We talked to former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos about what the media got right and wrong about its coverage of Facebook’s influence on the 2016 election. Stamos — who played a key role in bringing information to Robert Mueller about Russian election interference — is someone who is willing to criticize his former employer without letting the media off the hook.
Stamos argues that Facebook inadequately addressed misinformation posted onto Facebook’s platform and downplayed its discovery of Russian election interference on its platform. BUT, Stamos argues that the media played a far larger role in helping Russian election interference by gleefully publishing stolen Democratic National Committee emails.
We decided to check in with Stamos as the credibility of the Steele dossier has continued to unravel.
We talk about the media’s failure to soul search over its own role in the hacked election. We also discuss the Facebook Files and Stamos’ objections to some of the latest reporting on Facebook.
Background reading:
Opinion: Indictment of Steele dossier source is more bad news for multiple media outlets
How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?
Collusion? Who needs it when Facebook was allowing Russians to help Trump?
Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
00:00:06
Welcome. Hey everybody.
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Welcome to this week's episode of dead cat.
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This is Cam joined as always by Eric and Katie joined this week
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by our very special, guest Alex Stamos, the director of the
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Stanford internet Observatory, though, you may all know him for
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his earlier work as the chief security officer.
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Assert Facebook, where he oversaw Security on their
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platforms at a time. That things got a little weird
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over at Facebook spicen. Yes, by C.
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So this week, we're going to go deep on Facebook and Russian
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interference and more specifically if we can get
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there. How the media reported on this
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crazy brain breaking time that we probably will never recover
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from before we get to that though.
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Quick public congrats to Friend Of The Show.
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Ken Griffin of Citadel Big Winners this week.
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Dead cat sponsor chair. Auction to win.
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Our in-house copy of the US. Constitution can beat out
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constitutional Dao, better luck next time guys, and congrats to
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Ken for winning. All right, Alex.
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So this week we want to dive into a look back on Facebook and
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Russia and the media. The reason it's interesting now
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is that there was this recent arrest of I Gordon chanko an
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analyst who was indicted in an investigation led by the doj
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that's looking into all the Trump Russia 2016.
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Ian, what have you? There's actually a great piece
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about it from Eric when people in Washington Post that we can
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link to in the show description. But to make this short, which is
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never easy to do with Russia gate stuff.
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This indictment essentially led to the collapse of the steel
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dossier and a number of attractions for media
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organizations but was never in doubt throughout all of the
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investigations was that Russia did interfere in the election
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and continues to interfere in elections as do many, other
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countries around the world and there's probably no one who
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Dance, that better than you. Alex, while at Facebook, you
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were one of the first people, to grasp, really, how Russia use
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the platform for their interference campaign.
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And you work directly with the molar investigation to explain
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that process. And then you got to see a
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covered by the media. Basically, in real time poorly,
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what's the score on? How is covered by the media in
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real-time? I think that's what we're going
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to discuss. Yeah, yeah.
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Well, you know, Can you maybe walk us through?
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What it was? You saw on Facebook's platform.
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Yeah, we've got to get to check a launching Point here, the
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weather. Yeah, what exactly did you see
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while you're at Facebook? And how did you hear going to
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cut right to the end? You guys gotta let me warm up
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into the eggs. Like I don't want anybody to
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actually know what happened. It's a special thing.
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Nobody knows what happened. And it's all just hot.
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Takes take first, smart blathers.
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Yeah, maybe like, yeah, we will sit on the media center enough,
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Eric, but we got to get a foundation here.
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You can read all about it. Yeah, in an ugly truth by
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Katie's colleagues which is soon to be a miniseries which means
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all of my friends are to eating are texting me with who should
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play me in the, the adaptation of what have you heard so far?
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Can we get some casting rumors going?
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Well, apparently exact Galifianakis is the current
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leader, making a dramatic turn as a Surefire way to 1 win, an
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award, but also reinvent your career, so it's it went out
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every. I think it would be a great move
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for him from a dramatic perspective.
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I'm hoping for John Stamos, you know, even though he's like 10
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years older, I feel like it's the same.
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This on Stamos could be the name of your podcast.
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When you talk about the right, I'll have to do a real-time
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podcast with the episode recapture.
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I was criticized for making the making this to light.
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Now you guys are. Okay.
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Kitty, ask a real question. Okay.
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Okay. Okay, so tell us what you saw in
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2016 so let's take. So look at the big picture.
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There's like maybe four different themes of Russian
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interference in the election, right?
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And so the first is, when I'm not going to talk about, just to
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mention is like all of the reach.
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It's in relationship to the Trump campaign, right?
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So, you know, all of that stuff of which the Steel dossiers part
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of it. There's a lot of stuff in the
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molar report and then the Senate Intel reports.
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And so, there's the physical stuff right from a propaganda
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perspective. Another part we won't really
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talk that much about is, what is called, kind of white or gray
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propaganda which is the propaganda that can be tied to a
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government. And so that's like Russia Today,
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Sputnik that's called White propaganda.
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And then kind of the two darker more mysterious ways that they
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influence. The election.
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The first was the gru activity. So the gru is the main
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intelligence, directorate of the Russian military.
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The gru has existed for a long period of time.
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It's Military Intelligence. They have a hacking side and
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they have a propaganda side and the hacking and propaganda sides
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work together. So this is what we see from kind
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of the really high-end State adversaries is these kinds of
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hybrid operations, where you have both a offensive computer
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network intrusion capability, combined, with the propaganda
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capability. And so, with the gru Was they
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broke into the dnc's email server.
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They broke into John, podesta is email, the email thousands of
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other people. It turns out most of them didn't
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have much to do with this but the campaign that they uncovered
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Pizza gate, exactly right. We broke that thing out.
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Eric's using this to spread disinformation.
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Fortunately, if you have a whole podcast but this information
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Spotify will give you a hundred million dollars.
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So there may be this is the way for you guys to we're working on
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it and so you have the gru activity T where they breaking
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all that stuff, they steal all this information and then they
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release it in a variety of different means, including via
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Wikileaks, including via personas that they created
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themselves. Their goal was to change the
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conversation about Hillary Clinton, so that's the gru
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activity and then there's the IRA activity.
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So II RA in this context were talking about the Russian
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internet research agency. That is a private group.
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They belong to a guy named Ian vague deeper Goshen.
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He is an was We considered an oligarch in Russia.
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He has this troll Farm, which at the time was in this building
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st. Petersburg, they've actually
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moved since then, but this famous building in st.
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Petersburg at which they would build propaganda and spread it
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on social media, and they did that through the creation of
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thousands of fake accounts of all of these personas that would
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pretend to be from the countries where they spread it, and then
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building up audiences and pushing it, part of that
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includes advertising. And so, the internet research
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agency were and about, Thousand dollars in ads on Facebook, the
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ads were not really for the creation of the propaganda that
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was for the creation of audiences.
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So their goal was to use ads to Target groups that might be
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interested in their content and then pull them into liking pages
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and then the most of the content was pushed via Facebook pages.
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So those are the identities for these groups.
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They would create like a pro-immigration group and
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anti-immigration group a pro black lives matter, group and
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anti black lives matter group, stuff like that.
