Kiota. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has implemented some changes across its organization since Donald Trump's election win. The social media giant is set to remove independent fact checkers from its service, replacing them with community driven notes, similar
to what x implemented after its rebrand from Twitter. The company has also ended various diversity, equity and inclusion measures, while chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has called for more masculine energy in the corporate world. All this came before he was seated in the front row at Trump's inauguration alongside other tech bosses, raising questions about how tied up these
global companies are becoming with the current US administration. Francis Hougan is a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower over the company's actions. She joins us today on the Front Page to discuss the changes in the take world. Francis, could you start by giving us a quick rundown of what you did, it matter and what prompted you to go public with those thousands of internal documents.
Certainly so when I joined Facebook. Facebook knew it had a problem, so it had invested a great deal of money in something called third party factchecking. That's the program that they recently ended. But they knew that that program only covered a tiny, tiny sliver of the people in the world. Overwhelmingly the money was invested in the United States. Beyond that, it was a little bit in Australia, a little bit in Europe, a little bit scattered in a
few other places. But Facebook is the Internet for most of the world. You know, for many, many, many people. They live in countries where, you know, seventy percent, eighty percent, ninety percent of the content available on the Internet in their language will only be on Facebook. And so they said, hey, we need to have a way to deal with misinformation when we can't have factcheckers. And so that was the responsibility of my team. So the Civic Misinformation Team and
I came forward in twenty twenty one. Because in the process of doing that job for two years, different variants of it worked on different parts ended up within threat intelligence within Facebook. I realized that Facebook was serially lying. They had a habit of lying about what their company was doing, what the effects of their action or inaction was and they actively misled the pubook about what was possible. And so I came forward because I wanted people to
have the information they needed to protect themselves. And in the process I became known as the Facebook whistleblower, even though there are very very many whistleblowers that come out of Facebook, because I'm not the only employee that knows their problems the public needs to act on.
Now, I've had in recent ways about metas plans to remove independent fact check is and let use this fact check content. Does this feel like a backward step to you?
You know, it's one of these actions that on the surface feels really dramatic. But one of the key things that I detailed when iking forward was was how superficial the third party fact checking program was. You know, every month they fact checked maybe hundreds and maybe less than like five hundred. We're talking three hundred two hundred pieces of content globally, when Facebook was producing hundreds of millions,
if not billions, the pieces of content globally. So in many ways, we're ending an era of you know, lipstick on the pig, if you will. When it comes to seeing like third party fact checking is our first line of defense. But I think the larger issue is around how a lot of this has been framed. Right, The idea that you know, Facebook is quote like fighting for freedom and fighting for freedom of speech, and yet we see that they're quite willing to take down content from
issues that maybe be politically expedient to them. So it'll be interesting to see how all this evolves.
After Trump first got elected in twenty sixteen, the legacy media wrote NonStop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried, in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
I know some of the revelations from your Facebook files centered on Meta's failure to fact check stolen election claims prior to the January sixth insurrection. Right, does it surprise you that the company is now I guess, perceivably handing the power back to its consumers. It doesn't feel like they've actually learned any kind of lessons, does it.
Well, I would say the larger issue in my disclosures was, for example, prior to genuine so before the twenty twenty election, they actually took a lot of actions. You know, they had one hundred plus what they know is break the glass measures, which were little tweaks to how the company operated. You know, for example, if you're in a group that has a very small number of people who are driving all the invites for the group, that's kind of suspicious.
You know, when you have point three percent of people who send out invites for stop the Steal, inviting a third of all the members, you know, that should be something that you would maybe take pause on or maybe operate that group a little bit differently because you know that someone's trying to manipulate your platform. I was trying
to hack your vulnerabilities. Facebook knew prior to the twenty twenty election they had a bunch of problems, and they flipped a bunch of little switches to make their systems work in a way that they knew was safer. But prior to January sixth, they turned off. They left all
those switches in the dangerous position. I think one of the key kind of differences of what's changed in the last few years is this question of do companies have a responsibility to understand their vulnerabilities and do they have responsibility to act to address those vulnerabilities if those vulnerabilities have the ability to say, change the course of an election.
And back in twenty twenty, Facebook very clearly thought they had a responsibility to do that because they had a three hundred person team staffed to look for things like voter disenfranchisement, to look for foreign operations trying to amplify misleading information. But by the twenty twenty four election, they
had dissolved that team. And now they're taking even a step further and coming out and slandering their own efforts to go and try to make the platform safer by labeling with words like censorship, even though many many of those interventions had nothing to do with content. So it's interesting to see how far Mark has come and how his perceptions around what his responsibilities are have shifted in a remarkably small amount of time.
