Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption

We’re sharing the trailer for the new season of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption. Our friends over a Recode along with The Verge explore how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge speak with top Meta executives and some of its biggest critics and ask how the company has shaped our lives, and what lies ahead. Subscribe to Land of the Giants to get new episodes starting Wednesday, July 13th. 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.

• 0:00David Pierce?

  Hey, everybody. It's your friend David Pierce. The Vergecast is taking a much-needed vacation this week. So instead of this week's episode, we are excited to share with you a trailer for the new season of Land of the Giants. This season, the Facebook Meta disruption is a collaboration between Recode and The Verge. Senior reporters Shereen Ghaffari of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge explore how Meta, which you may know as Facebook, is impacting our lives on and off the internet. Take a listen to the trailer and follow Land of the Giants wherever you find your podcasts. New episodes are out every Wednesday, starting July 13.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Fun fact about Mark Zuckerberg. Before he dropped out of Harvard to build his company, The Facebook, he was a psychology major.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  You know, I basically studied psychology and computer science. So all of the work that I do is sort of at the intersection of those things. What I care about is building technology to help people interact with each other.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  That was Zuckerberg in an interview earlier this year, and it captures just how optimistic he still is about shaping the way people communicate with each other in the digital future, even after his company has been accused of stoking misinformation, inciting violence, and polarizing the globe. I'm Shereen Ghaffari.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  And I'm Alex Heath. We're hosting Land of the Giants, a podcast about the biggest tech companies of our time. This season, Meta, formerly known as Facebook. It's a company in a particularly controversial and vulnerable moment.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Zuckerberg is placing a multi-billion-dollar bet towards an imagined metaverse future. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still grappling with what he has already built.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  When I think about any kind of abuse, from my perspective, the philosophy should be the company should try to prevent the things that they have done that make those things worse, but not try to fix society itself.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  This season, we're going to talk to the executives steering Meta's biggest decisions.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  We hope we can marry the best of letting people freely communicate and then figuring out how to do that while keeping people safe from the worst of the worst, I think is the play we're running right now. And I hope it works because the alternatives are all... Much worse.

• 2:06Speaker 06

  The first thing to do on elections and on hate speech and on content moderation and on privacy is of course to look yourself in the mirror, ask yourself the difficult questions, what did we get wrong, what did we not anticipate and correct that first thing. But second thing is then to have the conviction to push back when the assertions and allegations just are kind of way beyond any reasonable sense of proportionality.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  And you'll hear from some of Meta's sharpest critics, its former employees.

• 2:34Speaker 07

  There is a system of incentives inside of Facebook, the company, and incentivizes bad behavior from people who want to curry favor with authoritarian governments or demagogic media figures, or just, you know, do what's right for growth for the company in the short term.

• 2:50Speaker 08

  I was thinking about the fact that the two entities I had spent my career working for, the Republican Party and Facebook, for different reasons, just looked very different than when I had first started working for them.

• 3:02Speaker 09

  What I was seeing was real, what I was seeing was unacceptable, and that the only path forward was to get the public involved.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  We'll explore why Zuckerberg is taking the company in a bold direction and how Facebook's past will inform its future.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Land of the Giants: The Facebook Meta Disruption. This season is sponsored by Klavio.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  From Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Subscribe for free wherever you listen and get our first episode on Wednesday, July 13.