The Motivations of Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen — With Her Lawyer Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is Frances Haguen's lawyer and a Harvard Law School professor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to address the various questions about Haugen's motivations, backers, and intent that have percolated since she came forward. We start by addressing whether the the leaked documents should be available to all and move into the conspiracies about her. A lively discussion follows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. The Facebook whistleblower has been making a lot of news. You might have heard of her, Frances Haugen. She is the source of an avalanche of news that we're seeing come across our feeds about Facebook based off of a cache of internal documents that she's released to a handful of news organizations. So what does this all mean? What's going on with the release strategy? Who is Frances? Who's backing her? Lots of questions around it. You're probably wondering a lot about what is the true nature of the source behind these leaks. Well, to discuss it, we have a great guest.

• 2:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  His name is Lawrence Lessig. We're gonna call him Larry in the interview. He is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, also former candidate for president. Remember your campaign very well, and he's acting as a lawyer for Frances Haugen. So he has great insight into what she's up to and what she's aiming for. Lots of questions that have been percolating, and I am super thrilled to get into them. And I'm very appreciative that he's decided to come on. Larry, welcome to the show.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I was gonna start, thanks for being here. Well, I was gonna start with your relationship with Frances, but I want to leave that for the second part of this conversation. Because I think the most pressing issue that a lot of people are wondering about right now is what's going on with this document release strategy? So just to catch people up, Frances brought essentially a laptop of information to the Wall Street Journal. If I'm right about that, they wrote a handful of stories that they labeled the Facebook files based off of the documents. They were able to redact a handful of them. Now they're in the possession of a consortium, small group of publications. I'm pretty sure they're entirely from North America and Europe. Thankfully, big technology is part of them, is part of this consortium, which I'm thrilled about.

• 3:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  But also raises some like serious questions about what's going on with the document rollout and why these documents aren't widely available to everyone. So Professor Larry, you've been deeply involved in this strategy. What, just give our listeners an idea of why Frances is taking this route? And when the public can expect to see these documents in full, if ever?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's really important you're being careful about how we understand what happened. And I apologize, I'm gonna be a little bit of a legal nerd and restate what you said to make it precise and accurate. Frances obviously had a bunch of Facebook, well, documents.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Materials which she turned over to the SEC and has released to Congress in a redacted form. And these are the documents that the Wall Street Journal has used to write their pieces. And then it is Congress, it was a congressional staffer in Congress who determined that they would be willing to make the documents that were turned over to Congress available to journalists. And that's when Frances's communication team, firm of Bryson Gillette, reached out to a couple journalists to say that this was what the Congress was willing to do. And they then formed this consortium. So it's important legally to recognize Frances

• 4:52Speaker 01

  has not handed the documents to the consortium. Frances handed the documents, redacted, to preserve the privacy of members in the Facebook community who are who are named in the documents to the to Congress. And it's Congress that's now making them available public to the consortium.

• 5:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  How does Congress get in touch with Bryson Gillette, which is run, I'm pretty sure, by a former Obama staffer? Yeah. So how does how does Congress settle on that firm? Or did Frances have a hand in that? And then as a follow up to that, how were the publications that were selected? How did that process go? Was that Congress's decision? Or was that Bryson Gillette's decision?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  So I don't think it was either decision. What I know, and, you know, I retained Bryson to Bryson Gillette as an attorney in my role representing strategy and communications with Frances. And they took the first steps. And, you know, I didn't, it's above my pay grade to be monitoring every step they took. But Congress at that point was eager to get the documents because they were going to be hearing her testimony. And in the context of getting the documents and discussing the testimony, the suggestion was raised, and I frankly don't know who raised it, that that it should be more broadly available.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And I think all of us, I mean, your piece about How it should be available to everybody. I think all of us have a desire that this information be as broadly disseminated as possible. I think that intuition is what led people on Capitol Hill to think, well, how could we do it in an effective way? What I think is useful about this is to compare it to, you know, other whistleblower like events. I mean, you know, you could think about the simplest way to be a whistleblower, which would be to dump everything into WikiLeaks.

• 6:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Which would make every-

• 6:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Sorry?

• 6:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not in favor of that?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's hard to interpret a lot of these documents. It's hard to make sense of them and put them in context and know what they mean. And obviously, that's what Edward Snowden recognized when Edward Snowden did his release, and he picked a relatively small number of journalists to take the documents and to digest them and make them available in that form. And he was very careful to make sure he protected the innocent in that sense, so that, you know, people who might have been outed were not. And I think that was a very important strategy. This feels to me like the next step in the evolution of figuring out how best to do this. Because I think with these documents too, at least in the initial round, there needs to be a filter

• 7:41Speaker 01

  of careful journalists, people who are looking at them and studying them and comparing them and figuring out exactly what is meant. And, you know, they're not all self-interpreting. Some of them are hard to understand. When was this? And what does this exactly say? And I think the idea of developing the consortium and making it available, it wasn't my idea, but I think it's a great idea. And I think, and I think it's on the way to achieving what all of us want, which is full public transparency about what in fact is going on in this extremely important company.

• 8:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so let's just pause on the consortium for a minute. Can you shed any light into how it was developed and who's making the decisions of who to let in? Because I'll just give you a sense. I mean, I obviously have advocated for these documents to be made publicly available to everyone. And, you know, of course, after careful redaction to make sure that privacy is- You know, people's privacy is retained. But the the reason why I'm asking about the makeup here is because a lot of these documents apply to countries, populations outside of the US, outside of Europe. There was an Atlantic story that talked about how like 90% of this stuff is about people outside the United States. Yet this consortium is consisting entirely publications in the US. In Europe, apparently, there's no Spanish speaking publications out there.

