What happened to Facebook?
I mean, it used to be cool, right?
It's massively problematic.
My entire youth is archived on Facebook,
from the good times to the bad times.
Now, it's become this toxic political wasteland.
When did it start pulling apart the fabric of our society?
We certainly have a big responsibility
to make sure that we address all of the new threats
that come from the Internet.
Self-regulation simply does not work.
These companies are too powerful.
These companies control what we see.
We should absolutely be terrified about Facebook.
Where is everybody?
Is everybody at home on Facebook?
[Echoing] Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.
Vaping illness blamed for...
Antifa is carrying out...
CDC recommends against e-cigarettes...
What parents should know.
As clickbait headlines warp out view of the world,
we're going down the rabbit hole to ask,
"How afraid should we really be?"
On this episode -- Facebook.
QAnon crackdown.
Facebook banning pages devoted to
the fringe conspiracy movement.
Australia's government is slamming Facebook's decision
to block users in the country
from all news content on its platform.
We have created tools that are ripping apart
the social fabric of how society works.
Facebook, to me, is not cool,
but I guess more people than ever are using it.
Despite that, it always seems to be in a bit of hot water.
I was once a very active user of Facebook.
I'm not kidding when I say my youth
is archived on the platform.
But after 2016, things got weird.
I guess 2016 was a wake-up call for the world
about how Facebook could be used to spread disinformation.
What happened was that, the Russian government,
using the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg,
was able to set up groups and accounts
that pretended to be on both sides of the aisle.
That saw that they could very easily use Facebook
to make these incendiary comments
that would drive people crazy.
And by doing that,
they were just pitting people against each other,
and hoping that they would clash.
They did.
What they wanted to do was just create chaos,
so that you wouldn't know
if the person you were looking at,
or the comment you were looking at,
was written by your friend or by someone in St. Petersburg.
Since then, the company has claimed
to have made a number of changes
to counter election interference.
We've been able to build systems
that can proactively identify a lot of those efforts,
at this point.
But Pandora's Box was already open.
What Russia did in 2016 was kind of show people how
you don't have to tell the truth on Facebook.
Flash forward to 2020.
I've seen a lot of COVID skepticism play out on Facebook.
It seems way too perfect.
And now that we, all of a sudden,
have a vaccine, seems a little perfect, too.
I believe in the science of vaccines.
I don't think what's in the needle is all good for you.
I think there's stuff in the needle that's very harmful.
I get news from Facebook, obviously,
because the national news
just doesn't seem to be hitting anywhere anymore.
During this lockdown, I really had the time to, like,
"Okay, I'm going to sit down and spend two hours
on this interview with this doctor,
and see what's going on, here."
There's so much information out there.
There's the black, there's the white,
and there's everything in the middle,
which is fucking confusing.
As public officials wavered in their COVID-19 response...
Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous,
whether it's ultraviolet, or just very powerful light...
...conspiracy theories were amplified in social media.
Then, in May, the conspiracy documentary "Plandemic"
became a viral hit,
and was widely shared on Facebook.
Like, the first thing I saw that got really censored,
hardcore, was the "Plandemic" video.
There is no dissenting voices allowed anymore
in this free country,
which is something I never thought I would live to see.
While the documentary was only on Facebook
for less than a week, it had been viewed millions
of times, and the removal of the video
only created more alarm bells surrounding censorship.
So, how does Facebook decide what's fake and what's real?
Facebook moderates posts through user complaints
and machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence does a quick scan of the post
to validate the complaint before it is passed
to one of 15,000 human moderators, to determine
if the post goes against the company's community guidelines.
It's not just right-wing, MAGA-loving, anti-vaxxers
that spread misinformation on Facebook.
Everyone from the far left to the far right
is capable of spreading disinformation,
even unintentionally.
This photo is real,
but put a fake quote from Donald Trump's mother on it,
and you've got shareable fake content.
Disinformation,
it depends on what side you're defending, or what you believe.
But with more than 2.74 billion active users across the globe,
moderating Facebook is a gargantuan task.
