Facebook Was Already Zucked

In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the latest "right-wing turn" for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is really just formalizing policies on Facebook and Instagram that actively protected and elevated right-wing voices - and how we're entering a new era of rot for two of the world's largest social networks. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?

• 0:09Speaker 02

  This is a constant worry.

• 0:11Ed Zitron?

  And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user Y.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I'm Walter Isaacson. On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:34Ed Zitron?

  Meet the disruptors who are setting today's trends and discover those who are building what's next. People like Sebastian Yatra. Life is on the other side of fear. Introducing Global Flow with me, Dramos, a new podcast where I sit down with disruptors across music, entertainment, business, and tech to break down what they're building, get the blueprint of how they got there, all while trying to figure out what's coming next. Listen to Global Flow on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.

• 1:22Speaker 05

  You gotta give Russia the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [bleep] about any of this now.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:34Speaker 06

  Hey, it's J O from Laugh With Me the Podcast. Why would you choose Laugh With Me? Well, great question. Maybe you like comedy, maybe you like sports, or maybe you just want to hear from a podcast host who has survived bad bosses, angry customers, questionable career decisions, and a pepper spray attack? Yeah, that's right. Other podcast hosts with broadcasting degrees, Laugh With Me has a survivor. Listen to Laugh With Me, a podcast with Jeremy Odom, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:07Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 2:24Ed Zitron?

  It's been a shitty week for many obvious reasons and I challenge you at this time to be kind to yourself and to the people around you. Be kinder, hold them closer, be more supportive, say nicer things. But specifically to my trans listeners, I love you, you're loved and accepted, fuck these people, fuck the executive order, I'm so sorry and anyone who agrees with the, that EO or is against trans people, you can go fuck yourself. Like, I need you to download something else, go and do something else with your time, I'm not interested in helping you, you are not my friend, you will never be my friend. If you're against trans people, I'm against you. Anyway, back to the podcast. So I've been back from CES for a week now and I'm finally recovering and I appreciate everybody who listened to the thirteen and a half hours of

• 3:09Ed Zitron?

  audio we put out. And a big thank you to the whole team there, Edward Ngueye So Junior, David Roth, Phil Broughton, Matt Asowski and everyone else who came along. Now we're back to our regular format and it's likely gonna be a rotation between more of the talk radio stuff you heard at CES and then heard with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis and then stuff like this, spoken word, I'm back baby. But 2025, it's gonna be a chaotic year. You're gonna feel a deficit of hope, I've said this before but I'm gonna say it again. The best thing you can do right now is to hold those people you love closer. Treat everyone around you, like I said, a little more kindly, listen more keenly to the things that people are saying and put your heart and soul into the things you do and the things you do for others. You

• 3:52Ed Zitron?

  may not be able to change much at scale but you can improve your immediate orbit, the bubble around you. Now, in this week's two-parter, I'm gonna talk to you about the people who choose to do the direct opposite. They use their power or their platform to exploit and hurt people for money, or they use another platform to help maintain the status quo, usually at the cost of other people's happiness. You see, in the last few weeks, we've seen the emergence of what I call the true meta and of course, the true Mark Zuckerberg, as the company chose to end its fact-checking program in early January, claiming that, and I quote, "Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created on both Instagram and Facebook," the latter of which is shown in a study from

• 4:34Ed Zitron?

  George Washington University to, by design, and I quote again, "afford anti-vaccine content producers several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies." Metta has also killed its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, something that I expect other tech firms to copy, unrestrained by any kind of societal norms under an administration that seems intent on destroying as many of them as possible. Shortly after announcing the policies, Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan Experience and had what I would describe as a full-scale piss-fit, claiming that corporations are "culturally neutered" and that companies should have both more masculine energy and have a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more. And then he added that said culture would have its own merits that are really positive.

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  I... None of this means anything. Zuckerberg also believes that the modern corporate culture has somehow framed masculinity as bad, something that he doesn't really attempt to elaborate on or explain or frame with any kind of evidence, because he's on the Joe Rogan Experience and because he also knows no-one's gonna fucking ask him. And it's... It's just this kind of directionless grievance and it fills me full of piss and vinegar myself. And this means, by the way, that Metta has now, and I quote their own announcement, "gotten rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are subject to frequent political discourse and debate", which in practice means that Metta now allows you to say that being gay is a mental illness or describe immigrants as filth. And as an immigrant, I find that disgusting.