• 8:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, you know, I'd be, I guess I'd be more in favor of the idea that, or I'd be more open to your argument that this is the exact right way to go about things, you know, if we had more global representation. So, yeah, so maybe you can shed light on that. Who's making the decisions about who to let in? And, you know, why not no one outside of North America and Europe? Because I'll tell you what my inbox looks like today. It's, you know, editors in chief from publications everywhere, from Italy to Russia. I just got another one from from another country, you know, of, you know, lots of publications that are interested in reviewing these documents and interpreting what they mean for their populations.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't think there's any disagreement that it needs to be made available in consortia around the world. And, you know, part of what happened in this rollout was the product of, you know, having to make decisions fast and moving as quickly as you could in the context of, you know, an exploding story. The initial consortium that was put together was actually a European consortium because there was some tension. The Wall Street Journal had an exclusive on a bunch of these documents that they were rolling out slowly after an initial, you know, dump of five or six articles. And the concern was, to be fair to the Wall Street Journal, since they had done the heavy

• 10:19Speaker 01

  lifting of putting this together initially and making it available. And then, you know, there was a certain point, I know, when the, when people on the, in the, in the team said, you know, we can't preserve. The Wall Street Journal forever in this exclusive English language space. So that's what opened up the American consortium. And I know that there's conversations about how to expand it even further. So there's never been a moment where the decision was made to restrict.

• 10:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  It's only been a difficult process to figure out how best to deploy as broadly, you know, step forward as we can. And, you know, you know, you're a journalist. You know that there's a complexity with even something like a consortium because, you know, journalists are spending a lot of time to understand this. And I think they feel, and I think rightfully so, they need some opportunity to recoup that investment, not through money, but at least for the chance to say something intelligent. You know, if they only had 30 seconds, what they would say wouldn't be useful. What they need is time to think and reflect and write things that are valuable and publish them and have a sense that they're not going to be scooped, you know, from half the story being released too early.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  So it's a complicated process and I think we're all committed to exactly what you identified as, well, your article is about making it available to the public. I agree with that too. But what you've just identified right now is let's expand this as broadly as we can around the world because the critical fact is the number you said. 90% of Facebook's audience is not from the United States.

• 11:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And the terrifying reality for the rest of the world is 90% of Facebook's safety budget is in the United States. So Facebook is making Facebook as safe as it can for the United States and it's still not very good. But for the rest of the world, it can be literally a disaster.

• 12:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I agree with you. And in fact, the other country, I feel like a fool for forgetting it. It was India. I got a message right before I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to talk and someone, a friend in India said, please ask him about Facebook's largest user base market, AKA India. I'd like to know more about what all these disclosures mean for the global south, quote unquote, given that they aren't aimed at us. My guess is they're aimed at US lawmakers. It hasn't even sparked a conversation here.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, this is part of the problem of like interpreting what's happening as if it's a plan driven, written, you know, 15 years ago, we were thinking through every step. This is, you're exactly, you're exactly right. We've got to get, and I think the plan is to get these documents in every place around the world where Facebook is affecting them, so that those governments can make the same judgments that EU is making, that Britain, when they had Francis yesterday testifying, will be making. And the United States, for all of our pathology in Congress, is at least in this respect, focused in a common way, both left and right, on the problems that this platform is creating for democracy and for our society, and trying to think about whether they can do something about

• 13:21Speaker 01

  it. So we're not disagreeing at all about the objective. It's just a hard thing to execute, given the complexity of the egos involved in, you know, the, the world of great journalists.

• 13:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah, there are plenty of those. And I'll just like state for the record, my perspective in, in having these, in the importance of having these documents made widely, widely available to the public. I definitely see your point, like there is a concern, you know, in terms of interpretation. But I do think we sort of get into trouble when we have like a class of gatekeepers and elite that sort of say, only we can, you know, view these and interpret them.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alex, let's be clear. I, I completely agree with that. I don't think there are gatekeepers. There's just release that gives people a chance to digest. And my objective, my personal objective, I'm not speaking for Francis or for the consortium or anything, but my personal objective is that everybody be able to read them. And the reason I think everybody should read them, it's kind of bizarre, but I think if you read them, you actually see how great a company Facebook is. I mean, what's striking about this is to see the integrity and the good faith of the engineers inside that company, trying to work out what makes sense, like what works, and the frustration they feel. As they complain about the fact that their systems are being interfered with by the politico types who reach down and

• 14:43Speaker 01

  overrule their decisions for political reasons. And, and they're like, look, we just let us apply our rules. Let us do our job. And I think when you see that, you know, it makes it easier to understand the complexity of a complaint like that. It's not filled with evil people. It's not filled with people trying to destroy American democracy. Putin doesn't control that company, but it's a company that's a mix between people doing as much as they can to make the platform safe and leadership who's focused on primarily, how do we increase the, uh, the, the commit, the commitment that the audience gives to that so that they can make more money?

• 15:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And look, I've been covering Facebook for the better part of a decade. I've been into the offices in Menlo Park, you know, countless times, sat with Zuckerberg. I haven't understood the company.