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Their content in the end with something like 80 piece of
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content. Seen in the end by over 130
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million Americans. That was the number one topic
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that they were talking about and you're at Facebook when this is
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happening or give us where you sort of fit into this time,
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right? So I was at Facebook, when this
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happened I joined Facebook in 2015 and as Chief security
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officer my primary job was keeping people from hacking
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Facebook, right? So actually feel pretty good
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about succeed at my piercing, right, right.
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So we actually did a lot of really good work on security
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stuff while I was there. And So that's like my primary
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job. But then I also had a number of
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groups that worked on the abuse of the platform to cause harm,
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most specifically there. I had investigators that worked
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on child. Safety, that worked on
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counterterrorism. So we had the counterterrorism
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investigators on my team and then we had to this threat
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intelligence team. And so the threat intelligence
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team is mostly X us and then a couple of other from Western,
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Government intelligence analysts work to NSA, what the CIA in
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such whose job. It was to track different
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government's activity, both attacking Facebook.
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But then also, In Facebook to do bad things.
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And so kind of a normal work week for them would be, we found
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four accounts that we can tie to the Islamic revolutionary guard
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Corps and they are spearfishing, State Department employees to
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try to get access to their Facebook accounts, from which
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they can then trick, Iranian dissidents into revealing
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themselves and then arrest them. So, that's like an actual thing
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that we found was this big attack by the Iranians because
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the state department where we had machine learning that
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detected the kind of activity, we figured it all out.
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We worked with the state department and the FBI to round
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that all up in to stop it. And so, that was their normal
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activity. But we got pulled, we got pulled
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into this from two different ways.
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So first, we had a dedicated team working on a PT 28, which
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is the, the hacking team. That's tied to the Gru.
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And we saw in the spring of 2016 during the primary process
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activity by Gru that look like they were interested in people
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who work for the DN C and D Triple C.
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If you're an intelligence agent, you've been told I want to hack
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somebody. Want to hack this organization
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with the first things you do is you try to figure out all the
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people that work there and then you learn everything you can
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about them from their public social media profiles.
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So, we had a bunch of accounts that we had previously
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attributed to GRU because their activity.
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So we saw them doing stuff in the Ukraine and we saw them
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doing hacks against the world, anti-doping agency, your
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Facebook, and Linkedin monetize that well or do you make exactly
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right? Yeah, we get ya LinkedIn.
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I mean Facebook doesn't sell accounts, but LinkedIn could
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probably sell some Premium Accounts to the gru.
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I To most people that reach out to me on LinkedIn are affiliated
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with some sort of foreign State actor.
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So, yeah, it's not, it's not a bad Theory.
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And, and so we saw this activity, we saw them kind of
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snooping around and so they weren't do any actual attacks on
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Facebook, but what they were doing reconnaissance, which is
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the first step in this. The standard operating procedure
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from that point, was you go and you tell the FBI if they're
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targeting Americans and the FBI handles it, we now know FBI
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didn't really do much. Like they had all this
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information about different kinds of targeting of DNC and
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there's all this crazy stories. Like I mean, you know, the
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Hoover building is whatever four blocks from the DNC headquarters
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or something, and somehow the message didn't make it, but
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okay. And then later in the year,
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after the hacks happen, which don't happen on Facebook.
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They happen on Gmail and then they happen directly against the
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dnc's infrastructure, which the DNC should never been running
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their own email server. But that's a different issue.
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They come back and they create these personas on Facebook
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called DC leaks. So we'll Wikileaks is kind of a
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useful idiot to them but they didn't have direct control over
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Wikileaks. And so, they pretty clearly
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wanted To have personas to leak information that were under
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their direct control. And so they create these
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personas, and then they start reaching out to journalists here
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are stolen documents. I have, these are the stories
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you should write, right? And that is effective, it turns
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out. Now, they also release the data
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in a bunch of different ways, right?
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And in the end, they get the stories written that they want.
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Now, the internet research agency stuff, came after of, you
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know in the whole discussion of fake news and such that we had a
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big project to kind of answer the question of all of this fake
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news content. How much of it came from Russia
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now in the long term. Just a very small fraction of
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all that the vast majority of that content is domestically
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created or family. We suck ourselves that we're
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just right, right? And or it's created by like
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financially motivated actors like the apocryphal but real
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Macedonian teenagers, right? Like things like that.
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But you know we did obviously found a big chunk of it.
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We found the internet researching to see activity and
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then announced that later in 2017, but those are kind of two
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different things. So, on the gru stuff, we were
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ahead of the curve on the IRA stuff.
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We were behind the curve. And you went to the molar team
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to say, we Found what led to the I re-indictment you reached out
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to Jeanne re on the team. You know, what was her response?
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What was that first conversation?
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Like yeah. So so there's an interesting
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back and forth between the big tech companies and Department of
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Justice on all kinds of crimes. In that we have this this is one
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of the interesting things that we haven't really figured out.
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Even since 2016 is, how do we want this kind of law
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enforcement to happen on these companies because the truth is,
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is that doj and FBI don't have the ability to find the things
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that the companies can because they can't access.
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Us petabytes, and petabytes of data without lawful process,
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they have lots of power to get data on specific individuals,
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either in a classified or unclassified setting, but they
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have to know who to grab in the first place.
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And so, this is actually a pretty common model of the
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company's notice something bad happening.
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You go and you send your lawyers to go brief, somebody from the
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right us attorney's office, you write sign out an Affidavit of
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this. Facebook employee has witnessed
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a crime being committed, so it's structurally.
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This is the kind of conversation that happens all the time.
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I'm from a political perspective, this was very
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different right in that, you're not talking about reaching out
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to like just the normal us, attorney's office in Kansas or
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whatever because you found a child molester there, you're
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talking to the special counsel's office, right?
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And it was interesting, I think in the end, I mean, they were
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great and they were very thankful.
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But yeah, we went and privately told them you personally or who
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is no. No, the lawyers went.
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So, I was part of preparing all this stuff, but like, in at that
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kind of level, you're not sending somebody like me in
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there, all the big tech companies have Of X doj lawyers,
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who are in-house, who handle law enforcement relationships.
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So we had a relationship between our threat Intel team and their
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counterparts and doj. So, for these big groups like
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apt 28, the FBI actually has coordinator sitting in the
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Hoover building because, you know, the FBI's like a
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franchise, right? Just like McDonald's.
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There's some of them that have, like, great play places and some
00:13:21
have the really clean bathrooms. So, like some FBI offices are
00:13:25
really good at doing cyber stuff.
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Some are not so great, so you'll end up with 5 or 6 other Offices
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looking at a campaign separately.
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And so the FBI is little have coordinators who sit in the
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headquarters whose job it is to watch all of this data being
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gathered and say, oh, these four different hacks, against
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different steel companies. In four different jurisdictions,
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are actually the same actor right there.
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So, we had Direct relationships, those those folks.
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But when you get to this level in your talking, the special
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counsel, it's like you're sending the lawyer.
