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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the End of Silicon Valley’s “Wild West”
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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the End of Silicon Valley’s “Wild West”
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, September 13th. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. For two years, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been at the center of a contentious debate about how social media is affecting democracy. In the 2016 election, Russian agents used Facebook to spread disinformation intended to sow political chaos and help Trump win the presidency. This past March, it was learned that a researcher had sold the personal data of millions of Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that had been hired by Trump and other Republicans. The scandal prompted a congressional hearing, and in April, Zuckerberg was called to testify. He began by stating his belief that Facebook is a tool for good, but also issued an apology.
- [02:14]
Evan Osnos
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake, and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here.
- [02:42]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos joins me to discuss how Zuckerberg and his company are grappling with their unanticipated role as arbiters of truth and decency in politics. Hi, Evan.
- [02:54]
Evan Osnos
Hi, Dorothy.
- [02:56]
Dorothy Wickenden
So you've been working for the past few months on a big profile of Zuckerberg, which was just published in the New Yorker this week, and I wonder if you could talk for a moment or two about what you discovered about how Facebook came to be so disastrously embroiled in the 2016 election.
- [03:15]
Evan Osnos
Well, this really has been a couple of years of agony for that company. And what's interesting is just as recently as three or four years ago, they were sort of riding on this generally positive sense of goodwill. They were obviously people who didn't like Facebook, but their internal narrative was that we're basically people. Embrace us now. There's just been this extraordinary turnaround of the mood in Washington and also public attitudes. You see it in surveys that there's just a real sense of skepticism and distrust. And I wanted to understand and go back and try to figure out how is it that this company, which was on the one hand so successful in business terms, was so unprepared and vulnerable for the kind of election interference and fake news that impacted the 2016 election. And what you find is a couple of very clear themes. Number one is that they were focused above all for the first 10 plus years of existence on growing. I mean, just growing for sheer growths sake. They were always making choices between should we go a little slowly, should we be extra careful, or should we go as fast as we can and open up our platform, for instance, to encourage politicians and political organizations and political advertising and just try to generate as much activity as possible. And the answer was that they would always choose the latter in that situation. And it was a series of choices like that that in a sense accumulated into a culture that was captured really best by their own motto, which was move fast and break things. And that motto, which sort of sounded great as a young hacker organization, ended up looking really like a liability when they were an organization that is, after all, bigger than any country on Earth, with 2 billion users.
- [05:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
So how big a deal was it? The fake news controversy, maybe help us see it in the context of Facebook and the Mueller investig.
- [05:20]
Evan Osnos
The indictment that Robert Mueller's office issued in February against 13 Russians was extraordinarily detailed, and it gave these very dramatic examples of how Facebook's platform had been used in a variety of ways. Number one, the Russian agents set up pages that were deliberately divisive and designed to attract people and to sort of outrage people. So things with names like defend the second to try to attract fans of the second amendment. And they also used ads that were designed to attract people to these kinds of contentious issues and foment a fiercer discussion. And then there was also even the use of false profiles. They would send messages to people on Facebook posing as American political activists, when in fact it was Russian agents. And they were doing things like organizing rallies, real world rallies, offline. So really, in every way, the Internet research Agency figured out how to utilize Facebook to maximize its effectiveness, to the point that it's quite remarkable that with less than 100 agents in Russia, they were able to reach what Facebook estimates is about 150 million users with one of their pieces of propaganda or another.
- [06:37]
Dorothy Wickenden
And was the problem at this end with Facebook that they didn't recognize the problem or they didn't act quickly and aggressively enough to fix it?
- [06:46]
Evan Osnos
It's more the former. They really didn't recognize what was happening until after the fact. During the election, they picked up signs of what they thought were ordinary kinds of hacking attempts to basically break into people's accounts, but they did not imagine that they were part of this much larger and more innovative effort to create a full fledged disinformation campaign. And part of that means that after the election, even after it was becoming clear to the public and to the press and to independent researchers that something dramatic had happened, Facebook was very resistant to the idea. And Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, who's vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said to me that when he first talked to Facebook about this problem and trying to get a greater understanding of it, he found that they were, in his words, completely dismissive. And so it took them a long time to come around to the idea that they had a very serious problem on their hands.
- [07:37]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and then they had a very serious second problem, which was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which raised, you know, major concerns over privacy and breaching the privacy of Facebook users. How did Facebook handle that uproar?
- [07:51]
Evan Osnos
Well, that was first brought to their attention way back in December of 2015 when the Guardian newspaper first came to Facebook and said, look, we now know that there's been this breach of trust of data in which data was sold to Cambridge Analytica. And at the time, Facebook didn't agree with that assessment. But in a sense, the more Important thing is that they didn't tell regulators about it. They didn't tell users about it. And so you had a situation in which 87 million Facebook users had been compromised, but the company was quiet about it. It took a long time. It was not until March of 2018, in which other newspapers followed up on that reporting, that you began to hear Facebook acknowledged this problem. And that really was a watershed moment.
- [08:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
More than two years after they had been notified.
