The Motivations Of Facebook Reporters, And Their Sources — With Ugly Truth Author Sheera Frenkel

Sheera Frenkel is a New York Times reporter and author of the best-selling book, An Ugly Truth. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss her hit book and her reporting process. We address critics's claims that Facebook reporters are harsh to the company because they’re mad Trump won, and they’re also upset that social media is eroding their gatekeeping power. Frenkel listens to these critiques and shares her perspective. 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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• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today, we're joined by Shira Franklin. She's the author of the bestselling book, "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination", and a former colleague of mine from the BuzzFeed News days. Shira, welcome to the show.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Hey, Alex. Thanks for having me.

• 1:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, I've enjoyed watching your reporting journey after we've both left BuzzFeed. And I remember sitting next to you in the BuzzFeed newsroom when you wrote the tweet, "Everything's been hacked. We just don't know about it yet." And it turned out that was pretty prescient, especially in the case of Facebook. So it was nice reading a full-length book about how that was exactly what happened in the case of Facebook.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I was just getting started in cyber security reporting and just sort of coming to terms myself with how much of the internet had been hacked. And we just didn't know that yet.

• 2:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so let's get right into your book. I want to start a bit meta. Because to many people, the criticism from journalists about Facebook boils down to two things. One thing they say is that journalists are just mad that Trump won and they're taking it out on Facebook. The second thing they say is that journalists are mad that they're losing their gatekeeping powers. And now everyone has a voice and they take that out on Facebook. So I guess I'd like to start there. So first question to you is, do you think Trump would have been elected without Facebook? And do you think some of the reporting that's been done about the company, I'm not talking about yours necessarily, but some has been motivated by anger over his victory?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  I, you know, I don't think myself or really any political analyst who's much better qualified than I am to talk about Trump's campaign would be able to tell you whether or not Trump would have won if it wasn't for Facebook. I think we know that he was able to reach a lot of people through Facebook, that he was an incredibly effective user of that platform and that he really, or his campaign, really understood how powerful Facebook could be as a megaphone for people, especially like Trump, who had quite, you know, newsworthy things to say. What he said often was very emotive and it was the kind of content that was kind of almost built to go viral on Facebook. I, but yes, sorry, to answer your first question, I don't know. I don't think any of us do

• 3:29Speaker 01

  know what would have happened if if social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, were not around for Trump's campaign. And then in terms of your second question, I I can just say that like, as a journalist, I've never been motivated by that. I don't know any journalists that have. I've yet to, I've heard this among some people in the tech world and I can see how for tech companies, it's a good talking point because in their minds, maybe we need a reason, you know. The reason we write about tech companies is that they're incredibly powerful. Facebook reaches over three billion people through its family of apps and it has less oversight than any government I've covered in my career and I was a I was a foreign correspondent for over a decade.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I think it's our job as journalists to cover powerful companies and you know, that's why we write about them.

• 4:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and there was a rosy view of Facebook after, you know, Obama used the digital tools to ride that to his historic victory. But I guess the difference is that with his campaign, there wasn't any

• 4:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  foreign election meddling that was used in order to get him into office and and that did happen in some cases with Trump. And Russia, do you think that that's the core difference?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Um, well, you know, I think I think there was some critical coverage. It's funny. There was a version of this book that was twice as long. And we had an early chapter, I still remember writing it, where we looked at the Obama campaign and how they used Facebook and and sorry, I'm talking about his reelection campaign, specifically his second his second run for office. And how he actually ran one of the first really big data gathering operations on Facebook. And tried to sweep up as much data about people who joined the

• 5:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that was during during these campaigns, they were always talking about the Democrats' data advantage over Republicans.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And you know, Obama understood that Obama's campaign understood how powerful that data could be. And I think he actually in some ways set a precedent that it's interesting, you know, Hillary Clinton's campaign did not choose to follow, but Trump did. And so I think, you know, the the roots of of using social media as a tool to really, you know, understand voter bases and reach voters was was laid long before Trump, but you know, Trump was the one to use it more effectively than any others had before. Also, you have to remember, like, when Obama was running for office, Facebook wasn't as fully fleshed out as a as a network, right? Like, a lot of its capabilities and and the the as we know, the incredibly effective targeted advertisements, the only really, you know, they ramped up

• 5:59Speaker 01

  in those in that sort of intuitive time. And so Trump was able to fully take advantage of Facebook in a way that Obama couldn't. I would love to ask people on Obama's campaign, if you could have done what Trump did. Would you? Would you have run those kinds of incredibly specific targeted advertisements? Would you have A B tested the way he did? I imagine their answer would be yes.