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So the lawyers go and brief her and them and then we send our
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people to go talk. After we got lawful process to
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go, fill them in and to give them all the data that we So
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this investigation by the special counsel was probably the
00:14:04
most watched and reported on Investigation, maybe in my
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lifetime as your team is speaking to members of molars
00:14:12
team. How did you sort of view the way
00:14:14
the media covered that? I mean, did you find that there
00:14:17
was fairly restrained and reasonable articles written
00:14:20
about it? I mean, what's the
00:14:21
sensationalism already surrendered?
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Because we can talk about what happens after the fact because
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that's when shit really gets crazy but even just in the
00:14:27
lead-up to the molar investigation, What was your
00:14:30
perspective from where you said right?
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I mean, I think one, so we published a white paper, I think
00:14:37
it was April or something. So in 2017, in Spring of 2017,
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we publish a paper on what the GRE you did.
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This is the paper that famously doesn't say it's Russia, but has
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a footnote that hints that it's Russia and there's almost no
00:14:50
coverage of it, right? Like we did media briefings, we
00:14:52
did this in that and there's only a couple of stories, right?
00:14:54
A hint that it's Russia but not. Not actually have it be Russia.
00:14:57
You just say a country and what All-Stars?
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Backwards or something. So I can pull up the exact
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footnote. But it says something along the
00:15:03
lines of our data is consistent with the attribution provided by
00:15:06
the US intelligence agencies in their January memo.
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So if you remember like, before Obama goes, there's a joint
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communique from the intelligence agencies, saying it was Russia.
00:15:15
Right? Like was clearly the
00:15:16
administration getting anywhere. You're worried about getting
00:15:18
sued for libel or why the game. No, I mean, so that was a big
00:15:21
political fight internally which I'm sure will be an entire
00:15:24
episode of this miniseries with Zach Galifianakis being yelled
00:15:27
at by by the queen. I was part of Facebook.
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Except her to not get as much news.
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So, Facebook, explain any other not the lack of news coverage?
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I think it's, I mean, there was a bunch of different things, but
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there's comfy people who did not want Facebook volunteering that
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bad things. Had happened that Facebook had
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any part of this, which was clearly not going to work,
00:15:44
right? Yeah.
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Thatís a, and it worked perfectly and no one's blame
00:15:46
Facebook since, right? Exactly.
00:15:48
And so you have to calm people were pushing that, but then you
00:15:50
also have like the d.c. government Affairs.
00:15:52
People who don't want to take a side, right?
00:15:55
And so, I think that was one of the big things is like, if you
00:15:57
say Russia, you know, you got those new Trump Administration,
00:15:59
Didn't the right thing to do is to turn this over to the special
00:16:02
counsel and eternal all the data over to the people who are
00:16:05
investigating. And our job is not to get
00:16:07
involved in the public fight, which just happened to coincide
00:16:10
with the, like, coms goals of the company.
00:16:12
And not yet like involved in anything, right?
00:16:15
So, yes, there's a big fight. Like it was a lot, just to get
00:16:18
it out. Like the fact that we admitted
00:16:19
that anything happened, but everything in there is accurate,
00:16:22
just like the whole Rush attribution section was cut out
00:16:25
as in one of 85 different versions that went out, but it
00:16:29
got very little Coverage. Right?
00:16:30
And there's anything we've learned from the whole mother
00:16:32
thing. It is that the rollout of stuff
00:16:34
matters. Almost more than sort of all the
00:16:37
technical footnoted. It's not like, oh, the public
00:16:40
eventually consumes it the smartest way as long as it's in
00:16:44
there. It's that the the fucking
00:16:46
headline is the most important thing and you can say, oh is in
00:16:49
there, I don't know. That's that's no.
00:16:51
I think you're right. I think you're right and
00:16:53
certainly in so it didn't cover the much.
00:16:55
I mean, looking back it's not that great.
00:16:58
I think like the treatment of Facebook has to Seen in the
00:17:00
context of the overall coverage of trump in Russia, which I
00:17:04
think, you know, and Smith came up with this term resistance
00:17:07
journalism and I think there's a lot of that going on right in
00:17:09
that. There's a bit of a moral panic
00:17:12
and as long as you say stuff that is about the targets,
00:17:15
there's not a lot of pressure from other journalists to get it
00:17:18
totally right. And so there's a lot of kind of
00:17:19
logical leaping and I think that happened both before and after
00:17:23
our announcement September of 2017, obviously after we
00:17:26
announce people kind of lose their minds what we'll get to
00:17:28
that in a bit because II actually.
00:17:29
Yeah. We'll get to that in a bit
00:17:30
because I pulled some, some clips from that era which was a
00:17:33
great thing. I spent the, I spent like two
00:17:36
hours last night, rolling through articles.
00:17:38
We'll get to that in a because I definitely want your things.
00:17:40
So, so anyway, so you guys work with the council and it is being
00:17:44
reported on simultaneously, what will we briefed molar way before
00:17:47
the Public Announcement, right? And in fact, when things get
00:17:50
complicated, the Public Announcement is that we had a
00:17:52
gag order from the molar team, right?
00:17:53
So like we go and tell them and then they hit us with a gag to
00:17:57
not talk about any of this. And so everything that Facebook
00:17:59
Okay, announced had to be negotiated with the special
00:18:01
counsel's office, which turns into this whole kind of
00:18:04
nightmare when we do the announcement, it doesn't come
00:18:07
with any of the data and that was specifically due to this
00:18:10
order from Miller's office. So you know and I'm not a lawyer
00:18:13
but like these lawyers were having some pretty honest and
00:18:17
big arguments both with molars team and then the lawyers in
00:18:21
Congress and side like you said, Eric the rollout is what
00:18:24
matters. And so you know Facebook ends up
00:18:26
putting out this mealy-mouthed blog post with my name on it.
00:18:29
That had pretty Much nothing to do with the first draft that I
00:18:31
wrote like every single word was changed by a lawyer.
00:18:34
A comes first. Before when I say every reporter
00:18:36
would tell you you can't let people put stuff on your byline.
00:18:39
The you know yes, I learned that too late.
00:18:42
Yeah, I should not have let them get my name on it.
00:18:44
Really you regret the whole thing?
00:18:46
Like I mean isn't it better something than nothing?
00:18:49
I don't regret the white paper I think getting the white paper
00:18:51
out. So on the white paper side I
00:18:54
wish it said Russia. This is the other part.
00:18:56
So when you talk about the treatment of the media, you
00:18:58
know, again there's two totally different.
00:18:59
Campaigns the IRA campaign. Absolutely.
00:19:02
The responsibility of Facebook and Twitter, right?
00:19:04
It is our responsibility to catch that and we did not my
00:19:06
team did not catch that. I did not catch that you didn't
00:19:08
stop it. The gru campaign was targeted at
00:19:12
the media and that absolutely worked, right?
00:19:15
I wrote. There's a there was a story
00:19:17
about John podesta as pasta sauce recipe, which one could
00:19:19
argue probably wasn't really relevant to the election issues
00:19:22
at hand. And yet, there was political ran
00:19:24
a live blog at start. We all know we all know that he
00:19:26
had risotto recipes, or whatever.