• 6:02Ed Zitron?

  I find all of this so fucking disgusting. They or... As I'll get to in this episode, they never really cared that much, but to formalize this stuff is so utterly hurtful. It's a template for worse people and Facebook are... Metta is right down at the fucking bottom of the barrel. This is going to give other companies something to borrow. And it's just... When I read this stuff, I just... I hear the Perry Mason music from Kill Bill. Anyway, moving on with the episode. Now, surprise here, Casey Newton at Platformer, who I have been deeply critical of and will be very critical of in a later episode, has done a really excellent job reporting on exactly how horrifying these policies are, revealing how Metta's internal guidelines

• 6:44Ed Zitron?

  allow Facebook users to say that trans people are both mentally ill and don't exist, which, to be clear, if you're listening to this and saying that you agree with that, I'd like you to stop listening for a second, I'd like you to get your car keys, I'd like you to close your garage door and I'd like you to start the fucking ignition, just in case it's really... It's not clear enough how I feel about anti-trans people. And it also included one of the most wretched things I've ever read.

• 7:09Ed Zitron?

  Alex Schultz, Meta's CMO, who is a gay man, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights. This is, and I don't say this lightly, one of the most disgusting and offensive and stupid things I've ever heard a tech executive say. But let's be abundantly clear, this is exactly the kind of social network that Mark Zuckerberg wants. An unrestrained, unfiltered, unrepentantly toxic and noxiously heteronormative one, untethered by the frustrating norms of making sure that a social network of billions of people doesn't actively encourage hate of multiple different marginalized groups. And I am so angry about this, because it's all so needless. It's all so needless.

• 7:53Ed Zitron?

  But everything, everything, has to be thrown into the fire for growth. That's who these fucking people are. But, but dear listener, don't worry. Mark Zuckerberg, he's finally free, finally! Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Meta, can do whatever he wants, as opposed to the past 20 years where it's hard to argue that he's one of the most, if not the single most punished man alive. You see, Marky Mark's net worth recently hit $213 billion. He's running a company with a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion, and he can never be fired from it. He even owns a 1,400-acre compound in Hawaii, and while dealing with all of this suffering, he had to once, sorry, I mean twice, sit in front of a senate hearing

• 8:37Ed Zitron?

  and lazily apologize for something non-specifically. He was tortured, tortured only six years after having done it last. I am being very sarcastic, obviously. This man has not suffered... I don't want to say the next part of that sentence, but he's, he's not suffered at all. He's had the easiest go of it, just like the rest of these fucking people. Few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg. He's a man insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibility, and he has been for like 20 years. The sudden and warranted alarm to this, by the way, and I will say, the media has acted with enough alarm here. Here's this air of surprise, though.

• 9:17Ed Zitron?

  It frames Meta and Mark Zuckerberg like they just suddenly were like, hmm, what if we were super bigoted? What if our new network could, uh, if, what if it could be more racist? We need to please Donald Trump, because that's not what Meta has been doing before, right? They've, they've never been, well, we'll get to that in a bit, but I kinda wanna take you back in memory lane a bit. A long time ago, by which I mean August 2024, the people in the media today saying, oh, wow, Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly gone conservative, he's suddenly right wing. Months ago, they were fawning over this guy. They were fawning over his new look. They were desperate to hear about his gold chains and why he was

• 10:00Ed Zitron?

  wearing them. And they declared that he had the swagger of a Roman emperor and that he had, and I quote the Washington Post here, "transformed himself from a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits." Zuckerberg was, until these last few weeks, being celebrated for the very thing that people are upset about right now: flimsy, self-conscious and performative macho bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men and those credulous enough to accept it." Which in this case means almost every media out there. The only difference between then, when Mark was with his chains and his big baggy t-shirt and he looked like Kevin Fedline, and now is that Mark Zuckerberg has finally decided

• 10:44Ed Zitron?

  to be honest. After all, where was the punishment or judgment for his last macho media bullshit? If anything, it kinda proved that anyone will accept anything that Mark Zuckerberg does at all. Yet I really wanna be clear that what we're seeing with Meta, and by extension, Zuck, is not sudden at all. It's the direct result of a man that has never, ever, ever been held in check. It's utter fantasy to describe or even hint that these changes are the beginning of some sort of unrestrained Meta, rather than part of the intentional destruction of this product and all of their products in the market leader of rot economics. This is the rot economy. This is everything I've been telling you about. Growth at all costs,