• 6:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, they would for sure.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So we talked a little bit about the reporter motivations. Um, we think about the reader a lot. There have been, I don't think there's any question that there have been, um, that readers have seized on to this story and have done so for the reasons that some are looking to impugn the credibility of journalists, right? So, um, I think a lot of readers do blame Facebook for, well, a lot of, you know, liberal readers. Yeah, a lot of liberal readers do blame Facebook for Trump's election. And, you know, that sort of, um, powers, I think a lot, it's funny, right? But it powers a lot of the sharing of the stories that are about Facebook and its failings and the Russia, uh, stuff and Cambridge Analytica.

• 7:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  How, how do you deal with the reaction from readers to see some of these stories blow up? And see them interpret straightforward reporting of events, uh, and use it for these political ends.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  I mean, as a reporter, you can never, it's out, what's out of your control, it's out of your control. And that includes what people tweet about your articles. And I'll say that I've, I've seen a lot of tweets from people that are, um, right leaning, you know, prob, you know. Admittedly, I think they, they say in their bios that they're Republican Trump supporters, who've tweeted about the book and have been excited about it because they think it reinforces some of their ideas about Facebook. And yes, I've seen people on the left doing the same. And each one of them are reading our book through a political prism and finding in it what they want. Ultimately, our book is neither, I would say. Our book is a look inside the company and why they made the decisions they made. And if there's anything I think, or I hope people will walk away with is this, this, um, what we have covered.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Which is that, you know, a lot of Facebook's mistakes were really ad hoc, right? Like, a lot of those decisions they make, which are hugely consequential down the line, are just a group of like 12 people in a room hammering it out, trying to figure it as they go along. There isn't this like grand plan motivating Facebook's actions that some people, Republican and, you know, Democrat, tend to put on that company.

• 8:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I agree. And it's very apparent, um, through the book. I think that it's worth going through these questions because. Yeah, I think it's a topic of discussion that gets brought up a lot when it comes to Facebook reporting. And if this is going to be, this is going to be the definitive book about what happened 2016 to 2020, 2021. You know, we should run through it. So people do have a sense as to like, you know, how the authors themselves think about this stuff. The last question I'll ask on this topic, then we move on, is how do you, as a reporter, I know we're like doing inside baseball, but you know, let's just go for it. How do you, as a reporter, think about the fact that, you know, a lot of these leaks that came out of Facebook, you know, have probably

• 9:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  been motivated by, you know, anti-Trump Facebook employees who are trying to shape the narrative around Facebook. Like, it's very clear that Facebook employees themselves were mad about the role that Facebook played in the Trump campaign. There was, in fact, I think you put it out there in the book, this question that got voted up to like the top of the list of questions for Mark, saying like, Mark Zuckerberg saying, what can Facebook do to stop a Trump election in 2016? And I imagine, you know, because Facebook didn't do that, there were a lot of left-leaning employees that were ashamed, angry, you know, eager to see change, and ended up breaking this cone of silence that had always been around the company and

• 9:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  starting to share some of these details with the press. So how do you sort, you know, I mean, it's always tricky when you have a source that wants to leak because you have to think about their motivations. But how do you sort those motivations? And, you know, particularly when you end up going to write the story, write the book, say, you know, have I heard from, you know, a majority of people who feel this way and are talking to the press because of these reasons? And I, you know, and I can't let that influence the direction of the story, you know, however much they might want to.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I think Facebook itself would tell you that the majority of people that work for it are probably, you know, probably vote Democrat.

