to things like guns, we're willing to accept many, many more kids being harmed because of the societal value that we place on, on guns. I think we are reaching a tipping point when it comes to kids where if you look at things like the suicide rate, you know, it's, it's a hockey stick. And, and you know, the data is always like five years behind. So last year, the most recent data I could find was from 2017. This year it's

• 1:55:13Frances Haugen?

  from 2018. It was hockey sticking though up into there. And I don't see any reason why I wouldn't keep hockey sticking. And I think there's just a real thing that it is, it's going to be difficult for social platforms to say, we, we deserve to continue to operate the way we have, given the level of harm it gets.

• 1:55:35Rich Roll?

  It's an interesting tension between freedom of speech and family values, particularly in conservative locales, when you're dealing with young people and their access to social media tools that we're discovering are very damaging and how that butts up against that deep entrenched interest in unfettered free speech.

• 1:55:57Frances Haugen?

  And think about this for a second. You know, some of those harms have nothing to do with speech. So like sleep deprivation, sleep quality has nothing to do with free speech.

• 1:56:07Rich Roll?

  Right. But truncating access to a social media site can easily be interpreted as, you know, an infringement on free speech.

• 1:56:16Frances Haugen?

  But imagine instead you came out and said, hey, you have to publish how many kids are online at 10, 11, midnight, 1, 2, 3 a.m. You know, we're not saying you have to cut kids off at 10.

• 1:56:25Rich Roll?

  And then parents have the, have the right to make that decision also.

• 1:56:29Frances Haugen?

  Or, or like, one of the things I often suggest is, you know, we've known for 20 years that if you make a site slower, people use it less. So like my, my husband always likes to joke, we all have willpower at noon. Right? Like 10 a.m. Everyone has willpower. But like by the time you get to 10 p.m., you know, that's when you start doom scrolling. You start dissociating and self-soothing with like your phone. Imagine a world where a kid stays up till 2:00 AM. And the next day, when they're kind of hung over on Instagram in math class, you know, a little thing pops up and says, "When do you want to go to bed tonight?" And the kid says, "11:00." "My mom wants me to go to bed at 10:00. I want to go to bed at 11:00." And for two hours or three hours before 11:00, the app gets a little bit slower, and a little bit slower, and a little bit slower.

• 1:57:14Frances Haugen?

  Like around 11:00.

• 1:57:15Rich Roll?

  But isn't every kid just gonna say, "I'm gonna go to bed at 2:00 AM"?

• 1:57:18Frances Haugen?

  I don't, I don't, I don't think so. Because like, kids feel bad the next day.

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Frances Haugen?

  And if you could have a soft landing...

• 1:57:23Rich Roll?

  But it is so powerful.

• 1:57:25Frances Haugen?

  But that's because we don't have a soft landing right now. We, we pop up a little thing saying, "It's 10:00 PM. Do you want to go to bed?" And, and I don't know about you, I hit dismiss. Right? We don't have soft landings right now.

• 1:57:35Rich Roll?

  It's tough. You're asking kids to, to bring a knife to a gunfight, you know, with these incredibly powerful tools that are, that are pitted against developing minds. You know, even, even the most conscious and well-intentioned among us are powerless to fight its wiles. You know, and so the fact that young people are contending with this, you know, we're, we're running this massive experiment, you know, at the greatest scale imaginable. And it's very unclear how this is gonna pan out, but early indications are, it ain't fucking good.

• 1:58:04Frances Haugen?

  It's not good. So the thing that was terrifying for me about the Surgeon General Advisory was, you know, they said, "If your kid uses social media for more than three hours a day, they're at, like, double or triple the risk of getting depression or anxiety." The average kid in the United States uses these products for three and a half hours a day.

• 1:58:23Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:24Frances Haugen?

  Right? Uh, 30% of kids say they're on till midnight or later, most weeknights, most school nights. Like, you're totally right. Like, we are, um, when I went to the State of the Union, so I was a guest of the First Lady at the State of the Union, I don't know, a year ago, a year and a half ago. And, um, he said, "We are running a national experiment on our children." And I, I had actually forgotten about that line until, like, when my book came out. In one of the interviews I did, they played that soundbite. And I think if more people thought about it that way and said, you know, we're running a national experiment on our kids. Like, what say should the public have in that experiment? I think we'd have very different conversations.

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we should all have a say. And that kind of gets to the core theme of the book, which is agency. Like, the book is called The Power of One. You might think that that refers to like you being this all-powerful whistleblower, but it's really a call to action to all of us to get more engaged with this and to get more involved and to realize that we all have more agency than we believe that we have. So, talk a little bit about, you know, how to get people engaged and active around these issues and where they can plug that enthusiasm.

