Could Facebook Have Stopped January 6? With Frances Haugen

Welcome to the Oath in the Office podcast. I'm John Fegelsang. We have a great show planned today, including the woman who is the inspiration for the new film, The Social Reckoning. Please let me turn it over to the star of our show, the author of The Oath in the Office, the pride of the Brown University Poli Sci Department, where they call him the Mac People of Earth. Let me welcome Corey Bretschneider. Hello, Professor.

Hi, John.

Of course, this is a podcast about the threat to democracy, and we're going to talk about stories of the week. But we're also going to have an amazing guest. I mean, I've been talking about the Facebook movie. We'll talk about it today as well. But when you see it, you'll see the movie centers, although Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting character played by Jeremy Strong, it really focuses on a hero. And that hero is Francis Haugen. And Francis is our guest today. It's an amazing conversation. We taped it earlier. And as you'll hear, it's a story about how Facebook really did threaten our democracy on January 6th. in its rise of extremist groups, how it's enabled that. And we spoke to the person, too, though, who John and I really regard as a hero, the person who blew the whistle on what was happening, and who also has ideas about how to stop these social media companies, including Facebook, from continuing to threaten our democracy.

Quite a show today.

Yes, and she's played by Mikey Madison. And I must say, her character has a bit more of a uplifting arc than a Nora, but check it out. Corey, I want to begin by, by asking you about Vivek as a comedy fan. He means a lot to me, Vivek, for those who don't know, I've always thought he was kind of like, uh, he was kind of like if Eddie Haskell from leave it to beaver had been up doing tainted cocaine in the basement with James Woods all night. That's sort of where Vivek is for me. And of course, he made the headlines this week by having this campaign ad starring Amy Acton's estranged mother, Ms. Donna Arthur, who was, of course, married to the man who allegedly abused her for years until the authorities took her away at age 12 and her brother as well. Donna Arthur chose to stay with her husband and the man who had abused her children, stayed with them until his death. And, you know, Amy Acton's talked about their childhood and how they lived in a tent and their family history and and her mother's husband's criminal indictment for rape. This ad was, of course, this woman, Donna Arthur, calling her estranged daughter a liar. She hasn't seen this child in almost 50 years. And it's really turned into a moral Rorschach test, I think, for a lot of people on the right. We've seen some Republicans, including Governor DeWine, decry it. Ramaswamy has doubled down on this, spent more money. The initial ad didn't have the disclaimer in the end, Corey, saying, I'm Vivek and I approve this message. which means it wasn't really a political ad. It was just a smear designed to hurt someone. But now that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have expressed their huge fans for having a sex abuser's enabler scorn and ridicule her own flesh and blood who was an abuse victim, we're going to see more of this ad. What does this tell you, Professor, about the standards of political conduct in America right now?

It just shows us how far we've fallen.

And part of the story is about Vivek and how reprehensible this individual is And thankfully, there is pushback.

You know, that's part of the hope.

There are venues that are canceling on him. The Republican governor of Ohio has condemned this ad and said that he should pull it down. But yet the fact that it continues tells us that there's some reason.

Why he's running it.

Now, one reason is that this is the mentee of Donald Trump and he's emulating him and something that celebrates, that brushes aside sex abuse and boosts actually this person, the mother who was complicit, it looks like, in the sex abuse of her child, at least allegedly. And not just allegedly, there was an indictment in that case of the husband who committed this abuse. So this is a craving character who's taking a playbook from his mentor, but it's even more than that. And that's what I wanted to say, because it really deals with our theme for today. We have an ideal in democracy of deliberation and discussion and back and.

Forth and argument.

And that's not what's going on in this story or in our politics or with Donald Trump or with Vivek. What's going on instead is doing things that appear perverse to observers that have some point to them. And as horrible as this ad is, it works for some segment of the base. And that must be why they continue to run it, that they must have data that shows this is going to help them with a certain segment of.

The American people.

And that is a sickness of our politics. And the fact that you can have an ad as reprehensible as this serving any purpose is a sign of how things have fallen, that a world that's really run by algorithms and by outrage and by stimulation of people based on, well, the opposite of facts is really a sign of the times.

We also must remember, however, Professor, that they are stupid. And what we're seeing here is not unlike this desperate attempt to humiliate Ilhan Omar and or the president just melting into Islamophobic bigotry, alleging that this American-born doctor who wants to give everybody health care is on the side of the 9-11 terrorists. I mean, Trump didn't just lie about Dr. Al-Sayed. He exploited the deaths of 9-11 to lie about someone else. And when looking at this, I think the larger story, I don't know if it's the advertisement itself, the decision by the president and vice president to turn any criticism of it into this partisan loyalty test. But I think you might be right. The worst part about it might be that all this controversy is going to shift all the attention away from policy issues like healthcare, the economy, public services, the cost of gas, and we'll be normalizing these tactics while at the same time not talking about the issues that we really should be talking about before election day.

That's right.

I mean, so much of what's going on in politics right now Well, it's a kind of classic idea, I should say, in political science, like who sets the agenda, what's on the agenda, and just what the questions are that we're focused on.

People don't think of it this way, but attention gets focused.

And, you know, if you're focused on the issues that help your party, this is a traditional idea, you're in better shape. For instance, symbolic issues often helped Republican candidates.

In the 1970s and 80s as opposed to economic issues. Well, look at what's happening now.

It's a similar idea that if we're focused on this controversy over sexual assault, there shouldn't be any controversy. But of course, Donald Trump and Vivek and J.D. Vance are creating it. What are we not talking about? We're not talking about the fact that inflation is through the roof. We're not talking about the fact that this president promised to bring prices down and got people to vote for him based on that. And the reason we're not talking about it is because they don't want us to talk about it.

The more we talk about that, we're going to.

See why this regime, this president and his allies like Vivek are really harming us economically. And they can distract us with this really horrific nonsense. But it is also the kind of thing that people are clicking on social media, as we'll talk about with Francis.

Well, I mean, this whole thing is Streisand affected so hard against Vivek. I mean, it's going to marry James Brolin, I think. I mean, you know, I think when Vivek finally shuffles off this mortal coil, having never achieved the office he sought, this will be mentioned in the first paragraph of his future obituary, which I hope he lives a very long life and has plenty of chances to repent for all this. But, you know, Corey, I got to say, they're doing this. It just reeks of panic because you don't do this to try to convince those Democrats to cross over for your side. You don't do this to try to convince all those moderates and independents to come over to your side. You do this because you're desperate to try to get your own core base to show up. And in many cases, the racists, I mean, the Ilhan Omar raid was a Hail Mary pass to get the racists excited to come vote for a guy who just jacked up their gas prices and lied about everything. And I sort of view this as the same thing. It wreaks more of their desperation than of any kind of shrewdness. No doubt it'll test well with some people, But I have to believe the majority of Americans are repelled by this once they learn the facts.