• 15:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, I, well, let me just put it this way. My understanding of the company is far deeper now after reading these documents and I had heard the conversations. But I do think that you're right. When you see the, um, the amount of research this company does into each and every little decision that we sit and pontificate about, but there's data behind it. It's totally astonishing. And, you know, we'll get to what Francis is trying to accomplish here in a minute, but I think purely that for the public's sake to have access to these documents and be able to see this, you know, I'm already on, on team Francis, you know, being, but being able to, to read through these because I know, I know my journalism is going to improve and my understanding of the

• 16:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  company is going to be able to, you know, be more, more complete. And, uh, you know, I hope people who get a chance to view these things, and I hope everyone gets a chance to view them, but are able to like, look at them with, you know, with an open mind and, and be able to take a look at the machinations of the company and learn from that.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yes, we're, we're in agreement.

• 16:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I, now let's talk a little bit, you know, people, there, there've been articles, we need to understand Francis and her political motivations and who's backing her. It makes it sound a little bit more nefarious than I think.

• 16:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's actually going on, but it's good to address and you're the perfect person to be here to talk about it. So let's start with your relationship with her. You are a yeah, I mean, you're you ran for president as Democrat. How do you, you know, former presidential candidate, you know, obviously someone, you know, aligned with the party, you know, come into contact with Francis. Did you like reach out when you saw the Journal story? Did she reach out to you? I'm going to say that the concern that people have, and I don't, you know, believe this, but I feel like it's important to bring up, is that people are saying she's an instrument of Democratic Party and the association is something people question. My job is to put the question to you.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Well, of all the things I've done, I think the least significant is I'm trying to become a candidate for president.

• 17:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I knew you would say that. I liked your podcast video. It was fun.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  I believe in the cause and I would do it again, just to make that issue central to the Democratic Party. But the other part of that is the Democratic Party doesn't like me. They they kind of hate me for what I do.

• 17:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. You ran on like campaign finance reform or?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I can't run on anti-corruption platform. Like, we got to fix the democracy. Fix Democracy First was my slogan.

• 18:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no wonder they didn't like you.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm no tool of the Democratic Party. But I think that, you know, I came to know Francis because of the work that I've been doing about, you know, technology policy since the 1990s. I mean, you know, I've been writing and thinking about this forever. And one of her close friends who knew my work asked if I would talk to her at a at a point sometime in August, when, you know, she was, this was all going to happen. And I, of course, at that point, knew nothing about what was happening. But she, at that point, had been working with whistleblowers aid, which is, you know, a public is a charity, a nonprofit, which helps whistleblowers. So pro bono, they've been

• 18:47Speaker 01

  giving her legal advice about the strategy to protect herself, given what she was doing, both releasing documents and also going up against one of the most powerful companies in the history of humanity. So they had been advising on that strategy. And she was asking me about the bigger questions of, you know, the legal strategy, what other issues she was going to face, what possible steps she could take. And that's, that's the scope of what I was originally talking to her about. And it was, it was also part of what I would do to think about what support she would need. And so I was in the position of just deciding like, what kind of firm would make sense here? And I'd known Bill Burton forever.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  And I knew him, you know, the thing that stands out for me was not that he worked for Obama, but that he had been in a wide range of political contexts. It seemed to me he was the perfect person to make calls here. And I reached out to him. So at this stage, there's no Democratic Party that has anything to do with this, except when I reach out to Bill and I say, would you be willing to step in? And I hired Bill, my firm, I mean, I'm a sole practitioner. I'm doing my work for Francis Probono, but I hired Bill's firm. And that's when Bill became involved and his colleague Emily Schwartz became involved to begin to give her advice about the strategy. Because, you know, obviously on the other side was a trillion dollar company

• 20:16Speaker 01

  that was going to be spending endless amounts of money.

• 20:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Trying to develop the other side of the argument. So we were trying to do as much as we can, we could. And up to the moment that she announced, came out public, she had no support from anybody except the pro bono support she was getting from me and from whistleblower aid. After she came out and testified after 60 Minutes and then her decision to testify, then other people decided that they were going to step up and try to help her to make sure that she could tell her story and that this information could be spread broadly without the fear of, you know, criminal penalties or whatever else might be on the table. And that's when Pierre Midiar's foundation stepped in. And I hope others do too. I mean, because, you know, for the same reason you said these documents should be out there

• 21:05Speaker 01

  and read by everybody. I think many people, even people inside Silicon Valley who support Facebook, ought to be keen that this event helps us reflect in an informed way about technology and helps us, you know, helped guide us about what kind of policy changes we should make. So that's the story of how I was involved and what I've been doing. And it's funny to watch, to read all these conspiracy theory things.

• 21:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's why we're here to talk about them. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Right, because you know, you know, maybe I don't even know about the conspiracy. Maybe the conspiracy is so deep that it's controlling me without me even being aware of it, but I don't feel like that's likely.

• 21:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so I guess, do you, just from an optics standpoint, do you worry that, you know, yes, I know Bill isn't, Bill Burton isn't involved with the Obama administration now, and you know, you're apparently on the outs with Democratic Party, but do you worry that people will look at this and, and say that this is, you know, we, we address that it's, you know, your perspective that it's not, but do you worry about the, this potentially, the Obama Association, potentially, and, and the fact that Richard Blumenthal set up a hearing right away, right after the 60 Minutes interview, do, do you worry this could potentially take away from what Francis is trying to do by, you know, we live in a pretty polarized

• 22:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  time, you would, you agree, so by taking this and turning it polarized, polarized, because what I'm seeing from, you know, one segment of the people that are viewing this, is that they say that it is a operation to censor more on social media, I don't believe that what it, that's what it is, but I'm curious if you think that it does, you know, potentially open it up to that criticism.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Well, I completely agree with you that we're in a moment where it's hard to see anything, seeing it in left and right terms.