• 1:59:40Frances Haugen?

  You know, I think it's interesting. Like, I had an interview like two weeks ago with a relatively young woman. She's like in her twenties. And it kind of felt like I had stumbled into a therapy session. Like, I spent like a solid 20 minutes of that interview just trying to convince her that there's hope, right? That there's things to be done.

• 2:00:00Rich Roll?

  So she's so down the social media addiction rabbit hole?

• 2:00:03Frances Haugen?

  She's like, how is there any chance we're ever gonna stop these giant corporations? And one of the things I pointed out to her was, you know, I think the first step is that we have to believe that change could be possible. And the thing I told her was like, you know, one of the first quotes in the book is from a guy named Vaklov Havel, who wrote The Power of the Powerless. So, for those of you who are not Cold War Studies minors.

• 2:00:29Rich Roll?

  I'm old enough to remember.

• 2:00:32Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. And in the Soviet Union, you know, if we'd gone to anywhere in the Soviet Union in 1960 and said, "Will the Soviet Union fall?", no one would have said that. They'd be like, there's this like iron grip. And, and he said, you know, there's this, this, uh, you know, you can feel like there's no potential to change because the Soviet Union figured out a way to glue things, like to make them stuck, you know, instead of being a totalitarian state where they just ruled by force, he said, they're a post totalitarian state, you know, they, they, they rule by ideology, that if you cross the ideology, the ideology just heals

• 2:01:13Frances Haugen?

  around you. So in a system where if you are powerful or you're powerless, if you speak out, the system just heals around you and, you know, shunts you to the side, you know, what is left? Like, what is your power? What is your agency? What is your power left? And he says, you know, you start by valuing yourself and saying, I am a human being and I have dignity. You know, I think if we started more conversations on social media just from that simple of a lens, like saying, you know, right now, Facebook is not really indicating they value our dignity, you know, what, what would, what would social media look like if it did, that did look like they valued our autonomy and our choices? You know, for

• 2:01:54Frances Haugen?

  example, he mentioned Netflix. When I was sick, I watched a lot of really depressing Netflix, and I think I didn't even realize that I had like gotten into the darker depths of, of the catalog.

• 2:02:07Rich Roll?

  Like the true crime Dahmer stuff?

• 2:02:09Frances Haugen?

  Oh, no, like, like, I don't know, moody Scandinavian dramas, you know, like, you can be real dour on Netflix if you want to be.

• 2:02:16Rich Roll?

  Scandi crime. I like it.

• 2:02:18Frances Haugen?

  But when I started getting better, you know, I'd open up Netflix and I'd be like, nothing appeals to me on Netflix. Like, like, I try to search for comedies, I try to search for anything.

• 2:02:26Rich Roll?

  Netflix only knew that I feel better now.

• 2:02:28Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 2:02:29Rich Roll?

  You're thinking like, I should, I need to fix this algorithm.

• 2:02:32Frances Haugen?

  Well, I didn't, I didn't even think about it until I moved in with some new people during COVID. So I moved to Puerto Rico and moved in with some new people. They had their own Netflix account and it was delightful. Like, there was all this wonderful stuff on Netflix, but I hadn't even realized that I had gotten into a corner of the algorithm, right? Like, like, imagine a world where.

• 2:02:51Rich Roll?

  And you of all people.

• 2:02:53Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Rich Roll?

  It's interesting.

• 2:02:54Frances Haugen?

  So imagine, you know, imagine we said, hey, step one, I matter as a human, I have dignity, I, I deserve to be treated with respect. You can imagine things like, you know, maybe we should have the right to reset algorithms. You know, you shouldn't have to give up all your watch history and all your like ratings. Like, like I have, I have a watch list of stuff I want to watch in the future. Should I have to walk away from my data in order to get the algorithm to reset? And this becomes like a really big deal when it comes to kids because like when I've talked to therapists about kids with, say, an eating disorder or who have been self harming. You know, kids are forced to choose between their pasts, you know, all their friends, all these moments of their life they've documented and an algorithm that threatens their future.

• 2:03:38Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's really interesting. It seems like an easy fix.

• 2:03:42Frances Haugen?

  Sure.

• 2:03:42Rich Roll?

  You would be able to do that because imagine the young person or anybody who's contending with some kind of mental health issue, eating disorder or otherwise, they realize they need to get well, they engage in some kind of recovery process, they're getting better, but when they open up their app.

• 2:04:00Frances Haugen?

  It's pulled right out.

• 2:04:00Rich Roll?