- [08:41]
Evan Osnos
Yeah. And the fact that they sat on it for so long is of acute interest to regulators and law enforcement in the United States. You now have investigations underway by the FBI, the sec, the Federal Trade Commission. They are all looking into this question of what did Facebook know and when.
- [09:01]
Dorothy Wickenden
Did they know it, and what has Facebook done? There are lingering worries about interference in the midterm elections this fall. What has Facebook done to address those?
- [09:13]
Evan Osnos
They are pushing very hard to demonstrate that they're ready for these elections. Over the last few months, they have made a few big announcements where they've taken down information operations, attempts to try to monkey around in American politics. A couple of them were Russian campaigns. In one case, it seems to be a campaign originating from Iran. But what they're trying to show overall is we get it. We've got this huge new investment in what they call election integrity. In many ways, they are now having to take on the kinds of operations that traditionally you would imagine were a government's responsibility. One of the people involved used to work in the White House on the National Security Council, working on cyber policy. He's now doing more or less the same thing for Facebook. And it just sort of underscores the way in which Facebook, which started in the dorm room 14 years ago, now has to have some of the instincts and operations of a government. But we really won't know, honestly, how prepared they are until the midterms happen.
- [10:17]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [10:20]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Kollori, Wired's Director of consumer tech and culture.
- [10:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [10:25]
Katie Drummond
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
- [10:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [10:33]
Katie Drummond
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington 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.
- [10:43]
Evan Osnos
Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [10:50]
Katie Drummond
Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice, so you don't miss an episode.
- [11:03]
Dorothy Wickenden
So in April, Zuckerberg embarked on that apology tour, and his appearance before Congress came in that period. Last week, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, testified in a hearing on foreign influence in social media. And once again, you know, the committee's vice chairman, Senator Warner, said that he gave her a pretty hard time. He said that he thinks that social media companies are entering a new era. And he basically promised that there's going to be more government oversight.
- [11:35]
Evan Osnos
But the size and reach of your platforms demand that we as policymakers, do our job to ensure proper oversight, transparency, and protection for American users in our democratic institutions. The era of the wild west in social media is coming to an end. Where we go from here, though, is an open question.
- [11:57]
Dorothy Wickenden
So what did he mean by that, Evan?
- [12:01]
Evan Osnos
I think that the mood in Washington has sort of solidified into an understanding that there has to be a new set of rules around social media. And this is the beginning of a new era. There was a, you know, when the Internet was first growing in the United States, and you had all of these new companies that were staking out different kinds of businesses. The default position from Washington was, let's create the conditions that make it easiest for them to grow. And there's now this broad recognition that that period is over, that these companies now have such an important role to play in the. In the content and the nature of our democracy and our political discourse that they have to be held accountable for what happens on their platforms. But nobody is quite sure what that'll look like. There's going to be hearings in front of the Federal Trade Commission. There are going to be certainly more hearings in front of Congress. And I think the companies recognize that the process is happening, and so what they're trying to do is shape it. They can no longer say, we don't think we should be regulated. That's going to impede the growth of American business. What they're saying is, let's make sure that these rules are rules we can work with.
- [13:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
A lot of this is going to rest on Sandberg's shoulders. She's the architect of Facebook's business strategy. She's also been a little bit absent over the past two years. There was an interesting critical piece in the Wall Street Journal last week titled, sheryl Sandberg's new job is to fix Facebook's reputation and her own. Tell us a little bit more about her role in the company's troubles.
- [13:32]
Evan Osnos
I think the idea when Sheryl Sandberg came aboard in 2008 was that she was going to be to use the old clich, the adult supervision. She was going to tell Mark Zuckerberg, the engineer, look, that's a bad idea. You need to be more conscious of the law. You need to be more conscious of politics. You have to be really sort of thinking more broadly. And instead, what happened was that Facebook ended up kind of galloping so far in the direction of growth that those other important considerations, they were always secondary. Somebody said to me in the piece, this executive said, I have a couple of friends who are colorblind. And if you're colorblind, you rely on other people to lay your clothes out for you so you don't look like Bozo the Clown. And the job of the board and of Sheryl Sandberg is to lay the clothes out so that Mark Zuckerberg's blind spots are not leaving the company exposed. And I think there's going to be a real pressure on her to demonstrate that this company, in the full range of ways, is ready for to take on these responsibilities.
- [14:35]
Dorothy Wickenden
She issued a statement saying that she's been working at Facebook for a decade because she believes in Zuckerberg's vision of the good that can come from connecting people. And I still feel that way. But what about that guiding idea in Myanmar? As you point out in your piece, Buddhist extremists have used Facebook to plant fake news to incite violence against the Muslim Rohingya. People in Myanmar have been telling Facebook that it's become a tool in genocide.