• 10:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt, no doubt. Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  But, you know, yeah, I can tell you very honestly, that not a single person who spoke just for the book did so because they were, you know, a Democrat voting American who was angry about Trump winning. The people who spoke to us, every single one of them, I would say, including, so just to back up for a minute for those who haven't read the book, we spoke to over four hundred people. And the vast majority of those are people that are still employed at Facebook. They spoke to us because they're angry about what's happened at Facebook. They want to hold their own company responsible for mistakes that they feel they made. It had nothing to do with who won the elections, but rather the bigger question of, well, we missed Russian election interference.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  We messed up on Cambridge Analytica. We let ourselves down a rabbit hole in terms of political speech and allowed Donald Trump this carve out of being able to say what he wanted, which down the road led us to allowing him to spread COVID misinformation on the platform. Now, I actually am remembering right now vividly a conversation I had with one Facebook employee who's a Republican, who was like, yeah, I mean, I I'm not, you know, I'm not, I I voted for Trump myself, but, you know, I'm still mad about how we handled things. Like, we didn't have big policy decisions going into these. We didn't have the foresight to imagine where Trump would take it. Like, there are just so many employees at that company who feel like their own managers, their their C suite hasn't been held responsible

• 12:02Speaker 01

  and that the truth has been really tightly controlled by a PR narrative of what Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg think. And that's that's why they want to come out and speak to journalists.

• 12:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, you know, I mean, having lived lived out here, you know, just a few miles away from Facebook headquarters for a long time. It does seem like this place, you know, definitely is about as as angry about Trump's election as almost anywhere in the country. So, and and that's obviously the pool where a lot of, you know, Facebook employees live, a lot of them are drawn from. Do you really don't? You really don't think that anger over the Trump election was their motivation at all for speaking? I mean, maybe the the end, uh, uh, things that they were upset about were policy and stuff like that. That's probably what they came to discuss, but. You know, part of me has to imagine that that anger over Trump's victory had to be at least at least have something to do with it. You don't think so?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I really don't. I have to, I mean, like, honestly, we had so many of these conversations with people because, as you said, you want to understand what's motivating a person to come speak to you. You want to know where a person's biases are. And, yeah, it really wasn't, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't the thing that, that, you know, I have, I mean, a lot of them don't spend that much time thinking about, I mean, they think about Trump being in the White House and they think about Facebook's role in that. But really, like, they're any other employee. Day to day, they think about their managers, they think about their bosses, they think about what they themselves did in their role to enable misinformation to spread on Facebook, to ignore what happened in Myanmar. I mean, I cannot tell you how many face, if you want to talk about things that motivated Facebook employees, I was shocked at how many Facebook employees came to me and they were like,

• 13:40Speaker 01

  I stay up at night because of what happened in Myanmar. I feel really, I'm sorry, I'm not going to curse here, but, you know, really, okay, really fucking responsible for, for that. And we sat back and all of us knew it. And why didn't we bring it up at company Q and As? And why didn't we, like, you know, at all hands meetings with Mark, say, why aren't we doing something about this? Like, there are things that haunt them in terms of real life, you know, real world deaths of people that a lot of them, you know, they go out to bars and they drink about it. So, yeah, that that came up spontaneously a lot more than, you know, I'm really mad about Trump winning. Like, that's not something anyone said.

• 14:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, interesting. I mean, yeah, it's, you know, they're both, they're both political things. Obviously, the Myanmar situation was awful, remains awful. Also, really important section of your book. So I encourage everyone to go out and get it. Let's move on, because the second thing that people say when it comes to this type of reporting is, oh, the press is upset because, you know, it used to be the gatekeeper, now user-generated content is the way people share information and they want to grab that power back. What do you think about that argument?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you you kind of hinted this before. I just don't think that's what motivates reporters. You know, I I I can say it's not what motivates me as a reporter. In no way have I ever thought of myself or any other journalist as a gatekeeper of information. If anything, reporters think it's their responsibility to um hold powerful people accountable. You know, it's cheesy, but like a saying among many reporters is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I think for um for much of Silicon Valley's history, you know, they haven't had that much sunlight. It's been a very tightly controlled message, as you know, from covering tech companies. You know, the army of PR people that work at this company, including Facebook. Their whole goal is to see Facebook and its narrative shaped in a certain way.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I I mean, more broadly, like, you know, Facebook relies on the public goodwill. They rely on their public image so much. If you don't ultimately, if you, if you know, if people all over the world start to think of Facebook as really what it is, which is a company that surveils you for data because they need that for their advertising model, you're not that inclined to share like cute photos of your baby or your puppy. You have to think of it as like, oh, a nice place connecting the world and making us open and connected. Because that's what's going to motivate you to share with things with people and join groups and join pages and do all the things they need you to do.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  So, yes, sorry, Facebook is tightly controlled, its messaging um like like many other Silicon Valley companies. And as journalists, it's about figuring out what's actually happening at the company. They're incredibly powerful, and that's really the reason why we report on them. And I just, I think anyone who thinks otherwise has to learn a little bit more about why journalists do what we do.

