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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
How Worried Should Americans Be About Facebook and Cyber Warfare?
00:16:15
How Worried Should Americans Be About Facebook and Cyber Warfare?
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, December 20th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. It's been a damning year for Facebook, and it got worse this week. On Monday, reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the company of dissembling about its knowledge of Russia's efforts to divide Americans, suppress votes and help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. The next day, the New York Times revealed how Facebook gave other big tech companies extensive access to users personal data. On Wednesday, the attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the company for allowing the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to Trump, to buy the data of millions of Facebook's users. When the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress earlier this year, he vowed to restore control of private data to its users.
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C
This is the most important principle for Facebook. Every piece of content that you share on Facebook, you own and you have complete control over who sees it and how you share it. And you can remove it at any time.
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B
Evan Osnos joins me to discuss Facebook's struggles to regain the public trust and what they reveal about our vulnerabilities to continuing cyber attacks against American businesses and our entire electoral system. Welcome back, Evan.
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C
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
I guess we're just gonna keep discussing these revelations as they unfold. And what did we learn about Facebook this week that we didn't know already? I began to think this morning that following the drip, drip, drip of revelations about its dissembling and its entanglements with Russian election interference is a little like following the weekly developments in the larger Mueller investigation.
- [03:15]
C
You know, they have this thing in common, which is that we think we know the broad outlines of it, but then we keep learning new, more fine grained, and in some ways, alarming details. I think the thing that was most surprising that came out of the Senate reports this week was that one of the targets was the African American community. A huge share of the energy that the Internet Research Agency, this Russian outfit dedicated to spreading false messages, were dedicated to trying to suppress African American votes, get them not to vote for Hillary Clinton. And I think why that was so surprising was we tend to think, well, by now we have an idea of what propaganda looks like. But I think this gave us a feel that there are layers upon layers here that are not just designed to generate outrage or say that Donald Trump, if that's the preferred candidate of the Russians, as it was in this case, that he's a great candidate. It's really a complex kind of bank shot where they're trying to get people not to vote at all, or they're trying to circulate rumors that you could mail in your ballots in ways that were not true.
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B
Zuckerberg claimed in his congressional testimony that Facebook doesn't sell data. So how does its ad system work?
- [04:28]
C
Yeah, that's a key detail that Facebook relies on a lot. That fact that is true, they don't sell data, means that they are not saying to a company, you give us money and we will give you all the information about our users. But what they clearly do, and what the New York Times this week laid out in much more detail than we'd seen before, is that they have opened up access to their data to other big companies in order to help Facebook grow. To give you an example, they struck these deals with places like Spotify and Netflix that allowed those two companies in particular to be able to read people's private messages. Facebook and Spotify and Netflix say, look, we never intended for those companies to be able to go in and look and see what Dorothy and Evan are saying to each other in messages on Facebook, it's really about saying, if I want to send you a song, then I can do that in a Facebook message. But the broader point is very clear, which is that when Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg came out and said to the public this year, you have complete control over your data, that clearly doesn't mean to Facebook what it meant to the members of the public who are on the receiving end of hearing that. And I think that's their core problem, is that, yes, they don't sell data in the strictest sense of the word, but they make your private information available to other businesses in ways that you probably don't fully understand.
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B
It's very creepy. You know, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted, opening someone else's mail is a federal crime. And he's pointing out, we need a law to protect American sensitive information. This is. This is really bad.
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C
Yeah, there was a real uproar in Congress after this Times piece this week because it just felt like enough is enough. I mean, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called Facebook's handling of data the privacy equivalent of the BP oil spill. Ooh, it's not how you want. Any company would want to be described. Ron Wyden, actually, of Oregon, who's been out front on a lot of privacy issues over the years, he made a very personal critique of Mark Zuckerberg and said that he had, in Wyden's words, a lot of chutzpah to get up in front of Congress and say that Americans could control their data when the facts seem to suggest that was clearly not true. And I think that's the problem here, is that even two years into this ordeal for Facebook, they return over and over again, as they did this week, to the same basic defense, which is people give us permission to share this information. They check the box. But the reality is, over and over again, we're seeing that people don't think. Think that when they check that box that they're giving up as much as Facebook clearly believes that they are giving up.
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B
Doesn't the FTC monitor exactly this kind of thing?
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C
They do. Yeah. The Federal Trade Commission is the body that's responsible for this. Facebook signed a consent decree back in 2012 with the FTC saying basically they would do a much better job of monitoring privacy. But the FTC is woefully under equipped to be able to deal with this. Everybody who works on these issues will tell you that, that they. They're a small agency without very much money and without A lot of state of the art lobbying and legal support of the kind that the companies have. People who know about what's happening tell me they don't have anywhere near the capability that they would need in order to be able to police something of this scale.
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B
Is there talk among members of Congress now about regulating social media?
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C
Yeah, there is. There's definitely talk about regulating what that would look like. It's still very unclear. I mean, there could be all kinds of different things. They could impose certain expectations on companies to be much more explicit about how they're using data. They could give people kind of portability. So you could take all of your data off of Facebook one day if you decided to. And that's the sort of thing that's being discussed. But there's a lot of concern among advocates for greater user protection that whatever legislation makes its way through Congress is going to get watered down, partly for technical reasons and partly because these companies are very powerful in Washington, D.C. they are some of the biggest political players. And so anything that makes its way through is probably going to be perforated pretty dramatically. Which is one of the reasons why I think this suit that was filed in the District of Columbia is a big deal, because a lawsuit is not subject to the same kinds of lobbying pressures that a piece of legislation is. And a lawsuit can bring about some pretty dramatic penalties or responses from the companies. And DC Is not the only place that's doing it. You heard the New York Attorney General this week say. Say that New York is looking at possible remedies. And I think you can really expect other states to follow suit. So that may be the area where you begin to see some action. I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director. I'm Michael Kolori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [09:28]
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And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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A
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington.