• 22:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think one striking thing about the hearings is that both majority and minority leaders, Marsha Blackburn too, was like keen to have her on as quickly as possible, so there at least, we started in a nonpartisan way around these issues. But, you know, the striking thing that Francis taught me from the very beginning of her, my relationship in this, with her in this, in this matter, is that what's important to her is not her, she's not running for president, she's not running to be senator, she's not running to be czar of technology, she's trying to make the documents understandable to the world, and what she wants is the documents to speak for themselves, and I think part of, I know part of our thinking in like getting the consortium going and getting hundreds

• 23:38Speaker 01

  of journalists to be writing about this, was to shift the attention beyond her to the substance, and let the documents speak for themselves, and let the substance be the debate. Rather than imagining that we're trying to choreograph, you know, this really phenom. She's a phenom, right? It's astonishing how good she is at what she does. But, but, you know, the objective here is not to turn her into a figure, a media figure, or like a, uh, somebody who's supposed to be the, um, oracle of all wisdom about everything to do with the internet. The, the, the objective here is to enable the information to be out there in a way that helps the public and governments on the left and the right and, uh, north and the south, think about what the right policy response to this problem should be.

• 24:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And, and that's why I, you know, started that question, which with the assertion that I don't agree, agree that's what this is because, you know, I even found in the document stuff that doesn't really go along with what Francis believes, but it was there. So, uh, so that was interesting. The other thing that people say, and, and, you know, I guess let's end this segment on this, uh, is that she's, I mean, it's kind of wild, but people have said she's like a tool of the company. Like, I mean, we're going through the conspiracy theories, so let's just, you know, touch them all because you're the person to ask about them, right? And that, you know, a lot of, she believes Facebook is good and a lot of the policies that she wants to see are the policies the company wants to see.

• 25:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's including the agency, an agency to overlook social media staffed by former social media folks, uh, which people say would just empower Facebook to be even stronger. Uh, so, so what's your response to that?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I can't believe it. Um, you know, I, I get, I get why people think this way. I mean, I thought the most hilarious conspiracy was that she was, you know, from intelligence. You know, she was CIA because she was so good. You know, and I agree, she is so good at what she's doing. Um, looks like she'd been training for this for the last 20 years. But, but, you know, what I know is that when this was unravel, uh, uh, you know, unraveling, like in the sense of like the story was opening up and we were, uh, it was going to come out. This was not somebody who was confident, and none of us are confident, that the company is happy and going to go along and pat her on the back for this, to the contrary.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Like, the company has been pretty clear about, you know, if there's criminal actions to be pursued, they should be pursued.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  It's pretty clear that the data that's coming out, they don't agree, is a fair representation of the facts. So, so I think those conspiracies would be more plausible if the company were responding differently, but I just, you know, having been up close and watching a sausage being made, I just can't believe it's anything like that, except, you know, a woman who decided she had to do something to help us understand what we didn't understand. I mean, many people have been predicting what her documents demonstrated. Renee DeResta at Stanford had been talking about the rabbit hole effects, you know, for five years. But now we have the data. And, and, you know, I think what we had in Frances was somebody whose moral compass

• 26:53Speaker 01

  was clear enough that she realized she had to sacrifice whatever career she might have in Silicon Valley, which of course is a very attractive career to many tech wizards, in order to help us understand the political threat that we faced better.

• 27:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  One, yeah, one follow up on that. Don't you think that she's going to be in a better place now than she was, you know, working as an integrity staffer? I mean, she's, like you mentioned, she's a phenom now, and she'll probably have like a very successful career writing books and giving speeches, don't you think?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  If you add up all the whistleblowers and you do the average of like what the net effect of whistleblowing is for them, it is wildly bad. It is terrible. So, you know, I agree, she's in a very good position because she's done her job so effectively. And I think people are persuaded by her integrity and by her good faith. But you know, before any of this happened, if you had been, I had, I wasn't advising her at that point, but if some, if she had said to me, so what, what do you think my chances are? I'd say, look at every other whistleblower. Where's Edward Snowden right now? What happened to Chelsea Manning? Um, you know, uh, and any number of these whistleblowers whose careers are destroyed and they basically fall into oblivion. And, you know, what are, what are

• 28:06Speaker 01

  they going to do? They don't do what they're doing because they're trying to get a book contract. They're do what they're doing because they think what they're doing is right. And that's what motivated her. Uh, and, um, I think she's right about that. And I think, uh, fortunately for her, her message is resonating around the world in a way that, um, I think will have some good effect.

• 28:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Larry Lessing is here with us on the Big Technology Podcast. We are going to take a quick break and come back and talk a little bit about Francis's funding. You mentioned that in the first part, and then her political goals. So, uh, we will be back right after this here on the Big Technology Podcast. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended

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• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back on the Big Technology Podcast with Larry Lessig. He is a professor at Harvard Law School, also the lawyer for Frances Haugen, advising her on her whistleblowing activities after she's leaked a ton of documents from Facebook. We talked in the first half about funding. Larry, you mentioned that you encourage other people to come and help fund this. The concerns that have been brought up in some places, and by the way, first of all, I appreciate you rolling with all this stuff. I think it's important to ask these questions because we want to really attack all the concerns that folks have had, and I appreciate your responding to them, help us get a better

• 30:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  picture of what's going on here. So, you know, speaking of those concerns, you know, people have talked about the Pierre Omidyar funding. You mentioned you want to see other funders come on board. Is there a concern that people with, people will try to push a political agenda by funding this in one way or the other? Like, I don't know if the Chinese government came, you know, with a truck of money. You know, do you think that's a good thing to take?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's, let's be clear, nobody's running a GoFundMe campaign.