00:19:28
Yeah, I mean, yeah, like Luke. I ran a live blog of, like, what
00:19:31
embarrassing stuff can we find in these emails?
00:19:33
And maybe it's a Russian plot, but doesn't really matter
00:19:35
because it's newsworthy. This is where I spent most of my
00:19:37
evening yesterday reading through old articles because as
00:19:40
Facebook, gets closer to, I guess it was just delivering
00:19:44
testimony front of Congress about what you found in your
00:19:47
research on the IRA. There's kind of leaks that come
00:19:50
out did the day before hand and so just pulling through a
00:19:53
sampling of Articles, you know, this one from the New York Times
00:19:56
actually October 2nd 2017 headline Facebook's Russia link
00:20:00
ads came in many disguises and, you know, has a lead in there.
00:20:04
The Russians, who poses Americans on Facebook last year
00:20:07
tried on quite an array of disguises.
00:20:09
There's an article in CNN from Dylan Byers, September 28th,
00:20:13
2017 that refers to the IRA as a shadowy agency, which comes up
00:20:18
very frequently, describing them as a shadowy agency that's
00:20:21
extremely sophisticated in their ways of disseminating.
00:20:25
They're not necessary to visit of information things of that
00:20:28
nature. There's also So, a column from
00:20:30
Margaret Sullivan, I want to get to later.
00:20:32
But again, from your perspective, as these articles
00:20:34
are coming out in advance of Facebook employees testimony in
00:20:38
front of Congress. What's your sense as this is
00:20:40
being rolled out? Because it definitely fed a
00:20:42
frenzy happening in the public that.
00:20:45
Russia fucked everything up. They came in there.
00:20:48
They broke American democracy and they did it through to visit
00:20:52
Facebook posts. Yeah, I mean, I think so.
00:20:54
Facebook obviously takes a huge should take a huge amount of
00:20:57
blame on the way that all this information.
00:20:59
Was released and framed and the desire to keep everything
00:21:03
secret. And then to only allow things to
00:21:04
come out drips and drabs really hurt the company.
00:21:07
That being said, the overall reaction seemed crazy because it
00:21:10
was completely out of touch with the actual quantitative size of
00:21:15
this content because something like 80 post sounds big
00:21:19
Until you realize the denominator on that is in the
00:21:22
hundreds of millions, right? And so the vast majority, this
00:21:25
content had almost no reach like on the stuff where the Russians
00:21:28
posted the content themselves. All right, so II ra, they're
00:21:31
making propaganda, they're posting it.
00:21:32
So this is like a picture of people at a fence that is an
00:21:36
anti-immigration add or it's a pro.
00:21:39
Something that looks like it's Pro black lives matter.
00:21:41
But made by a fake group, right? For that stuff, its overall
00:21:45
reach compared to other, both organic, and paid content was
00:21:49
nowhere near, right? There's hundreds of millions of
00:21:52
dollars were spent on the election on Facebook and they
00:21:54
spent 150 dollars, right? Which it's like over the course
00:21:56
of two years, which do the math. That's what less than 5.
00:21:59
I was in a month. I mean like there are they are
00:22:01
like, you know, d2c makeup brands for dogs, that probably
00:22:05
spend more on Facebook and Instagram than the IRA did.
00:22:09
So the idea that this was a huge spend was was, was always a
00:22:12
fallacy and I don't know how many people that, you know, got
00:22:16
whipped up into a frenzy, about it, really understood that.
00:22:19
Well, because it also got combined completely without any
00:22:22
evidence with the Cambridge analytic issues, which is this
00:22:25
kind of imaginary world in which Cambridge analytical is this
00:22:28
magical Group of bond villains that have mind-control powers
00:22:32
based upon, right? Yo, people's likes that they
00:22:35
took yo, illegally via an API to be totally clear Cambridge
00:22:39
analytical themselves as a scam, right?
00:22:41
So they said they had these magical psychographic models of
00:22:43
people and there are quantitative metrics as to
00:22:46
whether online ads work. There's a whole set of people
00:22:50
whose entire job. It is to think about these
00:22:52
metrics and I know of those met none of those metrics is came a
00:22:54
general like a better than just any other kinds of AD targeting
00:22:58
that people do on Facebook, right?
00:22:59
And they had nothing to do with Ira to be clear, Kim Joon wook.
00:23:02
It had absolutely nothing to do with internet, research to see
00:23:04
the research internet research agency did zero data upload
00:23:07
custom audiences. So they didn't even do what we
00:23:11
consider micro-targeting. They targeted like you know,
00:23:14
young men in this ZIP code in Baltimore for pro black lives
00:23:19
matter messages, but none of that mattered to the narrative
00:23:22
which conflating these things at these Russians have kind of
00:23:25
magical mind control powers that they were able to use through a
00:23:28
hundred fifty thousand dollars of ads.
00:23:29
When Hillary Clinton campaign, spent like a hundred million
00:23:31
dollars, right answers? Like the idea that they were a
00:23:34
thousand times. But what about this idea that
00:23:36
you guys were like hand holding the Trump campaign in a way, you
00:23:39
weren't the cloaking campaign. So there's I think totally
00:23:43
legitimate arguments on whether Facebook ads had an effect on
00:23:47
the campaign. Almost certainly Facebook ads
00:23:49
had an effect on the campaign but they were to the
00:23:51
quote-unquote legitimate ads paid for by the campaigns and
00:23:55
the official committees and such using the money that our country
00:23:58
allows people. To give, right?
00:24:00
Yo, to two candidates in the parties, for which there are no
00:24:04
legal controls, I had nothing to do this.
00:24:05
So all of this I know from the investigation afterwards, right?
00:24:08
But, my understanding is that both campaigns, just like any of
00:24:11
the, if you're a Procter & Gamble, you get a personal, you
00:24:14
get a Facebook employee whose entire job it is to help your
00:24:16
campaigns run. And so these campaigns are
00:24:19
spending tens hundreds millions of dollars.
00:24:21
So they got offers of these people will help you do it and
00:24:24
the Trump campaign not knowing what they're doing said, yes.
00:24:27
And the Clean Campaign was like now we At this and said no.
00:24:31
And so it is true and it is quite possible that trumps
00:24:33
campaign was way better than Clinton's campaign because of
00:24:36
that, we partially don't have this data because the data is
00:24:39
kind of Legally locked up and it's never come out and there's
00:24:42
never been any changes to the law to allow it to come out.
00:24:44
I'm actually think this is where Congress has failed.
00:24:46
The most is that there have been zero changes to online
00:24:49
advertising law, since 2016. I would like to ban
00:24:52
micro-targeting for political ads, because I think it's
00:24:55
innately corrupting because it both drives campaigns just All
00:24:59
this information but it also drives them to Target message
00:25:03
different messages to different audiences.
00:25:05
Both political parties. Do this in both political
00:25:06
parties, think they're better. So they will make all these
00:25:09
noises publicly about how horrible ads are incorrigible
00:25:11
lake or river. It's all Bs right?
00:25:13
In private, all of these senators and congressmen are
00:25:16
being told by their Consultants were getting paid to run
00:25:19
political ads. They're being told by their
00:25:20
Consultants were better, do not unilaterally disarm, and so they
00:25:24
won't pass any laws. Europe.