• 11:26Ed Zitron?

  except the costs now are the safety of trans people, the safety of LGBTQ people, the safety of immigrants. This hostile network that was already pretty hostile, and I will get to that, is now basically saying thumbs up, go nuts, be as bigoted as you fucking want, it's disgraceful. And as I said in the middle of last year, Meta spent years gradually making the experience of its products worse in pursuit of perpetual growth. And if you go back to the people destroying Facebook, that podcast episode, that was actually from Mark Zuckerberg, you wanted something like 12 to 14% perpetual year-over-year growth, insane stuff. But when I say intentionally, I mean the product decisions, like limiting the information and notifications as a means of making users click more and go around the page rather

• 12:11Ed Zitron?

  than, I don't know, being notified of something and knowing something, or heavily promoting clickbait articles. This was all to keep people on the site longer. And they've been doing it for years, in broad daylight. And it's led to this deterioration of Facebook and soon Instagram that is just disgraceful. But not as disgraceful as formalizing horrible hate-filled policies. And some are touting Zuckerberg's current move as some sort of master plan to appease Donald Trump and the conservatives. And they're suggesting that this is a magnification of these platforms, where conservatives will somehow be given, I don't know, preferential treatment perhaps. Um, maybe like Facebook's algorithm, it could promote more conservative content. Man, wouldn't that be really bad?

• 12:52Ed Zitron?

  Wouldn't it be bad if Facebook's algorithm was intentionally and repeatedly recommending conservative content? It's been doing it for fucking years, why are we pretending like this is new? Why is everyone acting like this is new? I'm going insane. I am actually going insane, because the actual problems here have been there a while. The only thing that's changed is they formalize them. And I am so angry in this episode, because I, I can't, I can't leave these people unaccountable. I cannot have people that wrote about this pretend like this is new, like this is sudden. It's time for everyone in the media to take a little bit of fucking responsibility for what we've done.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Hamad, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations. And economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Blockers. In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them, people who devoted their lives to public service, who believed their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis, and my new audiobook, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, tells the story of these blockers, people who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the Trump administration's agenda.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people doing the work it depends on. Get Blockers now, only at blockers.fm.

• 16:45Speaker 07

  Hey, everybody. I'm Chuck Bryant of the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

• 16:49Speaker 06

  And I'm Adam Pranica of The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  We decided to start a golf comedy podcast because we're both big golf lovers, and we wanted to spread that joy, and it's called Three Put Bogey.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  It's coming from the perspective of golfers who are sometimes good enough to hit two great shots in a row, but almost never good enough to hit three. And a three-putt bogey is kind of the purest expression of that. Every golfer knows what that's like.

• 17:14Speaker 07

  Obviously, we're going to talk a lot about the game of golf, how absurd it is and how fun it is and how vexing and frustrating. But more than anything, just how much we love the greatest game in the world.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  We love it anyway.

• 17:26Speaker 07

  We're putting these out every Friday morning for your weekend golf routine.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  This is a show about sharing our experiences on the golf course and how absurd and funny they can be. And that's what Three Put Bogey is.

• 17:36Speaker 07

  It's Three Put Bogey, everybody, out every Friday. You can listen to it now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:47Ed Zitron?

  But, give me a second though. I actually want to lead you through someone who did a pretty good job. And you're not going to believe me, but it's Kevin Roos of the New York Times. You see, in 2020, Roos created an automated Twitter account called Facebook's Top 10, listing the top performing posts, so what posts were shared, viewed and commented on the most on Facebook by US Facebook pages, and he posted it on a daily basis. He was able to do this using something called CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool provided by Facebook specifically for researchers and journalists to understand what was happening on the world's largest social network at the time. Roos's reporting revealed that Meta's top performing links regularly skewed toward right-wing influencers like Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity, as well as outlets

• 18:31Ed Zitron?

  like Fox News and the page of then-president and I guess now-president Donald Trump. Internally, Meta was kind of freaking out, suggesting that Roos wasn't really getting what it meant, because engagement was a misleading measurement of what was popular on Facebook. They suggested that the real litmus test was something called reach, as in how many people actually saw a post. Roos also reported that the internal arguments at Meta led it to suggest it'd make a separate Twitter account of its own that had what they would call a more balanced view of its internal data, which 100% makes sense. Meta even suggested the obvious answer: sharing reach data, as in, again, how many people actually saw a post, and that this would somehow vindicate their position. One nasty little detail though.