You know, I hope that's true, John, of course.

And we've had moments of overreach before that resulted not just in the end of a candidate, but of a political party. I think of the Federalist Party that literally shut down the opposition.

And of course, they don't exist anymore because they overreached.

But what scares me at the same time that I want to share your hope is that this stuff works. You know, let's not forget that Donald Trump learned to use social media in his first election.

His racist lies about Obama.

The racist lies about the birth certificate or why he's in power now.

And when he came down the escalator that first time and talked about Mexico sending us, you know, rapists and not their finest people.

How outrageous was that? And yet it worked.

And so that's what they're relying on, that there's a segment of the American people that will come to the polls as a result of this. But absolutely, you know, and I should say Vivek's polls should be in the 30s or 20s, and they're not.

They're going down.

But It is still a competitive race in Ohio. And that tells us how damaging and how damaged our politics are. And we have to start to think not just about the particular actors, but about the infrastructure that's doing all of this and the algorithms and the social media that's enabling it.

Yes, sir. Well, this whole story is so ugly and libelous and vulgar that it really it makes me happy that we're still watching Republicans cheat the old fashioned wholesome ways by exploiting a compromised Department of Justice. Todd Blanch, DOJ, announced criminal charges, Professor, against 28 California residents who are all lawful permanent residents alleging violations of federal voting laws. Now, this is completely... poppycock, but they've got cases of fraudulent voter registration, meaning someone accidentally got registered to vote but never actually went to do it. That happened with a 61-year-old woman. False statements and naturalization applications. They've said 11 defendants were arrested as part of Operation Protect the Vote. This from the White House that, of course, had cops beaten for a lie to steal the vote. So we know they don't mean it. I mean, before we even get into the politics, can you separate the legal issues here? Because we know why they're doing this. They're trying to create a pretense that there's widespread voter fraud, which only happens when Trump is president. Didn't happen under Obama. Didn't happen under Biden. But when Trump's in the White House, they have to have you believe it's chaos. Federal law prohibits fraud. non-citizens voting. We know that. But there's a huge difference between being registered to vote, being issued a ballot, and actually casting a ballot. Has Todd Blanch accused anyone in California of voting illegally? Not even in numbers that would affect an election, just anyone of illegally being able to vote?

Well, we're a long way from seeing if any of these people who supposedly have committed election fraud actually did commit election fraud. It could be that there were clerical errors, for instance, happened. And as we find out, and as we go through the criminal process, which will be after the election, of course, and after they've had the chance to try to suppress the vote and to cause chaos in our system by bringing up these accusations, we'll see if any of it's true. But to my mind, what it's really doing is actually linked to another story. So they're using these threats of prosecutions in order to try to force California to commandeer, and I'll talk about what that means, in order to look into about 20,000 instances of, they claim, suspicious voter registrations. And it's a way to try to, again, throw a wrench into our electoral system and to lead us to have no faith in it and to try to co-opt California into helping them.

The permission structure for stealing an election, the permission structure for throwing out a lawful vote.

Right.

That's what all of this is. It's not actually, of course, looking into election fraud. But now here's the irony, John, and this is going to surprise listeners, and maybe it will surprise you. In an odd way, the hero of this story is William Rehnquist, who I don't think of as the person who is really concerned to protect our democracy.

That's not the spirit.

The Nixon employee turned Supreme Court justice No.

I'm sorry. Segregationist.

Segregationist.

People forget we had a segregationist running the Supreme Court in this century. Go ahead.

Yes. If you look at some of his memos and opinions about civil rights, this isn't somebody who would be on the side of democracy.

But now here's the big but.

Rehnquist was, I would say, the primary proponent of an idea that's sometimes called the new federalism. Our Constitution gives limited powers to the federal government. And the Tenth Amendment reinforced the idea that those powers are limited and those that are not granted to the federal government, the national government, are left over and reserved to the states and local government. Now, why does this constitutional law lesson about the topic of the new federalism and the Tenth Amendment matter so much?

I'll add one more.

Wonky idea, the idea of dual federalism. that the sovereignty of the people lies both in the federal government, but also in the states. That's how we realize the idea of democracy. Well, why it matters is because the idea here is almost a textbook violation of what Rehnquist said you couldn't do. And that's to try to commandeer local government and make them do the bidding of the federal government. Now, in this case, do the bidding in order to undermine our election integrity. And no, the 10th Amendment, I think, protects us here. And that's what California is going to say in these lawsuits today. And it's why they'll prevail, I think, against this really dangerous attempt to manipulate our elections yet again.

Well, then let me bring it over to Alaska, because I don't know if it's more evil, but it's probably equally corrupt. Y'all know that there is the Republican nominee, Dan Sullivan, and an independent candidate with the same name, right? So voters are going to have to pay attention and make sure they're voting for the right one. We'll come back to why that's historically relevant in a second. So the DOJ has announced, oh, no, if the Democrat wins, if Mary Patola wins in Alaska, We might have to throw that whole election out because clearly people voted accidentally for the wrong person. Clearly, if the Democrat wins, we have to toss it. So the Democrats asked the federal court to throw out the DOJ's, I think, unprecedented lawsuit to preemptively block certification of a Democratic woman senator, an indigenous no less, in Alaska if the Republican loses. this is the most insane thing I've ever heard of. Why would the federal government professors seek to intervene before an election result even comes in, in case the Republican incumbent loses? There's only one reason I can think of, and it involves cheating.

Yeah, I mean, you laid it out perfectly.

What blows my mind, and I also was flabbergasted, you know, we're seeing shocking stuff all the time, but the idea that the election has to be stopped only if the Democratic candidates wins.

I mean, it's almost like, You know.

If the independent Dan Sullivan wins, they got to shut up and let that guy serve.

But instead, you're right. Yeah.

They're not claiming that somehow the process is flawed as a whole or something needs to be fixed. No, it's that if this outcome that harms us, our party happens, that's the thing that we want you to stop.

And that's why I think it's going nowhere.

It's obviously a partisan attempt to try to manipulate the outcome of an election, which is the core of what you cannot do in election law.

Mm hmm.

