Monetizing Our Demise

the thirty seventy year old former Facebook product manager. Francis Hagen, because of her integrity, because of her morality, because of her desire to see our democracy as well as other democracies around the world continue to flourish, she did an amazing thing. She came in as a caped crusader and divulged documents that we had all had a hunch about. Right. We all pretty much kind of knew right that Facebook and social media have been in a lot of ways

really bad for our society. It started out as a way to connect people. The whole idea of social media was to have people be more social, to connect to folks that you no longer live by or go to school with, or family members that live in different countries or across you know, around the world in different spaces.

It was an opportunity for us to kind of take you know, the the tangible photo album, right that we all used to put together or you know, maybe I'm naming my age, but the tangible photo album and be able to share that in real time with people that you care about. Well, that was the intent, right, But what do they say about intentions? The road to hell was paved with them. And that is exactly where we are in our current makeup of the Facebook world that

we are living in. Is that what began as the intention of Mark Zuckerberg and others to be able to connect to other folks on their campus has now morphed into the ability for the Proud Boys and you know, the Boogoloo Boys and different hate groups to be able to unite. It has turned into a tool for bullies

to be able to harass and taunt people. Right. And what we are learning about, particularly what Francis Hoggan has laid out for us, is the toxic effect that again we knew right before Facebook, before Instagram, what did we have. We had actual magazines and what were we taught about those magazines that the images that were being projected back two young girls, right, was distorting their images of themselves.

We knew this, We've known this for decades. So of course, when you are able now to just continually scroll and see images of these perfected, quote unquote bodies, right, these edited, photoshopped, enhanced bodies, then of course you're going to look at yourself in the mirror and say, oh my god, I'm not worthy, right, Or you're going to post a picture and maybe you don't get as many likes as your friend, right,

And so what does that do well? According to CNN Business, who picked up some of the key moments of francis testimony in front of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee, here are some of the things that she said. I am here today because I believe that Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy. These were a part of her opening remarks. The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because

they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They won't solve this crisis without your help. And here's the thing is that this is a crisis of their own making, but much in the same way that they have been able to take action to remove child pornography and child pornography groups and images from Facebook.

Tell me why they weren't able to the same thing with white supremacy right, tell me why they weren't able to do the same thing with misinformation about voting and misinformation about COVID. Well, what the whistleblower air is out for the rest of us is that hate and fear

are what get people to stay on the platform. That even though these girls seventeen percent of girls are developing eating disorders and thirteen point five percent have horrible images of themselves, even though these stats based on Facebook's own internal research, is there that what they have also learned is that though the platform is proving to be toxic and making people feel bad about themselves, guess what, they can't stop. It's like a drug and they just keep

scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So when Miss Hagan says they won't solve this crisis without your help, no, it's not about their help. It's about their fucking mandate. It's about they won't solve this problem because they have no incentive to do so. Right, the incentive here is to make billions and billions upon billions of dollars, more money than you'll ever be able to spend in a fucking lifetime.

Right earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, according to many reports, with the five hour outage across multiple platforms that are owned by Facebook, lost between six and seven billion dollars himself six and seven billion dollars he lost. Can you imagine? I just like, take that fucking in for a minute, Mark Zuckerberg lost in the five hours that these platforms were down, more than some country's GDP. But we don't want to talk about the wealth tax. We don't want

to talk about how big is too fucking big? Right. We got into a financial crisis in the early aughts because we said, oh, the banks are too big to fail, we can't let them shut down. What about the people? But we did nothing to restore the wealth that was lost to the millions of people that lost homes because of the predatory lending practices, and nobody went to jail. So it is not that this behemoth of Facebook needs

the help of Congress. It's that without the intervention, without the regulation, without the mandates, they're going to continue to grow out of control. Millions of people, small businesses, individuals run their lives their businesses through Facebook's ads and Instagram ads.

It's the reason why Stephanie Rule on ms NBC said, you know what you have to ask yourself when you are not paying for a service, Recognize that you are the product all of your information, all of your data, your phone numbers, You're this everything that we have done. We have literally handed over our lives to Facebook, and they have optimized their algorithms in order to be able to market to us in a way that we don't even know if what we like we actually like or

is it because we've seen it seventeen times? Right? Is the news that I'm getting actual news? Or have they just decided to feed me the bubble that they believe that I'm most comfortable in? And so what does that mean if I'm a person that believes that in verktimine right, or whatever the fuck that horse hormone is that everybody seems to be using in the Midwest, the circles that I run in tell me that that is the safest

thing and the best thing to use. And I'm just getting projected back images from inside my own bubble, right, then what does that mean for my safety? And while being one of the questions that I asked, as we're learning more information, as more information is becoming available, and after this testimony on Capitol Hill, the question that I asked, and I will have some lawyers on in the coming weeks that will hopefully unpack this for us. But here's a thought, And once again, I'm not a lawyer, but