What do you think it's because perhaps they more at home now. I suppose at Trump's inauguration last week we saw metas Mark Zuckerberg X's elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Google's the d Pachi in the front row ahead of Trump's cabinet. Why are these tech CEOs so keen to, I guess kiss the ring cozy app to the new administration.
So we're in a really interesting moment where when we look across the world, countries are starting to say that they want a different balance of power with Silicon Valley.
And I've heard very openly on certain podcasts where people who are really deeply connected into Silicon Valley say things like part of why people shifted, why these taxios shifted to support Trump, was that as those countries, as the European Union passed the DSA, as Australia started sending boundaries on how young should children be when they to use social media, they expected the United States government to step
up and defend their economics interests. And the Biden administration, I think, in many ways took what is probably a more appropriate position, which is to say every country is different, trace should have autonomy to say how they want to govern forces that shape their own countries. But if you're a tech ceo, your job is to optimize for your company. And so Trump's inauguration is a second chance for a lot of these companies, you know, the AI regulations that
you're a past. The only way Silicon Valley won't have to figure out how to adapt to those things like they did to GDPR the privacy law is by having people like Trump's step in and say we're just not going to do that. Look at what happened with the TikTok Investment Bill, also sometimes to know as the TikTok ban. He said, I'm very popular in TikTok. I don't want it to go away. You know, there's these interesting moments where, you know, Silicon Valley sees we have someone who is lawless.
You know, he doesn't care that the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress had the right to do this, that this is a legal action. He believes he's about the law. So if they can show Trump that they are useful to him, they are going to get a second chance at all these mechanisms of oversight. And I think that's the thing that they're fighting for.
And as of today, TikTok is back. And I said, we need to save.
TikTok because we're talking about a tremendous who in this audience goes with TikTok Benny very popular.
And frankly, we have no choice. We have to save it a lot of jobs.
We don't want to.
Give our business to China. We don't want to give our business to other people. You mentioned the TikTok ben and it's quite incredible to see once it came back online, there was a message shown to all users that thanked the Trump administration. That doesn't seem like something that we've seen before.
No, well, they know flattery works. You know, this is what foreign governments realized in the first Trump administration. But the number one thing that you can do to get your way is just make him feel like a really big man. And so we have the situation now where tech CEOs are coming in and saying, as long as we can stay on Trump's good side. And remember, in
the case of Mark, he really needs Trump. For context, when we look at what's coming down the pipeline, just this year, we're going to start seeing the cases that are going to make up the forty four US state lawsuit against Trump against Meta herting kids. You know, this
is often compared to like the tobacco lawsuit. We're going to see school districts suing to say, hey, you're costing us tons of money by forcing us to have to pay for tutors, to pay for more security guards, to pay for therapists because kids are shown up to school suicidal. We need those costs rehooped. There's a lot of these major actions that are coming down the pipeline. More countries are probably going to follow Australia's lead and putting in
age restrictions. Mark's only chance to subvert the democratic processes that are happening here is to get Trump to intervene in one of these hail Mary's. And so I think it makes a ton of sense strategically for these companies to be doing everything they can to kiss the ring. That's the thing that's going to protect them from this wave of oversight that democracies around the world have been pushing forward.
Zuckerberg recently suggested on the Joe Rogan podcast that corporate culture needs more masculine energy, describing it as culturally muted, and that having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits. Now having worked in that Silicon Valley environment, to those ring true to you.
You know, it's fascinating. So Google spent a huge amount of money and a huge amount of effort, bringing in data scientists, bringing sociologists, doing huge amounts of work to figure out what makes for a highly performing team in Silicon Valley. And the thing that they found was most important was that people felt psychologically safe. So when you sit there and you say we need more masculine energy, like, what does that mean? Does it mean violent? Like you know,
active aggression, doesn't mean more yelling? Like, what's the behavior you want to see more of in the office? You know, I think if I were sitting at Google, you know the thing they actively did after they did that research was go and give their managers more EQ training because you know, if you want to have a highly performed team where people take risks, people have to feel psychologically safe.
So it feels just like marketing messages. It doesn't feel like you know, a serious person actively looking at the research that's been done on what makes teams.
Achieve, Yeah and not. The key thing we've learned in recent ways is about the end of DEI initiatives that the company and Meta, including removing tampons from men's toilets that were there for trends or non binary employees. What point are they trying to get across by doing this?
