How to be a whistleblower with Sophie Zhang

our communities and around the globe. My name is Francis Howgan. I used to work on Facebook. I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in US. But I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weak in our democracy. This week, her findings will be rolled out in what's being called the Facebook Papers, a series of coordinated stories and seventeen different media outlets by sased on the internal

documents she photographed during her time working at Facebook. But how can isn't the first woman to blow the whistle on Facebook. In September, a year before Halgan spoke out, Sophie's on a woman of color who worked as a data scientist at Facebook uncovered that Facebook was slow to act or in some cases did nothing at all about coordinated fake campaigns by foreign governments that were manipulating citizens

and destabilizing democracies. Only when Sophie spoke up, she didn't get to testify before the Senate or go on sixty minutes to tell the world what she found, and in some cases media outlets didn't even refer to her as a whistleblower, just some former employee. Sophie is the kind of person who would rather be at home playing with her two cats than doing interviews, but that hasn't stopped her. She continues to speak up, including recently testifying before Parliament

in the UK. When a whistle blower speaks up, we all see the polished interviews and here the snappy soundbites, but Sophie wants people to know the reality that whistle blowing can be thankless dangerous, personally costly work. Here Sophie story. So if you're jung Street her cat Petter, that's absolutely why, that's absolutely why you wanted you might meet to speak right. He just wanted me to go along at lengths about

how getting my cats are and how I had them. Actually, actually you probably know me about you as a whistleblower and former Facebook employee. So Sophie, I have to ask, just before we get into everything, just with everything that's going on with the Facebook and your your role in whistle blowing, how are you, like, are you feeling supported?

Are you feeling overwhelmed? You know how Sophie doing and momstly feeling in a bit overwhelmed, But like I don't In case you didn't know, I'm an introvert who hates any and attention and hates the public spotlight and just wants to stay home and put my cats and and so frankly, I sort of wish that they had gotten a pr FAM or something, if not in us. Judging by the difference in responses, I did, I mean, I did, I did ask for I did ask for one. When I was starting that they turned me down and they

decided that I would yellow it. As it turns out, you're knowing this does not work. Let me tell you that. Yeah, I mean, that's actually a great place to start, you know, as someone who is an introvert, as someone who is not really that interested in being in the public eye, what has it been like navigating this experience as someone who doesn't really want to put themselves out there like that, it's been difficult, it's it's it's it's honestly a bit

like potent taste. But I mean, I think many people can relate to the experience in general of doing something that they don't need to, don't want to do because it's important. Like I think most people don't want to wake up but it's x am in the morning to go into the office or something like that. But most but money people do it anyways, and because they need

to make a living to survive. And and I see this just another version of the same thing, like there are parts that they were surprised at how well I do, like Frank the Frank Thee. When I started, my greatest worry was that I would have a panic attack on life national television or something. And there's other things that I'm doing about myself, like apparently I study when I'm never in an interview or something like that, which is which I mean I don't usually do in everyday conversation.

And there's not that I noticed that's actually a good thing to point out. I feel like people don't realize the cost, like the personal cost of whistleblowing, that it comes with a lot of work, a lot of physical stress, a lot of challenges, and when you do it, you are kind of taking a lot on that. I don't think people really see people. People just want to see this like polished, eloquent person speaking truth, but then they don't see the stress and the physical manifestations of what

that looks like. Yes, I'm not polished or under quin Actually I have a bit of a t on my face right here. My personal excuse is that I have nothing to hide from the people of the world. That is my cause for not wearing makeup. It's easy to think of tech employees is having tons of lucrative job opportunities at the ready, But that wasn't really a sofie situation.

In fact, when she first started working at Facebook, she just kind of needed a job, and Facebook, with its massive influence on all of our lives, well, here was a chance, she thought to make some real change, to have a hand in making Facebook a real tool for good from the inside something. What brought you to working in tech? How did you wind up working at Facebook in the first place. Frankly, I needed the job to make money to survive. I applied to a lot of faces.