• 19:16Ed Zitron?

  CrowdTangle's CEO told them that, well, false and misleading news stories also rise to the top of the reach list. In simpler terms, they didn't share the reach data because it would prove that Facebook was, in fact, a misinformation machine. The reporting around CrowdTangle, though, danced around an important detail. They were just talking about posts and, you know, these are just the posts that happened to be on Facebook, right? It just happens that Dan Bongino got to the top all of these times. How did that happen? Well, let me tell you how it fucking happened. They were likely recommended by Facebook's algorithm, which has reliably and repeatedly skewed conservative for years. A study in The Economist in September 2020 found that the most popular American media outlets on Facebook in a one-month period were Breitbart and Fox News,

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  and that both Facebook page engagements and website views heavily skewed conservative. This is quite old. This has been happening a while. While one could argue that this might just be the will of the users, what a user sees on Facebook is almost entirely algorithmic now, and it certainly was back then. And it's reasonable to assume that said algorithm was deliberately pushing conservative content. At this time, Metta's head of public policy was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working as George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff for policy, as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy Future Holdings. Really fucked up little story for you. This was a company, a private equity firm, kind of catamaran situation, which bought up a giant Texas power company called TXU for $45 billion,

• 20:44Ed Zitron?

  and then immediately steered it into bankruptcy due to the $38.7 billion in debt that Energy Future Holdings was forced to take on as a means of acquiring the power company. It's private equity again. It's always fucking private equity, Jesus Christ. Anyway, this is the now the policy head at Metta, and he has been for years. It's all very good. Anyway, Jeff Horowitz reported in his wonderful book Broken Code that Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook's health team attempted to remove COVID conspiracy movie Plandemic from its recommendation engine. And Facebook only did so once Kevin Roos reported that it was the most engaged link in a 24-hour period. Naturally, Metta's choice wasn't to fix things or improve things or take responsibility or issue a comment saying, "Huh, we're gonna look into the conservative thing." No, no, no. Why would they do that?

• 21:30Ed Zitron?

  By the end of 2021, Metta had disbanded the entire CrowdTangle team, and in early 2022, the company had stopped registering new users for CrowdTangle. In early 2024, months before the 2024 elections, CrowdTangle was shut down entirely, though Facebook Top 10 had stopped working in the middle of 2023.

• 21:48Ed Zitron?

  What I'm getting at is that Meta hasn't made a right-wing turn. Meta has been an active arm of the right-wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious, horrifying creatures like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform so that he could still send his shit out even when he was banned. A report from November 2021 by Media Matters found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm in 2021 to help right-leaning news and political pages to outperform other pages using, and I quote, "sensational and divisive content." Another Media Matters report from 2023 found that conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left- or non-aligned pages between January 1st, 2020, and December 31st, 2022,

• 22:31Ed Zitron?

  even as the company was actively deprioritizing political content, by which I mean the algorithm was allegedly showing you less politics, unless, of course, you were conservative. A report from last year from nonprofit GLAD found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, with the company either claiming that the content didn't violate its community standards or just ignoring the reports entirely. While we can and should actively decry Meta's disgraceful new policies, it's kind of ahistorical to pretend that this company gave a shit in the past or took it seriously or just that they cared. And this pisses me off because if we act now like they've changed,

• 23:16Ed Zitron?

  they don't get held accountable at all. But then again, did they before? Have they ever been held accountable? I don't know. The answer is no, by the way. There are reporters who have done really good work on this. Rus, Kevin Rus, who I've given a lot of shit, he did some really great reporting on CrowdTank, or Jeff Horowitz from the Wall Street Journal, along with other TV did the Facebook Files, which we'll get to later. There are people doing great work. The problem is, there's just this kind of weak and inconsistent approach that the media's taken to Meta and to Mark Zuckerberg. And none of these changes, none of these things that I'm saying here, are particularly hard to find. If you look this up, you could say, "Hey, look, exactly as I am right now, hey..."

• 23:58Ed Zitron?

