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ConnectSafely Live
Interview with Antigone Davis, Meta head of global safety
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- [00:05]
A
Hi, I'm Larry Magid, CEO of Connect Safely and I'm with Antigone Davis, who is the global head of Safety at Meta, formerly Facebook, where she works with internal teams, external experts, safety organizations, including Connect Safely, and government bodies around issues on online safety and well being. She serves on the international advisory board for WeProtect, the board of the national center for Missing Exploited Children, and the board of the Technology Coalition to Fight Child Sexual Exploitation Online. Antigone, nice to see you. And let's start by talking about what is your role at Meda as head of Global Safety?
- [00:41]
B
Well, first of all, it's very nice to see you as well, Larry. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this. So let's see, where do I start with my role? My team, we really try to take a 360 degree approach to the work we do. Looking at the issues that we cover, do we have the right policies in place, do we have the right tools both in the background, so the AI, the machine learning, etc. And in the foreground, the tools for users themselves. Do we provide the right supports and resources for folks who are using our platform? And maybe most importantly to all this work is do we have the right partnerships? Are we engaging with the right experts to inform all of that work? We have experts internally, but we like to work with experts who sit outside of the company because they have an ongoing effort to understand what's happening and to bring that into the work we do.
- [01:34]
A
Thank you. So let's get right to the elephant in the collective room. I'll try to be a little more kinder and I hope intelligent in the congressional interviews you had publicly on television. But I do want to talk about the controversies of Frances Haugen report, the issues of well being, the research you've done, the various things that have kept Meta before Mali, Facebook in the news, in some ways, not so positive light.
- [01:59]
B
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting thing. So from my perspective, looking, you know, now, having had months and kind of looking back, I think the thing that I want to make sure that people are really aware of is that the work that we are doing, the research that was highlighted is, is actually work that we do to understand our platform, how it works, how it's impacting people so that we can adjust and make changes, whether that means updating policies or changing tools. So for example, during my testimony they asked about some of the research and I talked about some tools that we're now, that we've now launched. So for example, take a break which gives prompts people to consider taking a break from being, from being online or a newer work that we're doing on nudging people to different content. If we see them sitting in a certain kind of content for a long period of time, that work was ongoing. So prior to all that, those, all the leaks, we actually were already doing that work. And I think that was a little bit lost in sort of the leak of documents and the focus on that
- [03:07]
A
you have to deal with competing rights. For example, there are many people of goodwill who are pushing Facebook to allow more content to basically have a full free speech environment where you can say almost anything, perhaps not absolutely anything. And then there are people like the ADL that are really concerned about hate speech as well as bullying and harassment. And sometimes these rights conflict. And I'm just curious, how do you approach the issue of trying to balance the right of free speech or the. I realize it's not a right because you're a private company, but your desire to create an open forum versus your desire to create a forum where people feel comfortable and are not offended or see things that could terribly upset them, like hate speech.
- [03:49]
B
You know, it's funny, I mean, I do think that we've expressed at numerous different points some discomfort with that role. We basically try to strike the right balance of giving people plenty of room to talk, to engage in conversation, to have meaningful conversations. But we also do try to find that line where people's safety may be at stake. And we're constantly looking at it. We are constantly reviewing our policies, checking to make sure that we've got the right lines in place and in fact have actually set up our oversight board, which I think you're aware of, to look at certain decisions that we make. Either ones that we suggest to them, they take some of those, or actually the public suggests to them, we'd like you to look at certain decisions that we've made to basically check and have that kind of oversight and hold us to account. The other thing that we try to do to hold ourselves to account is I think you're aware we have a community standards enforcement report where we actually show our progress in enforcing our, in enforcing our policies and how well and how well we're doing. So, you know, we are, it is an ever going and ongoing process to try to try to get it right.
- [05:07]
A
But it's interesting, even when you testify before Congress, you're going to get some people who say you're censoring, you're blocking speech and other people are going to say you're allowing too much content that is offensive or leads to violence or whatever. I mean, people have different opinions and you guys seem like you're kind of caught in the middle of issues that society is grappling with.
- [05:26]
B
Well, that's one of the reasons that we've actually spoken about and encouraged efforts to create some legislative and regulatory frameworks around these issues or at least to perhaps put in place standards around the processes that a company has in order to manage against its community standards or against its policies. Policies as a way of trying to give. Give help, create some boundaries and for, for our policymakers, who are the elected representative of. Of people to actually provide some, some input in the, in this area.
- [06:03]
A
You know, we hear a lot about cyberbullying, probably less than we used to because there's so many other issues that are being talked about online, but it still exists. And I'm curious what Facebook does to. To try or Facebook Instagram Meta does to prevent it. And also what advice you have for parents who are concerned about their children being affected by it.
