Facebook's Accountability Problem

words long. The focus of the story was about Facebook and how executives at the social media company have tried to respond after a series of scandals and accusations and muddied Facebook's public image. And it was a pretty eye opening report and it's ended up causing a lot of people to yell at each other, or at least it has given a lot of ammunition in the yelling arguments that are happening in Washington, d C. And Silicon Valley.

So the scandals in question are uh some of the things we've talked about in previous episodes of Tech Stuff this year, like the signs that Russian agents and hackers were creating numerous accounts in order to steal information and spread propaganda and misinformation, and to generally undermine the democratic process in the United States. It also included the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is a separate thing. I covered that

in an earlier episode. In that mess, the public discovered that an enormous amount of personal data had been mined by this political analystic company, Cambridge Analytica, often without the user's consent. Then there's the ongoing problem of hate groups and hate speech proliferating on the social network. So this New York Times piece was really an investigative look into how Facebook top brass have bonded to these problems, and

spoiler alert, it ain't great. The piece goes through the process of Facebook becoming aware of Russian hacker activity on the platform. Alex Stamos, who was then the head of security over at Facebook, initiated an internal team to look into suspicious activity. In December, Mark Zuckerberg sort of dismissed the idea that fake news on Facebook was having some sort of effect on uh political process and had in

fact played any role in the election. Stamos was worried that this wasn't exactly true and so he ended up meeting with Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg, who is the chief operating officer over at Facebook now. According to the New York Times article, Sandberg was furious with Stamos and said that his investigation had opened up the possibility that Facebook

could be held accountable or liable for this stuff. But ultimately the company chose to expand this investigation in an internal project that was called Project P. The P stood for propaganda. I should also point out that Sandberg responded to the New York Times piece after it ran in a blog post, and she denied the suggestion that she wanted to avoid or slow down any internal investigations into

Russian interference. She specifically wrote, quote, Mark and I have said many times we were too slow, But to suggest that we weren't interested in knowing the truth, or we wanted to hide what we knew, or that we tried to prevent investigations is simply untrue. End quote. So that's going on. But in April, Facebook would publish a paper about the subject. However, in this paper, the word Russia

was mysteriously absent from it. It was about interference, but the company did not name Russian hackers as the perpetrators. Joel Kaplan, who is Facebook's vice president of Global Policy. He's also a former deputy chief of staff for Republican US President George W. Bush, had argued behind the scenes

against Facebook taking a more firm and definitive stance. He said it would open the company up to accusations that it was anti Republican and biased towards Democrats, and so he said, in order to do that, let's not just let's not lay out that it's Russian hackers that were attempting to sway elections specifically in favor of Donald Trump. So how did things get so bad so fast for

the company. While the piece maintains that Mark Zuckerberg, you know, founder and CEO, and Cheryl Sandberg had focused on personal projects rather than critical operations at Facebook, and they had handed off those important responsibilities to subordinates, the New York Times journalists cite numerous current and former executives who indicated that there was a lot of delegating going on and

not enough oversight. So there were a lot of people who were given a great deal of leeway to do their jobs, and as a result, people probably stepped a

little further out than what Zuckerberg or Sandbrick would have preferred. Now, when the various scandals all rose to a certain level and public opinion was really beginning to shift against Facebook, someone over at Facebook and it's not clear who yet as of the recording of this podcast, made the decision to go on the offensive and hire an opposition research

firm called Definer's Public Affairs. Opposition research is a really nice way to describe the technique of researching an opponent, typically a political opponent, in an effort to dig up dirt or compromising information so that that information can be used against that opponent. This information can be used to discredit or weaken the person. And this technique is not new. It's actually ancient. Was used in ancient Rome in their republic more than two thousand years ago, so this has

been around for quite some time. The term opposition research is a bit more modern, but the underlying principles are ancient. And just to be clear here, this is a tactic that's been used by politicians from all political parties. This is not something that's someone should say, oh, only Republicans do that. No, No, all political parties, at some point or another engage opposition research at some level, and the question is when does it go from being a legitimate

