ROBERT COSTA: Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill, defending Facebook's policy on
misinformation. What role will social media play in the 2020 election? This is
the Washington Week Extra. Welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I'm Robert Costa.
The role of social media in the 2020 election has come under scrutiny as bipartisan
voices have sought to address the spread of disinformation on their platforms.
Democratic presidential candidates, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have criticized
Facebook for allowing President Trump's campaign to run ads with false claims, including
one about former Vice President Joe Biden.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified this week before Congress and faced questions
about how his platform will handle political speech in 2020 ahead of the election.
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pressed Zuckerberg on Facebook's
decision not to fact check political ads.
REPRESENTATIVE ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): (From video.) Do you see a potential
problem here with a complete lack of fact checking on political advertisements?
FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG: (From video.) Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad,
and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie that would be bad.
That's different from it being - from it - from - in our position, the right thing to do
to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied.
ROBERT COSTA: Zuckerberg's hearing came as 47 state AGs announced an antitrust probe
into Facebook this week. Joining me tonight, Karoun Demirjian, congressional and national
security reporter for The Washington Post; Catherine Lucey, White House reporter for The
Wall Street Journal; Amna Nawaz, national correspondent for the PBS NewsHour; and
Jonathan Swan, national political reporter for Axios. Amna, you've reported on
Zuckerberg's visit. What did we learn? What mattered?
AMNA NAWAZ: We learned that despite the fact that Facebook has a mechanism for fact
checking, which is they outsource it through a third party to try to mitigate the
misinformation and obvious, like, bad, manipulated videos and memes that go up on their
platform, they have made an exemption for political ads and political speech.
And the argument being made by Mark Zuckerberg is that this is an issue of free
expression and free speech, and if we start policing political speech we're actually
hurting the democratic process; it helps incumbents, it helps people who get a lot of
national attention already if we start figuring out what is true and what is not, and
censoring what should come down or not. If they put a lie out, it's up to the
American people to see that they're putting a lie out and make a decision based on that.
ROBERT COSTA: And is Facebook going to change its ways on interference and dealing with
foreign interference for 2020? Has Congress been pressing them on that front?
KAROUN DEMIRJIAN: I mean, you know, rhetorically there's been pressure like this when he
comes up to Capitol Hill, and certainly that's been building.
I mean, you compare this to the first time he came to the Hill, it was kind of he was
teaching the lawmakers how Facebook worked, and now they're - they know and they're
pushing back and saying it's not working up to our standards. But look, there is no
momentum right now to pass any of these bills that would actually police disclosure
rules or, you know, the way that the algorithm work(s) or anything like that, or
actually put in any sort of standards that Facebook would have to hop to and comply to.
So it's been a public shaming campaign, not really a legislative campaign at this point,
and I don't necessarily see that changing because it's been - those bills have been so
mired in this partisan process of what does it mean for the legitimacy of the last
election more so than the questions about the upcoming one and how to better safeguard
against that that, especially at an impeachment time, I don't know how that shifts to
actually break the logjam.
ROBERT COSTA: What about the Trump campaign's use of Facebook?
How critical is Facebook for Trump 2020?
JONATHAN SWAN: Facebook is not ancillary; it's actually at the center of their campaign.
Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, views Facebook as the keystone to their
victory in 2016. He was the digital director now, and now he's the campaign manager.
And Democrats are actually quite worried, and they should be, because the Trump campaign
used Facebook brilliantly. People on both sides recognize that.
And they did it at such a scale, they spent so much money on Facebook that when you talk
to the people who are involved in this and who know how it works and who on the campaign
have had exposure to it, it's only when you use Facebook at that scale that you can do
the level of experimentation and modulation that you start to understand how to perfect
it for fundraising and for all of these other motivational changing behavior, et cetera,
et cetera. Who would have thought - who would have thought, heading into 2020, that the
Republican would have the advantage in digital over the Democrat?
(Laughter.) It's really important. And he's struggling.
ROBERT COSTA: Let's stick with that.
Why, Catherine, then is he not only spending more money - but why is the president so
critical of social media as being to the left, if it's so important for his campaign?
CATHERINE LUCEY: Well, both things can be true. I mean, the president's campaign is
spending more than any of the Democrats. They've spent huge amounts on Facebook, and
they'll continue to do so. And the president has been critical of social media.
He has repeated a lot of conservative concerns that these platforms are biased towards
conservatives. But he has also talked a lot about how he loves that he can sort of
directly get his message to the people via Twitter.
And he recently met with Zuckerberg at the White House.
JONATHAN SWAN: He goes pretty light on Facebook. It's really Amazon that gets the
brunt of it, and Twitter to some extent, and Google. He's actually pretty gentle with
Facebook, comparatively speaking. (Laughter.) They've been good to him.
ROBERT COSTA: But we saw Representative Ocasio-Cortez wasn't gentle on Facebook.
CATHERINE LUCEY: No. No, I mean, I think, as was said, they're going to continue to get
political pressure. But it's not really clear how this is going to play out in terms of the
2020 race. We're also seeing the candidates, you know, trying to put pressure on Facebook.
Elizabeth Warren has been making a lot of noise about how they should be doing different
things around factchecking. But as of right now, it's not clear how that's going to play out.
ROBERT COSTA: And when you think about Representative Ocasio-Cortez in 2020, are we
seeing a populist moment when it comes to big tech from both right and left, a push from
the left to make them social utilities regulated by the federal government? Just
intense pressure. And how do you see that playing out, based on your reporting on it?
AMNA NAWAZ: So that's the debate now, right? It's, like, when you have - there's clearly
some kind of problem here. How do you address it? Is it more regulation? Is it breaking it up?
To Karoun's point, I don't think there's any appetite to actually do anything about it.
So it just continues to be pressure, and talk, and information, but not a lot of action.
Facebook will say, look, we've actually taken a lot of steps to try to mitigate the
foreign interference, at the very least, for the upcoming elections. They say they now
have ways that people can identify whether or not things are coming from state-sponsored
media or not. I think a lot of this is going to be on sort of user beware platforms and
actions. People will have to know what they're looking at. But nothing is really going
to change substantially on Facebook because what they're doing right now works for them.
KAROUN DEMIRJIAN: It's also just not that transparent. I mean, the other AOC exchange had to
do with whether Daily Caller was a legitimate entity to be policing certain posts on Facebook.
AMNA NAWAZ: As a factchecker, yeah.
KAROUN DEMIRJIAN: Right, exactly. And that was a back and forth. And, you know, it's -
we don't know how Facebook works. So there are these promises that come out from
Zuckerberg periodically when he comes up to the Hill to make these defenses, or when there's
court cases, et cetera. But fundamentally speaking, it's kind of whose word do you take?
And do you shift your practices and what you like doing, showing, you know, your
grandmother posting her pictures - and not just that too - and different platforms appeal
to different, you know, subsections of the population who probably vote in different ways
as well. But it's becoming - the other element of this is just in any other time, you
know, Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on Capitol Hill would have gripped everybody. And I
don't think that it was anybody's number-one issue that they were watching right now.
It's become a common practice thing that just happens periodically, that we talk about,
and we go back to focusing on everything that's far more dramatic, that's happening in
the Middle East, and impeachment, and everything else like that. And that makes it even less
likely that there's going to be really a critical mass to change something in the next year.
ROBERT COSTA: We'll end it there. (Laughter.) So you're saying, impeachment, tough for
the White House, good for Facebook. (Laughter.)
KAROUN DEMIRJIAN: I don't know if I'd go that far.
But, you know, not a number-one issue anymore.
ROBERT COSTA: Anyway, that's it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra.
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our website.
While you're there, check out the Washington Week-ly News Quiz.
I'm Robert Costa. Thanks for joining us. And see you next time.