  This doesn't seem to be a new policy. This just seems to be them deciding to formalize their lack of effort to protect trans people, their lack of effort to stop conservative demagogues doing stuff. I mean, it's just, it's frustrating. It's frustrating and annoying. And seeing them formalize it fills me full of poison in my veins. It's just, it's hateful. It's racist. It's violent. It's cruel. It's bigoted. And it's how it's been for so long. Why are we not just able to call these people what they are?

• 24:32Ed Zitron?

  And they really will do whatever they want to or need to for growth. And I'm gonna quote something here. I'm gonna quote Facebook's old vice president, Andrew Bosworth, from an internal email from 2017 I may have mentioned before. And I quote, "All the work that Facebook does in growth is justified, even if it's bullying or a terrorist attack carried out on their platform." And yes, that's exactly what he said, by the way. And you'd think a guy who's like, "Yeah, you know, growth? Just, we need to grow at all costs. And indeed, if something bad happens as a result, eh, at least we connected people." You'd think that a letter like that getting out in 2017, eh, that would lead to him being probably put in a naughty box, right? He wouldn't get promoted, would he? He wouldn't become

• 25:15Ed Zitron?

  the chief technology officer, would he? Because that's what Andrew Bosworth is now. This is what this company is. It's time to stop pretending that Meta was ever something noble or good or well-meaning. Mark Zuckerberg is a repressed coward, as far from manly as one can get, because true masculinity, if you can even fully ju... I don't even know if you can really give it a full definition, but I will tell you what is masculine. It's a sense of responsibility for both oneself and others and the things that we do, and finding strength in supporting and uplifting those close to you, and loving more and caring more for people. I don't really wanna put down a hard and fast one, but that's part of what masculinity is for me. It isn't being a fucking crybaby billionaire going on Joe

• 26:00Ed Zitron?

  Rogan going, "Where? Oh, the company's not masculine enough." Coward, coward motherfucker. It's disgusting. Meta as an institution has been rotten for years, making trillions of dollars as it continually makes their services work, all to force users to spend more time on the site, even if it's because Facebook and Instagram are now engineered to interrupt everything you're doing, your decision-making, your autonomy, with a constant slew of different forms of sponsored and algorithmically curated crap. The quality of the experience, something the media has categorically failed to cover, has never been lower on Facebook or Instagram. I'm not sure how anyone writing about this company for the last few years has been able to do so with a straight face.

• 26:42Ed Zitron?

  The products suck, they're getting worse, and yet the company has never been more profitable. Facebook is crammed with fake accounts, AI-generated crap, and nonsense groups teeming with boomers pushing stupid, grainy memes that say "I wish we'd return to a culture of respect", as they recommended their third racist meme of the day. Instagram is a carousel of screen-filling sponsored nonsense and recommended crap, and users are constantly battling with these products to actually see the things that they log on to see. I want to be explicit here. I do not believe enough reporting has been done into the fact that Facebook is, as a product, both bordering on useless and run in such a way that it's actively harmful for society. Some important facts to begin with are that the initial feed on Facebook is totally

• 27:27Ed Zitron?

  algorithmic, with large chunks of the screen taken up by stuff that Facebook pushes on you. We don't really know how their algorithm works. After all, not like there's any legislation or regulation that requires them to disclose it, but we do know that it's built to get people to engage with the content, even if said content is low-quality, incendiary, racist, or misleading. The biggest thing to know about the modern Facebook experience, and I must be really clear here, is that it's effectively unmoderated. I referred to Jeff Horowitz's Broken Code earlier. It's a really powerful book. Everybody should read it because it's the most clear-eyed view of how bad this company's been, and for how long it's been this bad. But the big thing that Jeff brings up is that everything internally at Facebook is

• 28:11Ed Zitron?

  about removing friction. Now, you may think, I mean, oh, so that would make a really good experience. No. Removing friction in this case means allowing people to post whatever they want. Groups that are giant scams, which I'll get to soon. Or just nonsense groups that spread misinformation, fake sports news. Memes that make people pissed off and more racist. And some of the shit I've seen on Facebook going back years is horrifying. And while there are mechanisms that Meta has in place to stop outright illegal things like pornography and violence, effectively anything else is fair game. I have, in preparing this script, found 50 different groups that are nakedly scamming users. Each one with anywhere from 1,000 to 18,000 different members.

• 28:54Ed Zitron?