political strategy to an unethical one. And it's a pretty gray line. It's uh ugly as well. Politics tend to be pretty ugly, and in this case, they Facebook was starting to employ a tactic that had been used in politics and now was going to be used in business. So the reason Facebook hired definers in the first place was to help monitor news stories about Facebook so that the executives would be aware of the general public opinion

about the company. In October, Facebook would expand this to direct definers to specifically focus on the story about Russian hackers on Facebook and how it relates to the manipulating of the American public and the lead up to the twenty sixteen election. They said, forget all the other stories, really focus on these and see where that narrative is going. The more the Facebook security team investigated the Russian hacker issue, the bigger and more impactful it was turning out to be.

So it was sort of an attempt to Facebook trying to stay ahead of what the public narrative was about this whole thing and to get a better grip on exactly what had happened before someone else found out and then put Facebook on the defensive. So Facebook was really concerned that this increased focus on the company would possibly lead to government intervention in the form of regulations. Now, generally speaking, big companies are not huge fans of regulations.

By definition, regulations limit what a company can do, and since from a very high level perspective, the purpose of a publicly traded company is ultimately to make money for shareholders, limitations are generally viewed as a bad thing. They tend to also require that a company invest money in various processes and procedures, which means there's less money to go toward profit. So again, the more costs you have, the

less attractive you tend to be towards shareholders. So all of this requires a bit of mental gymnastics to separate out what would typically be considered ethical, as in, what is the right thing to do and what is considered good business practices. Those two questions often arrive at very different answers. A lot of a lot of businesses try to go and UH and a moral route not immoral.

They're not trying to do something that is UH antithetical to morals, but rather remove morals from the the question entirely as much as you can. Uh, that isn't every business, and certainly I don't think there are very many businesses that do it to the fullest extent. But you see a lot of companies try to ignore certain ethical questions if those ethical questions are inconvenient in the pursuit of profit. Now, to be fair to Facebook, the situation is incredibly complic

had it. I don't wish to say that there was a very simple choice to be made and Facebook went the wrong way. That is far too simplistic for what was going on. Facebook executives have understandably, I think, argued that Facebook is a platform, not a publisher. There is a difference. As a platform, the company is not responsible for the type of stuff people will post to that platform. The ideas that the company is agnostic and disinterested. They

provide the venue, they do not provide the script. In other words, so that guess Facebook a bit of protection if someone were to post something really awful on that platform, the company can enjoy a bit of protection. It's related to a concept it's called safe harbor. The idea that if you provide a place for people to put stuff. You actually are not liable if someone puts something illegal there. You you were fighting a service in the sense of

a place for people to go and do things. The other person who put the illegal thing, they're they're the ones who broke the rules. They should be held liable, not you as the service provider. But then the problem is Facebook doesn't take a completely hands off approach when it comes to people posting stuff on the platform. For one thing, the company has designed algorithms so that users see some content, but they might not see other content from their friends. And I'm sure if you've used Facebook

you've had this experience. Maybe you missed out on a post that a lot of other people are talking about, and it's not that you were excluded, it's just that Facebook's algorithm didn't share that post with you, so you didn't see it. Or maybe you posted something and you were surprised that more of your friends didn't respond to it. And again, it may very well be that Facebook just didn't display your post in people's feeds. So Facebook algorithms

in part determine what you see. Generally speaking, posts that get more interaction or engagement tend to be seen by more people. Facebook's algorithm tends to favor those. So if a post gets a lot of likes, if it gets a lot of shares, if it gets a lot of comments, it tends to raise the visibility of that post, and it tends to show up in more people's news feeds. Well.