I said this. The documents Francis Hagen released confirmed what we already knew about Facebook, including their role in spreading hate. If the papers reveal that the disillusion of the Civic Facebook group right, the one that was supposed to be monitor ring misinformation about voting on all of these things, all of these social ills, if that group was dissolved post twenty twenty election because they felt like, oh, well, we did our part, we did our very minimal, low

fucking lift. And they show that the Civic Facebook group right that was responsible for reporting and kind of having eyes on the situation with regard to voting and misinformation and with regard to these white supremacist groups, if they shut down and then went back to their old algorithm, allowing their platform to become a convening for the insurrection? Then are they can Facebook be held criminally liable because it was not then an accident? And that's the point.

That is what is so important here about Francis's testimony is that what she has unearthed is what we all assumed but had no evidence to prove, which is that Facebook knows exactly what the fuck they are doing. They know exactly what is toxic, they know exactly what is dangerous. But they are choosing to monetize people's pain and monetize the demise of our democracy above all else because it does not, in this instance or pretty much fucking ever

pay to do good. But what also gets me, folks, is that if it wasn't for this whistleblower, we would be none the wiser. And so we are basing right, We are basing the health and well being of our democracy, right of our cultural climate, on a few people that decide to do good. Well, what happens when nobody decides to do good? What happens when tribalism fully wins over? Are we just fucked then? Because we have put together

no guardrails, no safety measures. We are not handing out sentencing for the insurrectionists that would make us believe that another attack isn't on the horizon because there's nothing. What they're going to say, Oh, well, maybe you know, this is worth the forty five days in jail, This is worth the slap on the wrist, if I believe, because I'm being fed this line of thinking that I'm the

true patriot and everybody else's the enemy. If I believe that, and that is being reinforced through these algorithms that are coming to me, isn't someone somewhere fucking responsible for this? And I'm not taking away like this is not this is not me deciding then that, oh everyone has been duped and so to avail them of personal responsibility. No, No, But there was a network that was in place from the donors who got these buses and put people up

in hotels. Right. There was the right wing media that was amping people up and telling them what to do. Right. There's a manifesto that was put out that Donald Trump decided to follow to a t in order to conduct this coup. And then he had this tool, this technology, both Twitter and Facebook to be able to do it.

Eighty million fucking people. And so if Facebook knowingly decided, well, you know, we're losing money because God forbid, right the billions upon billions that they make, It's just not enough. And that is the disgusting aspect of capitalism. There is never enough, right. They'll just keep consuming and doing and consuming and doing until somebody stops them. So essentially, what this whistleblower has laid out is what she believes and

what she had said in her testimony. She is doing this at great personal risk because she believes quote, we still have time to act, but must act now. Well, what's terrifying to me is that I don't think that our government actually knows how to act. We can't decide what Facebook actually is, and we don't have laws that are in place or in development of how one regulates

an algorithm versus an actual tangible entity. Coming up next, dear friends, is my conversation with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel to unpack this very issue and whether or not the harms that have been done are just too far gone for us to be able to do anything about it. Hey, friends, as always, I am excited every single Wednesday when we get to sit down with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel to go through the latest in our global health pandemic,

the latest in the multiple pandemics that we are living through. Jonathan, you know, I think that we've kind of reached a place where we don't know if I like what I like or because somebody is telling me that I should like it. And I think that that is you know, that's part of the problem of being in and like I think, I forget who said it, but they said it this week. Oh it was Stephanie Rule on MSNBC.

When you're on a platform that is free, right, you have to recognize that if you're not paying for something, then you are the product, right, And that is what we are learning with the revelation through you know, through Facebook and you know their outages this week across you know, multiple platforms, billions of people. But it's recognizing that, you know, am I clicking on this thing because I like it, because I want it, or because somebody has created an

algorithm that is enticing me? And what does that mean? If I am an addict? Right? If I if I am somebody who you know is an addict, is a gambling addict, you know, an alcoholic or what have you like you can literally target to people, and so it's really important to begin to cross a reference and to kind of, I think, unplug and go back to what you were doing, you know, pre which was picking up a paper and decid I mean that you were going to read it going you know, reading it reading a

magazine because like you've decided to pick it up. I think that you know, it is the question that we all need to be asking ourselves, like why do I feel the way that I do? Why why has my opinion been formed in a certain way? And if we're working to get people out of these bubbles, right, like these tribal bubbles that you and I have talked about so many times, you know, how do you even begin to do that? Right? How do you even be able to break in to the bubble that's been created around them?