  Each trying to work out why they can't access things like their Facebook or PayPal account. And finding these groups is super easy. Just type "Facebook Support" and scroll down into the search bar at the top of your Facebook account. And by the way, the scam's fairly simple. People go into these groups, they're like, "Oh, I can't access Facebook." They are on Facebook at the time, but perhaps they had just logged into the app. And they go in there and they say, "Hey, I need help. I need help getting back in." And usually a scammer from the Global South will be there and say, "Yeah, message me." They get their password, they get their email, they get access to something else. And then they start stealing shit. And I really must be clear how easy it is to find these scam groups and how many people are very clearly falling into them.

• 29:37Ed Zitron?

  It's really worrying and it's kind of stomach-turning as well. And it's time to accept that Facebook has become a kind of open sewer, run with a complete disregard for the user. It's constantly battering them with sponsored and recommended content as a means of keeping them on the site for longer. The longer a user interacts with the site, the more advertising impressions they're shown. And in turn, they then make more money for Facebook and Meta, even if there's not really a service being provided. And you may think, keeping someone on the site, that means giving them something they want, right? Negative. It means getting in the way of the thing they want, putting a bunch of things for you to jump over. Little obstacle course. It's extremely annoying and pisses me off daily.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Stories of survival.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck. Because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Aminé, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in?

• 32:30Speaker 07

  This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  Blockers. In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believed their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis, and my new audiobook, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, tells the story of these blockers. People who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the Trump administration's agenda. What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people doing the work it depends on. Get Blockers now, only at blockers.fm.

• 33:36Speaker 07

  Hey, everybody. I'm Chuck Bryant of the Stuff You Should Know podcast. And I'm Adam Pranica of The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek. We decided to start a golf comedy podcast because we're both big golf lovers and we wanted to spread that joy, and it's called Three Put Bogey. It's coming from the perspective of golfers who are sometimes good enough to hit two great shots in a row, but almost never good enough to hit three. And a three-put bogey is kind of the purest expression of that. Every golfer knows what that's like. Obviously, we're going to talk a lot about the game of golf, how absurd it is and how fun it is and how vexing and frustrating, but more than anything, just how much we love the greatest game in the world. We love it anyway. We're putting these out every Friday morning for your weekend golf routine.

• 34:19Speaker 07

  This is a show about sharing our experiences on the golf course and how absurd and funny they can be. And that's what Three Put Bogey is. It's Three Put Bogey, everybody, out every Friday. You can listen to it now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:39Ed Zitron?

  Now, kinda like in the episodes I did at the end of 2024, I'm gonna walk you through very practically the experience of going through Facebook. I want you to have as close to a play-by-play as humanly possible, because I want you to understand how fucked up this website is now. Okay, you open your Facebook app, and you immediately see a pop-up for stories, kind of the Instagram thing where you click them through and there's an entire phone screen-filling video. But, once you've watched some of those, you scroll down, you see one post from someone you know, then a giant ad that takes up a third of your screen, then a carousel of people you may know, then a post from a page you don't follow, then a series of recommended reels that show a two-second clip on repeat of what you might see, but not enough for you to actually get an idea if the video will be good, so that you click through, more advertising impressions,

• 35:24Ed Zitron?

  then another ad, then three posts from a page you don't follow, then another ad. And I find my app is hitching as I scroll too fast. It's kinda getting a bit clunky, so I think, huh, what would someone do if they needed help, though? So I decided to search for "Facebook support", which leads you to a thin banner for Facebook support at the top. It's like a, maybe a half-inch banner. And then below that is this giant, quarter-screen-long sponsored post about Facebook, and I quote, "bringing your community together", and this, by the way, has nothing to do with support. It's a completely different thing. And then you get a selection of groups below that. The first of which is called "Facebook support", with 18,000 members, including a support number, 1-800-804-9396, that does not work. The group is full of posts about people having issues with Facebook,

• 36:09Ed Zitron?

  with one by an admin called Oliver Green, telling everyone that this group is where they can, and I quote, "discuss issues and provide assistance and solutions to them". By the way, Oliver Green's avatar is actually a picture of political writer Oliver Darcy. It's extremely fucking strange. Anyway, one post on there says, and I quote, "Please don't respond to messages from my Facebook, comma, I was hacked", with one responder called Decatechfix, asking, "When was it hacked?", and asking them to message him, now, for a quick recovery of an account that they appear to be posting with. Another, where a user says, "Someone hacked my Facebook and changed all password", is responded to by another account called Retechman, who adds, "Inbox me now for help". Another, where someone also says that they were hacked,

• 36:52Ed Zitron?

  has another account, James Miles, responding, saying, "Message me privately". There are hundreds of interactions like these. Seriously, just...