• 16:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, but I guess I think that the argument isn't that like, you know, journalists want um, you know, don't want Facebook to control its its narrative. Um, I think it is that um, you know, not about reporting on Facebook, but it's more about that, like, you know, it used to be that newspapers, TV networks, um, were the only place that people could go for information. And they made a decision about the type of stuff that they would cover and the type of topics they would discuss, and they obviously missed things and um sometimes were too crudgeless when it came to what um the official line, uh, yeah, the official line was from government. And social media gives anybody an opportunity to talk. And you know, there's, this is the argument, I'm not saying I agree with it, but the argument is that like,

• 17:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, the reporters who are covering Facebook, not only Facebook, but all social media and, you know, talking about the need for content moderation are um, trying to claw back the fact that they had like sort of this monopoly on the flow of information and they don't anymore.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I can just repeat, like, you know, that's never been something that's motivated me. Like, I, I, I, you know, I write about misinformation on Facebook and conspiracy theories on Facebook, because it's a problem and because as someone who was physically on the ground in my MR, who was a foreign reporter for ten years, a foreign correspondent for ten years, sorry, I saw it, like, I saw firsthand what hate speech does in much of the world, what misinformation does in the rest of the world, and here in the United States, I should add, when it goes unchecked. And so these are important things to cover because only Facebook can get a handle on it. Only these Silicon Valley companies with their, you know, massive amounts of resources can begin to get a handle on the problem that they themselves introduced.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So it's important to hold them to account. And I'll note that, that like, Alex, you know, Facebook says themselves, like, they often take this stuff down only when journalists bring it to them. So only when I, for instance, today, I was looking at a number of extremely antisemitic posts on Facebook and I sent it to them. And I said, hey, doesn't this, because I'm, I'm reporting a story about this and I was like, hey, I'm reporting on this and I found these posts and does it, do these violate your rules? And they were like, yeah, of course these violate our rules, we'll take them right down. I will note that those same posts were reported by multiple other people and the company didn't take it down. So I'm one person, I'm not getting paid anywhere near as much even like a project manager at Facebook gets paid.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  I'm not doing it because I'm, you know, I think newspapers need to be any kind of like, you know, yeah, the idea that, that, that it should only be newspapers and radios isn't true, but ultimately newspapers and radios and TV, television stations, to some effect, you know, they have assumed. Some responsibility for the content that they share, right? Like, if we get something wrong, we correct it, we issue a correction, we fact-check things, we take responsibility. Facebook has said that it's not a media company, it's not doing that themselves. But they need to find a middle ground, because ultimately, they themselves have said they feel badly about what's spreading on the platform. And so, yeah, they just, they can't, right now, it feels a little bit like they're trying to have it both ways. Um, and they're trying to rely on journalists to bring to their attention everything that's wrong with the platform.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And that's just, that's not sustainable for anybody.

• 19:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, yeah, I'm kind of curious what you think. What is the right balance between, um, user-generated content and, uh, and content moderation? Like, where, where would you draw the line? Do you think Facebook's policies are sufficient?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think Facebook itself says its policies are not sufficient. Its policies are haphazard, and they're figuring them out, and they know that. I mean, any Facebook executive will tell you that, that they're still figuring it out.