  They're getting exposed to the same content that fed that, you know, maladaptive behavior pattern. That's not great.

• 2:04:07Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. So, so.

• 2:04:08Rich Roll?

  And so they're faced with the choice. It's, it's that whole thing of like, it's on the user.

• 2:04:12Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Rich Roll?

  Right? And so what? They have to delete their account or unfriend everybody in order to reset it when there could be some healthier tools.

• 2:04:21Frances Haugen?

  A happy medium.

• 2:04:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Frances Haugen?

  And I think that's like the recurrent theme that I want people to walk away from is that we have been sold by the social media companies that there are only these very stark absolutes, like extremes. And there, there could be like happy mediums, you know, things where we say, you know, let's design to put control back in the user's hands or to make patterns that were invisible, visible. And, and I, you know, that's not enough. Like we need companies to have to pay for social costs too, but they're like really easy for steps. So, so the second thing is, you know, we've, we've started from change is possible, I matter, I deserve to be respected, to, you know, taking care of other people, right? Like coming and saying, if you have, and this is part of what Vakav Havel talked about.

• 2:05:07Frances Haugen?

  He said, you know, start just by saying, I refuse to let you humiliate me. I refuse to let you devalue me. Second is, I'm gonna care for my friends and family. Right, like, I'm gonna also remind them, they matter. You know, I think until we get social media that is safer, we have to start saying, I'm gonna, we need to redefine some of the rituals of what it means to care for each other. You know, talk to your parents, talk to your kids, talk to your friends and family about how they use social media. Right, how would you feel if you found out your friend died because they were getting sucked down a rabbit hole of despair? And you didn't know. Right, and I think it's just one of these interesting things where like,

• 2:05:50Frances Haugen?

  I don't know, maybe I'm like a radical and I'm like, what if we said, hey, I'll show you my Instagram feed if you show me yours?

• 2:05:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:05:57Frances Haugen?

  Right, like, like, maybe I'm a radical because I'm like, what if we just tried it? You know, like, what, how would, how would the world change?

• 2:06:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Frances Haugen?

  You know?

• 2:06:03Rich Roll?

  And we're all operating on some level on this low-grade assumption that our feed looks like our friend's feed.

• 2:06:09Frances Haugen?

  Exactly.

• 2:06:09Rich Roll?

  But we're all living in our own siloed, unique, like, worlds as a result of these platforms.

• 2:06:15Frances Haugen?

  My, my husband is much better at Twitter than I am, like, he much more actively engages in it. I think he has more time than I do, more patience, whatever. I like swimming the ocean more than he does.

• 2:06:24Rich Roll?

  Does he still have a bunch of troll accounts?

• 2:06:26Frances Haugen?

  Oh, he does. Oh, he doesn't have as many. He actually has, he has a check, he has a blue checkmark now and he actually uses his own name. Because he, he can't just, you know, troll all the time. Because when, when Elon came in, he lost like 20 or 30 troll accounts.

• 2:06:40Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:42Frances Haugen?

  Because my, my husband used to have a hobby of, he really likes finding Chinese information operations and then needling them. So he likes to make them like,

• 2:06:51Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:51Frances Haugen?

  Like, ask them very reasonable questions and watch whatever hilarious answers they say back. But he, he lost, he lost like 20 accounts when Elon came through and did the first wave of housecleaning.

• 2:07:01Rich Roll?

  I lost my blue check and I have not subscribed. And I found my, my use and engagement on that platform to have gone from being my favorite place to engage with people to almost nothing.

• 2:07:16Frances Haugen?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:19Frances Haugen?

  I think enough people left, there's a very different tone.

• 2:07:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it feels very different to me.

• 2:07:26Frances Haugen?

  But what I was gonna say was, like, when I say this idea of, like, you know, what if we looked at each other's feeds? Like, I actually live that. Like, my husband, because he engages with Twitter more, he mostly does it for, like, national, like, his account is much more like national security news oriented. Like, I literally, like, we lay in bed, and when he starts, like, doom scrolling late at night, like, I'll sit and, like, you know, enjoy his feed with him. And occasionally, I annoy him, because I'm like, I want to read that, so you have to slow down. But we can do these things. It's not like they have to be alien actions.

• 2:07:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, somebody suggested, I'm not taking credit for this, and I'm sure you've thought of it, a great tool to add to Twitter or other platforms would be, when you visit somebody's profile page, you can hit a button, and then you see their feed.

• 2:08:12Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Rich Roll?

  Like, so you could live in that person's experience and see what they're seeing. I think that would be

• 2:08:19Frances Haugen?

  I think that'd be cool.