• 31:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, they are. Whistleblower aid is.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  I mean, whistleblower aid is to fund whistleblower aid, but I mean, what I'm saying is for Frances Haugen.

• 31:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Frances, okay.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I'm not talking about paying Frances Haugen.

• 31:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  You know, money is being raised for the purpose, for example, of buying plane tickets and hotels as she's traveling to, you know, Europe to speak to the EU Commission and into Britain to speak to the parliament. So, you know, that's, you know, again, to emphasize the point we talked about before the break, nobody's into this to make money from it. And certainly, the funding that I'm talking about is not the funding to pay her off. It's just to make it possible to tell, to protect the story enough so that it gets out there broadly enough so journalists have access to it. I agree with you that understanding funding is a critical part. Of understanding the integrity of the message you're hearing.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I spent six years running a ethics center at Harvard, the Safer Center for Ethics, focused on what we called institutional corruption, which is not illegal corruption, but legal corruption. The way in which academics, doctors, politicians, everybody gets inside of relationships that are dependent on corrupting influences, primarily influences of money. And so one of the striking things, for example, about academics is if you go around to academics who are studying the internet and you ask, so where have you gotten your money? An extraordinary number have gotten their money from the very people they're supposed to be writing about, right? Facebook or Google.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  And I think that's a deeply troubling reality of modern life. And so I completely support your questions, Alex, about what exactly is behind this. What I've seen is that there's not been a lot of money. You know, whistleblower aid is an incredible shop. I mean, the lawyers in there are working 24/7. But they're not big and they're not wealthy and it's hard to keep the lights on. Especially the numbers, the money to, for example, redact these documents is not cheap. You've got to pay not lawyers who are charging $200 an hour, but people who are qualified enough to make the judgments about what have to be redacted. So it's all very expensive. And then, you know, I'm not in here for the money.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  And, you know, obviously professional firms like Bryson Gillette is doing their job and they're going to be compensated for their job. But this has not been a project where money has been slushes of money that have been pushed around to drive the agenda one way or the other. Now, is she pushing a political agenda? Well, I think the agenda she's pushing is a better understanding of the truth about Facebook, because there has been a political agenda on the other side. We've seen again and again, Mark Zuckerberg on down, telling a story about that company that turns out not to be correct. That the dynamics of what's going on inside that company among good lawyers,

• 33:57Speaker 01

  among engineers acting in good faith is a story of an extraordinary struggle. Time and again, the trade off between safety and profits and time and again, the choice being made in favor of profits over safety to the great frustration of many of those engineers. That story needs to be told and that is that an agenda? I don't know. It's like it's the agenda to make more understandable a reality that is affecting all of us.

• 34:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I definitely not suggesting that this was like a way to get rich quick scheme. But yeah, I do think it's important to talk about the motivations of the funders. And the point that you just brought up about the academics, I mean, you talk about the third party organizations that are out there that, you know, look legit. There's like a thousand of them and they fight every anti-big tech, every anti-Facebook initiative, well, not even anti-reform, every reform initiative. And they're all funded by these companies. And I was speaking to, you know, a source close to the antitrust initiative in Congress. And there was boasting about how they were going to come after, you know, Representative David Cicilline.

• 35:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, then they turned on all the agencies once some of this antitrust stuff got going. So, yeah, but the money is, is, you know, you follow the money. I guess this has been your thing for a while, right? So, and you find pretty wild stuff. So is there anybody that this campaign would turn money down from? Like, again, like I'll just bring up the China example of China.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  We haven't had that conversation because, you know, we haven't had a problem of like endless money coming in. But I'm sure there would be. I'm sure there would be. I mean, I certainly would recommend. But because, you know, the sensitivity that you're revealing is a valid one. It's an important one. And we ought, now, I think Pierre Amidyar, nobody's embarrassed about taking money from Pierre Amidyar.

• 35:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And I have incredible respect for his integrity and his extraordinary, you know, what he did, what he built. But But I think the question is an important one. Let's keep on asking it and ask it on all sides. You know, it's not just Francis, right? But you know, people are going to be supporting Facebook. Why are they supporting Facebook? What is going on behind that? And let's keep that question on front and center to make sure that we have a clear sense of who's responsible to whom.

• 36:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And if people want to hear the question on the other side, I recommend them going back in this podcast and listening to the episode with Adam Kovakovic. That that might be of interest. I want to touch on the Bitcoin stuff. It came up in Ben Smith's column. Francis apparently is self-funding this in some way with Bitcoin winnings and living in Puerto Rico with her crypto friends.

