Hey, Facebook: What’s that smell?, Part 1

we have problems. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and to bring the world closer together. Facebook says that they're bringing us together. Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what companies say they stand for and what they actually do, and what they would need to change

to practice what they preach. I'm your host, Time Ontogue, and I've spent over a decade helping companies define what they stand for, their purpose and then help them to use that purpose to drive transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of organizations today, there's still a pretty wide gap between word. Indeed, that gap has a name. We call it bullshit. But, and this is important, we know that bullshit is a treatable disease. Because we felt

countless companies close that gap. So when the bullshit detector lights up, we're going to explore things that a company should do to fix it. We're devoting two episodes to take a hard look at Facebook. Like you, I've been thinking a lot about the company since January six one, when we will never give up, We will never concede. An angry, armed mob stormed the United States Capitol. President Trump and others had fed them the big lie that

the election had been stolen. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by a bald and radical left Democrats, and it spread like wildfire on social media, including Facebook, ultimately leading to a frenzied mob out for blood. Glued to the news, watching this chaos unfold, I couldn't stop thinking, how in the hell did we get here? Watching the Capitol riots that day, I could clearly see how much damage the gap between

ard indeed can actually do. So I decided I had to take a harder look at as many of these so called purpose led organizations as I could to try to understand how many of them are just purpose washing. What I discovered led to the creation of this show. Each week we feature an organization and invite experts to help investigate the potential gaps between what they say they

stand for and the actions they're actually taking. Will explore why these gaps exist and more importantly, what the organization needs to do to close them. So let's dig into Facebook, starting with a quick rewind back to when Facebook was just an online network for college kids. Born in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard, Facebook took off fast. In those early days. The company motto was move fast and

break things. People are just like too careful. I think it's more useful to make things happen and then like apologize later than it is to make sure that you dot all your eyes now and then like just not get stuffed on soon. Facebook was for everyone. It was where we all reconnected with old friends and shared pictures of our dogs and by if you use Facebook this past Monday, you were in good company. You went about a billion other people. That means one in seven people

on Earth. As it grew, some thing's definitely got broken and the company came under increased scrutiny, which really reached a boil around the presidential election. We're learning more about how groups believed to be linked to Russia, used Facebook to meddle in the election. Facebook's newest scandal revolves around

a data analysis firm called Cambridge Analytica. It raises some troubling questions, including Facebook's role and targeting voters during so in ten, with Americans more polarized than ever before, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new, kinder, gentler mission. The thing that I think we all need to do right now is work to bring people closer together. And I think that this is actually so important that we're going to change Facebook's whole mission as a company in order to focus

on this. Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, Which brings us to the key question of this episode is that all just a bunch of bullshit? So get out your BS detector and join me on a quest to find out. To get to the bottom of this, I talked to two experts who spent a lot of time thinking and writing about Facebook. First up, sent On a Roll, director of the m I T Initiative on the Digital Economy, founding partner of

Manifest Capital, and author of The Hype Machine. How social media disrupts our election, our economy, and our health and how we must adapt sit on. Thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for having me. I got a strong sense from the book that you believe that there is both great good that has flowed from the creation of social platforms like Facebook, as well as great harm. Can you first talk about some of the positive aspects

that you see. We've got to transcend this debate about whether social media is good or evil, because the answer is yes. I mean, I call this the promise and the peril. So we went through a decade of techno utopianism, which was related to this mantra Facebook was going to connect the world and provide life saving health information and so on, and access to jobs and meaningful human connection.

Then we went through a decade of no dystopianism, where Facebook was destroying democracy and polarizing society and spreading this information and so on. The question that we need to be asking is how do we achieve the promise and avoid the peril? What is the promise? Well, when Nepaul had its greatest earthquake in a hundred years, Facebook spun up a donate now button and raised more money than