• 37:02Ed Zitron?

  Go on this site and look. Go and look, type in Facebook support. It's completely insane. This site makes them so much, billions and billions of dollars from this site. It's so fucking strange. So another group is called Account Hacked and it has 8,500 members, but I'll add it hasn't been updated since the end of 2023. But it immediately hits you with a post that says, and I quote, "Message me for any hacking services, Facebook recovery, Instagram recovery, lost funds recovery, iCloud bypass, etcetera." With a few users responding along with several other scammers offering to help in the same way. There's another group with 6,700 members this time called Recover An Old Facebook Account You Can't Log Into. And it offers yet another 1-800 number that also did not work.

• 37:44Ed Zitron?

  A post from December 5th, 2023, from a user claiming that their account was compromised and their email and password was changed, has been responded to 44 times, mostly by scammers attempting to offer account recovery services, but a few times by other people experiencing the same problem. Elsewhere, a group promising to literally send you money on PayPal has 24,000 members and 10+ posts a day. Another, called PayPal Problem Solution, which reminds me of a Hive song, offers similarly scammy services if you can't get into PayPal. Another, called Cash App Vemo PayPal Zelle Support, has 5,800 members. Now, I also, as part of my research for this, joined another group and it was called Facebook Support.

• 38:24Ed Zitron?

  It is just every day, people going on and on and on and on about how they can't get into accounts and then being told, "Hey, call our toll-free number." And it sucks. It sucks because this took me no effort to find. There are hundreds of people every day just going on this thing, begging for help, and then being aggressively scammed. Someone here saying, "Live chat, can I get someone from Meta Live Chat?" Day later, "Help me recover my disabled account. Plus, someone stole my pictures from Instagram and is using them to scam men through offers of sexual content and meetups. Facebook won't delete the account because they used a different name than mine." "Someone hacked my Facebook account. Now he changed all its details and name too."

• 39:06Ed Zitron?

  I think they meant to say, "And I sent the complaint in Facebook Help Center. They restrict the account and gave me a link to recover it. When I tried that and recorded a video selfie..." It didn't work and every time when I tried to make the video, every time has failed to load. Anyway, some of these people don't have the best English. I can't speak other languages, not gonna judge them for that. But anyway, I have a product idea for Meta is this idea of deleting every one of these groups so that people don't get fucking scammed. Important detail though. Now, last year Meta came up with a bloody interesting new idea, this new feature. Not a big product company Meta, but they came up with this idea, it's called Meta verification. Now, do you know what you get for your fifteen dollars a month? Where you get a little checkmark and they know who you are and they say you're the real person.

• 39:51Ed Zitron?

  You know what you also get? Support, customer support. It's an actual kleptocracy. It's an actual situation where they are making it so that only those who pay will have help. Now, there may be an argument from some of you, you say, well, that's just not particularly fucking fair, is it? These poor companies, poor Mark Zuckerberg, right? Poor Mark Zuckerberg, he doesn't make anything from these poor, these horrible little free pigs who oink at him and say, Mark, Mark, I, please don't let me get scammed, don't let people steal from me. And Mark says, ah, I can't, I couldn't possibly make, because I make only forty dollars a user. He makes forty fucking, forty dollars and sixty cents per user.

• 40:33Ed Zitron?

  This is more valuable than a regular subscription, though of course fifteen bucks a month would be making him more than that. But nevertheless, that's an insanely large amount of money. That's an insanely large amount of money for a service that is decaying and being decayed by a lack of responsibility and stewardship from the fucking Burke who runs it and the scumbags who run it with him. And this is what Facebook is, by the way. It's just this whole of sponsored content and outright scams. And Meta is not a steward of this product. It's been fucking awful for years, they've been making it worse to grow revenue. But also, on top of that, they've not been trying to keep it anything like a reliable product, like a good product.

• 41:17Ed Zitron?