Facebook gave me an offer. It's the honest explanation. I applied to a bunch of them, and I was expecting a few others two. Except if I had waited a bit, maybe I would've gotten some more offers, but Facebook had offered. It was and and honestly, I was also partly motivated because they wanted to help fix Facebook. Because it's easy for a lot of people, especially in America in the United States, to say we should just quit Facebook and not use it. But that's not an option for many

people in most of the world. In parts of for instance, rural India. In Africa, for instance, Facebook is essentially the Internet and people do not have the option to leave it. And so by refusing to work for a company like this, you essentially really inquation any influence that you could have over it. And they saw it was important for me to try and fix the company from the inside, to give the chance at least and they think they did accomplishout more the boy I was there, then then they

would have been able to from outside the company. For instance, they took down the troll farm operations of two separate road governments, and ultimately a lot of people have made that consideration. Like when they joined Facebook until them a dancing Facebook was good for the world and was trying to try and fix it. They told me, you'd be

surprised how many people feel that way. And I don't want to say that the most people, Like a lot of people just want to do their do their nineties and go home at the end of the day, which is perfectly understandable. Like I knew people who were, for instance, on HMMB visas, which means that their residency is tied to employment and so for instance, and some of them were unhappy that's a situation, but didn't feel comfortable with speaking out because if they did, they could get fired

and immediately deported back home. Now the cases, maybe people have families that they need to support back home, maybe they have sacredatives, maybe they maybe they have children or etceuter And like with up blowing, is not for everyone. You take on certain risks both financially, go personal, etcetera. And even rocking the boat is not something that many

people do not feel comfortable with. But but they are certainly also people at Facebook who feel strongly about fixing the system, or at least did and try to worry how to do so. All they were there, Many of them have since left the company. Some of them have spoken out to varying extents, like there's always going to be a self selection bias, by which I mean, if you think Facebook is a double you're that's likely to

work for Facebook. If you think the Facebook is the greatest thing since slight spread, you are more likely to work for Facebook. If you think that podcasts are evil, you are not likely if you start a podcast or or listen to one. And so the people I am who are listening now probably do not have negative opinions about podcasts, and and that sort of self seduction bias happens in everything. Like Facebook did regular surveys of how many how many events employees thought that Facebook was making

the road better? That number, that number fluctuated between fifty and seventy. Boy, it was there, it was, It was on the higher end. Earlier on it was much though

it got towards fifty million left. And that may sound very high to you, but it's also important to remember we have a certain advantage coming from the United States and Europe, presumably like series have generally some show people much more positive on facebooking countries like Indonesia compared to the United States, where the mood is very negative, because for many people, Facebook is the Internet. It's the way that they connect to people, and they aren't any other options,

any other awainabilities like there is here. Well, working at Facebook, Sophie found that foreign governments in places like India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador have been using big Facebook accounts to generate fake engagement to manipulate their citizens. She found evidence of cordated campaigns doing this in an attempt to manipulate political outcomes and to help or hinder certain political leaders. And even though this was technically against Facebook's rules, there really

wasn't anybody whose job it was to stop it. So Sophie decided to do it herself. On top of her official job at Facebook, she worked to flag these fake accounts. Now, if you asked me, I would say that Facebook probably should have given her a raise and thanked her for doing this extra work to make their platform that much more secure, But they fired her instead. When you started uncovering,

you know what Facebook calls this in authentic behavior? Um, you basically were like, oh, you know, we know this is happening, but no one's really enforcing a policy against curbing it. And so you kind of single handedly made that your business even though it wasn't really like technically your job. Did you feel sort of motivated by like an internal system, like an internal more like system of morality?