00:25:25
Europe is starting to make some moves here, but in the United
00:25:27
States, there's been nothing Kim.
00:25:28
Can we take a quick Step back for a second to to the IRA stuff
00:25:32
because I mean you sort of brought it up and I have this
00:25:34
column here. This is again for that.
00:25:36
Same time period in 2017, this is from Margaret Sullivan, who
00:25:39
is a great media columnist. This is not a slam on her at
00:25:41
all, but I think it looks very interesting in retrospect and
00:25:44
really is a good summary of the era.
00:25:47
So the headline is collusion, who needs it?
00:25:49
When Facebook was allowing Russians to help Trump.
00:25:52
This is a key paragraph from this column much of that
00:25:54
content. This is the IRAs content was
00:25:56
expressly designed to widen the cultural divides, the United
00:25:59
States to Of wedges among its citizens and in doing so, to
00:26:02
help elect the Russian, government's preferred candidate
00:26:04
Donald Trump. It worked.
00:26:07
And while those more recent numbers are astonishing, I'm
00:26:09
assuming this is the numbers. Unlike reach the reality is
00:26:11
probably far worse research from Columbia University's Tau Center
00:26:15
suggests that Russian, linked information or disinformation
00:26:18
with shared hundreds of millions of times on Facebook.
00:26:20
The numbers Boggle, the mind of what here.
00:26:22
No, let me, let me read the key paragraph here because this is
00:26:24
where I think it really gets to the point.
00:26:26
We need to admit the obvious. If there had been no Facebook
00:26:29
spreading, Russia propaganda. There might as well be no
00:26:31
President Trump. Now looking at this.
00:26:35
Now from 2021, I don't want to seem too much smarter now
00:26:38
because it's easy to be critical in hindsight.
00:26:40
But is that an insane conclusion to reach based on everything
00:26:44
that you saw from the IRA? And is the fact that a major
00:26:47
newspaper is publishing this, in some way, a failure on the part
00:26:51
of the media, or the interaction between the media and these tech
00:26:54
companies to accurately, assess the role that the I replayed in
00:26:58
the 2016 election. Yes, that's wrong from my
00:27:01
perspective, the two kinds of online propaganda that were most
00:27:04
effective was one legitimate Facebook ads.
00:27:07
The ads that were run by the candidates in, which Trump did a
00:27:10
better job than the Clinton headed.
00:27:11
Straight up above board, using custom audiences and all the
00:27:14
Procter & Gamble shit. Which again, I would like laws
00:27:17
to change that but we need laws to change it, right, right.
00:27:19
And then the second was the gru activity because the gru
00:27:22
activity completely changed the tenor of the coverage of Hillary
00:27:26
Clinton, that was incredibly effective because what they used
00:27:29
was. Olin emails that allowed them to
00:27:32
create stories that were based upon a kernel of Truth.
00:27:35
Where the story itself was not accurate and be frank.
00:27:38
The US media has never ever ever looked inside of itself of the
00:27:43
fact that every major news are, you know, the New York Times The
00:27:45
Washington Post, CNN MSNBC, not just Fox, which like, we'll just
00:27:48
have to write off Fox of like what we can do about Fox.
00:27:52
But for all the, what I considered the legitimate media,
00:27:54
every single one of them was played by the gru they wrote
00:27:57
exactly the stories of Gru wanted and they Done.
00:28:00
No soul-searching on that at all.
00:28:03
And so at, yes, we screwed up like I will absolutely admit
00:28:06
that we screwed up but the idea that a hundred thousand dollars
00:28:09
in ads is as important as the entire legitimate, American
00:28:13
Media changing the way it covered Hillary Clinton is just
00:28:17
ridiculous. I want to just to say Tom
00:28:21
response to your comment and then it was must Alex in a
00:28:23
minute. That Margaret sullavan column is
00:28:25
so interesting because it kind of erases history, you know,
00:28:29
Russia 'He had used propaganda to widen the divisions between
00:28:34
Americans before there were very active in the 60s and 70s the
00:28:37
United States when the country was going through an
00:28:39
extraordinary Civil Rights Movement.
00:28:42
This is not the first time that Russia and other countries but
00:28:45
especially Russia have used internal divisions in a country
00:28:48
to try to destabilise the country itself.
00:28:50
So I think that, what is missed in that column is that this is
00:28:53
not a new strategy, it's simply a new tool and I think we could
00:28:57
debate whether or not the tool is more.
00:28:59
Active than any other tool they've had before and that is
00:29:03
an interesting debate but certainly this is not new.
00:29:05
I mean, if you're a student of history and you've read anything
00:29:08
about Russia's efforts to cause the collapse of the United
00:29:13
States in the 60s, you know, this isn't new.
00:29:16
Yeah. Tom Tom ridge book on this is
00:29:18
fantastic right. Active measures like absolutely
00:29:22
CIA invented AIDs that whole thing.
00:29:24
Yes, I think this is a good because we're now promoted
00:29:26
Cecilia and share has book and soon-to-be TV show.
00:29:29
Ow. And now, this really great book
00:29:30
after measures were really more of kind of like a marketing, a
00:29:34
marketing agency owner. Do you guys have a code that
00:29:37
unites discount on these books? You need to you need to line
00:29:40
that up before this goes. Yeah, but I think that on the
00:29:42
question of whether or not newsrooms have really reckoned
00:29:46
with this idea of being played by the gru, there were moments
00:29:50
where at least Dean baquet at the times, he came out different
00:29:55
panels. He was asked about this and he
00:29:56
did say that it had led to some soul-searching.
00:29:59
I You know, the internally certainly this conversation
00:30:03
husband had an is being had and those are really important and
00:30:07
ongoing conversations, especially we saw going into the
00:30:10
2020 election, will see you again going to the 2022.
00:30:15
Midterms like this, this is an ongoing conversation.
00:30:18
Even if it's not necessarily happening as publicly as it is
00:30:21
for Facebook and whether or not that's fair, I think is very is
00:30:24
a very good question, really? I mean, there are there are
00:30:28
great journalists at All of these organizations who I've had
00:30:30
private conversations with where they absolutely recognize all
00:30:33
this. And I know that they are part of
00:30:35
the internal conversations of. Like, let's not get played again
00:30:37
on D McKay, I remember very distinctly a week because I
00:30:40
wrote something about this, where Mark Zuckerberg gave his,
00:30:43
like, the speech were like, he changes history.
00:30:45
That Facebook was invented because of the Iraq War, which
00:30:47
is, yeah, yeah. I was not in that Harbor Group
00:30:49
which is why I don't own an island, but like, that does not
00:30:52
seem accurate to me, but the same week Dean Beck a was on
00:30:56
Michael Voris podcast, which I'm a huge fan of the times podcast.
00:30:59
And borrow to his credit is like interviewing his boss's boss's
00:31:04
boss, and ask them. These really tough questions.
00:31:06
And Bouquet says, if it's newsworthy, we will publish it,
00:31:10
right? And so I saw both Zach and Decay
00:31:12
or kind of actually to me similar figures in that from
00:31:16
bekay everything is about newsworthiness right?