• 20:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let me, let me just ask it this way. What's the, where do you draw the line on content moderation? Like, obviously, people need to be able to post stuff that's factually incorrect. You can't take down everything that's wrong. Um, so, so what, where, where do you draw the line? Like, there's no way that the Facebook feed can be held to the same standard as, you know, what's written down in An Ugly Truth or on the pages of The New York Times.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, the, the first thing you do is, is you, you admit there's no line. You say, like, you know, it's, it, there's a lot of gray areas, there's a lot that is, that, a lot of content that is people that are, um, promoting things that, um, that fall within the realm of free speech, but which is damaging. I mean, I think one thing Facebook could do is seek to work directly with government agencies. Because right now, there's a lot of, like, the ball being passed back and forth on the court. And sorry, that's the closest I get to a sports analogy. But it just feels like, you know, Facebook is asking the CDC or other, you know, health officials to come up with rules. Those health officials are like, no, you have to come up with rules. Like, we're, we're almost two years into pandemic at this point.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  You know, i- it just, it feels as though someone should set down rules in which they say, "Okay, it's a global health crisis, it's pandemic. Here are the things that we think are really important not to, not to have spread." So whether that's, um, posts that claim that vaccines are poison, or posts that tell people to burn their masks in effigy. Like, I, I, I'm not a, I am not, you know, a member of the CDC, um, nor my medical professional. But there are people who are those things, who should, who should be working with Facebook directly to say, "Here are the lines with content moderation, um, specifically on this issue." I think more broadly, to answer your question, you know, Facebook knows doesn't have enough content moderators. It knows that it has a problem, especially in the rest of the world

• 21:54Speaker 01

  in terms of, you know, how many people happen to moderate content in countries like India and the Philippines and, um, and, you know, many others. But it knows this problem is ongoing and despite its tremendous resources, we still haven't seen them really build up resources in, in much of the rest of the world they know they need. And therefore, it's just a matter of time before we see yet another case of hate speech, leading to real world violence in other parts of the world. So, yeah, I would say what they're doing right now isn't enough. They admit that themselves. And I think the bigger question is like, how they grew to be as big as they are without getting a hold of these issues and figuring out some of these issues earlier on.

• 22:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Why don't we talk about that a little bit more after the break? We'll be back right after this, uh, on the Big Technology Podcast here with Shira Frankel. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, 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 AppPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf.

• 23:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales. Without scaling risk, Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. And we're back on the Big Technology Podcast. Here is Shira Frankel, New York Times journalist, former colleague of mine, author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.

• 23:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Shira, we were talking a little bit about content moderation beforehand. I think there's this debate that's going to just keep going where liberals, you know, say, take down more stuff. Facebook conservatives say, Facebook, you're censoring us. I'm curious what you think about the debate, especially in line with the fact that I've had some discussions with conservatives here on the show recently. And they say that, you know, social media is kind of like an alternate media for them. And, you know, they don't see themselves represented on, in the pages of the New York Times or on, you know, networks like CNN, or I guess even in mainstream magazines. And this is sort of the place where, you know, alternative media has formed for them.

• 24:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm curious if you think that, like, if that, yeah, I'm curious what you think about that read on the situation.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Sorry, what is, tell me again, what is their read exactly?

• 24:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, their read is that, you know, basically conservative viewpoints don't get a lot of airtime in the mainstream press. And so of course, they're going to go to social media, just like gaming doesn't get a lot of, you know, coverage, you know, in the mainstream networks, you don't really see a lot about gaming in the Times or on CNN. So of course, gaming is going to be popular content on social media. And so when, so they see talks about content moderation as just like, you know, this attempt to crack down on the content that's started to thrive outside of the mainstream media.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that fundamentally, the premise there isn't right. You know, the studies that have looked at Facebook show that the things that are regularly among the most viewed on the platform and most shared on the platform are, you know, do come from people that that are self claimed conservatives. And so that, you know, that's out there. It's there's a number of of experts who have spoken about why they think that's happening. And then in terms of not being featured in the pages, like I I don't know what they mean by that. Do they mean not being featured on the op ed pages of the New York Times or do you know, other leading publications? Because ultimately, what we cover as news reporters isn't conservative or liberal. And I think that's like fundamentally a problem here that, you know, I I wrote an article earlier this week about the biggest spreader of anti vaccine misinformation.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Um, who has been named by the White House by a number of of uh academics and researchers as the most influential, most influential, sorry, spreader of anti vaccine misinformation. And I was sent a lot of hate mail from people who said, why are you trying to ban conservatives? Why are you trying to, you know, get conservative content? But and my answer to that was this has nothing to do with conservative or liberal, like, in fact, quite a few of his followers are progressive, left wing liberals who believe in natural health and yoga, like, it just has to do with the fact that he spreads vaccine misinformation. And that's that's neither, that should not be liberal or conservative. That should just be something that we all agree is bad for public health.