• 36:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  People, I have to ask, people have brought up the fact that like Puerto Rico is kind of like a tax shelter for people who've like made big money on capital gains. How do you feel about that? Is Francis, you know, excited about it? I mean, we talk about the big tech companies paying, I don't know, paying a little bit of taxes on the money they make, you know, is this even a valid question? I mean, it's definitely a valid question. What do you think about it?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Well, remember, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It's a poorly treated territory of the United States. It's not been attributed. It's not been given equal rights. Citizens from Puerto Rico are not given equal rights. So we owe Puerto Rico a lot. And of course, the United States government has taken steps to try to encourage entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico. And I think that's a great thing. And if an American citizen wants to go live in a part of America called Puerto Rico and do their work, I'm all for it. You know, they could go to South Dakota and evade all sorts of regulations. I mean, there's an extraordinary ability to hide your assets in South Dakota, like it's the great laundering location of America today.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Does are people troubled by the fact that you go to South Dakota? I mean, it's part of the United States. So I, you know, I don't have not never talked to Francis about the tax implications. I'm sure that there are investments incentives for entrepreneurs in.

• 38:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's like why all the crypto people are there.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, good. I'm glad they're there rather than the Grand Caymans or something like that. You know, it's part of the United States. Let's, let's keep it here.

• 38:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so we've touched on funding. Let's talk again about the political goals. In particular, are there any specific political outcomes that Frances would like to see? Does she have a wish list here? Or is it something that, like you mentioned, maybe the best way to go about this is to turn the documents over to civil society and have them come up with the solutions?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think the main goal Frances has, as she said, is that the platform becomes safer. And how that's brought about is complicated by the dysfunction of governments around the world. So we have dreams about what the United States government might do, but we have a recognition that the United States government is wildly crippled in its capacity to legislate. And the chances of real legislation happening anytime soon, I think, are scary to contemplate. But there's a lot that could be done before legislation. Center for Million Technology has launched a campaign to try to get, for example, Apple

• 39:30Speaker 01

  to insist that Facebook implement changes to make it so that the platform is not so poisonously viral. And one really interesting and important bit of information in the Facebook files is the research about reshares on Facebook. And so what this basically shows is that if you have something that's been reshared twice, it's four times more likely to be misinformation. And as the reshares go up, that probability goes up to almost 10 times more likely to be information. And the proposal in response to that is to say, let's just limit reshares to two. Now, that doesn't mean that once it's been shared twice, it can't be shared again.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  It just means that you've got to copy the URL and paste it into your message and send it on your own. And so here's a very simple, technical way that's completely content neutral. It's not looking at conservative reshares versus liberal reshares. It's just any reshare and saying that, let's put a speed limit, almost, on the platform. Slow it down so humans can catch up. And that would deal with a huge amount of the misinformation. And my point is that, and I think what CHT is suggesting is that actually companies could begin to insist on that tomorrow. You know, if Tim Cook said tomorrow that Facebook won't be on the platform unless it takes steps against these poisonously viral aspects of their platform, that would change pretty quickly.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Now, other governments are actually capable of governing. I think Britain is close to being able to pass legislation here. And I think the Europeans as well are past, are of the position of passing legislation. I've not studied the bills that are being considered, so I don't want to give any support or opposition to them, but I'm just saying that they are, they have functioning governments in the way that I don't think we have a functioning government. And, and so I think that we could see legislation in Europe, but I think we could see, you know, not Facebook regulating itself. We tried that. Turns out that doesn't, that doesn't work. But we could see other companies stepping up and trying to create a standard of safety so that, so that we see Facebook actually changing their behavior.

• 41:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm so glad you bring up the reshare. This is something I've been standing on the table about for years now. And I spoke with the guy who built the retweet, or who helped lead the project team that built the retweet in Twitter, and he said it was like handing, I think his words were, it was like handing a machine gun to four-year-olds. And, and the same thing is, is the situation with Facebook where when you start to hit that share button, it's geared entirely towards emotion and not thoughtfulness. And it's, you know, this is another one of those things where we've known it for a while, but to see the documents is good. Actually, I should follow up with you after this because I'd like to find the document name and, and, you know, look into writing something about this because that's

• 42:21Speaker 01

  You should, you should. It's really important and emphasizes an important difference that I think lawyers are sometimes like slow to grab. I mean, not because lawyers are slow, but because we like to think of things in traditional ways. You know, everybody looks at this debate about how do we deal with Facebook and thinks this is a debate about censoring, even, you know. Glenn Greenwald is like obsessed with the idea that anything against Facebook would be about censoring speech. But you know, the problem with Facebook is not that there are particularly bad messages on Facebook. The problem with Facebook is not the speech, it's the amplification. It's the manipulation engine that amplifies some speech and suppresses other speech.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  And of course, they're not amplifying speech on the basis of anything anybody would recognize as a good reason to amplify speech. They're not amplifying liberal speech or conservative speech, not amplifying well-thought-out arguments. They're amplifying the things that they know will trigger more engagement. And what is that? It's anger, it's emotion, it's ignorance, it's falsehood. And that dynamic of amplifying the worst of us is the essence of the problem. And with some people, like with kids, when you look at the stories about how teens are fed even more body dysphoric images when they're identified as body dysphoric, because

• 43:44Speaker 01

  that just drives them to a focus even more, at a certain point, you're like, well, you know, this is a platform which is doing harm for those people. And one thing Frances said that I think is really brilliant in her testimony in Britain was to say, you know, for many years, drug companies in the United States, you know, in the 19th century, would make drugs, and then governments would have to come along and prove that the drugs were harmful. And Frances said, then at a certain stage, the frame was reversed, and drug companies had to prove their product was safe before they could bring it to the market. And, you know, for some of these contexts, you know, like algorithms with children, maybe

• 44:28Speaker 01

  we ought to start thinking about a regime where you got to demonstrate safety before you can deploy an algorithm, a manipulation machine for children. Especially when we see the consequences of this unregulated dynamic are so tragic for so many.