Europe and the United States combined for relief efforts. Sinnon also reminded me that Facebook is crucial to the success of important community efforts like the ice Bucket Challenge, which raised a quarter of a billion dollars for ALS research, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which relies on social media to spread awareness and information. Imagine that globally and in some countries, Facebook is the entire Internet, like in the Philippines and parts of Africa. Imagine the value that's

being created worldwide. But I'm also realistic about all of the peril false news, election integrity, eurose and a privacy. Our real challenge now is how do we achieve the promise and avoid the peril? Right, you do a great job of unpacking the promise. Could you spend another minute just unpacking the peril a little bit? Think back to

the two thousand sixteen US presidential election. Russia sent manipulative messages to a hundred and twenty six million people on Facebook, twenty million people on Instagram, ten million tweets from accounts

with six million followers on Twitter. Erosions of privacy, our lack of control over our own social networks, live streaming of mass murders like the christ Church New Zealand, mass murder, lots of bullying and hate speech, potential effects on depression and loneliness and isolation, which we're still sorting out scientifically. Certainly all of these effects are very important and the polarization of society. Does the algorithm polarize us into political

factions that hate each other? Yeah, in the book you use a term filter bubbles. Could you go into what you mean by that term. There's two main algorithms that run social media. One is the people you May know or friend recommendation algorithm that really guides the structure of the human social network online and the other the feed algorithms that control the flow of information over this network.

And as these algorithms a connect us to people who are like ourselves, who believe what we believe, and be feed us information that is more likely to be what we already believe in what we want to see. The more we get trapped into our own way of thinking

and the less we have access to diversity. And this has been shown in large scale experimental research to polarize society and to create affective polarization, which is hatred of the other side, that is a cent What I mean by filter bubbles being trapped in an information environment where you're only seeing things that comport with what you already believe, and the algorithms are designed to do this, while the algorithms are actually designed to maximize engagement primarily, which means

to keep you engaged with the platform, because that's what the business model runs on. This is how Facebook works. It's an attention economy. It needs attention to sell it to advertisers and to persuade their users, whether it's to support a political campaign, a good cause, or to convince you to buy new shoes. Attention is essential to their

business model. So how do you keep the attention by giving people things that either rile them up, that are emotionally charged, or that uh comport with what they already believe. And so though the algorithms are not necessarily designed to separate us by by being designed to maximize our our interaction with them, essentially they pull us apart kind of as a result of that. Exactly, so, when it comes to polarization, we know through experimental evidence that the large

scale experiments show that the algorithms pull us apart. Now is that the soul cause of polarization in America holding constant news media like CNN versus Fox holding constant politicians, which are themselves polarizing. It's very difficult to know what is primarily or solely responsible for polarization, but we do know that the algorithms have an important role in that. Sinnan says that even though most of us say we want truth, what really makes us click is a strong

emotional reaction. And it's here that my bullshit detector is going off because Facebook knowingly manipulates the user's emotional reaction by optimizing the algorithm to reward the inflammatory and the ridiculous. You point out that one of the you know, primary drivers of of attention is novelty. I think you said novelty is the short game and authenticity is the long game, And I just wonder if you would talk more about

that those two ideas. Yeah, absolutely so. We conducted a study which was at the time it was published, the largest longitudinal study of the spread of true and false news online on the cover of Science magazine in eighteen and it was a ten year study of the spread of verify true and false news stories spreading on Twitter. And what we found in that study was false news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth

in every category of information. And when we looked into why novelty was the primary explanation, people were shocked and awed by things that were surprising to them, and false news was much more novel, shocking and surprising to them than true news. And so in a sense, novelty and surprise and shock and awe are engaging in the short term, and they are also what we found in that study was they're also emotionally charged, their blood boiling, their anger inducing.

They are um, you know, emotional, and that gets your attention. The only problem with that is that I don't want to see that all the time. When I think about what I want out of the information that I consume online, the types of people that I'm drawn to in terms of influencers and so on are people who are authentic, are people who are real, and people who are relatable.

And so what I mean by that is that the short term shock and awe, anger inducing, blood boiling, surprising, shocking information might be short term engagement spiking, but it's not sustainable. And so the true leaders of the new social Age are going to be the ones that realize that long term shareholder value of their companies really should align with society's values, not just the shock and awe of the short term spikes and attention. Preach love that.

So do you think that there's a world in which the algorithms could actually be redesigned to do a better job of bringing us together? Absolutely? I think that that's really part of the promise. Now, two things that are essential to achieving that are algorithmic transparency and choice. We need to know how these algorithms work. We need to give consume humors choices between different algorithms and be upfront about which algorithm is going to deliver what type of result.