And it's interesting because it's you can just see even and as you describe it, the kind of vicious cycle here, right, which is you have a pre existing ideology, your liberal or your conservative, your libertarian, your Raylian, your whatever you are, and then and then the news is formatted to reaffirm your belief, so then you gravitate toward that news that news makes an emotional sense to you because of your existing ideology, and then when you read the article, it

doesn't challenge that, it reaffirms that, you know, liberals suck or conservative suck, and then you in your mind generalize, oh, all liberals suck or all whoever suck, and then it's a feedback because then you share that article and stuff like that. And so we're in this thing where, especially in a time like a pandemic, where we don't know all the answers. I mean, we thought vaccines did one thing, they do something else. Masks now cloth masks are bad whatever.

Like that's the way humanity understands a pandemic is like our knowledge evolves. But when knowledge is changing important life or death information is changing, then these kind of bubbles, these ideological bubbles. It's just it's a perfect storm. Like no wonder Facebook made so much money because it's a perfect storm of hunger, attention, anxiety, all those kind of things.

You know. But I want to I want to ask this though, because I you know, I don't think and again I'm existing inside of the bubble that you and I share, right as progressives, as as democrats. Right, I don't get messaging that tells me to hate conservatives. I don't get messaging that is directed towards how terrible you know, conservatives are white evangelical Christians like any I don't get

messaging like that, do you? Because I think that the messaging that is to I would argue that the messaging that is targeted towards people who are Democrats, who are you know, who are more aligned with the intent around the values of our country. That like, we're not trying to hate other people, and that's not that's not our clickbait, right, but but it's actually a kind of visual sample biased

kind of how this works. So even if you're not, you're not getting a message that says something horrible like Mitch McConnell is holding up the infrastructure bill. Who would possibly say that, um, you know, but but but but what you get is so like I was on a plane this morning. There was one guy who was determined to be a nostril patriot. He needed his nose out, and that kept telling this dude, put your frigging nose under your mask for everybody else, and then he'd pull

it back down something like that. Now there were maybe on my flight this morning. I don't know how many people want to flight two hundred people at whatever. One hundred ninety nine people had their mask on normal, and this one guy wanted us to see the inside of his nostrils. And so if the way the media algorithm works is somebody films this guy, it goes crazy and then you think all these anti mask people, they're just pulling their nose off out on the thing, but you

don't see the other one hundred ninety nine people. And so the way it works is by kind of a stable giance, like you think every single person is doing this, who is part of this bigger ideology, when really the way things go viral is I mean again, think about it, seventy two million people voted for Trump. How many two thousand stormed the Capitol on January sixth, But in a way, what you think is everybody who voted for Trump must have been at the see on that day. That's the

way it kind of messes with your mind. Yeah, and also what it takes to go viral. And you know, conversely, how many people marched for justice after the murder of George Floyd and how many created acts of violence like it was like point zero one percent. But in conservative media it was like every protester is smashing plates and

lighting stuff on fire and stuff. So in a way it works by taking out of context and totally decontextualizing and creating this generalizing, generalizable ethos, and then all of a sudden when it's like, oh, every protester is smashing things, how could I possibly negotiate? We're so different from you. And so in a way it creates this thing where it's like it's like what's the literary term metonomy or synectic key or something like that, where the part comes

to represent the whole. And so you think every black person must be an angry protester who's going to steal stuff from CBS and all that kind of stuff, when probably one person that maybe they were, I don't know, getting paid off to do whatever. But that's what drives clicks, is like you see the little thing and then you

generalize it. And that's the danger of this stuff is, particularly because the bar is so high to go viral, Like it used to be just your dog could catch a frisbee, and now it's like you've got to do the craziest shit in the world. But then everybody thinks like, oh, every person is like that. So that's that's how that this algorithm works. Yeah, And this is what the whistleblower was articulating in the hearing, which is that the presumption

that everyone had. And I say presumption that everyone had. But I really believe that our members of Congress are inept and very fucking lazy. And I will say that to say that, one, I wouldn't call my mother and ask her what is the best like social media platform to use, right, because she is out of her age depth. Right. But we then are sitting with a Congress where the average age in the Senate is seventy two years old. They understand how to regulate things that you can touch

and feel, and even intellectual property to some degrees. We are talking about now regulating algorithms, right, which you need somebody to go in and explain exact to all of us, frankly, but exactly what an algorithm is. But you're more likely to be able to understand the machinations of it if you're somebody that readily uses technology and has a general awareness.