Were you like, well, this is wrong and I had to stop this, Like what motivated you to take this on? Facebook has no official slogans, that's nothing that Facebook. It's someone else's problem. And that was always what I used that internally as an excuse. And what this means, it's that when you see something wrong, you don't assume it's someone else's problem. You don't see someone else is fixed, will fix it. Because when you do that, a round's like all that came. Person can fix it. That person

can fix it. I'm not doing it myself. And the idea is that when you see something wrong, you stop in and fix it yourself. And this is a slogan, of course it is that's not actually get obeyed very much, but I mean it gave me some official cover where I was there. Ultimately, of course, I was personally motivated to do this, I mean it fell in a gray area. I could argue it was within my preview even though it's what I was expecting to do. Do you think

that your work trying to combat these inauthentic profiles? Do you think that that's why Facebook let you go? I don't know. I cannot read minds. They don't know the decisions that were made by people higher up. Like I know people who believe that I was let go for this reason. It's hard to meet to personally saying like the facial reason I was let go, of course, was under performance. The way I would personally describe this is

that it fell into two separate areas. The first was that in the second half of twenty nineteen, during performance reviews this season, it was officially decided that the work I was doing outside what my manager told me to do did not count for my performance, and as the result, I was under performing. The second part of it is that, of course, the pandemic hit in twenty twenty. This resulted in many people working from home. This result, I mean, many people had a lot of difficulty with it. I

was one of them. My mental health and performance suffered, so I was actually anti performing them and Facebook pad in the official policy that in the first half of twenty twenty they would treat everyone as exceeding expectations because you are exceeding our expectations by doing sover and braving it through the pandemic or something like that. In my case, they decided how over that, because I was already officially engine performing before the pandemic, they didn't want to give

me the way that they would for others. And they hopefully makes sense, like Facebook is a company at the end of the day, and ultimately they hired me to do a specific job that they was trying to do in addition to this at the same time, and as anyone who's tried to hold down multiple full time jobs at the same time can tell you, it's very hard to do that. Well, let's say, click right at her back.

When an employee leaves Facebook, it's common for them to write what's called a badge post, a goodbye memo published on workplace, which is kind of like Facebook's internal Facebook for Facebook employees. Now, usually these posts are typical goodbye, fair, it's been great working with you, keep in touch. Only Sophie didn't do that. Instead, he posted a seven thousand ish word screed laying out exactly what she'd seen during

her time at Facebook. In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on a vast scales to mislead their own citizen read and caused international news on multiple occasions, she wrote, I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I've lost count. I have blood on my hands. So you leave Facebook.

When you're leaving, you published an internal memo as you're like, goodbye, badge, and I guess I have to ask, what is going through your head when you hit published? In this memo you talk about having blood on you see that you have blood on your hands. I mean, this memo was earth shattering. What's going through your mind when you hit published? Honestly, it was probably that it was very sleepily proved. You're that I mean, And I stayed up from midnight until

eight am that morning. Right in the memo, there was that second decision. And there's anyone who has taken an old lighte too to write something can tell you you're the result is not going to be the greatest. And I took a quick four hour nap after that because I cannot actually function on no sleep, unlike some people. Am very jaendous of the people who can. But then again, I don't drink coffee. Maybe they should have. And so I posted it like an hour or two before and left.

So this is a bit of a tradition at Facebook. It's called the badge post. When you leave in the company, you post a picture of your employee badge and you put and you write something with it. It's usually it's not usually as controversial as mine, of course. Oftentimes it's just brought statement I was so happy to work with all of you. You are all great. I am like, I am going to Pinterest next, I'm doing this. I

thank you for being part of my journey. And but sometimes they are also more controversial and people have criticized the company's in the bag posts before, like several employees started the idea of hosting a password protected copy on an external website and only sharing the password and link with within't initial badge post. This was after the company had taken down a few small controversial internal badge posts.

So the idea was that if you share the Lincoln password, then people can share that even after the company takes down your internal post, and this were dissuade them from doing so and etcetera. So the initial reaction was mostly from people at other people who did not read the memo because because reading so and solves an eight words, it's a very time consuming affair. There was a lot

of initial expressions of support and etcetera. There's of course a self seleuction bias, by which I mean people are usually fairly prodite and not super rude, and if you have a coworker that hits you your guts and you're leaving the company, they are probably not going to go up to your faith and say, oh my god, you're finally leaving and I'm so tired of you. You're e EO and finally rate of you and start going to be finally she's gone quietly and not tell you anything.