• 2:08:19Rich Roll?

  Very cool.

• 2:08:20Frances Haugen?

  If people could opt into it.

• 2:08:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and then you can go, oh, this is what this person's reading all the time, and that's maybe why they're posting in this way. I understand this person a little bit better than I did prior.

• 2:08:29Frances Haugen?

  Yeah, that'd be cool.

• 2:08:30Rich Roll?

  So, in the interim, while we're wrestling with all of these problems, existential and practical, like, what are some best practices around how to interface with these tools? Like, we need to understand just how powerful they are, how addictive they are, the many pitfalls and risks of engaging with them. But they are part of our lives and our identity, and, you know, we're not gonna, nobody's gonna become a Luddite, or, you know, delete their account. I mean, some people may delete their accounts, but for the most part, these are things we have to figure out some kind of healthy symbiosis with.

• 2:09:04Frances Haugen?

  And I want to acknowledge, like, you know, when I talk about this idea of, like, I would work at Facebook because we can't leave people behind, right? You know, there's people who, for whom Facebook is the internet. The flip side of that is, there's lots of people in the United States who don't have the luxury of getting to do a lot of socializing in person. You know, socializing in person costs money. You have to get there. Maybe you have to buy food to be in the space. Maybe there's other things. We keep devaluing, getting rid of the public spaces where we could interact with each other. You know, people don't join bowling leagues anymore or garden clubs, that kind of thing. And so there's a bunch of people whom, even in the United States, we need to not leave behind.

• 2:09:44Frances Haugen?

  But the next thing I would say is, I saw this app recently when I was, you know, on my book tour a couple of weeks ago, that I loved, which was, it just, when you open any social media account, it tells you how many times you've opened it today. And a little thing goes across the screen very slowly that counts down like five, four, three, two, one, and then asks you, do you really want to open Instagram? Like, do you really want to open YouTube? And I love that idea of just giving people-

• 2:10:18Rich Roll?

  A little bit of friction.

• 2:10:19Frances Haugen?

  A little friction. Because one thing that people do is they use these as like digital pacifiers. You know, you're feeling a little anxious, you're feeling a little uncomfortable. Instead of sitting and just enjoying the silence, or like watching the scenery go by in your Uber or whatever, you know, we pull out our phones and we just, we immediately dive in. Any kind of moment of intentionality gives you a chance to make more of a real choice.

• 2:10:46Rich Roll?

  What is that app called?

• 2:10:48Frances Haugen?

  You know, I-

• 2:10:49Rich Roll?

  We'll figure it out. We'll put it in the, we'll put it in the show notes. I like that idea. I haven't heard of that. I've heard of other, you know, other sort of apps that you can put on your phone that you can set hours where certain apps don't work, et cetera. I think it's important to reclaim our boredom. You know, if we want to be able to express ourselves creatively and do our best thinking and be able to respond to the world around us and be available for the people we care about. We have to reprioritize the importance of rumination and quietude and those moments. And I'm as guilty as anybody, you know, like I'll fill every opportunity, you know, standing in line or what have you to check the phone and, you know, lose myself a little bit. And like, I'm powerless.

• 2:11:33Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Rich Roll?

  You know, it's really hard. I have a lot of compassion for people that are suffering and feel powerless to, you know, make any kind of adaptive behavior change around these things.

• 2:11:44Frances Haugen?

  I think there's some other low hanging fruit. It's like, charge phones not in the bedroom.

• 2:11:49Rich Roll?

  That's a tough one.

• 2:11:50Frances Haugen?

  You know, kids should charge their phones in the parents' bedroom.

• 2:11:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:53Frances Haugen?

  Adults should.

• 2:11:53Rich Roll?

  Once the cat's out of the bag, as somebody with a bunch of kids, like, it's hard to, you put the genie back in the bottle on that one.

• 2:11:59Frances Haugen?

  Well, that's why the kids' phones can charge in your room, but like, your phone could charge in the kitchen or something.

• 2:12:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:05Frances Haugen?

  You know, you can buy an alarm clock for 10 bucks. It will wake you up in the morning. That's one of those ones that I'm really, um, I need to do it. Right? Like, my vice is, is I doom scroll late at night and, and my husband totally calls me out on it. And so I need to like, start charging the, the phone in the kitchen, probably.

• 2:12:25Rich Roll?

  The, the final thing I kind of want to ask you about is, is this conflict or tension between immediacy? Like, we need solutions. Like, we've got, you know, there, like, as you, like, as I open up this conversation with this idea that if we don't fix this, tens of millions of people are going to die, your own words.