It's a constant game, of kind of,
"Okay, we're trying to stop this problematic content,
but something else is going to come along a couple of days
later to to challenge us again."
David Gilbert has been reporting on Facebook for years,
and recently documented the platform's laundering
of the QAnon conspiracy, from its origins
on message boards to the mainstream.
QAnon initially started to move into the mainstream
about a year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic.
when Lockdown happened, people were at home,
and a lot more people started getting into it.
While QAnon was still being passed around fringe
corners of the Internet, like 4chan and 8kun,
users started bringing it onto Facebook.
People within the QAnon community
saw what was happening,
and saw that more people were coming to it
from a very much mainstream audience.
So, what they did was, they shifted the message
to kind of strip away the QAnon,
and a lot of the really out-there conspiracy theories.
And they focus, essentially, on the Save the Children campaign.
That's how a lot of people got so-called "red pilled."
QAnon organizers began using the hashtag #SaveTheChildren
to recruit followers on mainstream platforms.
Meanwhile, legitimate, century-old charity
Save the Children had released a statement
that they were unaffiliated with the campaigns
using their name and hashtag,
which became an Internet gateway drug
to push believers into the deeper,
darker parts of the QAnon conspiracy,
with bizarre, baseless claims ranging from
"Hillary Clinton is the leader of a cabal
that drinks the blood of children,"
and that "a great storm would come in which
Donald Trump would defeat the Deep State."
But Facebook was warned about it a long time
before they took any action.
And they did -- they did take action.
They took action late summer.
It was pretty effective.
They got rid of most of the accounts,
most of the big groups.
But at that stage, it was kind of too late.
Facebook purge whole communities from the platform,
and made it impossible to search for QAnon terms,
like "Where we go one, we go all,"
"save the children," and "Great Awakening."
So far, since they implemented this,
it's been -- it's been very, very effective.
They did that, and, a couple of months later.
it was Stop the Steal they were trying to stop.
The Stop the Steal movement,
which alleged systemic voter fraud
in the 2020 election,
culminated with a mob storming the Capitol building
during the election certification on January 6th.
Facebook removed Stop the Steal content five days later.
While Facebook has put resources in English-speaking markets,
the platform has many more liabilities brought.
The stuff that's happening in other languages,
in other markets, that we don't really hear about,
is -- you know, is really, really disturbing.
Human rights groups have criticized Facebook's move
to censor anti-government posts in Vietnam.
A UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar
released a report in 2018
that noted widespread allegations
that posts and messages on Facebook
have increased discrimination and violence
against the Rohingya Muslim community there.
In June, 2020, after an Ethiopian singer
was assassinated, hate speech shared on Facebook
created a frenzy of violence around the country.
It's sad because, like, that --
that's where Facebook's growth is happening, right now,
is in these developing countries.
but they're launching without proper support in the languages
that are spoken in the country.
While these countries may be on the other side
of the world from Silicon Valley,
it's also happening in Facebook's backyard.
In the social unrest after George Ford was killed,
hate speech flooded the platform in the United States.
Our analysts, again, who study these issues,
saw White supremacists organizing out in the open
through Facebook groups.
Jonathan Greenblatt is the head of the Anti Defamation League,
which has set up an outpost in Silicon Valley
to work with tech companies
to combat anti-Semitism and hate online.
The big platforms, like Facebook,
and Twitter, and others --
they've certainly done a lot of good
in connecting people across communities and cultures.
But they've also been exploited by extremists,
who have used the platforms
to sort of, you know, spread their poison.
The ADL and a coalition of advocacy groups band together
to create Stop Hate For Profit,
to get brands to pull ads from Facebook
until the company responded to a list of demands
to clamp down on hate speech.
Facebook initially said,
"We're not going to make changes to our product
because some group demands that."
Stop Hate For Profit gave companies
examples of their advertisements
shown next to abhorrent hate content on the platform.
Eventually, more than 1,000 companies
paused ads for the month of July, 2020.