• 26:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you had an interesting story in the book about Nancy Pelosi. There was that slowed down video of her that made her look that like she was drunk while she was making a speech and she got uh she had been an ally of Facebook and Congress and then got angry about uh what happened and sort of said, don't take any of their calls. Uh, what would you have done with that doctor video? Taken it down?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  I I I mean, I can't answer that. I'm not an executive at Facebook. I'm, you know, and as a journalist, I don't think it's my role to answer that. What I would say is that they should have had a policy in place beforehand. You know, they knew these kinds of videos were going to happen. Um, I'll remind you that Christchurch, that shooting had happened not long before where they had seen already how quickly something could go viral on Facebook groups and pages. And it was for us, I think, a really stark example of how Facebook waits for a crisis to hit before they try to come up with a policy.

• 27:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, what would Facebook say to that? I'm kind of curious, like, you know, there are so many different types of media. Like, they had a deep fake policy in place. They had videos for, you know, a policy for authentic videos. Like, this was one where it was slowed down to manipulate it. Like, you know, it's a new, new forms of media are showing up all the time. It's, you know, part of what happens when there's new technology in place. So, do you think it's a fair excuse for them to say they can't anticipate some of the stuff? Or, you know, do you think they really should have this stuff buttoned up?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  You know, I think our book shows that again and again, they're warned that this kind of stuff is coming. So, yes, Facebook's PR line will often be that they couldn't anticipate it. And one thing we tried to show with our book was that they could. Because people within their own company were raising their hands and saying, this is a problem. We foresee this being a problem. Let's figure out something now. And those people are ignored. So, yes, I do think they should have seen things coming. And I think that it's important for companies like Facebook to hire people who will be that voice in the room, who raise their hand and say, here's the dark side of this. Here's the bad that can happen. Here's how this product is going to get misused. And I, I think, I will say, not just Facebook, many Silicon Valley companies don't have those people.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  They like to hire among these, like, techno-optimists, you know, this techno-utopian crowd who really want to cohesively believe that technology will advance society and do miraculous things for all of us. And, you know, I hope in hindsight, some of them realize that they need a balance of opinions in the room.

• 29:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I think that one of the most disturbing parts of the whole book was this guy who had alerted them about what was going to happen in Myanmar. And they just were flat-footed until it was too late.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Right, and I mean, I'll note, I think this is some, God, I hope you didn't cut this from the book. I think it's still there. We even mentioned a bit, maybe not a fully fleshed out scene, but like, you know, ahead of Russian election interference, it was also a group of European lawmakers who come to Facebook's offices from, I think they're from Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia. They, they come to Facebook's offices and meet with the, meet with the policy team. This is in 2015, and say, hey, Russia is wreaking havoc in our countries during every election we have. They've got a troll army, which is spreading disinformation about our politicians. We want to flag this for you and let you know. And Facebook ignores them. Like, the security team doesn't even find out about that meeting. And these are, again, people in their offices trying to raise the flag and be like, hey, here's a huge problem we see looming, please pay attention, and they're ignored.

• 30:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and one thing that that really struck me as I read was how often Facebook obfuscated the truth. I mean, that stuff really made me mad, just understanding that they knew that there was Russian Russian election interference going on on the platform and just kind of hope that it would go away. I mean, do they not think that this stuff was going to come out? I I kind of wonder like what what you think this I mean, a lot of this is your book tour has been psychoanalyzing this company. But what's what I mean, are they living in such a bubble that that they imagine that this stuff would just go away?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I don't know what their motivation was. I mean, surely they must have known that that eventually was going to come out and people were going to be mad. I mean, maybe they hoped to control the messaging a little bit more. Um, you know, as reporters, that's always a hard thing to find out. I I remember reporting on white paper that Facebook released um in March of 2017. And I had heard from a couple sources that the paper originally had a Russia section and that it was omitted at the request of executives. And I called up Facebook's PR department and I was told that it was categorically false. I still remember it. I remember the words that's categorically false. Um, there was never any Russia section. That's never something we included. And because it was such a strong denial, my editors and myself decided, okay,

• 31:27Speaker 01

  well, you know, it's a really strong denial. Let's guess it didn't happen. Um, and then I go and report for this book and I find that there are multiple versions with very long Russia sections that were in fact vetoed by by executives. So, yes, I mean, that that that is a very clear example of them obscuring the truth and and not wanting things to become public at a much earlier date. And I'll remind people listening that it's not until September of 2017 that Facebook actually does go public with what they know regarding Russian election interference.