• 2:12:43Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Rich Roll?

  There is a sense of urgency around solving these problems.

• 2:12:47Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:48Rich Roll?

  While also simultaneously, like, appreciating long-termism. Like, we're in for the long haul here.

• 2:12:54Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Rich Roll?

  We gotta get through this uncomfortable adolescent phase and, and, and learn how to do better. Both those things are true and important.

• 2:13:04Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:04Rich Roll?

  How do you, how do you kind of, as an advocate now, who's in the public spotlight, talking about this stuff all the time, you know, what is the message that you want to put out there in terms of what we need to do now to address the immediacy aspect of this?

• 2:13:22Frances Haugen?

  I totally get, like, I think I frustrate people because I don't come out and demand more sooner. Right? So like, I know when I first came out, a friend of mine who, who is very active in this space. You know, he was like, you need to pick like one thing that you want them to do. Like, maybe it's like, cut the reshare chains. You need to pick one thing and push to get that one thing, because you're not going to get anything more than that.

• 2:13:47Frances Haugen?

  And I, part of why I have resisted that so hard is, is like, I think the problem of social media is there weren't enough people sitting at the table. Right? Like, there are all these trade-offs and all these externalities, these social costs. And there weren't enough people who actually got to have a say in the process. Like, it was made internally by very smaller people who were working under very constrained incentives. And, you know, we have to start with transparency, because I really believe having a democratic conversation about how to move forward is so essential. And so, it's a little, it's a little hard, because like, I fully acknowledge the house is on fire. And like, coming in and saying, we should have smoke detectors. Like, I totally get that's not satisfying.

• 2:14:32Frances Haugen?

  But, right now, there are so few people in the world who get to participate in a conversation about how to move forward. I don't think it would, I, I think you'd be swapping out one dictator, you know, Mark, for another dictator, me, if you were just like, Francis, fix it for us.

• 2:14:46Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14:47Frances Haugen?

  Right? And so, we really need to immediately get transparency. We, we're, we're going to keep working at beyond the screen on things around like, how do we onboard and, and up-level, you know, concerned parents, litigators, regulators, investors? Because all of those actors together are how safety happens. Right? It's investors saying, we need to manage for long-term risk. It's litigators that say, we need to create the right set of incentives. And so, I think all in, you know, we start with transparency, and then we begin the hard work of actually figuring out where do we go from there. What is the floor?

• 2:15:25Rich Roll?

  Are you doing your own kind of like, youth education red teaming with social media projects? Where you get kids in and you're like, design your own social, okay, what happens when that person says that? What do you do? Like, how would you fix that? Like, creating literacy in, in like, a generation of young people who are obviously going to be inheriting all of this, at the earliest, you know, phases of their development seems to be, I mean, that's a longer-term solution to this, but I really like that idea of injecting that awareness in as early as possible.

• 2:15:59Frances Haugen?

  I think there's two kinds of education that are really urgent. So, so one is,

• 2:16:04Frances Haugen?

  Is that, so did you do high school journalism?

• 2:16:07Rich Roll?

  No.

• 2:16:08Frances Haugen?

  So there exists in the world, high school newspapers, there even exists junior high school newspapers. So hot take, do you think there are any good junior high newspapers in the world?

• 2:16:19Rich Roll?

  I have no idea, probably not.

• 2:16:20Frances Haugen?

  I think almost certainly not. But I mean, like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to rain on them, like, that's not why we do it. Like, it's, we're not, we're not funding those.

• 2:16:28Rich Roll?

  You're exposing them to the principles around journalism.

• 2:16:31Frances Haugen?

  We're saying journalism plays such an important role in a democracy, right? So the first pass at history, you know, it's digesting information, helping people get to have a chance to have opinions. That we believe we need to expose the broadest number of people possible to the process of journalism. We are shifting over our information environment from one where it's all about a structured process with journalistic traditions and ethics and protocols, to one that's decentralized or is run by algorithms. But we don't have a way of, like, actually being to expose people to those choices. And so one of the things that we want to do is, is build a lab bench, kind of like, um, did you take chemistry in high school?

• 2:17:14Frances Haugen?

  So like, the chemistry lab bench you used in high school is remarkably similar to what you would use in college, or if you're a graduate student, or if you're a full-blown chemist. That lab bench facilitates a lot of levels of, of understanding. You know, if we had a simulated social network, we could have, you know, high school data science clubs where kids could argue over, you know, should you have to click on a link to reshare it? And you could play the ads team, and I could play the new user team, and they could play the non-English user team, or the kids team.

• 2:17:46Rich Roll?

  So you're, you're, you're, you're bringing the debate ecosystem into this as well?