• 44:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Last question in this segment, I don't want to let you off the hook with this Apple idea without asking you a question about it. Apple's a pretty serious competitor to Facebook. And actually, from my understanding, you know, wants to see it go away.

• 45:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Aren't you a little uncomfortable with the fact that you know the Senate for Human Technology is asking you know essentially for an anti-competitive move here relying on a on a you know sort of unchecked you call it a monopoly or a member of a duopoly in terms of operating systems you know that could potentially you know kneecap Facebook now we can talk all about the share button all day long but this is again a power question so I'm wondering what you feel about that.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I think all of us wish we were in the first best world where we had a well-functioning government and if we had a well-functioning government I'm sure we would have a very different face on Silicon Valley you know I for a brief time a nanosecond was a special master in the Microsoft case the Microsoft case was the last time we had an antitrust enforcement action against Silicon Valley company I mean you know technology companies that was more than 20 years ago and so I completely agree with you that we should be we should first thing we should be looking for is the government to do the right thing but if we realize the government's not going to do the right thing in you know the next

• 46:12Speaker 01

  six months the next year whatever and we realize there's extraordinary risk created by this platform right now then what should we do and I have no problem hesitation saying that we should do whatever we can and if that means saying to fit to to Apple like you're trying to be the safety company you're trying to demonstrate safety I mean I've written skeptical pieces about Apple and what they're doing and you know they're all businesses they're all in it ultimately to figure out what the right way to make money is so I'm not praising Apple because it's Apple but I'm saying they have an extraordinary opportunity to leverage their brand around safety in a way that could actually help

• 46:53Speaker 01

  make the internet platform safer and why not why not do whatever we can to make it so that we don't lead into the next election cycle with a engine a manipulation engine that is just focused exclusively on how to turn us into crazy people because we've seen the consequence of that and it's a it's not it's not pretty.

• 47:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would say we're very sane. No, I'm just kidding. All right. After the break, I want to, there are a few more issues I want to talk to you about, so let's do that. We have like another 10 minutes or so. So we're here with Larry Lessig and we're talking about Frances Haugen and the Facebook files, the Facebook papers, depends on your persuasion on that front. We'll be back right after this.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side, but Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 48:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one final segment on the Big Technology Podcast with Larry Lessig. He's a professor at Harvard Law School, an advisor and lawyer for Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, graciously here to talk to us about all the issues. Speaking of the issues, we just had Farhad Manjoo on. He is an opinion columnist for The Times, and he describes what's happening around the Instagram stuff in particular, the way that it impacts teens, as something of a moral panic. And basically says every time there's been a new technology, comic books, television, people have said, oh, it's ruining the kids. Why is this time different, in your opinion?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  January 6th.

• 48:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Say more about that.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Look, we live at a time when half of a part of a political party, the Republican Party, believes something which we know is completely false.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Half the Republican Party believes the election was stolen. More than half the Republican Party believes there's clear evidence that the election was stolen. We know that's not true. We just know that's not true. We should pause and ask, how is it the infrastructure of the media? And you know, Facebook isn't the media. There's lots more. But how is it we have an infrastructure that can lead to this fundamental misunderstanding about something so incredibly important in the world? And I think a big part of it is the ad-driven character of media generally. You know, if you look at, in my book, They Don't Represent Us, which came out in 2019, before all of this, but, but there's a section where I describe what I think of as the scariest

• 49:50Speaker 01

  graph in American politics, which is a graph that marks the ideological content of the three broadcast cable networks, Fox and MSNBC and CNN. And in 2000, the ideological content is basically the same. But from the period 2000 to 2010, you see a radical divergence as Fox becomes extremely conservative, MSNBC becomes liberal, and CNN is trying to bounce between them. And that's because the business model of driving to a really engaged base so that they could better sell ads on their network produces this is the sensible result. The politics of hate pays. It pays on cable television. It pays on the platform of the internet.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  And I don't think it's moral panic to ask, what do we do when the infrastructure of democracy is being driven by a machine that cares only about how to turn us into people who hate our neighbors? I think that is a really important question. Like, there was a, there was a panic around comic books in the 1950s. I don't remember anybody storming the Capitol on the belief that, you know, Superman was being kept in the basement of the Capitol someplace. I just don't think that happened. And so the fact that there were panics before doesn't make everything that's happening now just as insignificant.

• 51:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh man, I have so many questions I want to ask you about that. So first of all, well, let's just go to the obvious question as a follow-up. Why are we focused on Facebook and not the cable networks if you, if you diagnosed that as the issue?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  I think we should be focused on both. I mean, you know, my colleague Yochai Bankler, after 2016, wrote a book about whether it was Facebook that gave us the election of Donald Trump or the cable networks and said, you know, I don't think it's Facebook. I don't think it's the Internet. I think it's the cable networks. And we ought to be focusing on the loss of journalistic standards by these cable, by that cable network in particular. I think we need to be talking about all of them together. But the fact that this is the one that's now, has our attention, given our limited attention as a public, is no reason to pretend that it's not a significant issue. It's an extremely significant issue. It's just one part of an even bigger issue and an even bigger threat.