00:31:19
And even if you're getting played, even if the leaked
00:31:22
documents were leaked from hacking from a Russian hacking
00:31:25
group, they're going to run. It whereas duck was all about
00:31:28
kind of free speech. In the freedom of individuals
00:31:30
and I saw them as like in this parallel that both of them are
00:31:32
getting played, both of them have like this deep belief in
00:31:35
what they're doing. And can't understand how that
00:31:37
deep belief is being used against them, so they Facebook,
00:31:39
like we at least published I? Yes, I failed to get the company
00:31:43
to put Russia into that paper. The New York Times wrote nothing
00:31:47
right. The York Times has never ever
00:31:50
written anything. About we got played by the
00:31:51
Jerry, you were sorry. And so yes, did I fail?
00:31:54
Yes, but I, at least will say it.
00:31:56
We need to realize, we need to rely on media columnist for
00:31:59
that. We need to rely on Margaret
00:32:00
Sullivan for those sorts of Articles anymore.
00:32:03
But Margaret Sullivan is as subject to the, you know, the
00:32:06
whims of the moment. And that means like in general,
00:32:09
right? Sure.
00:32:09
It's really hard to get the media to write a story saying,
00:32:12
we messed up. And I think the red and many
00:32:14
moments where various people have said, don't you think that
00:32:18
BuzzFeed should apologize for publishing raw unvetted
00:32:23
intelligence that completely changed the course of how we
00:32:25
think about Donald Trump, that's falling apart.
00:32:27
These questions have come up again.
00:32:28
And again, Multiple media organizations and I'm not
00:32:31
excusing them. I'm just going to agree with you
00:32:33
that we haven't seen the equivalent of a white paper
00:32:35
where a media organization comes out.
00:32:37
And says, this is, this is how we messed up and this is what we
00:32:40
want to do better. So I think, because of the way
00:32:42
the media works, we are all really dependent on columnist.
00:32:45
Whether it's a Margaret sullavan or whether it's a Columbia,
00:32:47
journalism review, some sort of outside forcing function to say
00:32:52
this is important to recognize for sure.
00:32:55
For sure. I mean the handling of like the
00:32:57
hunter by knee males Joe His daughters diary.
00:33:00
I mean those would seem to be early signs that the media is
00:33:05
having a much more command and control approach which is also
00:33:09
criticized. Well I mean it is sort of a
00:33:10
no-win case where if there's information out there that seems
00:33:14
it's absolutely no win and it's no win for both the tech
00:33:18
companies in the media. I mean, there's no direct hit
00:33:20
both sides screwed up right and sort of the government.
00:33:23
So, like you're asking about what is like, so what did it
00:33:26
feel? Like for us inside Facebook,
00:33:27
what it felt like was there. Three?
00:33:29
Three people, there's Mark Zuckerberg in the hoodie,
00:33:31
there's, you know, the FBI G-Man in his suit and there's, you
00:33:36
know, a New York Times Reporter with like the Press hat on like
00:33:38
the little, you know, the Fedora or whatever and both the
00:33:41
government guy in the Press car. Like, oh man, that guy in the
00:33:44
hoodie screwed up, right? We did nothing wrong, but they
00:33:47
really messed up. All these things were in bed,
00:33:49
Facebook are accurate and true. And it is the mistakes of the
00:33:52
company that need to be fixed, but they are in the context of
00:33:55
an overall, failure of American society to deal with this new Of
00:34:00
attack by one of our adversaries.
00:34:02
And unless you look at the big picture, you can't solve it.
00:34:05
And that's like one of my lessons come out of the 2020.
00:34:07
Election was the context of propaganda.
00:34:10
Mind is completely changed in the vast majority of it.
00:34:12
Now comes from verified American voices.
00:34:14
Tuna, we know exactly what they are.
00:34:16
They're not being Amplified by Russians are not fake accounts
00:34:19
and they have the ability to control the media context as
00:34:22
well as to get their messages out on social media.
00:34:24
And until we kind of deal with the fact that this is a
00:34:27
multimedia issue, That that it flows between kind of the
00:34:31
traditional media and the online platforms.
00:34:34
We're not really gonna be able to do anything.
00:34:35
I don't think any of us would make this case.
00:34:37
But some you could say that it was in the media's interest to
00:34:40
put the blame on Facebook to shift the blame from the media.
00:34:44
If the bigger hack was in retrospect about using the media
00:34:48
to spread disinformation pointing the finger at Facebook,
00:34:52
was in the media, is like Financial corporate interest.
00:34:56
I mean, obviously I disagree with that.
00:34:59
Really, really the only reason I disagree with that is because
00:35:02
you're talking about a period when the media was so beloved
00:35:06
that nobody was shifting blame. Well, bye.
00:35:08
If you want to Kratz. So loved by the left, if you
00:35:11
were walking down the street as a Washington reporter, you went
00:35:16
to an airport and somebody recognized in Washington, not
00:35:20
just in Washington like all over the country.
00:35:22
People were thinking you were getting letters.
00:35:24
This. I'm talking about the period
00:35:26
right after Trump was elected. Oh, I know what you're talking
00:35:28
about. Look my mom.
00:35:29
I signed up for a subscription to The Washington Post just to
00:35:31
support them. She's like right now.
00:35:32
I'm no, I'm not. I'm talking about the Trump, the
00:35:35
Trump term of his presidency. I mean, people are wearing
00:35:38
democracy dies in darkness shirts, and DC.
00:35:40
Yeah, there is no blame to shift who was blaming the media for
00:35:45
Trump at that point. Now, people are now might be the
00:35:48
time when that thesis would make sense, but literally in the days
00:35:52
months after the election, basically, from the time, Donald
00:35:57
Trump was elected through the issuance of Of the molar report.
00:36:00
They'll nobody was blaming the media for anything, just like
00:36:03
nobody is blaming the FBI another group with its hated but
00:36:06
suddenly was not hated for like a couple of years.
00:36:09
I just want to ask what this social psychological story for
00:36:11
the media is if it's not that sort of narrative, like this is
00:36:15
a good way to deflect it. Like what is your mental model?
00:36:18
Is it just like the media is not top down enough and there isn't
00:36:21
enough like command-and-control, it's like sort of that it's an
00:36:24
organ or just like do you have a thesis on like where the media
00:36:28
fails on this? Stuff.
00:36:30
Well, I think Ben Smith was right about resistance
00:36:32
journalism, right? Which is like we end up in a
00:36:34
situation where as long as you publish something that fits
00:36:38
preconceived notions about, who the bad guy is like, if you can
00:36:40
tell something in the in the Arc of this is this is the bad guy
00:36:44
and they did bad things then getting the details, right?
00:36:47
Isn't that important, right? Like, there's not push back and,
00:36:50
and we see that with Facebook all the time, we're seeing that
00:36:51
now with the Hagen documents, we're about to the media reports
00:36:54
about those documents, do not match up to the documents
00:36:57
themselves. Once they are released which is
00:36:58
one of the reasons. I am quite upset that this is
00:37:01
the way. These documents were released is
00:37:02
like in a way to create kind of a Feeding Frenzy only for the
00:37:07
headlines. There's a bunch of stuff in
00:37:09
there. That's going to be super
00:37:10
important for academic, study of social media.