And the people who are like were like, I'm so sorry you're gone. They will they will tell you that. So that's what I mean by self selection bias. But there were certainly people who were very sad to hear me gone, and they were certainly people who were exlad to hear about the details. And I don't know if there was anyone who was like more ha ha if I only got read of her, but I mean again't

read minds. And so anyways, the company took down the Internet workplace post if you always after I posted it, and then then they called me asking me to take it down from a website. I told them they would do that if they restored the Internet work they suppost. They they demoge and the next thing I heard from them was tomorrow when I was told that my website had been taken down. A few days later they got made domain taken down to by the registroies. So I'm

sure the lawyers were very bity that weekend. There was a big employee bagdash because this is not typical at Facebook. I mean, it's it's been changing, but Facebook has historically been a very open company. That's why we had access as employees to talk to other employees. It's so much at the same time, that's why was able to brief a company vice president about the problem in the first plates. And so, like most organizations, there's intrinsic conflict when it

stated goes coming conflict with the selfish motive. The Internet version was restored after some adict after some adicts and etcetera. To the employee back that I think the official statement from the company was that they took it down because it contained a linked because it contained a linked to sensitive Internet documentation outside of outside of outside of the

company reach. And they restored it after I agree to take it down, which is something that makes them look reasonable and also connot be contradicted with me because they no longer had the audience. I know that Facebook offered you a severance if you sign an NDA. Is there any part of you? Is there, like a version of you that would have signed that? Not really? I mean maybe maybe if I wasn't considering doing anything of this, maybe if I maybe I was just doing the ninety

and the first place. But then this without being very rid of front like they offered me about sixty four assaults into the oars for in a severance package. They've had a lot of stipulations. One of them was in the eight non nonisparishment agreement, etcetera. And so these are usually worded very These are often worded very broadly in

tech companies. In my in mind, my recollection of the nondisparishment agreement was saying, basically, I couldn't criticize the company in any way, shape or form, and and this was extremely broad and so I'm going to give an example of of how how broadly the supplies. And so, of course, a week or two ago Facebook went down wrote wide for a few hours. Suppose that during that time period someone asked me, Hey, I see Facebook is down. Is it down for you too? And they check, oh, I

can't face access Facebook either. It's done. At that moment, I am technically in violation of a nonisparishment agreement because I have said something critical on Facebook. But I mean not that they would average too to enforce it, because I would be ridiculous. But that's because but that it is technically some ten negative or critical about Facebook, that's the series is stung you. And if it's even if it's public to accessible information or something, it's just that

it's worded extremely broadly. And that was my official reason for not signing it. Had the time which this seemed pretty promused by but accepted before she was fired from Facebook. Sophie was pretty much single handedly trying to keep foreign governments from of using the platform to manipulate their citizen

ring with no oversight whatsoever. I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time, Sophie said in her badge post, a manager at once teaser saying that most of the world outside of the United States was effectively the Wild West, making her their part time dictator. He meant a statement to be a compliment, Sophie writes, but it illustrated the immense

pressure upon me. She started thinking, I can't be the only person on the planet who is responsible for this information. What if something happens to me? What if I get hit by a car? And kind of by coincidence, she encountered Julia Carey Wak, an accomplished tech reporter for The Guardian US, and that's how our findings reached a new audience. Someone things already talking to Julia. It was two years ago now before this had happened. It was very coincidental.

The first time I met with her in person, I wasn't intending to put out the way, so it was more I was setting up because I mean single points of fender are bad. What happens if you get run away by a car the next day or is untra it? So I was taking it was intentionally contingency. I gave you some information and made your promise not to use any of it and unless there was study was something. She promised that she wouldn't try to kill me with something.

I'm joking. It's a good promise to get before, even before you like spill everything doing journalists. Of course I am joking. And any ways, and this was in Oakland. I arranged with some friends to be in my other by as they agreed that if anyone asked, I was at the cost petting the cats the entire time. This is something I actually visited for at other times I went to I went to oak and then dropped off of my electronic devices with them. I'd also dressed up.