• 2:17:50Frances Haugen?

  Or the Model UN, you know, or mock trial, you know, like, like, how do we make kids say, hey, actually, these products I use can be built in a very large number of ways? You know, there are choices being made. There's consequences of these choices. And to be real clear, every single time we change them, it's not like it's either good or it's bad. It's it some some of those stakeholder groups are going to benefit, some are not. Do we still ship?

• 2:18:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:17Frances Haugen?

  So that's that's one kind of knowledge that I really want, like we're very actively building towards, and we'd love support if anyone wants to give us support.

• 2:18:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So what is the what is the website for that?

• 2:18:27Frances Haugen?

  Oh, um, so our website is beyondthescreen.org.

• 2:18:30Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:18:30Frances Haugen?

  And please reach out. Also, my email is [email protected]. But um, but the second kind of knowledge, I like to think of it as like, um, community governance, right? Or or like in addressing the idea that we are actually very rapidly stripping, um, social capital from our children. So I'll give you I'll give you an example. I was told by, um, a member of either like the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Academy of Pediatric Psychologists.

• 2:19:02Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:19:03Frances Haugen?

  That there now exists nonprofits that teach 14 year olds how to play pickup basketball. So take a step back for a second. Like, when you and I were were kids, there were not startups that taught kids how to play pickup basketball.

• 2:19:16Rich Roll?

  But there wasn't a need for that.

• 2:19:18Frances Haugen?

  So why wasn't there a need for it? Right?

• 2:19:20Rich Roll?

  Because we weren't at home staring at screens. We were out at the playground and somebody's older brother taught us how to do it.

• 2:19:26Frances Haugen?

  And so I think what happened was to it used to be if you wanted to play, you just showed up. And sometimes there weren't enough kids. And so like, you know, the 14 year olds had to let the 12 year old play. They're like, he's smaller, she's smaller, not very good, but we need one more person. Today, those 14 year olds all coordinate on their phones. They show up at 4pm on Tuesday. They always have enough people and they never let the 12 year old play.

• 2:19:51Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:51Frances Haugen?

  And so now you have to figure out how to do intentionality around propagating that knowledge. We are facing, I think, a really serious crisis amongst teenagers because for two years, we shut the schools down. Right? The juniors and seniors that were supposed to socialize, the freshmen and sophomores, they didn't have those moments. And now, the juniors and seniors are those old freshmen and sophomores. Right? Like, we're cutting-

• 2:20:20Rich Roll?

  They weren't indoctrinated into that mentorship mentality.

• 2:20:24Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:25Frances Haugen?

  And I really felt this in college, right? Like, I was part of the first graduating class at a college. And so, we never had upperclassmen that taught us how to be adults. Right? Like, we had to go and be seniors for four years. And I don't think it was good for any of us. So, there's this interesting question of, like, let's say, we went into high schools and we said, "Hey, we're going to teach you about network effects." Like, the idea of, "You guys are locked in right now. And we're going to teach you about the business model. And we're going to teach you about the idea that, like, if you want to decide to spend more time in person with your friends, they have to make that same decision at the same time, or you don't get to." Right? Okay, now that you all know that you're not, you know, just leaves floating in the river,

• 2:21:09Frances Haugen?

  like, you are people who can make choices, let's fill an assembly and say, "Hey, let's just start out. How does this make you feel?" Like, have the kids vote and just put it up on the screen. You know, "How does it make you feel when you use social media?" Because most of you say it doesn't make you happy. How much time do you spend on social media? Like, let's check on our phones together. How much time do you spend? Okay. If you could set a rule for the whole school on how much time you're going to spend online, what would you choose? Are you a three-hour-day school? Are you a four-hour-day school? Are you a one-hour-day school? Because every hour you're on there, you're not with your friends. What would happen? And like, that's like an area I really want to play out in, where like, this question

• 2:21:52Frances Haugen?

  of, can kids intervene and start teaching each other's social skills? Can they start? Can we intervene at the level of a community? Instead of a single kid or a single family.

• 2:22:02Rich Roll?

  Well, that speaks to agency and also this idea of self-regulation because ultimately it is, as much as it shouldn't be on the individual, it is on the individual and we have to make these choices ourselves about how we're going to engage with these things. And you know, the younger you can get to somebody and give them that sense of agency where, listen, you're a sentient human being and I trust you and you have to figure out how to be responsible for yourself, like what do you want? And engaging with a young person at that level about these things, I think is really, can be a powerful thing. It should be part of like elementary school curriculum.

• 2:22:43Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:44Rich Roll?