And so I say the laziness part because we have known, we've been listening to Congress bitch about Facebook, and we've all been bitching about Facebook and it growing into a monopoly and gobbling up all of these companies and then it goes out and three and a half billion people across the around the world can't communicate, right, And so it's it's it's this thing where we're our laws are not keeping pace with the reality that we're living in

and how fast technology is moving. And the fact is is that like, go ahead, Well, it's also that our legal system becomes a reflection of that system. Right. And in other words, like the people who do well are people like Marjorie together Green who don't do anything, but they're good at they're good at manipulating that algorithm, and

the algorithm the ultimate result. It's great for business if people feel like we have so little in common that there's no way we're ever going to be able to work together, or the other side is so morally bankrupt, there's whatever. So if you feed into that, but there's a ton of money in that, right, and so polarization is great for business. And so again you just think about that happening during the pandemic. It's like the it's

like it's like the perfect storm. Right, it's great for their business to be creating all this polarization, but it's you know, it's just really bad if you're trying to solve a common problem of humanity. But I don't think that that's the thing. Facebook isn't here to solve problems, right, They're here to monetize, right, and that and the reality is is that we know I mean, you can go back in history. What did they used to say about

journalists and headlines? If it bleeds, it leads, that is the same reality that is true for this tech this major tech company, this utility that needs to be regulated that for them, they've just been able to use that exponentially. You know, with billions. We're not talking about, oh, the circulation of let's say The New York Times or even their online subscription. We're talking about everyone in the world.

And so when the whistleblower is talking about the fact that this is destroying democracies not just in this country but around the world because you are so hate and you know that you're sewing hate because it's telling you that the angrier that people are, the longer that they stay on the platform. And this was alternatively true for the young girls and the research that was done about Instagram that seventeen percent of the young girls that are

on Instagram or developing eating disorders. Well, and also I feel so bad, like like, I mean, so many of my students they just want information. Right, the world is changing, the economy is changing, There's all these health risks that we weren't bargaining for. So they want to know, like where can we go for information? And that's really what our class was about, and they were just saying, like where can we get like do we need to wear

a mask, do we need to whatever? And the sad reality is like, I mean, Trump was right about this, and he created this world in a way that there's no such thing as a neutral fact that everybody can look at the same story. But some people are being told Iver Metton is the greatest thing since whatever the last d wormer was, and some people are are being told it's it's it's a forest, And so we're kind

of getting different versions. People are just hearing different realities in a way, and so it just makes like coming together in a common good more difficult because people are I just say, I've done a lot of on the ground research I'm doing a focused group project tomorrow that's starting where I'm talking about COVID with a bunch of very conservative people. So I'm curious, you know, because the thing is, like in people's daily lives, I feel like

they're a bit more malleable. But the problem is it has tons of implications, particularly during a pandemic, Like you want people to be kind of working with the same knowledge base, but that becomes impossible when people are are really are really just there's like so many different realities right now. But that is that is a product of Trump and Trumpism, which is where we decided that you

can have facts and alternative facts. And while the rest of us were laughing at Kelly Ann Conway when she said that, other people were like, oh, that's right, you know, I believe something that is different. Well, this is actual science. Right. So if we're just talking, if we're looking at this Facebook issue just through the prism of the health pandemic, not our social pandemic, just the health pandemic, then we're saying, well, what do you mean, where do you get information from?

Don't you get it from the CDC, Don't you get it from the World Health Organization? And if you don't trust any of those entities, wouldn't you call your doctor's office if in fact you have a doctor, or go to the local pharmacy. Because I'm sure, Jonathan right, like they're not saying, well, maybe you should try and the horse hormone. They're not going to tell you that, not

even at the fucking CBS. But also we live in an environment where like again I just tell my students go on Twitter and say something really nice, like I'm a Democrat but I think Republicans are really friendly or something like that. Um. You know, like you get that makes no money for Twitter. But if you go on and you like spit fire, that's that. So the algorithm monetizes conflict. And that's true for the media. I do

the media, you do. Um And and now we're seeing the implications, which is sometimes and certainly of course Trump with fake news and all that we didn't we didn't even we didn't even say fake news before him. But he was stepping into like a he was stepping into a table that we set for him in a way. Um And and he just mean, I mean, he's a he's a manipulator. He's not a maker. He's a manipulator.

But uh, but but I think that's the issue is like how do you step back from that in a way, you know, if if it's so clear, like your people in your you can like COVID death is not a mystery. You can see it everywhere you go right now. So it's kind of like, how do you how do you step back from that? You know, It's kind of a million dollar question. That's it for today's Woke f Daily podcast.

To hear more from today's show, including my full interview with doctor Jonathan Metzel, support me on Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Woke a power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.