News flash posts that get a lot of engagement tend to be very emotionally charged and controversial because they tend to invite people to either chime in and say, yeah, you're totally right for that controversial perspective you've posted, or you are way off base and you are a jerk face for putting such a controversial post up on your

news feed. All of that engagement just drives the visibility of that post and makes it even more visible, which invites more people to participate, which again boosts the visibility, and so you start to get these sort of toxic posts rising to the top. Then there are promoted posts. So by paying money people, organizations, companies, they can boost the visibility of a post. They pay Facebook and Facebook make sure that that post will show up on more

news feeds. So that muddies the waters too, because Facebook, as it turns out, isn't just an empty stage where anyone can get up and say anything they want and be heard by all the people who happen to be in the room at that time. It's not an even playing ground, and it tends to favor inflammatory, controversial posts and people who have money to spend. And again, understandably, Facebook didn't want to take on the mantle of publisher

at that time. They didn't want to accept that as their responsibility because that would mean the company would need to monitor posts and potentially step into sensor problematic users and accounts. They would where a lot of investment on the part of Facebook, and this would be an ongoing expense. They would have to keep on policing their service. And

it's a big service, so that's a huge job. And since again the purpose of business is to make as much money for the owners or shareholders as possible, additional expenses are generally undesirable. I've got a lot more to say about this whole subject, but first let's take our own quick break to thank our sponsor so we can

pay our expenses. In addition to monitoring the news about Facebook, definers began to dedicate resources to deflecting some of the blame for Russian involvement by trying to steer the conversation to target some of Facebook's rival tech companies, namely Google and Twitter definers, along with two other companies that it shares space with. Those two companies being America Rising, which is a political action committee, and in t K Network, which is a news network with a right wing slant

on news items. We're all collectively using the same office space, some of the same staff, and so that brings some questions in there. In t K Network would publish stories that were pro Facebook and anti Facebook competitor during this time, so they were trying to steer public opinion to try and take some of the heat off of Facebook itself

and put it on some of its competitors. Well before the problems that would lead to Zuckerberg having to sit in front of Congress, activists had been accusing Facebook of allowing various oppressive governments around the world to co op the platform in order to spread propaganda or to identify people that those governments considered a threat in order to

sign lence them or eliminate them. When Facebook was responding to mounting criticisms, including that famous session in which Mark Zuckerberg Berg would appear in front of Congress to provide answers or explanations regarding Facebook user data, Russian interference, and more. There was a simultaneous problem of people protesting the company and its practices. So this is going on around the

same time. Activists were calling for oversight or regulations, which Facebook definitely did not want to have to deal with, and so definers got the directive to go do some digging on the activists in an effort to discredit them. Now, one particular group that was becoming a thorn in the side of Facebook was called Freedom from Facebook. Now, this included an attempt to link those activists to a billionaire

financier named George Soros. You probably heard that name if you've been paying attention to the political news in the United States. George Soros has backed a lot of different causes. A lot of them are democratic causes for countries in Europe. He's backed a lot of philanthropythropic causes in the United States, but hasn't put as much money in direct democratic races here in the US as he has in Europe. Soros

would actually create a philanthropic agency. It was called the It is called the Open Society Foundations, and Soros funded this organization with eighteen billion dollars of his own money. According to Bloomberg, Soros is currently worth about eight billion dollars. So. Soros was born in Budapest in nineteen thirty and he comes from a Jewish family. His family wasn't really religious,

they were non observant Jews. But growing up in Budapest in the nineteen thirties, you know, World War two write on the horizon. It was a stressful time and uh. He then would move throughout of Hungary. He moved to the UK and then moved to the United States, and

he built his wealth. His enormous amount of wealth and his support of various liberal causes, not just in the United States but elsewhere, particularly in Europe, has evolved to the point that some conservatives, not all, Some conservatives tend to accuse Soros of trying to manipulate government policies around the world through his wealth, and those accusations often come from the more extreme fringes of the conservative movement, and

those accusations sometimes carry with them anti Semitic messaging. This notion of wealthy Jewish people trying to control world events and it's a frequent anti semitic message that has been repeated numerous times. Uh, and it is a an insidious and dangerous message to send out there. It feels a lot of hate groups. So at the same time that the Definers were starting to link George Soros to this activist group, Freedom from Facebook, the Freedom from Facebook group

went and did something pretty bone headed and wrong. They attended a House Judiciary committee meeting where a Facebook executive was testifying about corporate policies, and the activist group held up a sign and that sign showed Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg as a two headed octopus with its tentacles encircling the globe. And that's more than a little problematic.

Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are also Jewish, and the depiction of an octopus grasping the globe has been used as an anti semitic messaging method before, and so this particular sign could legitimately be viewed as being anti semitic, as being uh bigoted against Jewish people. Now, whether or not the activist group intended to express anti Semitic views or not is up for debate, but either way, Definers was able to take that protest and leverage it against them.

They contact the Anti Defamation League and they said, this is a terrible thing. This should not stand. The group needs to apologize taking some of the attention away from Facebook and putting it onto Facebook's critics. And again I'm not defending Facebook. Freedom from Facebook for doing that sign. It was a dumb thing to do, and at best it was dumb. At worst, it was racist. So Definers

takes that protest and leverages it against them. Simultaneously, Definers is trying to link George Soros and his money to that activist group, which is doubly weird right, and on one part the group, this Definers group is reaching out to the Anti Defamation League and saying, look at this anti semitic messaging that this activist group is sending out

that is unconscionable. At the same time, this same group is trying to link George Soros, who has been frequently uh accused of engaging in various anti conservative causes and has been linked anti semitic messaging, has been linked to those claims, like there's been a lot of of anti semitic messages that specifically target George Soros. So they're playing both sides at the same time, essentially is what I'm saying.

They're They're saying, how dare this activist group send out this anti Jewish message while meanwhile they're fanning the flames of anti Jewish sentiment by linking Soros to that group. By the way, Soros is philanthropic organization would later say it had not provided any financial support to Freedom from Facebook, So the claims were, uh, we're burious to begin with,

they weren't even true. The New York Times piece also goes into detail about Facebook executives and their relationships with various politicians, and there are many executives at Facebook who have worked on political campaigns or held government jobs and specific administrations over the years. Several of them, Sandberg included, are very close friends with top lawmakers and have leveraged

those relationships throughout the whole affair. Sandberg would testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and leading up to her appearance, the Facebook team lobbied the committee chairman, Richard Burr to stick to the topic of election interference and not to press Cheryl Sandberg on other issues related to Facebook, like user privacy or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Burr

agreed to that. He said, we should really focus just on the election interference side, so that took some pressure off of Facebook. Facebook also lobbied to include competitors in this same hearing. They said, well, we're going to come forward, but you should also really get someone from Google and someone from Twitter. And since we're sending Sandberg our chief operating officer, the people those companies should send should also

be very high ranking executives. Burr agreed to that too, and he invited both of those companies to send in comparable executives to appear before the committee. Twitter's Jack Dorsey did so, he showed up. Google did not send anyone, So Google's absence became a topic of scorn among the committee members. People were saying, well, you know this, this is this looks really bad for Google not to be here.

And that also helped take some of the heat off of Facebook and also Twitter because they were there, so they were able to come out of it looking a little bit better because Google didn't show up. Oh and

and definers got involved in this part too. According to that New York Times article, definers gathered information about all the senators on this committee and then sent that information to various journalists That included information about how much each senator had spent on Facebook ads during various campaigns, as well as which tracking tools the various senators websites used

on the visitors to those websites. The message was pretty clear if those senators were to really go after Facebook, the journalists had information that could lead to questions from the senators. They could they could ask the senators, you know, you really chased Facebook down and you argued about privacy, but it turns out you're using a tracker on your website to track information about people who visit your website.

So how can how can you accuse them of being bad about privacy when you are gathering data or you're arguing about Facebook, but at the same time you've spent a huge amount of money on Facebook to advertise your campaign. How can you be so critical of that company. It was all meant to kind of add pressure to the senators, and it's all it's essentially saying something like, sure, right now, it's politically advantageous to go after Facebook because the public,

their opinion is turning against this social media site. But let's talk about all the ways you've leveraged Facebook to get where you are, and as I said before, politics gets real ugly. Shortly after The New York Times published its article about Facebook strategies to manage those crises, Zuckerberg announced that his company had severed ties with Definers. He and Sandberg both said that they were unaware that Definers

had been retained on behalf of Facebook. Sandberg said she should have been aware of it, but she wasn't until this article came out, and they said it was probably someone in the communications department who had hired Definers, and they just didn't realize it. That they being Zuckerberg and Sandberg, they didn't realize that had happened. According to tech Crunch, a number of face boks communications staff have ties to