Exactly. And I want to point out the Alaska Supreme Court already allowed the second Dan Sullivan to remain on the ballot. So the DOJ's got no business whatsoever interfering beyond the fact that they really want to cheat. Here's why it's historically relevant, Corey. We talked about this on Sirius XM this week. You know, if they double down on this and try to do it and throw out the democratically elected Senate of Alaska... They're going to say, well, the voters didn't realize they were voting for the wrong person. These voters didn't realize on the ballot that they weren't voting for the candidate they intended. And if that happens, I really want to hear Brett Kavanaugh's take on things. Because this, if we can now throw out the election results of a state because some voters were confused by the ballot, then when do we inaugurate President Al Gore for winning Florida in the year 2000, Corey? Because that's, tell me I'm wrong. That was the same exact thing. That was an illegal ballot. Warren Christopher, who would have been 101 this week, rest in peace. Warren Christopher said the ballot was illegal. Supreme Court didn't care. And again, it's on the Democrats in Florida for certifying an illegal ballot anyway. But it wasn't legal. There were not thousands of old Jews in Florida who really wanted to vote for Pat Buchanan. This was the whole hanging Chad debacle because they were confused. They don't care. It's only about when can the status quo assume power, and they will take an opposing view to what they fought for in 2000 to do the opposite here in Alaska. Am I off on this comparison?

Not only are you not off, John, but you're talking about my topic that I am really— diving into. When the history of Brett Kavanaugh and his hypocrisy is written, it is going to shock Americans because it's somebody who just will move between legal positions depending on which Republican master he's serving at the particular time.

And I know because I'm writing that history. So I can guarantee it is being written.

It's part of what I'm doing is in my book about the post-Nixon threat to democracy is looking at Brett Kavanaugh, who is against the independent counsel and law later in his career when he's working for a president, for it when he's trying to prosecute Bill Clinton.

And the other place that I see.

His coming hypocrisy is when it comes to the idea in Bush v. Gore of just allowing the votes to count, they come up with excuse after excuse. You know, they claim there's an equal protection argument in having all ballots counted equally across the United States.

That's in the decision itself.

There's an Article 2 argument that Brett Kavanaugh himself championed that says you can't allow the recount because it violates Florida law and under Article 2, which creates the.

Rules of presidential election, that's not allowed. This was the guy who was the.

Spokesman for not allowing the votes to be counted.

That's how he endeared himself to the Bush team.

And yet here we have the Republican Party saying, you know, we've got to essentially redo it.

We lose. Unbelievable.

And also, I just want to close it out before we hit the break that there's a long history in Alaska of trying to block the native vote. And Mary Patola being an indigenous candidate is very, very exciting. And maybe that's why, as of Friday, at least 18 early voting centers in rural Alaska still hadn't been opened. All the areas that are home to a majority Alaska native population still that have historically had to deal with disenfranchising policies over and over again. And Todd Blanch, let's point out, Trump will never go to jail, but boy, there's a good chance Attorney General Jack Smith will do something. First, he came out and said that they weren't trying to block Alaska from certifying the vote, but his own department's complaint proved that they are. And then the next day, Todd Blanch tried to blame it on Alaska having ranked choice voting, which caused confusion to justify his lawsuit. So The top cop has already lied twice about this corrupt lawsuit. I also want to point out that Mary Peltola was involved in a terrible car crash the other night. Apparently, she only had minor injuries. Her vehicle with her family was traveling to a campaign event and hit by another driver. She's a great lady, and we certainly wish her a swift recovery in addition to a decisive victory. Corey, it's going to be an ugly couple of weeks.

Well, Trump won was all about him trying to manipulate the Department of Justice into doing his bidding, into buying, for instance, his false claims that there was election fraud when he lost and that actually he won the election. And there was resistance within the Department of Justice. It functioned in many ways as you would hope it would function with civil servants and even attorney generals saying, you know, I don't think so. And now what's happening is the extreme opposite. Todd Blanche is functioning just as we thought he would, as the president's criminal defense lawyer and attack dog. And if there's an election that's to be won on behalf of Republicans that he can use the threat of a lawsuit to influence, then so be it. And they're doing that in Alaska. They're doing it in California. And they really are damaging. I worry permanently it's going to be hard to recover from this. Trust in our electoral system. And the events of January 6th continue on as a matter of Department of Justice policy. Wow.

Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to tug on your coat, Corey, about a couple of other issues, including what they are trying to do to James Comey as soon as a judge says they have to rehire James Comey's daughter. We'll be right back on The Oath in the Office. Welcome back to The Oath in the Office. Professor, wow, what a week. Federal judge in New York ruled on Monday that Donald Trump's Justice Department, I hope you're sitting down for this, Corey, this might shock you. Donald Trump's Justice Department broke the law when they fired Maureen Comey for no reason. Now, this woman had spent about a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. She worked on cases against Diddy. She worked on cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, which can have helped her. But she got so much praise from all corners of the government along the way. And in 2025, they had to fire her. And her lawsuit alleged that the real reason was her last name. Her father is Trump's very prominent critic who he has harassed and fired for a long time. And U.S. District Judge Jesse Fuhrman wrote, the department, and I quote, invented a new and expansive theory of executive power to justify the firing. I think that means he's calling her a liar. What exactly did the judge find unlawful, Corey, about Maureen Comey's dismissal?

Well, you can't fire somebody for solely political reasons in retribution for hating their father. That's a basic point about the way the civil service protections in the United States work. And I should say many civil servants in the executive branch, as much as this president believes they are just loyalists who are supposed to work for him, enjoy protection from political firing. And that's an idea that goes back to the 19th century. For instance, the Pendleton Act was meant as a way of reforming the civil service, to make sure that we had people who were actually doing their jobs. And in the Department of Justice, the idea that civil servants are serving the common good is protected by disallowing political firing. Now, I think that we have to think, look at this legislation and think about ways of increasing it, given what we've seen in the past few years. But at least this judge is not buying it, the idea that the president can fire anyone he wants.

Let me be clear, as much as.

I agree with what this judge did, and I'm very glad to see Maureen Comey vindicated, the theory that the president is relying on is not quirky.

It isn't just his theory.

It's the theory of the unitary executive that really claims that basically all executive power is in the hands and vested in one person, and that's the president. And he has a lot of the Supreme Court often backing him up. So we have seen this radical theory implemented in his destruction of protection, for instance, for independent agencies, the Federal Trade Commission, and his desire to reclassify so much of the federal government as fireable for his own.

Reasons, whatever they be, including political reasons.

So as much as I want to celebrate this victory, it also points to an area of law that we really need to reform in order to ensure, well, the ideal of the 19th century, that we're not going to have presidents engaged in political firing whenever they're elected. And this is a textbook example of a political firing, of course.