So sit on on the Bullshit podcast. We are always trying to discover how wide the delta is between word and deed in a company. Fundamentally, Facebook says that they are bringing us together. So bottom line, how why do you think Facebook's delta is? Uh? Currently, their delta is very wide. They have espoused a tremendous amount of the promise and they haven't paid enough attention to the peril.

So I do believe that they would prefer to be achieving the promise and avoiding the peril but it takes effort and it sometimes costs to do that, and I think that they haven't invested enough in addressing the problems that are being created in society. They're realizing that their current path is not sustainable. The question is what is the path to closing the delta? Right now, we're at a crossroads. We're at a crossroads between truth and falsity.

We're at a crossroads between meaningful human connection and polarization, where at a crossroads between democracy and authoritarianism. And the next eighteen to twenty four months are absolutely critical because right now the world's attention is on these platforms. We have to lean in, we have to make the right decisions, and we have to have science under the hood of all of these conversations. We need those transparent discussions to take place, and we need them to take place now.

Sitan believes in the promise of Facebook, but because they haven't to efficiently addressed the peril, we as a society are at a crossroads. How Facebook responds in the next eighteen to twenty four months will be crucial for closing that gap. And because of this prognosis, I wanted to get a second opinion. My next guest, Lucy Green is a futurist, strategist and author of the book Silicon States, The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What it

Means for our Future. I first asked her why she thought Facebook changed its mission to focus on bringing people together in the first place. I think it's partly to do with the scale of these companies and how quickly they grew. They epitomized, let's say, in the post bubble era, this very glamorous idea of startups and hacking and all of that stuff. And like a certain point, with the

scale that Facebook had reached, it becomes disingenuous. You see the rise of this idea of purpose branding generally becoming a bigger thing. So Facebook is not in a vacuum. Here you have Google removing the whole like Adobe evil, but sort of also making big claims to solve disease and solve aging, and air BMB being about belonging. And this was led by big tech in a major way. The lexicon of brand messaging really shifted during this moment

to something that there was bigger. In the bigger context, you have Facebook that can no longer claim to be a plucky startup moving into international markets like India, like Africa, like South America, and having a sort of reckless image is not the way that you do that, right, That makes sense. What I did notice in the timeline is that right after he made this announcement, or very soon after he made this announcement, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.

Do you think that's a coincidence or do you think those might be connected. I think it's interesting in Facebook's trajectory, they are quite responsive to these major well, depending on how they perceived major scandals to be. Like. So for example, the previous major big change that you saw in Facebook's messaging maybe after move Fast and Break Ship, is after that Aaron Sorkin movie comes out, which is hugely unflattering.

That's right, the social network, Right, so the social network comes out and suddenly Mark Zuckerberg presents himself as a major philanthropist, Right, so he was sort of using major philanthropy as a bomb to negative imagery about him being sort of an immature brat who created a sort of women face comparison website. So you do see that as a sort of pattern, And I wonder also the degree to which Lenin might have been to some degree strategic

about lack of diversity at Facebook. After the Cambridge Analystic scandal, I listened to the shareholder call with Facebook, and the shareholders were saying, even if this was incompetence or lack of foresight, you should be investing more in looking at potential fallout from policies like this because they could have a real knock on effect on the share value of this company. Well, they were extremely dismissive of that, but it became very clear that Facebook's notion of foresight, be

its strategic or ethical or whatever. To me, it should be all of those things. It's sort of woefully under invested in. And I also think structurally is not empowered. I speak to people from Facebook often, I have friends that work for Facebook, and it's very much the sort of yes culture. People don't like it. If you disagree or question or debate anything, what would you say their real mission is? What are they really trying to do?

I think they're trying to own more and more aspects or like the total communication experience in terms of dialogue and expression, but also the way not just individuals but business communications. So they're ramping up their B two B communication hugely integrating without much I haven't seen much about the privacy of B two B messaging and so on. Just trying to own more share of human and business

communication to monetize that through targeted advertising. So just following the threat of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for just a second after it broke, there was a consumer backlash hashtag delete Facebook. I had a bunch of friends who deleted their Facebook accounts at the time, but it didn't seem to have much effect. I think there's a real cognitive dissonance between what is becoming more discussed in the public sphere and what is totally embedded in people's consumer behaviors.