Matt Rhodes. Matt Rhodes is the founder of Definers, and he had previously run the election campaign for Mitt Romney. So Andrea Saul, who serves Facebook as the director of Policy Communications, also worked for Rhodes in two thousand eleven. Two thousand twelve, Facebook spokesperson Jackie Rooney likewise had worked

on the Romney campaign as chief of staff. Another member of the corporate communications team named Carolyn Glanville also worked on the Romney campaign as the deputy communications director, and then Joel Kaplan may have worked with Matt Rhodes while Kaplan was deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush. So there are plenty of people who could have initiated

bringing on Definers. Now, I want to be clear, I don't mean to suggest that the communications department at Facebook has a particular political bias, or if they do have a particular political bias, that they performed their jobs and that bias affects them. I don't know that that's true. I hope it's not. I'm assuming the department is largely just doing what most corporate departments do, which is to act in the best interests of the company, rather than

to push any particular political philosophy. The only reason I point out the relationships is because I think Zuckerberg's explanation that he did not hire Definers, but someone in the communications department did is probably true because there were so many people who had relationships with the founder of Definers. One of the things I think is really interesting is that when Zuckerberg appeared before Congress is the founder who I don't think always views his company the same way

as fellow executives. Due said that perhaps regulations might be inevitable for platforms like Facebook. Now, this was not quite the same thing as saying regulations would be a good thing. He said he thinks that they be unavoidable. So you can read that as saying Zuckerberg says yes, they're necessary, or he just is saying there's no way we're going

to avoid it in the future. Zuckerberg also warned Congress, however, saying, quote, I think a lot of times regulation puts in place rules that a large company like ours can easily comply with,

but that small startups can't. End quote, Sandberg would say essentially the same thing behind closed door meetings with various lawmakers, and she said Facebook was already changing policies to follow new best practices to make sure it was doing more to police the content on Facebook, but that regulations, if they were made formal, could end up hurting smaller platforms.

The New York Times reports that some of the officials were a little skeptical of that messaging, understandably, so it sounds like they're saying, oh, no, we we can handle this just fine. We're good what we're worried about are these smaller companies that don't have our resources. It doesn't strike me as being totally genuine, because I'm not convinced that Facebook is that concerned with smaller businesses. Um that's based upon pretty much every action I've seen Facebook take

over the last decade. I've got more to say about this article and its implications, but first, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. On top of these stories was one coming from CNBC about Kevin Systrom. Systrom co founded the company Instagram with Mike Krieger. In two thousand twelve, Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars, a princely some Systrom stayed on for several years, heading up

Instagram within Facebook, but in September System left Facebook. His departure was likely mostly tied to how Facebook has involved itself with Instagram over the last several months, and how it has changed the way Instagram photos show up in Facebook feeds. There were a lot of arguments that said that Facebook's approach was watering down the value of instagram. Sistrom and Creeer reportedly felt that Facebook was really interfering too much with their work and that the decisions being

made were ultimately hurting growth. So a month after leaving Facebook, System would say at a press conference, quote, no one ever leaves a job because everything's awesome. End quote. But they didn't go into a lot of detail. More to the point of this episode, recently, Systrom said that it is important for social media companies to be policed well and that misinformation and harassment is a growing concern. He even referenced deep fakes, which I talked about in a

very recent episode. But of course that's just one way some one could misrepresent a person, from faked video footage to faked audio footage or recordings. I guess I should say two photoshopped images to smear campaigns. There are tons of different ways for people to be pretty darn awful to each other and to also reach a huge audience to boot, because social media platforms have a very broad reach.