• 51:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, that's really interesting. So that's, it's what's in front of us right now that's driving this. And then the part of the moral panic that Fard was talking about, in particular, looked at the Instagram story about its issues with teen mental health. His, and that's what he was talking about in terms of the moral panic. The other stuff, we didn't really touch on, neither did his column. But essentially, yeah, that's been his idea. And also, he said that, that this was all self-reported data, which is notoriously unreliable. Actually, I think if you look into it, some of it wasn't, you know, as terrible as people made it out to be. For instance, like, the numbers were big, but it was, you know, drawn from people who were already having a bad experience.

• 52:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, maybe a third of them said Instagram made them feel worse, two-thirds said it made them feel better. What's the baseline there? So, so, yeah, can you address that one in particular?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Well, look, I think that Haugen, the Facebook files, which Francis has released, should trigger a bunch of other releases, too. Because I think it's a fair question, whether we have the full picture, and how do we analyze all the data once we do have the full picture? In lawyer speak, though, I think the prima facie case has been made. I think there's enough data out there to say there's something here to worry about. You know, it's not to condemn, but to worry about. The fact that two-thirds of people say they like the platform, when one-third say they don't, is no justification for the platform. Look, 90% of people don't get cancer from cigarettes. That's not an endorsement of cigarettes.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  So, so I think that the challenge in understanding the criticism is to recognize the precision of the criticism. And the precision is, when there are design choices that could make the platform safer... But less profitable or more profitable and less safe. The choice has been to follow profit rather than safety. It's that choice that is the criticism. It's not saying that overall, we should dump something because it's terrible for kids. Now, you know, I'm somebody who has kids. My youngest is 12, my oldest is 18. I think I'm in, my kids are in the, in the generation where it's impossible not to believe that these platforms are having a profound effect on their lives.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  And as a parent, it's extremely frustrating to, to try to think about the constant fight you've got to make to, to reclaim some order and some space for your kids. So, you know, from my perspective, it's hard not to believe that there's an effect here. But I think it's right to say, as far as I'm saying, that we, that we need to run this through the same kind of scientific evaluations that, you know, the claims about cancer and cigarettes run through. Let's run it all through that. The difference is with cigarettes, we didn't depend upon the tobacco companies to give us the data to evaluate whether cigarettes produce cancer. We could do that on our own. We don't have the data to know whether Instagram is causing kids to commit suicide.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  We don't have that data because they consider it their secret. Well, Francis has given us an opening into that. Let's get more and let's let the academics, those not paid by Facebook or Instagram at least, to evaluate it and decide what in fact the truth is.

• 55:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you might have to look pretty far and wide to get to those academics, but I'm confident we can get there. You talk about precision. So one thing that people have talked about sort of in vogue discussion has been, you know, just remove the algorithm, remove the newsfeed algorithm, give us like the reverse chronological feed that's not sorted by anything Facebook would want us to see and, you know, let people do the work themselves and we'll be living in a better society. Well, one of the documents I saw this week and wrote about in Big Technology was that Facebook did do that experiment. And here's what they found. They found that, that integrity issues spiked. They found that ad views spiked because people were scrolling through the feed, you know,

• 55:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  far more than they were beforehand, just trying to find something interesting. They found that content from groups, which we know of all sorts of problems, ended up in the newsfeed before a lot of other stuff. And, uh, yeah, and, um, they found that people hid posts 50% more, meaning they just didn't want to see them. So I would love to hear your perspective on this algorithm question. Is it just a matter of removing the algorithm? Or, or, you know, is that too simple of a solution? And a nice soundbite, but not a real, you know, way for us to get past some of the issues we see on Facebook?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  It's a great way to frame it. Is it too simple? Yes.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Because the algorithm problem is really complicated. And I don't think there's a silver bullet here. And I don't think that, you know, what Frances has tried to do is to sort of suggest that she knows the answer to all of these problems. What we're trying to do, what she's trying to do is to make it clear that there are problems that we've got to find a better way to address. And what drives these problems at their core is a business model, not just with Facebook, but TikTok and every one of these platforms. It's focused on grabbing as much of our attention as they possibly can. That's, that's, that's what pays, that keeps the lights on, right? And, and as long as that's the business model and surveillance capitalism is the mechanism, we're going to have a lot, a lot of complicated problems we have to untangle.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  But let's find a way of delivering content that is least destructive of our democracy, our understanding of issues and, you know, our own mental health. I mean, that's the objective. And however you have to tweak the algorithm to get there, let's tweak to get there.

• 57:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, this has been fun.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yes, it has.

• 57:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you, Larry.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 57:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Appreciate you rolling with it. And I definitely feel much better informed about Frances's strategy and what's going on here than I was beforehand. That's why we love to have these conversations. And I'm sure, because I know how these things go, that there are a ton of listeners that hit play at the beginning of this hour and are still with us now, which is very exciting.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  That is great.

• 58:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So thank you for being here. It's, it's really great to get a chance to chat with you. I hope we could do it again.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  And every time you ask, Alex, I say yes.

• 58:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Well, we're one for one.

• 58:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you, Nate Gwatney, for editing and mastering the audio. Thank you, Red Circle, for hosting the podcast and selling the ads. And thanks, most importantly, to you, the listener, for coming back every week and engaging with us here on Big Technology Podcast. I wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for you, and I appreciate you spending time with me every week. And I guess that's going to do it for us here. So we'll be back next week with another interview with a tech insider or outside agitator. We know which category Larry falls in. And so we hope you stick with us. First timers, please subscribe if you are a long time listener and haven't hit a rating yet. We would appreciate it. And that will do it for us here on the Big Technology Podcast.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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