• 31:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's like a child dumping a bucket of paint on their wall and like not telling mom and dad because they're so nervous about what the reaction will be. But anyway, they're they're gonna find.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And like, they've pushed their bed up against the wall. So you can't actually see it. But there's paint splatter all over the floor. So you're like, no, I know it's there. Just show it to me already. Um, and I actually think a lot of the anger at Facebook was because they did wait so long. Like, I really wonder if they hadn't come public with what they knew sooner, if they wouldn't have avoided a lot of the the public anger on this.

• 32:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. We have about, let's see, six or seven minutes left. So let's take one more break and then we'll do kind of a rapid fire round. This is a new thing I've been trying on the show. I'm kind of having fun with it. So I'll do rapid fire, go through some things that I found interesting and then we'll wrap and let you go on your, on your day, both you, Shira and our listeners. So we'll be back here in just a moment on the Big Technology Podcast.

• 32:53Speaker 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.

• 33:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one final segment of the Big Technology Podcast. I wrote down hot takes, but maybe just call it rapid fire. I don't know exactly what we need to title this section, but we'll go into it. So Shira, I wanted you to talk a little bit about Facebook's internal surveillance of its employees. They would track their phone locations to match leaker locations and all sorts of other, you know, KGB-style tactics. What was going on there?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And are they any, any different from the rest of these companies? It seems like they're on like a kind of next level.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. Good question. I think all of these tech companies do surveil their employees because they're all really worried about leaks. And I'll note, I'll note that, you know, interestingly, a lot of the worst leaks that Facebook and other companies have had have been employees that are actually selling proprietary company information to other companies, to competitors. And so that's, that's a lot, a big part of what they're worried about. But, you know, they're also worried about reporting, you know, them talking to reporters. And so, yeah, I mean, I've been aware of it for a long time because Facebook sources were nervous about meeting me. They didn't want me to bring my cell phone when I met with them and they weren't bringing their cell phone. So I was aware that, that, you know, whatever technology Facebook was using was, was enough to at least know real-time location. But I think I was surprised at how aggressive

• 34:41Speaker 01

  they were in trying to find leakers and not to get too meta, but definitely in reaction to this book. I know that they've tried very, very hard to find our sources. Have not found any yet, but that is a focus of the company.

• 34:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow, I do like remember these anecdotes of like Zuckerberg announcing the company that they had fired a leaker and everybody clapping. Now, I understand, you know, leaking, when you leak, you know, I can understand how it can feel like a betrayal to the company, especially if you like go out and just like share the roadmap. I mean, of course, us as journalists, we want that. But then, you know, honestly, like, if your company continues to fail and people are out there speaking because they want to make it better, you know, I think oftentimes the right reaction is ask why people are leaking and not how do we catch them and fire them. Okay, anyway, that that little ramble is done. Let's move on to the next question I had for you, which I think you even used the term surveillance

• 35:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  capitalism in the first segment or something close to it. Sure, are these ads really that bad? Like, I wonder who gets hurt and whether this term surveillance capitalism is actually kind of a little dramatic, given that like, we're looking at like ads that aren't even that well targeted, you know, for boots and stuff like that.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  You know, I think the the term surveillance capitalism came from Shoshana Zubroff, who we quote in the book, who wrote an excellent book about this. Um, you know, we don't use it, I don't think ourselves. I I think that, you know, yes, the advertisements can be very useful. Sometimes it's nice that the advertisements are targeted to your interests. I think why it's important for people to understand what that term is, and in general, we hope people take out of our book, is what makes Facebook work as a business, right? Like, people should understand that Facebook is in the business of collecting your data. They need you on the site as long as possible for as many hours of the day in order to be effective as a company, in order to continue to show that kind of growth that their investors

• 36:36Speaker 01

  have gotten used to seeing. And so whatever they do is incentivized by that. You know, the one like comparison I've made in some of the interviews we've done regarding the book is that I I think of it a little bit like sugar, like a little, everyone knows a lot of sugar is not great for you, but we accept a little bit of sugar in our lives. Like, I I think for people to start thinking of social media like that, sorry if this is overly simplistic. I know your audience is much more tech savvy than average.