I think people are becoming more and more aware of the way Amazon treats its employees, but they're still using Amazon. We've seen that from clear data points, more and more aware of the gig economy and how predatory it is, and yet we're all still catching ubers and ordering from caviare and so on. And I think it's been very easy for people to leave Facebook itself. That's where your

mom hangs out right. It's become more extreme, it's become more light wing, but they're requiring much more in every acquisition they're acquiring, or for now, you know, they might be broken up we saw this week. But like you know, it's very easy to leave Facebook, it's very difficult to leave WhatsApp. I think by diversifying in the way that they have, they've managed to make sure, at least to some degree, that they're capturing some part of your life

in a way that is sort of been escapable. Right, Yeah, so you can leave Facebook, but you can't ever really leave Facebook is sort of the idea, right, They've got you surrounded. Yes, losing a few eyeballs during delete Facebook

didn't seem to slow them down. But I actually thought more recently in the wake of the George Floyd murder in Minnesota, when a new outcry arose from organizations like Stop Hate for Profit asking advertisers to boycott Facebook because the platform has continued to essentially condone and spread hate speech. And a lot of advertisers responded and signed up Big Ones, Coca Cola, north Face, ri I, Unilever, like giant Global corporations. But even that seems to have petered out. At that point.

I thought maybe they would listen because ad dollars ultimately at the end of the day, or the thing that they care about, but that didn't even seem to have an effect. I think it speaks to how much they own the consumer experience, right, right, So even advertisers can't avoid it. I think advertisers have literally no power in

this scenario. So if you are an advertiser, there isn't really much alternative And if you're a CMO an accountable for that stuff, I think you just ultimately have to vote with your KPI s right, Okay, Lucy, we are always trying to discover how wide the delta is between word and deed in a company. Facebook says that they're bringing us together. How wide do you think Facebook's delta is? I mean, it could not be more polar, right, There's just this huge, huge gap. Just to put a fine

point on it, Lucy, is Facebook a bullshitter? Yes? Thank you, folks. It is time to make the call. Is Facebook really giving people the power to build community and bringing the world closer together? Based on what I've heard so far, I'm calling bullshit? But remember bullshit is a treatable disease. So after the diagnosis, we always discussed the cure. So I've invited three authorities on the topic to join us for a roundtable discussion of the positive actions Facebook should

take to sort themselves out. This conversation and Facebook's official BS score right after a quick break, welcome back. Since we've concluded that there is a pretty big gap between what Facebook says it stands for and what it's actually doing, what should Mark Zuckerberg and his leadership team do to solve it? In this podcast, we don't just curse the darkness.

We also like to light a few candles, So I've assembled a panel of experts and asked them to propose some concrete things that Facebook should do to get back on track. Joining us, we have sit on it Roll, who you have already met and who graciously agreed to join us for the group discussion here as well. Thank you for that sit On and welcome Thanks for having me, and we are joined by two new guests. Cameron Nascar,

Founder and CEO of Cross Media. Founded in two thousand, Cross Media is a forward thinking, transparent, highly analytical, totally integrated creative media agency with over a hundred and sixty employees. Thanks so much for being here today, Cameron, You're very welcome. Last, but certainly not at least, we have Rosemary Ryan, founder and co CEO of co Collective and also my business partner. Rosemary is a renowned leader, brand builder, and rabble rouser

in the marketing industry. Thank you for being here, Rose here. All right, so let's get right into it. So on, I'm gonna ask you to go first. What are some things that Facebook could do differently to truly live its mission to empower people, to build community and bring us all closer together. Well, I think it's a good mission if we can live up to it, and I think there are three things that Facebook could do. Two more closely aligned with their mission, and that is moved from

UH perspective of short term thinking, two more long term thinking. Second, to listen to their employees, and third to truly embrace transparency. And let me tell you what I mean. So right now, Facebook's business model UH is based on attention and engagement, and what they've focused on so far is very short

term understandings of attention by trying to maximize engagement. But I think the true leaders of the new Social Age will be the ones that realize that long term shareholder value is maximized by aligning the company's profit incentive with

society's values. Because when you have the short term engagement model that creates fake news, that creates bullying, that creates hate speech, and that creates crowd action like we saw in the Capital riot, as well as stock market actions like we saw with game Stop, that that might be short term advertising profit maximizing, but that it risks a regulatory and public opinion backlash that is uh, not good