  You have a hopefulness in how you're approaching this and I think that hopefulness is rooted in an understanding that change takes time. And so this is not, you know, hey, I came out and I testified and I went on 60 Minutes and my work here is done. This is perhaps work that has no end, but is worthy of, you know, devoting your time, attention, energy and life to. And when you think of the whistleblowers over the years, you mentioned auto safety, obviously Ralph Nader, he's sort of a talisman for you. There aren't that many. I mean, there's Edward Snowden and the NSA, there's Daniel Ellsberg and, you know, we all saw Russell Crowe portray Jeffrey Wiegand in The Insider. And there's you, like

• 2:23:29Rich Roll?

  there's these sort of iconic figures that don't pop up that often and create kind of a bit of a lightning bolt moment, but the groundswell of change in the aftermath of that is something that we need to appreciate, does take time.

• 2:23:45Frances Haugen?

  I would say the transformative moment for me that was kind of like the moment my life pivoted was, I really like, so I'm a big nerd. When I travel, I love maritime museums and railroad museums. I'll show you. I'm odd. I really like museums about cities. I like places that tell their own stories. And I really like museums about individual people because like you get to like, I really like, um, I really like understanding people. Like, I really like connecting with them. And, you know, I've been to ones about artists, political figures, architects, like, you know, I just enjoy people. And I, my, one of my favorite single-person museums is the Museum for Indira Gandhi in Delhi.

• 2:24:27Frances Haugen?

  Um, so I was in Delhi for a wedding and, um, uh, it's a really cool museum because they tell her life story from like letters and newspaper clippings that are in context to that moment. So it's all contemporaneous documents and like artifacts. And they had this article about her when she was five. So she's the only child of Nehru, who was like one of the founders of India. And this article is about her leading a march of children through the streets of Delhi when she was five. So like, think thousands of children. It was called the Monkey Army. And one, it shows you how different parenting standards were a long time ago, because who would let their child go in a mass of like thousands of five-year-olds today?

• 2:25:11Frances Haugen?

  But, but two, it was like a catalyst for me because I think she was in her 40s when India became free. Right? And I had never, like, I had watched the Gandhi movie or whatever and been like, oh, like, you know, Gandhi made salt in the ocean and India became free or whatever. But I hadn't thought about the idea. It took them decades. Like, it took them like 70 years to become free. And if you had asked anyone in the world in 1875, will India, will the British ever leave India? No one in the world, except for like, you know, the hundred people gathered from the Indian National Congress, would have said, there's a chance. And I think today, like, I, I have a line in the book, you know, fatalism is a sign that someone is trying to steal your power. Right?

• 2:25:56Frances Haugen?

  Like, when we say there's no chance, we can do something. Like, um, so much innovation comes from like some crazy person saying, what if it was different? And like, I look at it as, you know, we are going through a transformational moment. Like, the idea that our economy could go from being transparent to opaque. Like, we will wrestle with this for decades. And so it's easy for me to get up every day because it takes, it takes time.

• 2:26:22Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Any last thoughts? Like, is there anything else that you think people get wrong about you?

• 2:26:30Frances Haugen?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:31Rich Roll?

  You've done a million interviews. You've got this book out now.

• 2:26:34Frances Haugen?

  Interesting.

• 2:26:34Rich Roll?

  Um, obviously, you know,

• 2:26:37Frances Haugen?

  I was gonna end on that.

• 2:26:37Rich Roll?

  A lot of people are talking about the ideas that you're talking about, but they're also talking about you.

• 2:26:41Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Rich Roll?

  Is there anything that frustrates you around maybe some narratives that get out there?

• 2:26:47Frances Haugen?

  Um, I've really liked this conversation. Like, one of the things that's nice about podcasts is you get to have like such a larger depth. Like, you get to talk about such a broader set of things. Um, a lot of the press coverage in the United States has been, you know, in seven-minute or 15-minute chunks. And so we ask the same questions over and over again. Um, I think the thing,

• 2:27:09Frances Haugen?

  probably the thing that's most frustrating for me, um, in terms of like narratives is I, we have always, like, we've really, like, my nonprofits really struggle to fundraise because there's a perception that people have given us lots and lots of money.

• 2:27:23Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:27:24Frances Haugen?

  And, um, if people realized how little we had been given and like, I've had to pay like out of pocket for even basic staff for things, I think they would be really shocked.

• 2:27:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:27:34Frances Haugen?

  Because there's this perception that like,

• 2:27:36Rich Roll?

  Well, Pierre Omidyar is funding you. Yes.

• 2:27:39Frances Haugen?