00:37:13
In the long run. This is going to be great
00:37:14
because this is going to kick off, kind of a much more
00:37:17
rigorous. Empirical study of the things
00:37:19
that happened on line that is going to see a lot of great
00:37:21
work. But in the meantime, we have to
00:37:23
deal with the headline grabbing of like the Wall Street Journal,
00:37:26
writing the story about the Instagram slides that did not
00:37:29
match. If the slides once the slides
00:37:30
came out, the Washington Post had a headline about Facebook.
00:37:33
Uprating, the, you know, the angry Emoji, which was
00:37:37
intentionally misleading in that in the story.
00:37:39
If you read it, all of the Emojis were upright, all the
00:37:43
reactions other than, like, were up ranked and then, and then
00:37:45
there is an internal study and that turned out to be causing
00:37:47
harm. So they fixed it, which is
00:37:49
exactly what you want. People who wrote the read The
00:37:51
Washington Post story where, less educated about how faithful
00:37:54
camels these issues, than before they read the story.
00:37:57
And so that is resistance journalism to me, because Nobody
00:37:59
pushed back on them, the Wall Street Journal.
00:38:01
The Instagram one is been, I mean we've talked about a lot.
00:38:03
What's your case? You just quickly articulate.
00:38:06
Now your objection though. So there's a couple things.
00:38:08
One, this is like very initial work by an Instagram team to try
00:38:12
to ask people how they feel in different circumstances to then
00:38:15
lead to more research into your talking about a very small
00:38:17
sample size. And this kind of just asking
00:38:20
people how they feel is not that great, and it's known.
00:38:23
And then the second is, there's Parts where it's much more
00:38:25
positive, and it's great makes people really happy, right?
00:38:28
When you read this, you know, Okay.
00:38:30
It turns out that, yes, there are problems with teenagers and
00:38:32
social media and that is something that needs to be
00:38:34
studied. And this is the beginning of
00:38:36
that. The best part of this was like,
00:38:38
there was an article in Wired Magazine, which is owned by
00:38:41
condé Nast, who are the people who publish Vogue, which is like
00:38:44
to get lectured by condé Nast on, you know, beauty standards
00:38:48
for teenage girls is is amazing and just kind of encapsulate.
00:38:52
The overall problem here, which is, there is a problem, both in
00:38:54
social media, and media, in a bunch of these areas, but only
00:38:57
one of those sides ever gets looked at in the media, never
00:38:58
looks them. Condé Nast will never ask
00:39:00
itself, have generations of our publishing, but they're really
00:39:04
obviously doesn't work that way. A reporter at wired isn't even
00:39:07
connected, to what the editor-in-chief of wired things.
00:39:09
Let alone with somebody it voted but nobody writes it.
00:39:12
Nobody will write any of these things in the bigger context.
00:39:14
No, but I understand the argument in part, because the
00:39:16
media companies themselves aren't doing those studies to.
00:39:19
So, we're in an unusual situation, we're probably for
00:39:21
the first time. We have studies about how media
00:39:24
products. If we want to call, you know,
00:39:26
Instagram and meteor product. We want to call copy of Vogue
00:39:30
and media product, how they're actually making people feel, you
00:39:32
know, Vogue does reader surveys all Publications do reader
00:39:36
research but it's really mostly about subscription.
00:39:39
How did this convert a subscription or did this not
00:39:42
convert a subscription? What are our most loyal readers
00:39:44
do? And how do we get more of them?
00:39:47
I think to your point about why the Facebook research will
00:39:50
continue to be important beyond the stories is that we'd have
00:39:53
never seen really this much research done on media products
00:39:57
before and I think would be great.
00:39:59
More was done. I think it'd be great if the
00:40:02
media itself, didn't more of that kind of research.
00:40:04
But right now, it does 0 of it. So, right.
00:40:07
Well, which is why the big irony series, it's coming out the
00:40:09
Wall, Street Journal, a Murdoch property, and the idea of Rupert
00:40:11
Murdoch, having like a Civic Integrity team looking at his
00:40:14
impact on Democracy is kind of hilarious.
00:40:16
I sort of realized that, you know, when Ben wrote that column
00:40:19
and by the way, it must be said that.
00:40:20
If you want to talk about the various purveyors of resistance
00:40:23
journalism, the release of the steel, dossier could easily fall
00:40:26
within that category, that was Ben's decision.
00:40:29
It's amazing. Yeah it was and look he can
00:40:31
defend himself and I'm sure he will on any has several times.
00:40:34
So he has, yeah, there's no reason to call him out.
00:40:36
He's a friend of the show but it absolutely was friend of my,
00:40:40
friend of up, he was a great cast and we like, then it was a
00:40:44
great guy love, but I started fighting people Eric, you are
00:40:49
more like been than any of the other people on this show.
00:40:52
And this is why you can't get all of those Farm on side
00:40:56
Channel. My Discord thread.
00:40:57
I write, I wrote it like, multi, A screed defending Ben Smith
00:41:01
owning shares. I've written on Twitter.
00:41:03
I'm I'm the most Ben Smith Toady around.
00:41:05
I agree with Ben Smith on the steel dossier.
00:41:08
The only reason you're the only reason you're ambivalent is
00:41:10
because you guys are the same person.
00:41:12
I'm just saying. Yeah.
00:41:13
They if you playing the banker is more fun.
00:41:15
If he's a friend of me then he's just a blind friend.
00:41:18
Yeah. Weirdly Eric was not there that
00:41:19
week, we interviewed been. So you make your own decisions
00:41:21
on what that? I know I missed out.
00:41:23
I've talked to many, many ways. Oh, I just mean you're the same
00:41:25
person, but that's not going to make a substitution.
00:41:29
Stack joke aren't you supposed to make some tax jokes like
00:41:32
every 20 minutes or something? And that required traditional
00:41:35
journalists. But no in my mind everything has
00:41:38
become resistant journalism, not everything.
00:41:40
A lot of things have become resistant journalism now because
00:41:44
I think people recognize that as subscriptions have driven, you
00:41:48
know, to be the predominant, business model of many things of
00:41:51
many of these news organizations, there is real
00:41:53
need to serve that audience. Do you think that that has
00:41:56
gotten to be more and more the case, you know, post, Teen
00:42:00
post-2020. And if you agree with that Alex,
00:42:03
what role do you think? The tech companies and Facebook
00:42:06
specifically play in in that being the way things are?
00:42:10
I mean, yeah. So the Dynamics of like the
00:42:13
change way from the advertising model towards subscriptions that
00:42:16
is obviously being driven by the tech companies taking up so much
00:42:19
revenue and I think, and I've said this probably for I think a
00:42:21
huge failure by the tech companies was never to figure
00:42:24
out a way to revenue share with legitimate media, whatever you
00:42:27
call legitimate media, right? Like a bunch of The stuff has
00:42:29
happened and it happened kind of too late.
00:42:31
After media was hollowed out, especially local.