for Facebook's bottom line in the long term. They should give consumers choice between algorithms one through ten while describing how all of them work, and have a drop down menu on my feed that says, I want the more diversity algorithm, or I want the more such and such algorithm, which with much more background on how all of them work. And they need to have much more comprehensive, transparent and precise,

detailed content moderation policies they currently don't have that. The one last thing I'll say is they're going to have to thread what I call the transparency paradox, which is that we have been asking them to be simultaneously more transparent, oh and by the way, more secure at the same time, and the way they do that is with technical and policy oriented approaches like differential privacy, which allows you to reveal data without revealing individuals private information, so that you

can be more transparent and more secure at the same time. Thank you, Sonan Rosemary. What are your thoughts on ways that Facebook might better do their story? So, I guess the first thing I always say is that I think they have an excellent story and excellent purpose, one that is not just critical for them to fulfill, but I think one that we as a world a community needs

to kind of get behind. I think they now need to step back, slow down, and fix things because it can no longer be about growth for growth sake, but really growth in service of community, and so that I think involves not just doing the odd thing in service of this, but really taking stop, focusing and investing their time their considerable talent. They have some of the best talent in the world. For me, there are two key

issues that I think that they need to tackle. The first is the issue of polarization, and the second is the issue of misinformation. They talk a lot about empowering people, giving people the power. They use people's data as a way to kind of sell advertising, but they don't actually share it with the people that they're taking it from. So we are able to give people the tools to see what they're engaging with. It might actually help them

be more mindful and behave slightly differently. So you know, one thought is that they could share a used report at the end of each week that shows your exposure to different types of content. So think about the kind of Apple model raising your awareness of what you're seeing, how much time you're spending with it, with conspiracy theories, with poppy content, with fake news, with family news, you

name it. Maybe show how much of that content is labeled fake or untrue when we can talk about how we actually get to that, how much is negative in tone versus positive. There are lots of different ways to kind of break down your data they have all of it. Once they have that, they can then maybe tie that to some kind of accountability to help you maybe watch less hate content, lower your usage on things that are more conspiracy driven, give people actual tips on how to

kind of navigate the content they're using. I mean, there's a lot of different apps right now that use nudges as a way to encourage more healthy behavior, So how can they use more kind of nudges on the platform, and then maybe taking it one step further and rather than just as you should report that you get every week, actually building it into the platform and your usage in real time, and I think last, but not least, all of that data, then they should be sharing it with

the world. Make it global, show everybody what's actually really happening. Yeah, I love it. Okay, Cameron, bring us on. Let's hear a few thoughts from you and then we can get into the discussion. Well, I'm in the camp probably that it maybe it's too late for Facebook to change, and if they were to change, then really I think a

rewrite of the mission entirely is in order. And I think trying to bring the world together as bold and its ambitious, but to bit nay even what's led to some of the issues that they have today, and I would bring it down to a much simpler version. I felt compelled to sort of rewrite it, and it goes something like this. It's more of a purpose statement. Our purpose is to make it easy for people to connect. Our duty is to protect your privacy. You have a

choice to join our community. The platform is free for you to use. If you join, you are allowing Facebook and your friends to see whatever you share about yourself. You can control who sees your information, and you should manage your settings the way you might manage anything extremely important to you, like your finances, your car, or your house. We strive to do the right thing. As a technology company, we are always in beta, and as a result, we

sometimes get things wrong when we make a mistake. We vowed to be open, transparent, and communicative to you about exactly what is happening and the potential impact to you. And I think if you turn the mission statement a little bit on its head and create more purpose behind what you're actually aiming to do, connect and at the same time protect the privacy of its users. But I

think a rewrite of the mission is in complete order. Alright, some great ideas, So, non, I loved several of the things that you talked about their you know, in particular the move from short term thinking to long term thinking. It sounds like I believe it's sort of a fantasy that they are currently maximizing shareholder value, because what they're doing today is threatening shareholder value by thinking short term

and not taking into consideration stakeholders. How do we convince them of that, you know, because in a way you have to convince a publicly traded company to forego some short term income in in service of thinking longer term. That's a hard thing. Yeah, I have some thoughts on that. So in my book, I describe four levers that we have to sort of fix the social media crisis that we find ourselves in. And those lovers are money, code, norms,