This goes beyond Facebook. Obviously, Facebook is easy to talk about because the platform is so darned huge, but these same tactics work on other social media platforms as well. I don't mean to say that Facebook is the only

one that is vulnerable to this sort of thing. Specifically, System said at the conference, quote, you start to realize how important it's going to be for the future of the world that we police these things well, that we take it very seriously and put real resources against solving the problems now that you're at this scale end quote. Not to be clear, system wasn't necessarily calling for outside regulation, but rather the need for policing the platforms, which could

come from within. It would not have to be a formal set of laws. His point, though, was that it is necessary whether it's internal or external, and that the added expense of monitoring users and responding quickly in the event of someone trying to spread lies or harass others is absolutely critical. US Senator Mark Warner's office published a paper describing a regulatory scheme for social media platforms after

Zuckerberg's appearances in front of Congress. This proposed policy covered stuff like media literacy programs that are aimed at helping people so they can determine if the information they are encountering online is legitimate or if it's fake. It also called for more funding of military and intelligence agencies so that they can focus on misinformation campaigns from other countries

that are aimed to affect domestic politics. Essentially, the policy was saying, we've gotten pretty good at detecting hacking attempts and infiltration attempts. You know, not not flawless, but we're aware of a lot of the tricks people use in order to infiltrate systems. What we're not good at is combating these misinformation campaigns, and we need to put money

aside to get better about doing that. The policy also calls for social media platforms to do more to ensure that the accounts made on those platforms are in fact legitimate and not just run by a bot. If they are run by a bot and it's all on the up and up, it should be labeled as such so that users aren't misled into thinking that a bot account

represents a real, human like person. It also calls for platforms to be held legally liable for failing to take down posts that include stuff like quote defamation, invasion of privacy, false light, and public disclosure of private facts end quote. Also, the companies would be held accountable if they failed to take down fabricated video or audio if a victim had secured a necessary judgment regarding the sharing of that content and they also pointed at the European Unions General Data

Protection Regulation or g d p R rules. I covered that in an episode earlier this year that would put some pretty extensive privacy protections for Internet users if they were to try and copy that. The paper itself wasn't a draft of any sort of legislation. It wasn't a proposed law. It was more of a broader policy suggestion and a call for a discussion about those topics that

could lead to more actionable plans. The authors of the paper admit that the ideas they propose may have flaws, that they may not fully understand the situation or the implementations that they're suggesting, and that in some cases the proposed solutions might even undermine the goal that the solutions

were meant to achieve. I appreciate that they're very forthcoming about this because one of the big problems we saw in the initial congressional hearing with Mark Zuckerberg was that a lot of these politicians are not exactly clued in to the way social media works. Not a big surprise. There's a fairly let's call it statesman like nature too the Congress in the United States. That's a good way of saying, a lot of them are old and are a little out of touch, at least when it comes

to the technological side of things. So this paper was really meant more as a call to action to get an official stance of how it would be best to approach social media platforms as they play increasingly important roles in the way people get and share information. The paper did not call for Facebook or Google or any other big company that plays in this social media space to get broken up into smaller companies. That is something that

some activists have called for. That these companies represent an effective monopo bully in various industries, and that as a result, they have been able to dictate the conversation and sort of bully their way into favorable positions and favorable treatment

from the government. The general consensus to the policy paper that I saw was that it would likely not make much headway, and the only real chance it would have of getting any real momentum would be if there had been a really big shift in Congress after the two thousand eighteen mid term elections, and there was a pretty

big shift. The Democratic Party picked up more than enough seats to take control of the House of Representatives, but the Senate still remains a Republican majority, so it's hard to say if this is going to see any progress. It may come down to uh partisan lines, where depending upon which side proposes it, the other side might strike it down not because of the merits of the ideas,

but because the other side suggested it. Because again, politics get ugly, and sometimes politicians act like big old babies when if it's not their idea, it can't be a good idea. And that again, I apply this to both sides, y'all. I am not I have my own personal political beliefs, but I have no illusions that the party that I support is any better about that than the other party. Facebook meanwhile, has changed its policy in many ways to