I want to point out the judge ordered retroactive reinstatement and back pay. And in case anyone thinks this isn't complete corruption, the same day the judge ruled against the DOJ over Maureen Comey's firing, the DOJ's prosecutors pursued a third criminal case against her father, he of the dangerous seashells. Now, Corey, the DOJ says they're going to appeal this Maureen Comey ruling. What legal arguments can this administration make at this point? And would anything be at stake if a higher court overturns these rulings? I don't expect any of these guys to ever be held accountable for their crimes, but I mean, they're going to appeal it? What's their argument going to be?

Well, I gave you a preview of it, and I'll lay it out even more specifically. The idea of the unitary executive is very simple and very radical. It says that all of the protections of civil servants that are in the executive branch, independent agencies, are all, even if they're codified in law, they're illegal because the Constitution gives the power of the president all executive power. The language that they rely on, they claim this is based on the text, it's just a few words, is the idea that the executive power is vested in a president.

And what they believed, and.

When I say they, this isn't just this administration, it is this Supreme Court, it is the lawyers on this Supreme Court who were lawyers in the Reagan administration when these Theories were developed largely at the behest of Justices Scalia and Judge Bork. They're the heroes, really, of the unitary executive. And what they want to do is increase presidential power so that ultimately they've already succeeded in one ambition, destroying independent agencies, allowing the head of the FTC or the FCC to be fired for political reasons. And the next move, this is where they're going next. And this is why they care about this case. It's not just a one-off. is to give him the.

Ability to fire all civil servants.

So that means all the people like Maureen Comey, who are just doing their jobs, trying to carry out laws passed by Congress, which also has a power vested in it to make the law, they want to destroy those laws, say they're unconstitutional. So that's the wider argument. It's about this unitary executive idea.

You know, if you want to get to the heart of how deeply, corrosively hypocritical these guys have been regarding James Comey from the beginning, and I'm no big Comey fan, believe me. But I mean, let's not forget the name Rod Rosenstein way back in the first term when Trump fired James Comey as FBI director in May of 2017. Do you remember what the administration's official stated justification was? For firing him was, it was Comey's handling of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Rod Rosenstein's memo said that Comey had been really unfair to Hillary Clinton, the woman they hated and lied about and smeared and besmirched. But when they wanted to fire Comey, they fired him because he was unfair to her in his investigation, which we all said at the time. But that was their official stated reason for firing this guy. And then they fired his daughter because she's his daughter. And you actually have a personal story, Professor, from Brown University connected to Hillary Clinton that deals with this directly. The question of why she lost to Donald Trump in 2016. Could you share that story with our listeners? Because I think sometimes this sort of unexpected personal moment reveals what the post-election analysis cannot. What happened and what did it teach you about Hillary Clinton and the political climate of 10 years ago?

Yeah.

Just to close out the other story, the prosecution of Comey himself continues to be one of the most brazen.

Acts of retribution.

The idea that you would prosecute somebody for a seashell display that says 86-47. It's just so obvious to us when the history is written, this will be the paradigm of Trump's attack on democracy by trying to attack his opponents. But my story about Hillary Clinton also transitions us to our interview with Francis Haugen. It helps us to understand the power of Facebook and why in a podcast about threats to democracy and saving democracy, she is such an essential guest. And it goes back to that election, to Trump's rise. Hillary Clinton came to Brown. And, you know, sometimes in these events, you just don't learn anything. It's a lot of slogans. That was not the case here. She told the story that I've never seen reported. And I'll be interested from listeners if you've seen it anywhere else. But what she said is that Facebook came to her in that election and came to Donald Trump and offered to embed several Facebook employees within the camp and to help them essentially use the tool of Facebook in their election attempts to win election.

To the presidency of the United States.

And Hillary Clinton, after deliberating about it, explained that she decided not to do it. that Obama, for instance, had used Facebook very effectively. They thought they had a good internal team enough to make use of the technology and to compete effectively with Trump. Trump did take the offer, and she attributed that decision to why she lost, because what Trump was able to do with this team, which sounds like it had a kind of Stockholm syndrome, they weren't Trump supporters, but they went all in on helping him manipulate these algorithms to get people to vote.

And what did they use? They used lies, disinformation.

And so from the beginning, the Trump presidency and Facebook have been so tied together. And unfortunately, partly at Hillary Clinton's own explanation goes to her decision to allow the company employees to embed with her. But Trump decision at the same time to accept the offer.

I mean, it makes me think about bringing it back to, you know, the whole Amy Acton story and that horrific ad. Like, you know, you look at these gendered expectations of voters evaluate women candidates and suddenly, you know, personal attacks happen. I mean, they are much more powerful in some cases with some voters than legitimate scrutiny of a candidate's record.

You know, it's why it's so important to we had a computer scientist on not too long ago, Congressman Ted Lieu, talking to us about regulating AI. And when we think about Facebook, what we're seeing on our screens and what we're hearing about. to you and I and to our listeners, often just makes no sense. How can Vivek Ramaswamy be saying these things? How can he still be competitive in a race? And the answer has to do with the complexities of the way that social media works and our politics works now. And we're going to need an insider to explain that to us. And that's why this film, The Social Reckoning, is so important. I recommend that people see it. You'll see the hero Francis Haugen is, but you're also going to hear in a few moments.

the.

Real explanation of how she's even bigger of a hero than that movie lets on.

Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we will sit down with the one and only Frances Haugen, the famous Facebook whistleblower. I can't wait. This is The Oath in the Office. Welcome back to The Oath in the Office. I'm John Fuglesang. Professor, I'm really excited about this next guest. You know, we throw around words like civic hero and bravery, but wow, I think this particular lady really qualifies and shows us why whistleblowers are heroic and necessary and deserve a lot of protections.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's such an honor to have Frances Haugen with us, and we're going to touch on so many of the themes that are central to the podcast, the rise of extremism, the threat to democracy, the questions of free speech and its limits. So it really is an honor to introduce to the Oath in the Office audience Frances Haugen. She, of course, is the Facebook whistleblower who exposed what Facebook knew about the harms of its own platforms, about its amplification of extremism, and about, frankly, its danger to democracy. She's the author of the great book, The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.

I recommend that book to you.

And of course, her story is now dramatized on the big screen in Aaron Sorkin's amazing film, which I was pleased to watch and which we talked about earlier, The Social Reckoning. And Mikey Madison, of course, plays Frances. So today we'll talk about extremism, January 6th, and reform, what it'll take to make social media safer. Frances, welcome to The Oath in the Office.

Happy to be here.

Thanks for inviting me.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure.

Just to jump right in, some of our audience will have seen the film. They've heard us talk about some of the basics. But I'm really interested in the real story and the audience hearing what it was that made you decide to blow the whistle. I know it happened over time, but was there something in particular that you saw that you just thought your conscience required you to become a whistleblower and to seek legal whistleblower protection?