and laws. Money is the business models of the platforms that govern the incentives for how the advertisers and the consumers behave on the platforms. Code is the way that the platforms and the algorithms are designed. Norms is how we adopt and use and espouse a zeitgeist about what we think about social media in society. And laws of course a regulation. So money and code is under the

purview of the platforms in a sense. And so in terms of norms, things like the Delete Facebook movement and the stop Hate for Profit movement express a public sentiment about the unhappiness that people have about the direction that Facebook has taken. The employees whistleblowing and leaving in droves express an opinion from the inside about how happy employees are with the direction that Facebook has taken, that pressure

needs to continue and be stepped up. Secondly, I think we can make some meaningful inroads from the perspective of regulation. So the reason that Facebook doesn't have any sentive to change is because it doesn't have competition, and so it can continue doing what it's doing, and it's short term view of profits is profit maximizing. People can't leave Facebook easily because they're technically locked in because their network effects

and so on. We need to look at regulation. When I say that, people immediately think, oh, you mean breakup Facebook, But that's not what I mean. The social media economy runs on network effects, which means that the value of a platform is a function of how big it is. And in markets that run on network effects, they tend toward market concentration, they tend towards monopoly. So if you break up Facebook, it's just going to tip the next Facebook like company into market dominance. What we need is

structural reforms of the social media economy itself. We need to be able to connect across platforms that will preserve the value created in the network effects and allow me to switch from one platform to another and will keep my social network. That will enable us to vote with our feet when we don't like the policies or privacy policies of a given platform, and that kind of switching is what's going to really enable competition. I was just going to jump in and say that I think people

already are voting with their feet. Facebook is becoming an increasingly toxic environment, and the audience that they have there is not actually the most desirable audience for short term growth in terms of attracting advertisers. Younger generations have already decided that that is not a place that they want to spend their time, and new platforms like TikTok, etcetera

starting to kind of fill that space. So I think long term growth, I think there's some meat short term growth issues that they're probably starting to feel that will only increase if they don't start to address some of the issues. And Cameron, I see you nodding there. I'd love to hear your perspective, because I mean, you're at that cold face with clients, like having them decide whether or not to invest in Facebook or not. What kind of conversations are you having with them? Yeah, it runs

the gamut. Most clients understand the value Facebook can bring, but they're very, very wary, like all of us are.

And I think the idea competition is starting to emerge, and I think some of the things you're seeing with Apple iOS fourteen and the limiting of data access are really going to start to chip away at Facebook's power and make it probably less of a tool for advertisers to extract certain kinds of data and more of a general advertising platform to do what advertising is intended to do, which is helped move minds and behaviors and not manipulate.

On the idea of regulation that I'd like to go back to that for one second, because I completely agree there needs to be some sort of regulatory body, and frankly, i'd like to see the founders and the owners of these platforms step up and create a council of self regulation amongst themselves and decide that they're going to put some standards and practices in place. You know, not unlike the alcohol industry, where you have market messaging around drinking responsibly,

bringing full transparency and how they operate. But right now, because of Facebook and other social platforms are technologies or platforms, and they're not media companies and they're not consumer brands. They've completely skirted all regulation that is typically applied to other industry. You know, you would never send you know, food into a market that was spoiled. The FDA would never allow that, the same way you would never put a toy in a kid's hand that could explode in

their face. And essentially, Facebook and social platforms have been allowed to take data and use that in an unintended harmful way. I would like to see some self regulation occur first before the government would step in. And if they can't, then I really do feel the government needs to decide once and for all that for social platforms, right, there is a way to operate and behave that is mandated by law. Yeah, they are media platforms. They are.

They've been arguing that that they're not for yet, but that's exactly what they are. Yeah. I wish that Facebook would come out and just say they are a media platform. But unfortunately they don't have writers, they don't have editors, and so they don't have that kind of code of ethics that most media abide by, at least good trusted

media bye bye. Right, so users can say and do whatever they want, and Facebook has completely washed their hands of any any kind of obligation around editing what is on the platform, or what kind of code of ethics should be used on the platform. And it would be great if they consider themselves a media brand, but a media company. Sorry, but they simply don't. Rosemary, you talked about this idea of a daily report that just reflects back to you your usage, what you've been exposed to,

and why why would Facebook not do that today? Why does that not exist? I think it would cost the money and they would have to expose people to just how much of the data they probably have on them. To your point about not being a media company, Cameron, I don't think they want to kind of feel like they're stepping in between people and how they're communicating on the platform. Although I think it's it's a moral obligation for them to help people understand this is a new tool.