It's purely performative, right Like what harm was done by having tampons in those laboratories? Right? Like? Who has been damaged by this? I think one of the interesting trends that we are going to start to see happen over the next few years is AI encoding radically changes the constraints the companies were built on. So let's be super honest here. Part of why Silicon Valley companies started investing more in these diversity initiatives is they just needed more employees.
You know, It's like the US military. The US military cannot function today without reinstating the draft, without having women's soldiers. It's like, you can, you can drive the limit a way, you can drive the racial minorities away, but then we're gonna have to bring back the draft. In the case of Silicon value, you can't force people to work at a tech company. But at the same time, with the
advent of AI, you don't need as many employees. Like I think there will be companies that emerge that make very different choices esthetically, And I'm saying esthetically because that's what banning tampons or having tampons is in this case. Right, you're saying, hey, we want to be a culture. The way we envision happiness is being inclusive in the following ways or or or not being inclusive. It's going to be possible for some companies to actually reach reasonable scale
by just having fewer employees. And so I think one of the things that Facebook is probably looking at is, you know, they purge to huge number employees in twenty twenty two. They've done it again over the last few years. It seems like every single year they say their goal
is to decrease headcount. And they also are one of the top companies at investing in large language models, and so it you know, maybe they've made a decision where they're like, we don't have to anymore be a space that welcomes a diverse set of people because we can get away with it with So. I don't know this will become a larger trend. I don't know if it's
going to be. Like I mentioned before, people are going to go by the research and say, hey, if we want people to take risks, if we want them to act effectually at work, we're going to create spaces where people feel safe. But who knows, It'll be an interesting few years to see how it all plays out.
Within days, Musk has not only moved to reshape the product, but the company's culture itself.
What Twitter prides itself on is a real human centric, people first mentality.
That's what Twitter Canada's then boss told us in twenty twenty. Now Musk appears to be gutting the social media giant's content moderation team, and research is already pointing to a spike in racist slurs on the platform.
You described Meta back in twenty twenty one as putting profit over safety. I think that's the case now with the changes we're seeing coming through and where do you see it going from he so, I think.
I think one of the major trends that Elon Musk released on social media as a whole is when he reduced the size of the company by over fifty percent, he fired many of them, many of them left on their own accord. When he reduced the size of the company so dramatically, he ended up showing Silicon Valley that you could cut safety and there would be no consequences. And when we look at what Mark said in twenty twenty two when he cut huge spots of the safety teams.
He said, Elon showed you could quote rip the band aid off, and we're going to do it too. And so I think there's a real feeling that there's no one forcing them to do even slightly the right thing. Right. If they can evade the DSA, it doesn't matter how little they invest in safety outside the United States. If they can get on Trump's good side, they can evade the consequences of the lawsuits that are stalking them. And so I think they think that they can act any
way they want to. And part of that is there are people on the Internet who have demonized any form of action. They've lumked everything into one pot, even though people like me have been out here since twenty twenty one saying, hey, Facebook knows, there's lots and lots of ways to do safety that aren't content moderation. And those interventions like designing for safety, making sure the products operate holistically in ways that are safe, work much more effectively
than choosing which ideas are good or bad. But those messages really get lost in a world where you have so many loud voices on the Internet saying that the word safety is synonymous with censorship, and Mark got up publicly, you know, not more than a few weeks ago, and said over and over again in his announcement the word censorship, further equiting in people's mind that safety and censorship are so intimately intertwined.
Finally, I know you've spoken about some of Australia's measures against the likes of Facebook, but if you could speak to New Zealand lawmakers about the dangers of social media and algorithms, what would you tell them?
The most important thing for lawmakers to understand is that we are facing wildly asymmetrical forces here, that open societies are intrinsically vulnerable to be manipulated online. You know, we value people's opinions. If you can find ways to cheaply and at scale influence the opinions of people, you can
change the course of a democracy. And what we've seen time and time again now either through internal forces, because let's be honest, you know we've seen in places like Brazil or in Argentina there are people who are very effective at spreading their messages on social media can go and upend a political establishment, and so demanding transparency at a minimum for things that impact national security. That's things like foreign interference and manipulation of our social media platforms.
Ensuring that at a minimum we get transparency on national security issues is not a nice to have for operating a democracy in the twenty first century. It's a must have if you want to continue to get to be a place where we can have public deliberations, where we can altogether work defind what is the best path forward, because otherwise countries they want to make us week want to see us divided, will divide us, and we'll lose that magic that makes our democracies so special.
Thanks for joining us, francis my pleasure. That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.