- [15:05]
Evan Osnos
That's right. I mean, in fact, the UN investigator in charge of probing what's going on in Myanmar has said earlier this year that Facebook is, quote, a beast that has become not what it was intended. And that was a really powerful indictment from an independent investigator who is looking into what the UN now recognizes is genocide there. And in some ways, the Myanmar example is the most painful demonstration of ways in which Facebook was slow to heed the warnings that were really explicit. I mean, this is not obscure. People writing research reports that the company never saw. There were people who visited the headquarters repeatedly starting five years ago and made very specific presentations to Facebook officials about it, and yet nothing was done to prevent it. And when I talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this recently, he seemed to demonstrate an awareness that this is intolerable now, but it's taken a lot longer than it should have. And I think that is going to be something that Facebook is going to have to explain and defend. I think, Dorothy, one of the interesting questions is to think about why it is that they were so slow to heed these kinds of warnings. And in the end, what I concluded is that it's because Facebook, in its first decade, had trained itself to believe that when people complained about you, when they told you you were wrong, when they told you you were moving too fast, that very often they were the ones who were wrong, and that if you just kept growing, that eventually they would kind of come to agree with you, or at least would. Would be drowned out by the success of the business. And many of the problems they're facing today are the result of that, that they became intoxicated by their own growth and success.
- [16:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
We see how uneasy Zuckerberg is in public. As I recall, he didn't exactly welcome your request to talk to him, but then he gave you quite a bit of time, and I wondered how you found him.
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Evan Osnos
Personally, I was struck by the fact that he is more mature and more settled than the person that we all were introduced to when this company first emerged on the scene. And then, of course, also through the movie the Social network. In person, Mark Zuckerberg is milder and not as kind of aggressive as that character was. I think, though, that the part that is true, he's got a really incredibly strong desire to win. To win in many things. He loves board games. And one of the stories that I encountered was that a few years ago, he was playing Scrabble with the daughter of a friend, and she was in high school at the time, and they played a game and he lost. And before he played a second game, he wrote a little computer program that allowed him to look up his tiles in the dictionary and pull up a list of all possible words. And the girl he was playing with told me the story, and she said people were crowding around and saying, taking sides, either team, human, or team, and which side won? Well, the game got cut short because they were playing on a plane and it landed before we got to know what the fate of humanity is.
- [18:25]
Dorothy Wickenden
And what's with his fascination with ancient Rome and the emperor Augustus.
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Evan Osnos
I found that really interesting. One of his old friends had said, if you want to try to understand him, ask him about why he's interested in the classics. And first he got interested, he said, because the language and the grammar feels a little bit to him like math or coding. But then he really got drawn in by the epic stories of empire building. And the person that he was most fascinated by, he said, is the Roman emperor Augustus. And as he said to me, Augustus created 200 years of world peace. But in order to do it, he had to do some very harsh things along the way, and he had to make a lot of trade offs. What we know, of course, is Augustus did have to do a lot of harsh things. He had to banish his daughter for promiscuity. He's suspected of arranging the execution of his grandson. He invaded Egypt and Spain and much of Europe. And I came to recognize that that sense of trade offs, the theory, the idea that history only happens if you're willing to accept pain along the way, is actually an organizing principle that helps you understand Mark Zuckerberg's choices as well.
- [19:34]
Dorothy Wickenden
Some of what we've been talking about, the bigger issues that social media companies are facing about free speech and ethics. You mention a new field that I had never heard of before, design and ethicists. So you talk to one of them about Facebook, and he described it as a pioneer in persuasive technology, which I found a little Orwellian.
- [19:56]
Evan Osnos
It's a really compelling concept that Tristan Harris, who's the design ethicist, as you described, what he has figured out and was one of the first people to kind of begin to describe this, is that, as he puts it, there's two kinds of technology. There's non persuasive technology, which is like a hammer. If you put it into your hand, the hammer is not shaping your behavior in any way. You are dictating what that tool will do. And then there's persuasive technology like Facebook, in which it is, in fact, guiding your choices in ways that you may not even fully appreciate. And I'll give you one quite striking example to me was in the 2010 midterms, they added a little button to the people's pages that would, if you had voted, you could click on it and then it would broadcast to all your friends that you'd voted. And what they found was that it produced this kind of cascade of social pressure, such that in the end, they were able to calculate that 340,000 additional people voted that wouldn't have otherwise voted. And the joke internally in Facebook became that they were able to tilt the impact of an election just by choosing where to deploy that I voted button. And it's worth pointing out 340,000 votes is more than four times the gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three most critical states. So it is an immensely powerful instrument of persuasion.
- [21:21]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thanks so much, Evan.
- [21:22]
Evan Osnos
Thanks, Dorothy.
- [21:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Walentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [22:00]
Evan Osnos
Hi.
- [22:00]
David Remnick
This is David Remnick. We've just launched a new project that I want to tell you about, the New Yorker's Midterms 2018 newsletter. Every week, our writers and editors will check in from the campaign trail to tell you exactly what's happening across the country and why it matters. The newsletter is only running through the November midterm elections, so sign up now@newyorker.com midterms newsletter. That's newyorker.com midtermsnewsletter.
- [22:31]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [22:59]
Evan Osnos
I want a shark that that eats.
- [23:00]
Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [23:04]
Evan Osnos
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [23:13]
Katie Drummond
Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:43]
Dorothy Wickenden
From.
- [23:44]
Evan Osnos
PRX.