-Facebook has had an absolutely disastrous week,
with a damning whistleblower interview on Sunday,
an unprecedented outage on Monday,
and then a Senate hearing yesterday
on how the company dismantled safeguards
and fostered a business model
where dangerous misinformation can spread.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
Things have not been going great
for the world's most powerful social-media platform.
On Sunday a whistleblower
who filed complaints against the company
with federal law enforcement revealed herself on "60 Minutes"
and said the company is aware of the harm it causes
and prioritizes profits over safety.
On Monday, Facebook and its family of apps,
including WhatsApp and Instagram,
suffered unprecedented outages.
And on Tuesday, the same whistleblower
testified before Congress
and said the company's products harm children
and hides what it knows from the public.
Suffice it to say, Facebook has had a [bleep] week.
It's the kind of week you'd normally post about on Facebook.
Facebook had a worse week than the Yankees
or, worse yet, Yankees radio announcer John Sterling.
-The pitch to Stanton.
There it goes. Deep left.
It is high, it is far.
It is gone out of the ballpark.
A Stantonian home run.
Now, what did I do wrong?
What did I see wrong?
He's at first base.
-Look, sports broadcasting is hard,
and I also thought it was gone off the bat,
but why did he keep going after the ball bounced off the wall?
"It is high, it is far, it is gone.
Stanton hit it so hard, he stopped at first base,
taunting the Red Sox, as if to say,
'I will finish my home run trot when I am good and ready.'
What did I do?
What did I see?"
I'm sorry, but I just had to make some time tonight
to indulge some Yankee schadenfreude.
Plus, someone needs to take Wally down a peg.
He's such a big Yankees fan, he wears 27 World Series rings.
-That's right -- 10 on my fingers, 10 on my toes,
and seven on my -- -No!
No, I do feel a little bad making fun of Wally
on a day like today, until I remember he is a Yankees fan
and a Patriots fan, i.e., pure evil.
You know what his least favorite team is?
The run that has to win to save the orphanage.
So just be happy that the only Wally smiling last night
was this guy.
Anyway, the massive Facebook outage on Monday
was the company's worst since 2008,
leaving its 3 billion-plus users across the world in the dark
while it tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
-Six hours later, Facebook and Instagram
finally back online tonight,
the longest worldwide outage ever to hit the company
and its more than 3 billion users.
The crash impacting businesses
who depend on the apps to reach its customers.
-Now, for many small businesses,
Facebook serves as their website,
their way to share their hours
and any updates about their businesses.
Especially in India, Latin America, and in Africa,
Facebook, in a lot of ways,
effectively functions like the mobile Internet.
-Look, in certain countries, Facebook is almost a utility
and it does provide essential services,
linkages around the world.
-And it is, to say the least, not good
that what amounts to a global public utility
is controlled by one massive,
secretive international conglomerate.
It's like finding out that all the drinking water in the world
is controlled by some company called AquaBuds
and it's run by one weird little dude
who created the company out of revenge
because none of the cute girls at his college
would give him a glass of water.
"Oh, I'll show them. I'll show them all.
Who's thirsty now, Courtney?"
Facebook has since explained the outage, sort of.
They did so in the vaguest way possible.
Using as much tech gobbledygook as they could,
a Facebook executive said the outage was caused by...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Explain it to me like I'm a Facebook user.
Okay, I get it now.
Look, phrasing like "backbone routers" and "data centers"
lead me to believe that even when a company
as big as Facebook goes down,
they still have to deal with Time Warner for some reason.
"Yeah, so leave it unplugged for 20 seconds
before plugging it back in.
All right, I'll try it."
Anyway, the point is
that no one company should have this much power --
not just one company, one person,
because as whistleblower Frances Haugen
explained at yesterday's hearing,
there is one person
who very much calls the shots at Facebook.
-Mark holds a very unique role in the tech industry
in that he holds over 55% of all the voting shares for Facebook.
There are no similarly powerful companies
that are as unilaterally controlled,
and in the end, the buck stops with Mark.
There's no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.
Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven.
It is intended to be flat.
There is no unilateral responsibility.
The metrics make the decision.
Unfortunately, that itself is a decision.
And in the end, if he is the CEO and the chairman of Facebook,
he is responsible for those decisions.
-The buck stops with him.
-That's right -- The buck stops with him,
which is, I guess, why, when he goes out, he wears a disguise.
Either he's wearing too much sunscreen
or his face is at home recharging.
I knew there were funny clowns and sad clowns,
but I didn't know there were neutral clowns.
"I made you a balloon animal."
"Oh, what kind of animal is this?"
"It is the double helix, representing a DNA molecule,
so really it could be any animal on Earth.
Happy birth anniversary day."
Haugen claims that Zuckerberg made the choice
to run the site based on the metrics alone,
which, if true, is itself a massive choice.
You don't get to dodge responsibility by saying,
"It's not me promoting anti-vax misinformation.
It's a math equation."
The rest of us don't get to show up to work three hours late
and say, "It's not my fault Waze told me the fastest route
was kayaking up the East River.
I ran aground on a dead mobster.
Oh, Jimmy, why'd you have to talk to the cops?"
So if the buck stops with Zuckerberg,
what was he doing as a whistleblower came forward
with damning allegations that his company
was knowingly harming people for profit?
-As this whistleblower came forward this week,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
was posting video of his sailing trip
as his company faced a firestorm.