  It's like if you got on the bus and one of the wheels just fucking fell off sometimes and they went, well, you know, that happens with buses, that just happens sometimes. You sit on a bench in a park and it just explodes, splinters all up in your ass. Yeah, that's just what benches do, mate. The bench was free, you fucking asshole. It's so annoying and I really must repeat myself, it's been like this for years. Meta's been gradually and aggressively making the experience worse. And they've just let this hellhole. Kind of decay. It really is decay. It's the, that's the word I keep coming back to. Cause it sucks. And some of you, I've heard from a lot of you who say, oh, I just don't use it. I just don't use it. Even if you don't use this, even if Meta is something you have cut out of your life.

• 42:02Ed Zitron?

  There is a real consequence to a social network being used by billions of people. There is this unregulated digital ecological disaster. It's this open wound in the side of the internet where scammers and spammers delight in tricking and swindling people without any fear of repercussions from Meta. And honestly, they stopped giving a shit years ago. Now, if I get a comment from Meta about this, and by the way, if you're listening from Meta, put Mark on my show, otherwise I don't want to fucking hear from you. I don't care. I'm not interested. Actually, give me Bosworth. Give me Buzz. I'd love to have a chat with Buzz. You and me, Buzz. Let's chat it up. But anyway, I'm sure their comment would be, well, we do stop scammers. Well, you don't really stop them all. And indeed, if I'm the one, one, one surly dipshit with a microphone that can find this

• 42:47Ed Zitron?

  hive of scammers with really no effort, why don't you have any automation to do this? Why don't you have something to stop that? And the answer is Meta doesn't care. Meta does not care. They stopped giving a shit a while ago. And it's revisionist history to pretend that Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly chose to take the guardrails off. It's insane how many people I'm reading who are acting as if this is new. But I need you to realize at Meta, all things are justified under growth, like making the platform harder to navigate so that users spend more time trying to find the things they actually want to see, or allowing giant groups of scammers and spammers to flourish. So there's always new content for people to get lost in, even if it sucks, or it's

• 43:32Ed Zitron?

  harmful, or it hurts them.

• 43:35Ed Zitron?

  And you can hear how much distaste I have for all of this. But it's me. I wouldn't be done after just one. Now, this is a two parter. And in the next episode, I'm going to get into how Zuckerberg got away with all of this. And he did start by taking advantage of members of the media that were either asleep at the wheel, hamstrung by their editorial side, or actually just willing to help run air cover for Mark Zuckerberg. And then once I've done that, I want to explain what the actual consequences are. Cause they're not great. None of this is great. But I don't want to leave you completely depressed. Right now, you're probably, you've seen the inauguration, feeling pretty dark. I really do mean hold those closest to you closer.

• 44:17Ed Zitron?

  I do mean be a little bit more loving with the people around you. Big theme of CES was love and companionship and solidarity with your fellow human beings. Call your friends, text your friends, tell them you love them. Any of your friends were like, "Why are you telling me I love you? You love me?" That, that, that's, that's a, that in, in and of itself is a symptom of a society that has lost love. Everything feels really fucking dark, don't get me wrong. But you're still an autonomous human being. You're still capable of talking to the people around you. Uh, to quote Ned Beatty, I won't say, "Write your congressman, I don't know what." I would tell you to tell them, but I will tell you this. The people around you need you. The people around you love you.

• 45:01Ed Zitron?

  And if they don't, don't talk to them. But show more love to those around you. Show more love to everything and put more love into everything you do. And you'll hear the next episode soon. It'll only be a few days and I think you're gonna really like it. But I love you all.

• 45:25Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  This is a constant worry.

• 46:40Speaker 07

  And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user Y.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I'm Walter Isaacson. On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders, starting October 13th, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:02Ed Zitron?

  Meet the disruptors who are setting today's trends and discover those who are building what's next. People like Sebastian Yatra.

• 47:10Speaker 07

  Life is on the other side of fear.

• 47:12Ed Zitron?

  Introducing Global Flow with me, Dramos, a new podcast where I sit down with disruptors across music, entertainment, business, and tech to break down what they're building, get the blueprint of how they got there, all while trying to figure out what's coming next. Listen to Global Flow on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  You gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [bleep] about any of this now.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  Hey, it's J O from Laugh With Me the Podcast. Why would you choose Laugh With Me? Well, great question. Maybe you like comedy, maybe you like sports, or maybe you just want to hear from a podcast host who has survived bad bosses, angry customers, questionable career decisions, and a pepper spray attack? Yeah, that's right. Other podcasts have hosts with broadcasting degrees. Laugh With Me has a survivor. Listen to Laugh With Me, a podcast with Jeremy Odom, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.