I would say the like the instigating event, if you will, is like the movie. They play around the timeline a little bit, a little liberally. So they kind of make the movie take place over two years when the vast majority of like the, you know, I only started talking to Jeff in December of 2020. So when I left in May of 2020 or 2021, excuse me, and the movie has to take place from like 2019 to sometime in January of 2021. It's a little confusing exactly how the timelines all interweave at the end. The thing that made me realize there was no other option than figuring out how to get the public involved was Facebook dissolved, or excuse me, they integrated into the rest of the company this organization that they had made called Civic Integrity. So Civic Integrity was intentionally meant to be, as the movie describes it, a point of friction, right? Like everything inside the company was optimized for growth and like very, very cut and dry. You know, if the number goes up, it's good. Civic Integrity was supposed to be there and say, hey, actually- There's more complexity to this. If you just optimize for a number going up, you're going to fade into the background all the other side effects that go along with that number going up. Because there's actually many different paths to having that number go up. And less obvious ones may actually be superior when you take all the other factors into consideration. And so when they called us all together in early December, so this is like less than a month after the 2020 election. And they're basically like, you know, you could tell that we had been allowed to operate because they had feared blood on the streets. Like that was the fear going into the 2020 election. And when they dodged that bullet, they're like, oh, we made it. Like, clearly we don't need to, we don't need to try anymore. Like we succeeded in our goal. And unfortunately, because the group of people who are responsible for kind of like watching if things go off the rails, I basically have been told go on a long vacation.

Right.

Like my, my former manager, I think basically it was just floating around Facebook all the way up until I came forward. It's like a year. Like they said, go, go, go on a long vacation. It meant that when Stop the Steal started exploding on Facebook in December of 2020, there was no one around to be aware that a whole bunch of safety systems that were designed around preventing the weaponization of the platform had broken. You know, things had gotten bad enough that, for example, the most outlier individual on Facebook, one person invited 300,000 people to stop the steal groups. Like that's not supposed to be possible within the geometry of Facebook. I think most reasonable people would say like, You can invite 100 people a day to groups, maybe 1,000 people a day, but probably not, you know, 300,000 people.

Well, I mean, talk to us about that.

This sort of naive view of Facebook is, you know, it's just a platform. And certainly we hear Zuckerberg himself say this is a free speech platform. public square and we're just inviting people in. And yet what you're telling us is that when you look, especially at, well, one of the most violent moments in the transition of power, the one non-peaceful transition of power in our country's history, January 6th, that really Facebook shares some of the blame that it wasn't a neutral platform, that it was providing ways of people to organize and to spread the lies that led about the election and the supposed.

Fraud that, of.

Using it in order to, well, stoke the fires and the flames of January 6th.

Is that right? That's what the kind of bottom line of what you saw that the platform was doing?

I think one way, I think I would say there's two or three main pillars. So I would say the first and kind of like one of the core things that keeps us from being able to have conversations about going forward is that Facebook took advantage of the fact that we couldn't see how they operated to tell us how to solve our own problems. And they came out and said, you know, there's really only one thing we can do, which is if you see bad things, we can take them down. But do you really want us to have that job? Do you really want us to be the ref calling balls and strikes? And people quite reasonably say, no, that is not a good job for you to be doing. You're a private company. We don't want you to police what ideas are acceptable as a general rule. But the challenge with that is that is, one, ineffective. A huge part of what I brought forward said, hey, Facebook has claimed that the path to safety comes through having AIs monitoring our speech. But the reality is that because language is fluid, Because understanding that something is ironic or satire or, you know, just a joke in general, because it's hard to tell what people actually mean by language, you're never going to be able to have the level of control of just speech itself that would allow you to fulfill that vision. And one of the examples of kind of like the counter example is when you look at Arabic and you look at terrorism content, 75% of counterterrorism content was getting taken down as terrorism content because the AI couldn't tell the difference between someone de-radicalizing and radicalizing, right? So one, Facebook has told us there's only one solution. It's really unpleasant. So you won't push for anything, which is censorship when they knew it didn't work or it couldn't work the way they described it working. But the second thing was that Facebook knew that the thing that mattered much, much more than your uncle having weird beliefs and posting them on Facebook was was which systemic biases exist in the algorithm and how are the platforms designed as a whole? And I thought Sorkin did a really good job of when he went and looked through the, you know, thousand plus pages of memoirs that he started from and distilled down a two hour, you know, thriller. The thing he chose to focus on as like the idea that was simple enough for people to understand was that Facebook knew that when you had violent extremism groups on Facebook, two thirds of the people who joined those groups joined because Facebook recommended to the person who joined the group, you might like this group. And those kinds of decisions, what does it mean to make a successful recommendation? Those kinds of decisions are much, much more impactful in how the overall ecosystem functions than your uncle having an odd idea and posting it. And unfortunately, because we are not able to look behind the curtain and see how these things operate, We don't get to have a lively public debate about, well, how should the platform operate? Because we don't even know what levers exist for us. And that means that Facebook gets to continue doing business as usual. You know, they get to make whatever decisions and whatever optimizations they want to. And we don't actually get to have a conversation about what tradeoffs we want to have in our public square.

John, I know you want to jump in, but can I just ask Frances to get clarity? Because what you're saying is fascinating and more disturbing. I think, even than what the movie presents. But that, you know, they really focus on this statistic that you give of the number of recommendations that are leading people to join hate groups.

And that's sort of the moment, at least in the film.

Where you are making this decision. But what I hear you saying is something more disturbing, which is that Facebook really saw the events of January 6th unfold, they saw the violence that was about to happen. They had this very weak strategy of relying on AIs in order to ferret out some of the speech. But in the end, they really did allow and give a green light to these groups that were organizing what became the insurrection.

Is that fair?

I would say it's actually, I think, a lot worse than what you're describing.

So it's a lot worse side.

So There's a scene in the movie where, you know, the Frances Haugen character goes to this review, soft interventions. And that's a real term of art. So a hard intervention is we take a person off the platform, we take a group off the platform, we take a piece of content off the platform. That's a hard intervention. A soft intervention is saying, you know, maybe we'll turn commenting off on your group if, like, a very large fraction of the content being posted is about violence.

Right.

And the reason why turning commenting off actually has an outsized impact is because every time someone puts a new comment on a post, that post is considered new and it can go back to the top of your feed. So if you dog pile on a post, like if someone's like, let's go and do this, this violent thing and people like pile on, someone might see that post over and over again in their feed if comments are on.