-The hearing also took stark aim at Facebook's CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg, who posted a video sailing with his family
on Sunday just before Haugen exposed
some of the company's research on children
in an explosive "60 Minutes" interview.
-Side note -- I don't know how this guy's always outdoors
with his complexion.
If I spend five minutes on the beach,
I end up with sand in every orifice for three days
and a sunburn on my taint.
I don't know how.
I do know if you go to Walgreens
and ask the pharmacist for help with a sunburnt taint,
they kick you out of the store,
which, if you ask me, "taint" polite.
But that's definitely where you want to be
when a whistleblower accuses you
of manipulating people for profit -- sailing.
What's the matter, you couldn't find a dressage horse?
"I take issue with the fact that you're criticizing our company."
Then on Tuesday, Zuckerberg emerged
to respond to the claims from Haugen.
And suffice it to say his rebuttal was not that great.
-Zuckerberg writes...
-You don't know a tech company that sets out to build a product
that makes people angry or depressed?
What about Adobe Flash Player?
Gen-Zers won't know what I'm talking about,
but it used to be anytime you wanted
to watch something on the Internet,
like a dancing baby or a funny chipmunk,
you had to update something called Adobe Flash Player
that you didn't even know you had.
And it sucked because it took forever
and you had to do it every time.
And even the error message said...
Or how about Twitter?
Angry and depressed is their whole business model.
I have a Klonopin set aside every night
for my pre-bed doom scrolling.
I have specific accounts I check every day
just to get pissed off.
When you used to log on to Twitter, the bird whistled,
and now it just curses at you.
-[Bleep] you. [ Tweets ]
-Also, you think advertisers care
if the content people engage with the most
is angry and depressing?
Advertisers just want eyeballs.
If they only wanted happy people to see their ads,
they sure as hell wouldn't put billboards in Times Square.
Times Square's the only place on Earth
you can hear Elmo call a kid a dip[bleep] in a Russian accent.
[ Russian accent ] No tickle me. I tickle you.
Elmo tickle you.
[ Normal voice ] There's nothing advertisers love more
than commercials during sports games.
Those make people more angry and depressed than anything.
Is Budweiser worried Wally's never gonna drink it again
just because one of their commercials played
after Aaron Judge was thrown out at home?
I'm sorry, Wally.
-Actually, Seth, I don't drink Budweiser.
-Oh, because of the commercial?
-No, because I get paid per line on this show.
I only drink champagne.
-[ Laughs ] Oh!
Audiences are coming back, Wally, and the party's over.
[ Laughs ]
So Zuckerberg likes to present a glowing portrait
of what his platform does,
but in reality what Facebook hides from the public
it's much more revealing, as CNN explained this morning.
-Facebook released these numbers for the second quarter of 2021
sort of painting a rosy picture
that showed the best-performing links and posts on the platform
were about nice things like your pets and cooking
and family outings and things like that.
But some people started to ask,
"Well, what did quarter one look like?
What did the first quarter --
the first three months of this year look like?"
And it eventually -- That report,
which Facebook chose not to release,
was leaked to "The New York Times,"
and it showed one of the top-performing links
on the platform in the first quarter of this year
was a piece undermining the vaccine.
-They hid that report from the public,
but even if it didn't eventually leak,
you don't need to be a data analyst to know that Facebook
can be a toxic stew of conspiracy nonsense,
and that's part of the business model.
Just talk to your weird uncle about the news.
"Are you getting the vaccine, Uncle Ron?"
"Well, I read on Facebook that it has a microchip in it
that turns your penis into a Wi-Fi hotspot,
so I'm 50/50."
No corporation, let alone a single individual,
should have this much power over how we communicate,
which is why progressives like Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
have been calling for a while now
to break up these giant tech monopolies.
-I think we need vigorous antitrust legislation
in this country, because you are seeing --
you name the area, whether it's pharmaceuticals,
whether it is Wall Street, whether it is high tech,
fewer and fewer gigantic corporations
owning those sectors.
Facebook has un-- I mean, we deal with it every day.
They determine who we can communicate with.
They have incredible power over the economy,
over the political life of this country,
in a very dangerous sense.
-Anybody in here a little worried
about how Facebook uses your data?
[ Crowd cheering ]
Yeah, just a little bit worried.
So some of you may know,
there was another company that came along, WhatsApp,
and they said, "We're going to offer you
a lot more data privacy.
That's going to be a part of our sales pitch here,"
and, boy, they started getting customers.
So Facebook had a choice.
Facebook could, A, get better on privacy
or, B, they could just buy out the competition.
What did Facebook choose? Just buy out the competition.
No.
Giants are not allowed to buy out the competition.
The competition has to be given a chance to thrive, grow,
and either the giant gets better or the giant dies.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Whenever Warren goes into teacher mode,
it makes me wish she'd been my driver's ed instructor.
Then I'd know how to parallel park.
"Who here thinks you're supposed to go in headfirst?
Well, you're wrong.
You want to pull in backwards
at a 45-degree angle toward the curb.
And if you don't use your turn signal,
so help me God, I will fail you."
No company should have this much power,
which is why progressives have been calling for years
to break up Facebook and other tech giants.
If the testimony we've heard this week is correct,
Facebook knows what it's doing is dangerous,
no matter how much they play innocent and say...
-What did I do wrong?
-[ Laughs ]
"Is it my eyes?
My ears?"
This has been "A Closer Look."
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