• 36:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, look, I mean, we've we, I feel like within either, I I, you know, within like the coming weeks where we've already run it, we have a conversation with Nir Eyal where we talk about the same stuff. So

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're right on target. Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, think of it like sugar, like a little bit of sugar in your life, inevitable. Like, it's it's tastes good and it's nice to connect with friends. And lord knows, I have cute kids. I like sharing photos of them on the internet, but um. A lot of it I know isn't great for me. I know that a lot of it is, you know, out there. I can spend hours on Facebook scrolling through posts that get me angry.

• 37:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I know that that's not great for me, for my mental health, and so I don't do it.

• 37:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you even have a point in the book where um someone points out, one of the Facebook engineers points out the type of content that it takes to get people that engaged and and asks, is this really what we want to show? And I found that was so interesting because, you know, people talk about censorship and all this stuff, and actually, it's all editorial decisions. It's like, they they can decide what they want to show up there, you know, whether they want eyebrow or low brow or left or right or whatever, but sorry.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Right, and we have, no, we have this point at the very end of our book in which we talk about how around the November um twenty twenty elections, Facebook made the decision to show more, to more prominently feature news sites that had a high level of accountability and of fact checking. So they have this scale that they rank all the different news outlets. And the ones that were ranked lower, as in that they were repeatedly flagged by fact checkers for sharing things that were false, were down ranked on Facebook's algorithms, and the ones that were higher up on that scale were up ranked. And so basically, Facebook made this decision that we're in a period of elections. It's really important for people to receive truthful information, right? Like, let's, let's make sure that the top of their news feeds has information from news sources that are vetted.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  And so they kind of like make this calculation because they're like, oh, we're in this pivotal moment of democracy. But I guess I'd ask, like, wait, what about the last four years? Like, what about everything before? And then they, by the way, I will say that that only lasted for about a month before they reversed course on that decision. And look what happens just a few months later with the Capitol Hill riots riots in January.

• 39:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  So I don't know, I'm curious if Facebook executives don't look at all that and say, why don't we, you know, figure out a version of that that's more permanent?

• 39:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I, this is why I think they'll eventually lose their um section two thirty privileges because like, you know, at the end of the day, like, it's hard for me to look at this as any, as a platform, as much as I look at it as a media company now, less social, more media. Do I have time to ask you one last question before you hop?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I'll, I'll, yeah, yeah, we jump for one more.

• 39:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  So there's not going to be a book about Facebook and the twenty twenty election, at least I don't think so. So what does that say?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Um, well, I'll say that, you know, the last chapter of our book does cover Facebook in the 2020 elections and everything that was important about it, which was that they ultimately solved the problems of 2016 in terms of foreign election experience, but didn't solve the problem of peer-to-peer misinformation, Americans spreading misinformation to other Americans, which everyone was telling them back in 2019 and 2018 that this was the coming problem, that the problem was this gray zone of, you know, how do you stop Americans from using their First Amendment rights to say things to other Americans that aren't true? And so, yes, as you, you know,

• 40:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or do you want to?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Or do you want to? Is it your responsibility, right? Like that, those are all excellent questions. And that's really what we tried to cover in the last chapter of our book is how, again, a problem of Facebook's own creation with algorithms and how the algorithms rank things and all that emotive content going to the top of the news feed. But what is Facebook's responsibility there?

• 40:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Terrific. Well, let's wrap there. Shira, thank you so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you about these things. And

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 40:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did enjoy the book. It was a really good read and I appreciate you, you know, talking through some of the subject matter here and then also the motivation stuff. I feel like the more that we talk about the motivations, the less resonant some of the bad faith attacks will have. And, you know, sometimes it's good for us to be introspective as well. So that will do us here, do it for us here. Thank you, Shira, for joining.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Thanks, Alex.

• 41:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you to Nate Guatney for doing the editing, Red Circle hosting and selling the ads. And once again, to you, the listeners, appreciate you coming back every week. It's great to have you here on the Big Technology Podcast. We'll see you next Wednesday with another, another interview with either a tech insider or an outside agitator or journalist. Stay tuned for which one that will be. And we'll see you then.

• 41:35Speaker 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' health care 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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