  Uh, the, uh, so his, his nonprofit, Luminate, um, is, has never given me anything other than like logistical support. Oh, yeah, that was one of those conspiracy theories.

• 2:27:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:27:48Frances Haugen?

  That there was like the billionaire in the background.

• 2:27:51Rich Roll?

  For people that don't know, he's one of the PayPal guys.

• 2:27:53Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:54Rich Roll?

  Made a bunch of money and is a big philanthropist now.

• 2:27:57Frances Haugen?

  But one of the,

• 2:27:57Rich Roll?

  But his nonprofit gave you aid, but it wasn't like he had any

• 2:28:02Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Rich Roll?

  personal involvement.

• 2:28:04Frances Haugen?

  They paid me, paid, they paid, um, for plane tickets to Europe and, uh, like people to introduce me to like, um, politicians and stuff in, in Europe. But like, it's one of these things where it's like, you know, my salary is paid on public speaking. So like, if you want to invite me to a conference, that's always lovely because that currently is like the thing that pays for my assistant and things like that.

• 2:28:23Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:23Frances Haugen?

  Um, and so I think that's probably the thing that frustrates me the most because like,

• 2:28:28Rich Roll?

  Where people think if you have a book out, that you're a millionaire.

• 2:28:30Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If there's anything else where I haven't gotten asked it.

• 2:28:36Rich Roll?

  But you got that sweet crypto cash, right?

• 2:28:39Frances Haugen?

  I love that meme. I would say I was raised on Vanguard, you know, like Vanguard mutual funds. You should have a diversified portfolio. And I totally believe you should have like 5% to 10% in crypto. But that is not a life-changing amount of crypto.

• 2:28:55Rich Roll?

  But you moved to Puerto Rico. You're part of like the whole, you know, the bleeding edge of the crypto movement.

• 2:29:01Frances Haugen?

  Yeah. No, I, well, I lived in San Francisco during COVID and it was really cold and really lonely. Right? Like I, I talk about in the book, I had to relearn to walk and I still have very bad pain in my legs.

• 2:29:14Rich Roll?

  The neuropathy from the.

• 2:29:15Frances Haugen?

  Cause I, I used to be, it got bad enough that I was paralyzed beneath my knees. And I can, I can hike all day now. I can walk on my toes, but like every, whenever I'm cold and LA today is cold. I know you guys don't believe that, but you know, 70 is cold. In Puerto Rico, I can leave my AC off in my office and it just stays 85. And like that costs a thousand dollars a month in San Francisco.

• 2:29:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:29:40Frances Haugen?

  And so like I can't speak to any of the reasons why my other friends moved there. But like I moved there because like a bunch of people were like, oh, we're going to go on an adventure.

• 2:29:52Frances Haugen?

  And now I'm there.

• 2:29:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You've been there for a while too. You like it down there?

• 2:29:55Frances Haugen?

  I, I love it. Like in, in Puerto Rich, you can live on the beach. Like you can, you can have a condo on the beach where you open your windows and you hear the water. And like my husband and I, we go swimming four to five days a week in the, in the ocean. And we, we have this thing we call descending, descending bodies, bodies of water of descending size. Where we go in the ocean and at some point we get a little cold and we go to the pool at our condo. And it's like one or two degrees warmer. And then we have an inflatable hot tub, which sounds like a ludicrous object. But for $250, we got a Coleman hot tub on sale. And it only goes up to like 104, which turns out is.

• 2:30:37Rich Roll?

  Hot enough.

• 2:30:38Frances Haugen?

  Hot enough, right? But like, I don't know, like I, I can't imagine living anywhere else. Like we get to do that, you know, four days a week.

• 2:30:47Rich Roll?

  Good for you.

• 2:30:47Frances Haugen?

  And we could never afford to do that in like Los Angeles.

• 2:30:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:52Rich Roll?

  That's great.

• 2:30:53Frances Haugen?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:54Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you coming. Puerto Rich welcomes you. Yeah, I've been there. I like it there. Yeah. It's super nice. I get the appeal. Yeah. I get the appeal. It was great to talk to you. My pleasure. Thank you. I think that you're courageous and the example that you're setting is inspirational. Oh, thank you. And I think the work that you're doing is vitally important. So I appreciate you coming here to share. The book, The Power of One, is out everywhere, easy to find. We'll link it up in the show notes and all of that. And I'm at your service. My full. If there's anything I can ever do for you. My pleasure. Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's really amazing what you're doing and I'm here to support you. So appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you.

• 2:31:43Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment.

• 2:32:28Rich Roll?

  Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative Director Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake.

• 2:33:13Rich Roll?

  Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. [music]