People would argue that people's brains are being rewired. I think it is on them to help as they are now understand what kind of consequences that they are that people themselves get to see it. And I think also if you make it more personal so that I personally understand what I'm engaging with, I become much more intentful about what I do moving forward, So I don't know, perhaps they think you will slow down that engagement, yeah, or expose things that they don't want exposed to know.

And you had a similar idea, The idea of a drop down that allows me to choose the algorithms that I want to maximize for diversity of thought or whatever else that I actually want to be exposed to. I think is awesome, Like why would they not do that? If you combine Rosemary's idea with this idea of choice and algorithmic transparency, if you gave users feedback about the choices that they've been making, and then gave them those choices as well as transparency around those choices, you might

see them making healthy choices rather than unhealthy choices. Basically, you'd have a drop down menu of algorithm one, two, and three, and then there would be sort of published papers written by non Facebook employees, scientists, researchers, academics, experts who were given access and reported back about what they found from an objective standpoint about how each of these

algorithms behave. And this is part of the also the movement around healthy eating, where you sort of you put up a digital mirror in front of people that reflects back their choices and behaviors to them, and then they actually that is a quote unquote nudge as as Rosemary was talking about to behave in more healthy ways to create a more healthy communications ecosystem, I could envision a hundred percent opt in model where maybe you don't even need to see the algorithm, but just inform you know,

Facebook and advertisers what you're interested in and when you're interested in it, and then have brands actually pay customers for their data. Now that will cause Facebook money, but the idea of control and incentive aligned with transparency I think could be a game changer for Facebook, any platform,

and digital advertising as a whole. So I want to um shift gears for a second and talk about what happens if Facebook decides not to do any of this and to continue need to proceed whistling past the graveyard and pretending everything is fine. So if they refuse to change the way they're operating today, what would we say would be a better way of describing what Facebook is truly up to today? So, Rosemary, if you were going to rewrite Facebook's mission to align with the way that

they actually behave. Right now, what would you say? I mean? I think I would just abbreviate it, so I said, it's give people the power to build community and support their own world view and damn everybody else. Right, that's the mission that currently on. To capture and hold the

attention of the world in service of advertisers everywhere. Would be another way to explain what they're doing, and maybe a meaner way to put it would be to capture and hold your attention to extract the maximum amount of your personal data in service of any company, organization, or individual who is able to pay us for it. It's

pretty accurate. Part of the reason why they came up with this mission statement, I imagine it's because they realized the unintended consequences of some of what they had they've built, and decided they had to take a step back and really think through what their responsibility was and what their real intention was. So I think they did the work of getting to this, they don't seem to have done the work of actually making it real. Going back to story doing excellent story one that we all want to

get behind. I think one of their employees, to Sin's point, not to get behind. I think most of the users on their platform want to get behind. Certainly, I think the advertisers would like to get behind, but they have not put in the energy and the effort to really make it a reality. I think Mark Zupperberg, when he sets his mind to something, can do pretty much anything. He's got brilliant people surrounded by actually some lovely people

that work for him. So what is stopping them actually taking this very powerful and compelling mission and putting it to work. That's the question. I don't I'm kind of confused, and I don't think it's just economy. They've got a ton of money. I think this notion of connecting the world is aspirational, and I agree they are just not

aspiring hard enough to get there. I also don't really understand what prevents them, because I think that they could be enormously financially successful and still truly aspire to achieve that mission. I've heard you talk about this, and non they're so focused on the likes and the shares that then obviously are what they monetize, both in the social sense and in the advertising sense, that everything in the organization points not to the mission but to those metrics.

And so the mission doesn't stand higher than the metrics. But if they really took a hard look at the business and said we could diversify and offer pretty unique features and products to certain segments, then I think they could start to think about themselves a bit differently than just focusing on those two metric extent drive advertising. I think that's a really really good point. It brings up a pet peeve of mine. I gotta say, which is

just the metaphorical concept of the like button? Okay, the like button? What is the like button? It says what we prioritize most is popularity. The more people like something, the more valuable it is on our platform. And I've always thought about that like button because it's so arbitrary, arbitrary. So let me give you a different hypothetical reality. What if there was a a knowledge button, or a truth button, or a this taught me something button, or a wellness button.