I also I had also dressed up in a cute dress. I do not fear dresses almost ever. And the reason for that was if anyone from if I ran into anyone I knew by coincidence and they could contradict my first undy by then, hey you see someone, They're sneaking around. Unusually, they also dressed up pretty and usually nights. What is this thing that goes through your head with the assumption right exactly, So that so that was my second other bye.

I was really I was having a thing. I mean, it wasn't it wasn't necessary in the end of course, I mean went into anyone And it was just that was a paranoia alst name a bit surprised that Francis Hoagan got away with digg into work place as much as she did, but it but it sort of makes sense because Facebook is fundamentally it's fundamentally company that respondsed these things rather than acting proactively like as I've criticized for it many times before, because they could have easily

called sults, looked into people who were taking into many documents outside the important areas, outside the area of expertise. But apparently that they didn't do that. They only apparently they only do that when it becomes a pr crisis by the time but and and it's too late, which has been the practiced in many other cases much more

important to the road and democracy. So it's supposed to say around that it's their own that it's apparently the practice for interne security and and and employee monitoring as well. If you're going to blow the whistle on a powerful institution, there's a lot of practical things to consider, like should you take screenshots on your work computer or phone? No, you shouldn't use end and encrypted systems like signal on your personal devices, Sofie suggests. There are bigger picture questions too,

like what should you do about money? Sophie says it consider saving up before you go public, or how should you protect yourself from harassment? So if you suggests using a service like delete me to scrub your public information from the web beforehand. Now, at the time, there weren't really a lot of go to guides for how to blow the whistle, But now women like Sophie are helping to protect and guide the next generation of whistleblowers who

hold the powerful accountable. There weren't any guides for how to do list at the time I was making it do up non I eventually wrote the wrote the guide. You might have seen it, Turner. I mean by by now other people have written guys. Your guys are so helpful, you know, as something that I really appreciated in your guide is that you talk about how you know whistleblowing

is not for everybody. Is not everybody can do this, Not everybody would want to take on that kind of scrutiny that you might get when you do this, you know. I think that's just a really useful point that it's really not for everybody. Yeah, Like, like I've been askband all the people, and the first thing I always tell

them is that it's a personal decision. Because it's very easy from the outside for people to judge, for people to say, you shouldn't have stayed at the company that's known, you shouldn't be working here, you should be coming forward, you be talking to the press, etcetera. But but but but it's different from this personal Different people have personal situations, like even just turning down a two dollar a year job. It's it's it's very difficult. So many people have many

people are impart of rich situations. Maybe they have specific circumstances, and it's not my place to judge them for not doing what I did. No one is obligated to immolate their career and torture themselves on the period of world opinion for the for the purpose of for for for this.

I don't think that's something we can reason. I don't think that's something we can reasonably expecting many In most cases this podcast, it's all about identity, how our identities really make the difference when it comes to our experiences in tech and how we show up online. And the same thing is true whistle blowers, and I feel like we're really seeing that play out in real time. The more marginalized you are, the more fraught speaking up can be.

Sophie says that one of the biggest parts of her identity that is presented a challenge in her whistle blowing is the fact that she's kind of introverted. When I said earlier that Sophie prefers hanging out with her cats to giving interviews, well I really meant it. You'll even hear a guest appearance from her cat midnight later on in our conversation. It's really not difficult for me to see the ways that Sophie is being publicly treated because

of her intersecting identities. Even in a lot of well meaning reporting, I've noticed that some just can't help trying to pick whistle blower Francis Hagen against Sophie and obviously sexist framing two women can't possibly both be speaking up without there being some kind of cat right between them, right, and what's worse, Some simply erased Sophie altogether, implying instead that Francis is the real whistle blower, while Sophie is just some disgruntled former employee who was fired for being

bad at her job. After Francis went public, I saw a flurry of headlines about Sophie saying a second Facebook whistle blower has come forward, even though Sophie actually spoke out a full year earlier than Francis did. And it's kind of the rub. We don't have to buy into these limiting narratives about whose voice matters and whose voice doesn't. And we have got to believe in a world where there's a room for more than one woman to speak

truth to power. Our identities shouldn't keep us from being heard. Something that I'm really struck by, and that you talk about a lot on this show, is the way that our identities really intersect when we're talking about these things. And I firmly believe that whistleblowing is an identity issue that like, the more marginalized you are, the trickier it can be. So if you're a trans woman, it's gonna be harder for you. If you're a woman of color or a black woman, it might be harder for you.