Right.

So in the lead up to the 2020 election, so for like a full two years, you know, full two years, people had been trying to figure out what are all the available little knobs that you can twist that when you twist them, it doesn't actually make Facebook less money, right? So for example, turning off comments on violent groups doesn't really impact any money for Facebook, right? Nothing meaningful happens. Nothing in the business success changes. You just get like less violence. And they had come up with on the order of like, say 35 to 40 of these knobs they could twist. And on election day, 2020, all of those knobs were set to the safer configuration on the dial. And in the weeks after the election, they put everything back to normal. You know, we'll say they turned everything back up to 11, 12, you know, just optimized for raw growth engagement. And on the morning of January 6th, because the people who should have been saying, hey, I'm noticing the pot is starting to boil over, you know, like the water's really frothy. I think I think it's getting a little too hot. Let's start turning some of these knobs back to like eight instead of 11. Because all the people who, that was their responsibility because they were basically told go on vacation for a couple of weeks, right? Like come back in January. Like, like I know it's only December 3rd, go on, just, just have a leisurely December. Don't worry about it. And so, and especially the decision makers, right? Because the people who had had authority that reported straight up to Mark, they had been like, my boss had been removed, right? Our team had been decentralized. So who gets to make the decision to pull the trigger now, right? And so in the weeks leading up to January 6th, you know, they had a whole bunch of these small little things that add up to a lot difference in terms of the overall temperature of the platform. But no one felt they could turn them on. And one of the things that I brought through my whistleblowing was a photo like screenshots of the tracker that showed here's all the knobs available to us at 10 a.m. on January 6th. And only maybe 20 percent of them have been turned on. And by the next day on January 7th, all of them have been turned on. So it really was a thing where like they could have at any point been like, let's turn the heat down. But because basically all of Facebook goes on vacation for three weeks in a normal year for the holidays, let alone more people being kind of checked out because they had dissolved the team. No one was there to like kind of jump in and begin building like the response when you started seeing the stop the steal groups begin to kind of spiral out of control.

I mean, so to sum up, and then I'll throw it to you, John.

Sure.

It's not just that they, you know, were neutral or any of this language that they didn't feel an obligation. It's that they actually had the tools to either slow this down or maybe even stop it. And they were so negligent that they sent people away.

And tools that they felt they needed to use before the election.

Before.

Before they actually needed it in order to save democracy at the moment of an impending coup.

Right, because that's what it was all about.

And I think one other thing just to like flag for people, like to give an example of like why Stop the Steal was in many ways like a very artificial thing. When they went and I brought out the reports on this, like when data scientists went and inspected Stop the Steal at the time of afterwards, they found things like, so something that is not allowed under Facebook's rules is if you have a group and you call it Stop the Steal, you are not allowed to start a second group called Stop the Steal 2 or Stop the Steal again or the Stop the Steal. you know, like something that's basically the same group and then have the same administrators. So like, let's say you have 10 administrators, 15 administrators that run group A, you can't have the same people run group B because you are very clearly just making duplicate groups. And the reason for this is Facebook has a bunch of design intentional things where it's like, if someone posts to, let's call it group A and post to group B, if they had been two posts to group A, they would have gotten less, just each of those posts would kind of share the distribution. Like we're not going to flood your feed with content from one group. We're going to show you stuff from a bunch of different groups. So if I go and make 10 groups that are called like Stop the Steal 1, Stop the Steal 2, Stop the Steal 3, Stop the Steal 4, Stop the Steal 5, and I invite the same 100,000 people to each one, I can send you 10 times as much content than if I had only invited you to one group. And I think what happened based on people who did storm the Capitol, like when you talk to them and you say like, hey, like, why did you do this? A surprisingly large number of them say it felt real. Like when I opened Facebook, everything in my feed said that there was a coup going on and that like people who cared about their country, they needed to rise up and come do this thing. And so the question is, you know, when you go read the Jan 6th Commission's report, like they talk about like here's all the ways which Facebook was asleep at the wheel and how they facilitated people having this false perception of the world. Hmm.

You know, what's most impressive to me about your service in this whole ordeal is that you were not some outsider campaigning against Facebook. You were an insider who always believed in the company's mission. And you photographed thousands of pages of internal documents to provide evidence of what was going on on the inside. And I commend you for believing that the public had a right to know. I'm fascinated by something that you said, that there was really only a very small number of people internally who understood Facebook. how Facebook's recommendation systems really worked. Was it just conventional wisdom within that it was totally normal and acceptable and nothing strange about a handful of engineers and executives getting to shape the information environment for billions of people without any kind of independent oversight? Was that just considered to be normal?

I think that's really important for people to understand about kind of tech, right? Is that it's very easy to look at engineers and view all engineers as kind of like interchangeable widgets, right? It's like, oh, I have a widget here, I have a widget here, I can just swap them. And that was actually like a huge problem for me my first six months at Facebook was that even at Facebook, because disproportionately the engineers at Facebook are what I would call like a front engineer, they were, right? Like today, because they've done this AI pivot, I bet a larger fraction of them are algorithmic or data engineers. There are many, many more people who I would consider like an algorithmic or a data engineer today than there were five years ago.

Sure.

Or seven years ago, right? Because when I started, it was 2019, right? But when I came in, I was like, hey, you gave me three engineers who make front ends. These people have never run a query. They've never asked a data set for questions. I can't teach them to be data scientists and have them build an AI product in the same six months. That's not a reasonable ask. And because their own managers were more front end people, they, one, bristled at the notion that algorithms are hard, right? They're like, whatever, anyone can learn these things. And I'm like, well, as someone who's worked on this for 15 years, I would not agree. I would just not agree. But I think the situation was you had a culture that had a strength in that they cared a lot about what the user saw, right? So usability, you might've noticed that like Apple products are a little bit more usable than say Google products, right? On average, right? Like there are people tell these jokes about like, you know, it's funny that Google did X, Y, Z. Well, Google is a company that has over-indexed on algorithmic engineers since the beginning because they had search quality. Search quality was the thing that differentiated Google from all the other search engines. Because Facebook was not famous for being a place that really respected algorithmic engineers like data people, because they had great data scientists, but not particularly great algorithmic engineers, they just didn't have a very big pool. So if you come in with the mindset of, we have always struggled to hire engineers, because even by the time I joined, their brand was bad enough in the Valley that the vast majority of their engineers only had five years of experience or less. And amongst your engineers who are more senior, you know, they can go to Google and have like a much more pleasant work-life balance and be respected more. You end up in a situation where a very small population of people is kind of like holding the fork together. And so when I surveyed kind of how the organization operated, it was really clear that there was like 10%, to 15 people who had been working on it for a decade and had been kept there with like huge sums of money. And a lot of those people had acquired enough money that they were like, I kind of want to go to somebody else now. And I looked at it and I was really, really worried that once those people left, there would be no continuity of knowledge. And like, the ways of thinking about how a change to an algorithm affects like all these downstream things, that's really not obvious. And if you were going to take the few people who had like actually accumulated that knowledge base and then be like, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine if they leave. Like, I just didn't, I didn't think that was going to be true.