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Have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics. Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
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Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
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Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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B
Earlier this year, you profiled Zuckerberg for the magazine. And when you met with him, did he acknowledge the can of worms he's opened here that his business is really entangled with politics around the world, often in very dangerous ways.
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C
Yeah, he seemed to be, in my view, still coming to terms with the full breadth and complexity of what he had created and had brought on himself and brought on the world. If you go back to the way that he embarked on this process, it was a kind of limited ambition. I mean, he basically said, I'm going to set up a better version of what was then the dominant social media, which was Friendster or MySpace. And instead it became this incredibly powerful ingredient in politics or in the future survival of media organizations. Facebook became such a powerful player. I got the sense that Mark Zuckerberg was sort of a deer in the headlights at this point, frankly, even two years into this process, trying to figure out what is it that he has to do in order to satisfy regulators, in order to satisfy the public, and, to be blunt, not go down in history as somebody who contributed to harm to the American democracy rather than fortifying it.
- [11:23]
B
Facebook does have a director of privacy and public policy, Steve Satterfield, and he did issue a statement this week which is interesting. It defended Facebook's use of user data, but also conceded, we know we've got work to do to regain people's trust. You sort of touched on this in a piece you just wrote for the New Yorker's website. This whole issue of trust. And as Russian trolls have proved, undermining trust isn't all that difficult if you know how to go about it. Do you see signs that Facebook users are, some of them, becoming uncomfortable enough to shut down their accounts?
- [12:01]
C
I do see signs of that. Now, it's worth pointing out here that Facebook's future growth, the place where they look to see their prospects, are far away. In order for them to keep growing, they need to grow in places like the Philippines and places like that. They're not worried as much about what's happening in intellectual circles in the United States. But the other fact is that Facebook, those influential users, matter. Their voices get distributed more broadly. You've seen recently a steady drumbeat of people bailing out of Facebook. One of the most recent high profile ones is a guy named Walt Mossberg, who was one of the great technology writers at the Wall Street Journal for a long time. And he said this week, I'm dropping off of Facebook because its values no longer align with my own. That's quite striking because Walt Mossberg's always been somebody who favors bold, new technological ideas. And for him to do that is an indicator of the fact that the style around Facebook is changing in a big way. It's no longer associated with something fresh and cool and original. And that is a really catastrophic risk to a company. If you become known as being, as Richard Blumenthal put it, the BP oil of data privacy, that's a hard problem to solve.
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B
So getting back to this issue of trust. Russian efforts to undermine Americans trust in democracy have a long history. And we've known well before the 2016 election that they use every tool at their disposal. They just adapt as time goes on. And so their exploitation of Facebook and other social media platforms, that was consistent with what they've always done. They were just particularly aggressive and not all that secret about it. When you look back on it, why was this country so unprepared for those cyber attacks?
- [13:53]
C
I think it gets to the fact that we. And this is something that you're beginning to hear come up in the political discussion here in Washington now, that we were really complacent as a government, and then also, certainly on the industry level, about the risks that foreign agents posed to our social media networks. After all, the United States regarded itself as, rightly, as the origin of the Internet. We're the ones who created so many of these technologies. We created these great companies. We also, let's be frank, created the first important weapons in the world of cyber warfare. So the idea that we would find ourselves on the receiving end of that, particularly from a country like Russia, which today has a much smaller economy than many of America's more substantial partners and rivals in the world. It's just not a country that Americans, before the 2016 election, regarded as a particularly potent threat. So there was just a general sense of drift about how much Americans could be turned against ourselves using these tools.
- [15:02]
B
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia gave a really chilling speech. I thought recently a week or two ago about how utterly unprepared this country is for these foreign adversaries who are still engaging in cyber warfare. I mean, it is a form of war. And the only executive he called out by name was Mark Zuckerberg, whom he criticized for brushing aside the idea that Facebook could influence global elections. Have you listened to that speech or read it? And I wondered what you thought of it and what he's proposing we do about it.
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C
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was quite struck by that, too. There's a recognition in Washington now that something has to change when it comes to America's approach to cyber warfare. I mean, in Warner's case, he, after all, is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's calling for what he describes as a new cyber doctrine. What it essentially means is that it would open up a new realm of money and technology for the use of defending American interests and perhaps also waging cyber warfare abroad. And one of the points that I think he hit quite well is that even now, as he put it, there's still a reluctance among some technology executives to appreciate that with this immense power comes extraordinary responsibility. That's a huge fact, and it's one that they've sort of fought against for a long time. You heard them begin to use the word responsibility. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg would talk about the fact they they had underappreciated their responsibility. But what that actually means in practice is very expensive for them. I mean, it means being much more cautious about how you grow, and it means spending a lot more money on policing your site to keep it free of damaging content and to prevent it from being used for interference in elections. The ethos of Silicon Valley became sort of hostile to government. You know, they looked at Washington and thought it looked sort of pokey and slow and bureaucratic. And I think now we're getting a bit of a reminder that when the full apparatus of government gets inflamed, the government is able to strike back with some force. And I think the combination of these reports from the Senate and the speech by Mark Warner and now the beginning of lawsuits, starting with the District of Columbia, is a sign of that.
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B
Thanks so much, Evan.
- [17:29]
C
My pleasure. Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Evan Osnos is a staff writer and the author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. We'll be off next week. Have a safe and happy holiday. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex Baron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katanji Brown, Jackson Nuke Ingrid, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, the God and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts from PRX.