police content more effectively. It launched a new report called the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, which goes into the policing efforts that Facebook is engaged in, including how many fake accounts it has deleted. According to the initial report, Facebook deleted one point five billion fake accounts in just six months. After the New York Times piece, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will produce a report like that every quarter,

rather than you know, annually or semi annually. Zuckerberg also published a four thousand, five hundred word outline or blueprint on how the company is going to move forward with content moderation. In that piece, Zuckerberg wrote, and I quote, one of the biggest issues social networks face is that when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content. This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a

stable of tabloids for more than a century. At scale, it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. In our case, it can also degrade the quality of our services. Our research suggests that no matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed, as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average, even when they tell us afterwards they don't like the content. So how is Facebook going to respond to that? How are they

going to put a cap on that? According to Zuckerberg, They're going to train AI models to recognize is when a piece is sensationalist, when it is either fake news or it's misrepresenting the facts, or it is inflammatory on purpose and that it will then automatically be able to remove those items, which seems kind of interesting, especially since we just finished all those pieces about how AI is

not infallible. But the alternative would be to employ human beings to go through billions of posts every day, which doesn't seem like it's particularly realistic either. Zuckerberg also said that the company would seek out an independent oversight body to review any appeals made by people who had their content removed from the platform. Zuckerberg doesn't expect that such a body will be ready to go until the end

of twenty nineteen at the earliest. But the goal here is to create an entity that can review these appeals and do so objectively and remove the possibility that Facebook's algorithms are behaving on a bias against certain groups. So let's say it's conservative news. If the news items are not against Facebook's policies, if they are objective, you know, they are fact based, they're not representing things, and they're

not inflammatory, but they're still getting removed. That conservative groups could legitimately say, hey, your algorithms are targeting us based upon our political stance, but we're not lying, we're not misrepresenting the truth. This board would be able to review the appeals and say, you know what, You're right, that

piece is completely legitimate. We're going to allow it on Facebook, or they might say, I see what you're saying, but this piece violates our policy because X, Y, and Z. As of the recording of this podcast, this story is still unfolding and a lot of people are angry, including a lot of politicians, And it's likely that Facebook is going to have to wade through a lot more political

scrutiny in the near future. So I'll probably have to read at this sometime in the uh in the future, but I wanted to cover it now because it is a very fresh story and it brings up a lot of very interesting questions because if Facebook's a publisher, at what point is it able to or what point should it step in to moderate things. I mean, it's a private company or publicly traded company, but it is a company, not a government, so it can choose what can and

cannot be shown on its platform. That's been the case forever. Facebook has been able to do that all the time. It's just they haven't really enforced it a whole lot um. I'm very curious to see how this unfolds, because you're gonna see different groups react in different ways. They're going to be civil rights groups that might say there's some freedom of speech problems here. There are going to be other groups that say you're not doing enough because they're

still problematic posts being made on your platform. It's gonna be a rough, uneven road, I think, for a while. But I'm glad to see that some serious discussion is being held about these issues. It's a shame that it seems to be largely in response to this expose, a piece from the New York Times. You would hope that people would take these initiatives without that kind of public pressure, but sometimes that's what it takes. Anyway. That's what's going

on so far. We will revisit this sometime in the future if there's more to say about it. And uh, I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I hope you're all having a great holiday week for those of you who are listening to this when it publishes, and I look forward to talking to you again soon. If you have any ideas for episodes, why not visit our website tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can learn more about the show there you can email us at tech

Stuff at how stuff works dot com. I'll get those messages. Uh. You'll also find ways to contact me via Twitter or Facebook up on that web page. Don't forget to go visit our store. It's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. You can buy merchandise there. Every purchase goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and don't forget. We also are nominated in the I Heart Radio Podcast Awards. You can go to the I Heart

Radio Podcast Awards website. You can log in, you can vote up to five times a day for your favorite podcast. You can even dedicate all five votes for tech Stuff if you are so inclined. And if you vote enough and tech Stuff wins, I will have no choice but to go up onto a very large stage in front of a whole lot of fancy people and accept an award.

And that is terrifying. So if you want to scare me, vote for tech Stuff and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com