Has that been your experience as you have have your identities made this experience of being a whistleblower fraud the identity that has made it the most difficult. It's being

an introy who hates attention. I would say in that I don't think it was surprised anyone to say if if you hate it, if you hate attention and want nothing to do with attention, and they're doing this like like having tea suport, you'll be less good at getting attention and like frank Day should have gotten a pr firm and but like like almost at the end of the day, it's it's hard. It's hard for me to say.

It's hard for me to say how different people have responded differently based based based on my message and who I and who I am. Like, I'm happy that France States has come forward so so so so that's Frankly, someone who is more photogenic, and that's of a introvert who wants to hide at home, can be kind of the torch past to them and can be and can speak out publicly in my study, because I was never the right person from this from the very start, and

they never wanted to be. That's so interesting. I mean I've seen, I mean from following your tweets, I've seen folks will be like, oh, former Facebook employee out there there. It's a bit yeah, this is Midnight again. It's a bit funny that I'm just being described as a second twistle floor Now, yeah, I mean pizza, I mean europe thinks I'm first time. I testified to the European Pintament last year, and I'm testifying to the UK Parinnament next week. But the u S is America, the u S. It's

the center of the road, of course. And anyways, here is Midnight. He's much more important than myself. He's just a beautiful cat. He's very dedicated to food. And yeah, sometimes when he emails, I can imagine, I imagine protest slogans, what do we want? Food? We wanted? Now I would join Midnight's protests. I'm also very food motivated, so I would join that program. Well, maybe he wants equal access to food for a veryvere more. After a quick break,

let's get right back into it. When I was coming of age on the Internet. America, Online basically was the Internet. It was the end all and be all of how I got online, and in many countries, the same is true of Facebook, particularly in the Global South, where text messages and cellular data is expensive. Facebook's messaging platform What's App,

is the way that most people communicate digitally. According to data from the Brazilian technology news and research website Mobile Time, nearly half of Brazilian say What's App is their most used app, followed by Facebook and Facebook owned Instagram. In countries like Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, Argentina, Malaysia and Colombia,

it's the same thing. So for all the harm that Facebook is called in the United States, it's the version of Facebook that Westerners used that is actually kind of the best version of the platform that's out there, which is pretty sad. As Ellen Cushing reported in The Atlantic as part of the Facebook papers, It's the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are

the as too. It's the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government in a wealthy democracy. It's also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources. Elsewhere, the documents show things are different and the most vulnerable parts of the world places with limited Internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have

undue influence. The trade offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences, and Sophie's whistle blowing really helps underscore these stark and dangerous differences between how Facebook operates in the West and how it operates in the rest of the world. And the problem is you kind of have to count on people in the West giving a ship about what happens in the rest of the world

for it to make a real difference. In thinking about the amazing work that you've done pointing out the harms that Facebook was doing around the world. Do you ever feel that one of the reasons why, um, when you spoke out it didn't really rattle Facebook as much, is it because like we're kind of trade aim to not care about certain countries that you're talking about, you know, countries like India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador. Like, are we as Americans just sort of trained to like not

give a crap what happens in these places. And so when you're blowing the whistle about the way that Facebook was being used to destabilize these places, people are just like or whatever I think. I think that's a large part of it. Like no one, I mean, no one says it's so crashily. But it's the case that Americans care more about the United States and other Americans, and most countries are the same way. In the People's Republic of China, people care more about they found those Chinese citizens.