So right now, we're all incentivized to be as popular as we possibly can to get the most likes. What if we got the most truths or the most he taught me some things? Would we then be incentivized to teach people things and to bring truth to the discussion and to encourage wellness. And if that was the case, then could we make the mission and the metrics match by designing the platforms to have metrics that match the mission. I love that and I think that would really help

with true community buildings, really bringing people together. That's awesome. The number one thing that I wrote down in terms of what Facebook could do to change their behavior entirely and people's behavior has removed the like button, but I didn't have an answer for what would replace the like button. And I think a series of diagnostics based on truth and real opinion would open it up into a whole new stratosphere in terms of understanding what people really feel

and think. That's actually a useful tool. Okay, folks solved it. Does that mean you're not going to find any time you get to keep your job to rose, which you know was unexpected outcome, but I'll go with it. Thank you, everybody. I'd like to end the show today by giving Facebook an official BS score. On this show, BS exists on a scale from zero to one hundred, zero being the best zero bullshit and a hundred being the worst total BS.

It's pretty obvious that Facebook isn't living up to their mission of giving people the power to build community and bringing the world closer together. So I'm giving them a BS score of seventy two. That's pretty high. If you disagree, visit our website Calling Bullshit Podcast dot com to weigh in with your own score. We'll also track their behavior over time to see if they can bring that score down.

You'll also be able to see where Facebook ranks on BS compared to other companies we feature on this show. And if you're running a purpose led business or you're thinking of beginning the journey of transformation to become one, here are three things you should take away from this episode. One, Because young consumers are demanding it, there's a lot of pressure today on business leaders to declare the positive purpose

that they're pursuing. But your purpose isn't something you use for a press release and then stick it in a drawer. In Facebook's case, bringing the world closer together is a great purpose. March just needs to prove that he really means it, which brings us to take away number two. Once you've aligned on your purpose, it's all about action.

You've talked today about a number of actions Facebook could take, actions like giving people a daily report on what content they've been exposed to by the algorithm and why, or giving people choice drop down menu that allows you to choose the kind of content you want to see so you can tune the platform to your interests. The actions for your company will undoubtedly be different. The point is action is a vital part of being purpose led, and three,

transparency is key. No company is perfect, that's okay. A good purpose should articulate a vision that the company has to work toward over time. As a leader, you need to be honest about where you're succeeding and where you're failing. That builds trust. In Facebook's case, their leadership needs to do a much better job of letting us know what

they're really committed to doing to change the platform. Speaking of which, Mark Zuckerberg, if you ever want to come on our show to discuss any of these ideas or any other aspects of today's episode, you have an open invitation. Okay, So that was our original ending back in August, but Facebook, true to form, kept right on moving fast and breaking things, which put them right back in the news. Facebook whistle blow.

I don't know the thing. I saw Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for face Ablations from a former Facebook executive about Facebook has

known for years that Instagram is toxling. Way we can move forward and healed, Facebook, as we first sept in the social media giant, knew it's absolutely the way we'll have reconciliation and we can move forward is by first being honest and declaring world bankruptcy, whistleblower allegations, lawsuits, Wall Street Journal revelations, and right in the middle of all of that the name changed to Meta. The bs definitely got deeper, and we decided we had to keep digging.

So please join me for episode two, where I speak with Ramas Screeny Vasan, an engineer working in the place where technology and humanity intersect. We'll give Facebook a new score and as ever, try to find a few more candles to light. I'm sure there's a candle in here somewhere. Thanks to our guest today, Sinana Roll, Lucy Green, Cameron Nascar, and Rosemary Ryan. You can find all of them ironically on social media. We've got all their handles on our website,

Calling Bullshit podcast dot com. If you have ideas for companies or organizations we should consider for future episodes. You can submit them on the site too, and check out San's book The Hype Machine, How social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health and how we must adapt, and Lucy's book Silicon States, the power and politics of

big Tech and what it means for our future. If this discussion hit the made Me Think button for you, subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our production team Susie Armitage, Hannah Beal, Amanda Ginsburg, Andy Kim, d s Moss, Mikaela Reid, Lena Beck, Cilisen, Jess Benton, and Basil Soaper. Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and is hosted by Me Time Onto You. Thanks for listening,