It was the first time in Facebook's 15 years
that they had ever seen advertisers
leave the platform en masse.
Facebook, slowly, but eventually
made a number of changes
that Stop Hate For Profit had originally demanded,
including researching racial bias on the network,
banning Holocaust-denier content,
and hiring a VP of Civil Rights.
Facebook has not attributed any of the changes
to the advertising boycott.
I'm encouraged, as this new Congress gets underway,
that we have a chance at taking on some of these issues --
specifically, I think Section 230
Everyone seems to be talking about Section 230.
My executive order calls for new regulations
under Section 230.
You don't get to pretend you're not a publisher,
and get a special benefit under Section 230.
A benefit from the immunity
they're granted under Section 230.
Now, when I wrote Section 230 more than 20 years ago...
Is Section 230 the answer to our problems?
It's got two parts, not just one.
As former FCC commissioner special counsel
Gigi Sohn likes to say,
there's both a sword and a shield to section 230,
a law that protects the entire ecosystem of the Internet,
from big techies to micro-bloggers.
The shield protects online platforms from liability
in case harmful content is posted by a third party --
for example, a death threat in the comments section.
It also provides these platforms a sword
in case they want to remove content they find objectionable,
or that goes against their terms of service.
But this is where things get murky,
because people feel like they're being censored.
when a platform removes content it finds objectionable.
When I think of freedom of speech,
I think about the First Amendment,
and the fact that the government shall make no law
impinging on my freedom of speech.
The Constitution does not say,
"Facebook shall not impinge on my speech."
The Internet has grown up around Section 230,
which was written and passed almost unanimously
in a bipartisan fashion
as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Any effort to reform the law today
would most likely be partisan.
The agreement as to what to do about it isn't there
because each party has very, very different concerns.
On one hand, Democrats want more moderation
to stem the tide of perceived disinformation.
On the other hand, Republicans want less moderation
because they think it's perceived censorship.
Okay. They are private entities,
We can talk about whether they're too powerful,
and whether they have way too much control
over the public discourse.
Right now, our anti-trust law is painfully weak.
Right now, the courts look at, really,
only, you know, what you pay as a consumer,
whether the consumer is being harmed.
So, when they -- you know,
when they see a company like Facebook,
they're like, "Well, look, it's free, right,
so how are consumers being harmed?"
They're not looking at the impact on democracy.
It's hard to pin Facebook as a monopoly
when it's service is free,
but this hasn't stopped the Federal Trade Commission
voting to sue Facebook for maintaining one.
Today's enforcement action aims to restore competition
to this important industry.
And 49 U.S. attorneys general have filed a separate lawsuit
with a similar complaint.
They also sent a clear message to the industry --
don't step on Facebook's turf,
or, as one industry executive put it,
you will face the wrath of Mark.
It's really hard to know how exactly we break up Facebook
and other big tech companies.
But the reluctance to make change harms everyone.
It's the most powerful company, possibly,
that there has ever been,
in terms of the influence that it holds.
And sitting on top of us is one 36-year-old.
And that 36-year-old is none other than Mark Zuckerberg.
But even Mark laments this power dynamic.
It's unsustainable, over time, for one person,
or even one company's operations to be making so many decisions,
balancing free expression and safety.
And it's true that Facebook has changed,
and continues to change.
They've added fact-checking to help readers spot disinformation
without making other users feel censored --
although some argue that scientific information
should remain up for debate.
After a February coup d'etat in Myanmar,
Facebook announced that it was banning military-controlled
state media entities from Facebook and Instagram,
and they've introduced new features to help users control
how Facebook shares their data.
These are certainly big wins,
but if it weren't for consistent public outcry,
who knows when that change would come?
The problem with monopolies
is that they're not accountable to anybody.
Why do you need to get better if nobody is pushing you?
We should be afraid of Facebook,
because that means we'll be active participants
in voicing for change.
And this fear isn't just for Facebook.
It goes for all of big tech.
The Internet was created to connect the world.
It shouldn't just be for big tech.
It should be for everyone.
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