Indians care more about other Indians, Turkeys, Turkey thinks that the road revolves around the Turkey. The Turks think that the road revolves around Turkey, etcetera. And and this is this is the way, this is the way that the road works. And so if if if if ten people die in in In, if ten people die in Tennessee, were treated much more seriously than if a hundred people

die in banquet match. I mean, there's no one around adding adding adding notes to articles like a hundred people died in Bangladesh yesterday, parentheses the equivalent of five point two Americans and parentheses. But I mean, in practice, people do people, and in practice people do have this sort of mental calculation and approach. And this is extremely sad, unfortunately and sadly the way that the road is right now. But it's also true that it's also true that the

road tends to change every time. Every time, Like I live and live with my girlfriend who's who's white, and our relationship would be legal on multiple accounts in California a hundred years ago, like slavery was sadly commonplace in the United States, and hundred sixty a hundred sixty years ago, I mean there have been, there were, there are been words for over religion and and looking back we shake our heads and say, how could have we been so barbaric?

It's a nature for each generation to look back and look back and check the head of their last, and they can't and they don't know the future. I don't know what it holds. But if I, if I want to speculated, guess, I would say that hundreds of years from now, when people look back on us today, but they will find most barbaric. It's the way we treat people differently based on factors as arbitrary as a nine

strong arm map. When they were born mm hm. And they firmly believe that everyone should we have equal rights, and it should be treated equally, regardless of the national origin or other characteristics. But but that's me, and I'm an idea old list. I'd say part of the reason I haven't been listened to as much, it's also just that I dislike sound bites and and sensational its statements,

and and they like nuance. And it's a nature of the current world that this is the opposite track from what you should take to get attention, if any as anyone who's done that, who's used social media can tell you, like, like some of some of the criticism about Facebook in the in the more right now is frankly a bit sensational list and not the most accurate. And that has

been right. The criticis critics, right, they criticized, but they also want to But part of it also feels a bit iron like, because this is a world that Facebook built. This is what gets attention, and it's not surprising that that of the criticism and Facebook, this is what gets

to train the first place. God, that's such a good point that, like they definitely traffic in the idea that what's the most sensational, what's the most polarizing, what's the most extreme that gets the most attention, and that economy that they have really propped up. It's kind of like it's not any wonder that people are defaulting too extreme

statements about their platform. Yeah, Like, I don't know if it was intentional from the story from Facebook, but but but but certainly, but certainly a lot of people have the debt. It's a lot of people have the idea, have the idea that that that that there's that there dance and approach is inherently neutral somehow, and any evasion from it, it's it's is the it's is the is

a dangerous change. And like, ultimately, I don't know if if Mike or others have ideological reasons for wanting that is, if it was just the idea, if it was just made in the most sense for making money that they justified or what. But it but it does seem pretty ironic, a bit ironic to me, even if it's pick God against the specific criticism that I find to be countraproductive or not not substantial. Yeah, so so you said earlier that you're an idealist when you think about Facebook, are you?

Is there part of you that it's hopeful that do you think that it can be it can be saved, Can it be a force for good? Or is it just too late? Anything can be tooretically changed. The question is, though it happened, maybe Mike will have a change of hearty tomorrow. I can't read his mind, I can't read

if future. But but but fundamentally, I think I realized that cynicism, and not only it's amazing work in the Mordern day, it's very attractive for people to say the road is fundamentally to only broken, then it can't be fixed. Therefore I'm not going to do anything, and thus it becomes the self a funning prophecy. And then you can say tho, like, look, look I was right. Nothing changed because in the end nothing, nothing will happen then and

as and as we the people make it happen. If you want things to happen, you should You should try to make it happen, so you can say you have that you tried at the very least, even if it fails, because if everyone writes it off and says it's facebook it's broken, then what's the point. We already know that it's ready off of we can't do anything, then then

that will become a self a funning prophecy. And no one will and and no, because no one was up forward to fix it with change it in the first place. M hm. And so the question of anything happened, that's really up to us. It's it's up to it's up to yourself, it's up to me, it's up to the people and listening and on them. My am my working myself. Yes, yes I am, but that doesn't mean I can do it to known. I'm not a superhero. Sophie is amazing, but she's right. She's not a superhero and she shouldn't

have to be. She can't take on a massive, powerful, global institution like Facebook all on our own. So the question is what will we do? How will we honor women like Sophie who have risked everything to speak truth to power. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can be just at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridgetad.

It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer, Terry harry It as our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget DoD. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts