it's been about a year since I spoke with Roger and a lot has happened since
then namely his call for aggressive regulation within tech has become a
rallying cry within many circles with that what's the solution and how can
mismanage social platforms be fixed and what does the future hold for Silicon
Valley and big tech across the world Roger answers these questions in his new
book sucked but for more let's head to the source a lot has happened yes we
last spoke yeah a lot have happened well congrats first on the publication of
your book sucked fantastic with that in mind I want to get things started off by
asking you about Mark Zuckerberg it's the 15 year anniversary of Facebook
he recently came out in a post and said that he's going to commit 3.7 billion
dollars to safety and security do you view that as a win given the fact that
your message is that Facebook and the dark side of the internet represents a
clear and present danger to democracy or do you view that message from mark as
window-dressing a crisis well so I would like to believe that it's going to be
really effective I think the challenge of this is that and this is the issue
that we've discovered as we dig deeper and deeper is that the problems at
Facebook Google Instagram YouTube really go to the business model and that it's
from where I sit not possible to eliminate either the problems to the
mental health of the people who use it the issues for democracy the issues for
privacy or the issues for competition without altering the business model and
that's not something you do by applying money to the outside that's something
you do by re-engineering the inside and Mark's uniquely positioned to do that
should he choose to do so I found his 15th anniversary note to be mostly more
the same as opposed to a big breakthrough and I wasn't expecting
different at this point you know I first reached out to him in October of 2016
and at the time I think they were surprised by what I was pointing out the
connections I was making by October of 2017 it was indisputable there was a lot
of evidence that the issues I was talking about were real that it was
possible to use Facebook to interfere an election and then we discovered about
the time you and I talked a year ago that it was possible that Facebook had
caused a really serious set of issues around personal privacy and that their
internal policies for handling data for gathering data were so unusual and so
extreme that they really warranted intervention and of course we've also
discovered that as we're learning with snap and it's snapchat product today
that Google's also brutal on anyone who comes anywhere near a business that
operates ever that's sorry I'm Facebook's really up really brutal
excuse me Google is as well and those are not
things that you can resolve with a blog post on the 15th birthday of your
company those are things you require you're going in and re-engineering how
it operates and I don't think they're gonna do that quietly I think they're
gonna have to give people a lot of notice with that blog post in mind I
want to read you a little bit more from it mark said quote there is a tendency
of some people to overly emphasize the negative and in some cases to go so far
as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these
networks do he's mostly harmful to society and democracy to the contrary
while any rapid social change creates uncertainty I believe that what we're
seeing is people having more power and a long-term trend reshaping society to be
more open and accountable over time it sounds like he's talking directly to you
well I hope he is okay but the sad truth is that just last week Apple had to
evict both Facebook and Google from the App Store for 24 hours revoke all their
privileges because they've been trying to circumvent Apple
rules related to privacy with what they call a research app that spied on
absolutely everything the user did and they paid him a little bit of money but
a meaningful percentage of the people doing it were minors who clearly were
not in position to consent and it's really clear from apples determination
the product that none of the users who were signing up for this had any idea
what the implications of doing it would be the prior week Facebook found itself
in litigation with families where Facebook's
policies relative to in-app purchases on games resulted in kids running up bills
and thousands of dollars and Facebook Nelly encouraged this
it was unwilling to give money back when it was discovered that this was done
without the parent or child really understanding what was going on
in addition Facebook create got a lot of credit for creating a database of
political ads you know in theory to provide transparency and yet one of the
lead researchers working on that database ProPublica lost its privileges
to look at the database last week which makes you wonder about whether this is
transparent or not and there's you know that's just in the last week so I I look
at this and my concern is that Facebook is an enormous amount of economic power
but it also has massive political power you know it has the ability to shape
public opinion and it has obviously really great PR people who can make
everything they say sound good but I think in reality it's very hard for
anyone to influence the company mark has absolute control and the company
believes in its mission which is connecting the whole world so firmly
that they're willing to justify pretty much any action to get there including
ones that run precisely contrary to what Mark just said so I look at this and say
I don't think the problem is Facebook is an app
I love Facebook as an app I love sharing things I look birthdays I love you know
the things my bank can do on him so in that sense I agree with him
where my problem is is the business model produces side effects that are the
equivalent of chemical spills and as we know from the chemical industry for many
many years nobody told them they had to clean up the mess so they would pour you
know mercury and lead and things like that into rivers and they would just
dump it on the side of roads and eventually society decided that was
wrong and that they should pay the cost of cleaning that stuff up and I think
we're coming to the point where society's going to insist that internet
platforms like Facebook and Google clean up the messes that they create and bear
that cost and that's the conversation I would like to have again I'm not trying
to get rid of Facebook I'm not trying to get rid of Google but I am trying to
make sure that they are unbalanced a positive for society and that matters
because new technology is coming now in the form of voice powered smart devices
you know with a lexer Google home and artificial intelligence which are going
to extend surveillance in the case of the smart devices and control our lives
in the case of the AI in ways we've never seen before and for which we're
not prepared and where there hasn't been any discussion about what the standards
ought to be for those products and I just think what those are conversations
that need to happen and Mark is currently not participating when we talk
about some of the side effects of Facebook and the chemical spill if you
will as you put it if Facebook was built in a way that it couldn't be as easily
infiltrated by bad actors or even foreign governments with an eye on the
political landscape with Donald Trump be President today I think I'm sorry to say
right I mean a lot of things had to happen to like President Trump but
here's the observation I would make there have always been people in America
in other countries who believe things that were demonstrably not true people
believed in Flat Earth or whatever in the years since the development of
Internet platforms like Facebook and Google the percentage of the u.s.
population believes things that are demostrated not true has grown
exponentially roughly 1/3 of the people in the country
deny the connection between human action and climate change essentially all
scientists say that that is a clear thing I think it's five or seven percent
of the population believes there's a link between vaccinations and autism
even though not only does everybody say that's not true but the guy who
originally said it made it up now you add those two together that's
40% there's almost no overlap in the communities that believe those things so
a 40% of the American public believes things are demonstrable not true and if
products like Facebook and Google contributed to that happening then we
have to recognize that we have a big percentage of our population a
susceptible to manipulation you know because Facebook will tell you
if you believe one conspiracy theory you're prone to another one