00:42:34
I saw some stats of like, 10% of people who work in journalism
00:42:37
work for the New York Times. Now, it's like four percent of
00:42:39
the actual reporters and 10% of people overall.
00:42:43
Officially Wonder, like how much support staff in your time,
00:42:45
says, I'm skeptical that I would need to see ya insulted Dean
00:42:49
McKay, I talk about that your time.
00:42:52
This is like the game Katie fire, well, that would get rid
00:42:55
of one employee at the, I mean, that, like, consolidation, Is
00:42:59
clearly both from advertising being taken up by the companies
00:43:03
as well as the decisions of some journalistic Outlets.
00:43:06
Plus just the success of the times of building up an audience
00:43:09
that is willing to pay all this money but is a smaller smaller
00:43:12
audience, right? So that's what sub s
00:43:14
demonstrate. I mean, the New York Times thing
00:43:15
is the same as the subject demonstration, which is if you
00:43:17
have a small number of people who love you, then, that is way
00:43:20
more profitable than making it, you know, trying to make it in a
00:43:24
per click on an ad basis, right? But our subscription base is
00:43:27
growing. It's not a small number of
00:43:29
People who are subscribing so it's hardcore.
00:43:32
Dedicated you mean compared to like the entire universe of
00:43:34
people who use Facebook for TV? What I'm saying is like you have
00:43:38
a there's a small number of people who really all of these
00:43:42
media outlets and moved to subscription are absolutely
00:43:44
motivated to keep their small number of subscribers have.
00:43:46
Okay. I think we have more than 8
00:43:47
million subscribers. I don't think it's like the
00:43:49
tiniest number and I was just trying to be clear.
00:43:52
I get the times I'm you know but like I just have to like we're
00:43:55
all liberal Elites Coastal Elites, right?
00:43:58
And don't you trust At the most, this is what I want to ask.
00:44:00
What do you trust like, what if not the times?
00:44:03
What, you know, like oh I do trust the times most of the time
00:44:06
except like, I'll read the story.
00:44:07
I mean, again, there's a difference between like things
00:44:10
being factually accurate or not and things being applied in the
00:44:13
right context or the amount of coverage they get.
00:44:14
Right? Yeah, I understand.
00:44:16
I mean, like, this idea of resistance journalism, I'm
00:44:19
opposed to it just in practice, just, that's just me.
00:44:23
I mean, if you look at most of the things that came out of the
00:44:25
Frances Hogan stuff, you can agree or disagree with the
00:44:27
conclusions and, and either they, you know, illustrate a
00:44:31
completely fucked up company. Or the question is, like, what
00:44:34
should they just have released that information publicly?
00:44:36
And we could have seen, oh, there were research internally
00:44:39
at Facebook, showing that there a percentage of young girls that
00:44:42
use Instagram that are unhappy. Obviously, you don't want to put
00:44:45
out the internal deliberations at the New York Times, but some
00:44:48
sort of public discussion of a decision as to why they chose
00:44:52
not to run certain things would sort of benefit people to
00:44:56
understand what the process is that, you know, Separates a
00:45:00
mainstream news organization from one that has no
00:45:03
credibility. I mean, the Facebook side.
00:45:05
I think absolutely, they should publish it.
00:45:07
We go two directions from this one either.
00:45:09
Tech companies start to publish these things because they
00:45:12
realize that doing it themselves.
00:45:14
Makes it not a scandal like a bunch of these reports are just
00:45:16
reports in like there are good things and bad things like the
00:45:18
Instagram one. Honestly is both sides and so
00:45:21
Facebook, published that it would not be seen as like this
00:45:23
huge Scandal for what you need. All these investigations.
00:45:25
We actually launched a journal at Stanford which was totally
00:45:27
coincidental at the hog and stuff but I It's pretty the
00:45:29
Journal of online trust and safety specifically.
00:45:31
Because we want to get platforms to published peer-reviewed
00:45:34
research in places that they can interact with academics and
00:45:37
others. So I think that's a good thing.
00:45:39
There's also the possibility from here is that companies just
00:45:41
don't do the research because the truth is that Facebook has
00:45:43
more people working on this than the rest of the industry
00:45:45
combined and is now being punished for that fact.
00:45:47
And so there's a possibility that if you're at Tick-Tock,
00:45:50
you're like, oh no, never look, never create a document that
00:45:53
says anything is bad because eventually if it leaks it
00:45:56
becomes a scandal and it's better not to look to go.
00:45:59
Also to like kind of the 2016 story.
00:46:01
Facebook is not the largest Advertiser on the internet, it
00:46:04
turns out, not even by a long shot, and there's another large
00:46:08
company. I'm sure smoogle that had lots
00:46:11
of stuff going on that quietly found, it never told the public
00:46:15
never told molars team never told anybody because they're not
00:46:17
legally required to what you think.
00:46:19
Google is worse than Facebook and Russian interference in the
00:46:21
2016 election. I don't I don't know because we
00:46:25
don't know anything and And since then their playbook has
00:46:30
been to not share anything, right?
00:46:33
So like Facebook has crowd tangle which might get killed.
00:46:35
So I like crowd angles is fantastic platform.
00:46:39
That is super useful and was incredibly key to our 2020 work
00:46:43
and all the signs look, like Facebook's going to kill it.
00:46:45
But as of right now, Facebook has incredible transparency.
00:46:48
Twitter has incredible transparency.
00:46:50
YouTube is almost impossible to study as an outside researcher.
00:46:54
Tick-Tock is almost impossible to say, he's outside researcher,
00:46:56
and so, I think we're going to need to have mandated.
00:46:59
Here. Because what's happened so far,
00:47:01
is that the companies have opened up.
00:47:02
Have had a huge amount of criticism and there's never any
00:47:04
criticism the companies that have decided not to open up.
00:47:06
And as long as that Dynamic continues to exist, I think
00:47:09
we're going to have this lopsided coverage but also the
00:47:11
inability to fix some of these problems.
00:47:13
So guys, I'm sorry. I have the time out.
00:47:15
My daughter, schools about to call her the rubble.
00:47:16
So we're about 15 minutes so I can continue this conversation.
00:47:18
15 minutes or we've got to wrap it up.
00:47:20
I'm so I think we've gone long. Sure I give it like a little
00:47:23
goodbye. See ya.
00:47:25
Yes thanks so much for having me.
00:47:26
All right. We're like what's a concluding
00:47:30
Point earlier that's not to say? Well Alex I think we've all
00:47:32
agreed that Facebook and the media companies are all the same
00:47:36
that we all need to get in the same ship together and and and
00:47:39
figure it all out. They're not all the same.
00:47:41
I think what we have write my conclusion would be we have
00:47:45
fundamental weaknesses in our media environment as well as
00:47:48
like the psychology of Americans and we have to look at the big
00:47:51
picture if we're going to understand or deal with any of
00:47:52
these problems. Thank you so much for having me.
00:47:54
I'll send you guys the recording.
00:47:55
Sounds good, thank you. Thank you so much Alex.
00:47:57
We really appreciate it. Goodbye,
00:48:09
goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,
00:48:12
goodbye. Goodbye.