It all raises a question. I mean, I was very eager to hear you answer this. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg has a massive amount of control over the company and probably compared to other tech companies he's a much more powerful, not just founder, but the current CEO. So I guess if you could help us get into his mindset, because listening to you, my thought, you know, is not sympathetic.

It's that either he.

Was extremely naive in thinking that they didn't need more engineers. They didn't need a team looking out for this danger, even with Trump. increasing his rhetoric. And basically, it's not that this was a secret. I mean, the plot of January 6, as the report lays out, was outlined by the president with the aid of John Eastman. They were, you know, giving the speech at the Ellipse. All of this was unfolding. We were all watching it. It was like a slow car crash. So, you know, what's in his mindset? Was he so naive that he didn't realize that the danger was there and that's what all these vacations were about, business as usual?

Or do we need to think he's so late?

And was he complicit and refused to act in the moment where actually he could have, I mean, literally stopped at least a lot of the violence that occurred that day and a lot of the turmoil that almost resulted. Yes, there was a perception of a coup, but an actual attempted coup did unfold that day as a result of it.

There were people walking around the Capitol with guns.

I mean, people died.

And there was a plan to, you know, we've had we had Jared Huffman who talked to us about the role of Christian nationalists that day. We had one of the primary authors of the January 6th report who outlined how the plan works. So I think our viewers know it well, but now you're adding a different part of the story. So what was Mark Zuckerberg thinking in all of this? I mean, did he, he just sort of let it happen?

Did he not know?

So I think, I think it's important, you know, like a lot of the drama or like the pathos of Facebook and like how it's operated is like, it is definitely an unprecedented scale of, compared to like previous times in history, given that, you know, you do have this one man and for context on like how absurd it's gotten, it's like actually much, much more absurd, even in the last like two weeks than it was for the last like 20 years, which is, so for your listeners, people understand some companies have something called a dual stock structure. So most companies have a single class of shares and the number of shares you hold, that's how many votes you get. So if you economically own 10% of the company, you also get 10% of the votes. And inside of Facebook, you know, he was advised very early on, you know, you should maintain control. Like you should have two classes of shares. So you may economically not own a lot of the company. Like he still owns on the order of like 13%. Like it's under 15% of the economic value of Facebook. So in terms of the dividend checks he gets at the end. In terms of votes, he has 60% of the votes. And that number has gone up over the last five years because they keep doing stock buybacks. So needless to say, there's only one voice that matters at Facebook.

It's Marks.

So if Mark wants to make the whole company into a metaverse company, the whole company like turns on a dime and becomes a metaverse company. And if a few years later, he's like, oh, the metaverse isn't working. Okay, now we're an AI company, right? Whatever Mark wants to do, he now gets to do it. And understandably, a lot of people have said this is not respecting the other shareholders, right? Like you can get truly dysfunctional levels of mismanagement when you have that much singular control. But if we were going to generalize outwards and say like, hey, like part of the reason we don't do organizational or governmental structures like this is for some reason like why Putin invaded Ukraine, right? Like Putin has a complete control over Russia. That means the people around him are only there because he wants them there. They give him information he wants to hear. If someone gives him too much information he doesn't want to hear, that person goes away. And the same is true of Mark. Like it takes a truly, a truly mature and sophisticated person to keep people around you who constantly disagree with you. And so Mark, as he has gotten more and more and more kind of out of our consensus reality, he has been surrounded by people who tell him things that allow him to accept the way things are right now. And remember, no one around him has an interest in changing anything because the people around him right now are paid huge sums of money to do whatever it is they do. And so if they upturn the apple cart at all, there's only downside for them.

Wow. So he has more in common with Trump than I even realized. Surrounded by yes-men who are not necessarily steering him towards what is good for the overall culture, but what's good for them. I mean, I'm still fascinated by his decision to end third-party fact-checking in the U.S. by claiming, oh, it's greater freedom of expression, allowing liars like Elon Musk, allowing anti-Semites to take over Twitter as a greater freedom of expression. You've argued that, yeah, the old fact checking was inadequate in some important ways. What was wrong with it? And what do you feel should have replaced it rather than bring your lies, folks, and accept no consequences?

So for context for your listeners, like the headline totally is distressing. You're like, oh, my God, they had journalists. They had these third party fact checkers. Now they've gotten rid of them. And the timing was very convenient to it. Like it happened around Trump to coming back.

Right.

A big part of what I brought out was. like the more actual truth of what third party fact checking is. So back in 2017, actually, let's start with 2016. So 2016, this is the rise of Trump. As much impact as Russia had on that election, there was a group of entrepreneurs that had far bigger impact, which was back then, if you put up like a fake news site, right, like you could run it on Blogspot, make it look like a little local newspaper, you know, call it the Detroit Bee, you know, whatever you want to call it. Interesting. People in Macedonia, specifically northern Macedonia, discovered that if you made more sensationalistic headlines, the crazier the better, the more traffic Facebook gave you.

Yeah.

And this is a kind of– so when you talk about why do people weaponize social media, they have different ends. So maybe it's a monetary end. Maybe they want influence. Maybe they want to disturb your culture. Maybe they want clout, right? And they're going to monetize that clout in other ways. Or like maybe they're evangelical. They want to spread religious meaning. Like there's different ways to get paid, right? In the case of these Macedonians, they were getting paid like in dollars, right? Like the more traffic they could get their site sent back, the more dollars AdSense would give them. And when the election happened, people called out like, hey, like you should have known that you were giving in this insane platform to stories like Pope endorses Donald Trump. And part of how this happened was through very specific design choices. So back in 2016, it used to be like if I clicked like on a post about the Pope visiting France, I don't know, the Pope making a statement about agricultural policy, I don't know, a little carousel would pop up underneath the post that would give me other stories I might like, which sounds great. You know, it's like if you're trying to keep people on your site longer, like showing them other stuff they might like, that sounds totally reasonable, right?

Sure, that's what they all do.