- [06:22]
B
Yeah, well, there are a few things. First of all, in addition to having the policies that people are, you know, that we talk about quite a bit that you can find on our, on our platform, if you look up our community standards, we actually have some really amazing technology that we've built. So for example, on Instagram, if someone puts in a comment that has words that typically are associated with things that have been reported to us for bullying, we may surface up a notice that basically says to someone, hey, this looks like it could be a bullying comment. Would you like to reconsider? And actually, in about 50% of the time, people do actually reframe their comment. So that's an interesting thing. Another, another tool that we've built is we actually enable because sometimes bullying is so personal and maybe it's not. Someone may do something. For example, the example I always use is someone may say, hey, nice skirt. There's no way for us to know that that's bullying. But if there's context offline that maybe that person was teased about that skirt at school, that person can actually build into their own comments and put in words that our people are using to bully them. Words that we wouldn't necessarily know are bullying out of context to enable them to actually personalize their experience. But I also think when talking to parents, one of the things I think is most important is actually that they talk to their children, that they have these conversations early, and that they look to resources like the resources that organizations like Yours provide. It's really important for parents to educate themselves. It's also really important for parents to start conversations with their children early because if you start by the age of 13 or above, that's when kids are actually creating their own identity. They tend to be separating. You really want to be able to have those conversations earlier when they, when they are more of what you might think of as a sponge.
- [08:18]
A
Yeah. And we also advise parents not to overreact and their first reaction shouldn't be to pull the phone out of the kid's hand if something happens, but to start with a conversation and then figure out what to do with. Take a deep breath. Let's talk about disinformation. That's a big issue. Again, another big societal issue. I know that Facebook can't be the arbiter of all truth, but on the other hand, I know you also don't want your platform to be used for harmful content such as medical information that could harm you or something that could lead to violence. You know, so called facts that get people angry and they react in ways that have nothing to do with reality. What are you doing and what can be done to mitigate disinformation?
- [09:00]
B
Well, yeah, our general approach to content is either to remove if it violates our policies, we may reduce sensitive content or problematic content, reduce its distribution, and then also to inform where we will actually put, put access to information offline that may be informative or considered informative information. So you, you saw this in how we handled Covid misinformation, where we would actually point people toward authoritative information in addition to removing information that we, that would actually like, put people at risk. So when, when there were misinformation around vaccines killing people, we are going to remove. And the idea here is to sort of strike that balance. Going back to when you were talking earlier about how do you strike that balance of allowing conversation, not becoming arbiters of truth, but making sure that people do have access to good information. In addition to that, in the context of say, something like Covid, we actually spent time actually getting people toward vaccine information. So connecting them with the ability to get vaccinated to ensure that we are really playing our part in getting people the things that they needed to stay safe during the pandemic.
- [10:16]
A
Let's talk for just a minute about sextortion, unwanted sexual contact. You know, there's a lot going on, sexting, which is not necessarily a crime, although technically it might be, but not necessarily something that people are doing for exploitive purposes all the way through sexual Sextortion, which is when you're trying to coerce somebody into doing something with threat of revealing nude photos or something similar.
- [10:38]
B
Yeah, I'll tell you, actually I'm. This is maybe some work that I'm most proud of that my team has been involved in. And you know, I can kind of of let you in on the next iteration of it. So we began a while back to try to prevent the sharing of the non consensual sharing of intimate images on our platform. And we use photo matching technology to do that. So if we have a known image, it'll bump up against that technology and we can prevent that from being shared more broadly on our platform. That was sort of our first iteration. We then actually worked with NGOs so that an individual now can basically, if they have an image that they think someone is going to share on our platform or is threatening to share in order to elicit more images or to elicit sexual contact with that individual, they can actually download software that allows them to basically make a fingerprint of that image. They send the fingerprint of that image to a data bank and we collect those fingerprints to prevent that stuff from being shared on our platform. I think what's really important about this work is it is actually the way to take a way for the victim to take control back, to actually take to when someone is trying to extort them to actually get control back of that situation or attempt to get control back of that situation. We do that for adults right now. It is my hope that working with the national center for Missing Exploited Children, we can develop something similar for young people so that if they're in that position of someone trying to extort additional images or extort contact from them because they've already got access to an image, that we would be able to give them the same kind of protection. It's a little more complicated because those images are by definition illegal. And so we just have to work with a body like the national center for Missing Exploited Children that has legal authority to do work in this area. And so we've started that discussions with them on that, on that front.
- [12:41]
A
So we have to wrap up. And I want to end on a more positive note. Let's talk about just the resources that are out there, both at Facebook and maybe your partners and other organizations to help people deal with whatever issues that are bothering them. All the things we talked about today and the things that we haven't talked about.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, well, first of all, I would encourage people to go to our safety center. They'll find lots of resources there. The resources are oftentimes divided by subject or by your own by the audience. So there's a special section. We have a parent portal for parents. In fact, we have a number of guides that you have done there in our parent portal and a number of tips that have come from you at you at Connect safely. The other thing I would encourage parents to do is to not only talk to their children about the things that they're worried about, but actually talk to their children about what is it that they love about these various apps, what is it that they they find most useful or interesting. We see young people using all of these apps in so many creative and fun ways. And being able to have those kind of positive conversations with your child first of all allows for personal connection with your children, but also gives you a way to have broader conversations about these issues on an ongoing basis.
- [13:55]
A
Antigone Davis, head of global safety for Meta, formerly Facebook. Thank you very much.
- [14:00]
B
Thank you very much, Larry.