The problem was that when you looked at which stories, so of the whole world of papal content I could possibly be shown, it was very clear they were picking content based on the click-through rate. Because the first story would always be something like Pope endorses Donald Trump. You know, it would be something that was just insane. And so when Facebook is taking kind of an accounting of like, what did we do? How did we contribute to this? Like, here's all this blame coming in. What can we actually do? They said, okay, we acknowledge we have a problem with misinformation. we are going to pay journalists to fact check stories and put these little corrections on them saying like, hey, this has been found by a journalist to not be true. So while this sounds like a great idea in theory, writing a fact check takes on average three days because they're journalists. They have to go and talk to people, document why they think this is, write it up. The internet moves fast enough that between the fact that journalists were not even starting fact checks until things got popular- And then it would take three more days. By the time a fact check would go up, the content would have already gone 75% of all the distribution it was going to get. So it's this question of like, you know, and there was all this research that Facebook found of like, okay, so if you don't take a story down, do people even respond if you put a little fact check thing on and say this has been shown to be false? Or like if someone has already been shown a piece of content, do you show them the correction later and say, hey, a fact check came in? because they found that once someone was exposed to an idea, it was very hard to walk them away from the idea.

It's still the pre-Community Notes days as well.

Yes, yes. So Community Notes, I think, is a great... And for context for your listeners, there's billions of pieces of content created on Facebook each month. There were like 300 stories fact-checked globally, and they were disproportionately in English and in Western European languages. So the places in the world that had the most dependence on Facebook, like this is why I came forward, places like African countries, countries in Southeast Asia, Places where the internet is functionally Facebook, right? Because they went in there and paid for people to use Facebook. They paid for their data if they used Facebook versus like having the free internet cost you money and data. They never wrote fact checks there. Like the places where they needed to have a high quality environment from Facebook, that was the very places they didn't invest in it. So what's the alternative? So Community Notes has this amazing potential. And this is a great example where we need to have the right to transparency and we need to have public conversations about how these systems should work. Because in other domains, for example, have you ever used Waze? It's like the direction site. So Waze is crowdsourced, right? Like those maps were created by people putting little lines on maps. So there's this question of like, how do you establish, you know, if you and I disagree that there's a road here or that you can go this, this is a one way versus a two way road. How do we, how do we reconcile this?

Right.

And Noam Bardeen is the guy who founded Waze. And a big part of it was that they actually had systems for cascading credibility. So like, let's say John and I disagree and Corey comes and weighs in and like settles the conflict. If it turns out that other people then agree with Corey, then Corey's credibility.

Should go up, right?

Or if John is the one that Corey picks and everyone agrees with John, my credibility should go down a teeny bit and John's should go up too, right? There are ways of designing these systems to be able to say like, hey, how do we actually incentivize collective sense-making? And I know Mardeen tried to start something called the Post News that was based on this idea. And because starting new social platforms is really hard, and I think he didn't commit to doing it over a long enough time period, and it really has to be a thing where you have to choose to do this log, that he was trying to ground it in things like, I should be able to tip you five cents. I really like this tweet. I'm like, I'm really glad you wrote this fact check. I want to give you a tip. You might only get five bucks in tips between all these nickels and dimes and stuff, but the data is so precious. The fact that someone was willing to be like, oh, I'm really glad I got this fact check.

That actually.

information to the system that could be allowing us to form this kind of information immune system. And so there are ways that we can do this at scale, and there are ways that we can do this in a decentralized way, but you have to have incentives in place that either through market incentives or governmental incentives encourage these systems to be adopted.

Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that, Frances, because the more that we talk about the problems at Facebook and also the control of the company, I guess I'm increasingly skeptical that there's any purely market-based solution to this, because after all, that's how the company has been operating, is thinking about, not just thinking about profitability, but not willing to give up even an iota of profitability if it means more safety. And that suggests to me, you know, kind of market failure where we really need experts and regulators to come in and to start to think. So one thing we're always doing on the show is talking about the depths of how dangerous things are right now. And you've given us a very Good sense of that from the beginning that Trump's rise has been.

Tied to social media, tied to Facebook.

And then January 6th, of course, really egged on, not just allowed by the Facebook platform and was enacting in a neutral way.

We've learned from you.

So, I mean, don't we really need external government regulation in the world in which we don't have this president, we don't have this Congress?

And what would it look like to you?

Hmm.

So I think, again, to kind of bring your listeners along on the journey, there's kind of two large families of approaches to tech regulation. So one version is kind of the more obvious one, which is like the don't do that approach. So, you know, you put up a fence and you say, like, thou shalt not pass. Like, this is where the fence is. Like, we just don't do those things. And the challenge with that is that people go around the fence. So, like, they may be like, okay, we don't use, I don't know, recommender systems now. We use content suggestors. You know, like, there's You can always like do the shades of gray and say, is this really the same thing as the other thing? A second strategy is, I would say, more like a spirit of the law or principles or process based. So in the European Union, they have a law called the Digital Services Act. And the Digital Services Act is based around the idea that like right now, part of why things have gone so bad is we have allowed these intangible products, like the intangible part of our economy, to operate in a way that is very, very different than we've ever allowed any other major part of our economy. So for example, if you sell gasoline, I can buy a gallon of gasoline and take it to my lab and test it and come back and say, you put an additive in that is illegal. Or I can burn your gasoline and say, it doesn't burn as clean as this other person's does. And if there's lead in that, I can then sue you, right? Like there's things where like I have control over establishing what is true. And when it comes to intangible products, be an AI chat assistant, be it a virtual friend, be it an algorithm that recommends content to you, be it a I think this is just hashtags or friends on Instagram, right? Like one of the big things that came out of the kids lawsuits was, you know, they were talking about how do, you know, predators find kids on Instagram and like Facebook's own employees were like, hey, our systems are really good. If you friend, if you're a 55 year old guy and you friend a couple of 13 year olds and some of those 13 year olds respond and others don't, we will keep finding you more 13 year olds like the ones that did respond.

Right?

Because the algorithm doesn't understand the significance. It's blind, right?

It doesn't have an ethics that's baked into it. Yeah. It's just giving you more.

So when someone comes along and says, hey, we think you have a problem, right? So like, for example, in the UK, one of the things that they did that was different and it's like actually led to part of why they passed their child safety laws was they went to the police and said, how did these predators find these kids? Like, explain to us the process. And they came back and said, hey, like, you know, we found that people actually befriended kids on social media. And didn't even go after those kids. They went after, they said, hey, look at what a good friend I am to you. Look at how caring I am. I've always got your back. Do you have any friends that need friends? You know, is anyone in a vulnerable place right now? Like, you know, maybe they're fighting with their parents. Maybe the things are unstable. And then they'd go after that kid, right? You know, this is one of these things where imagine the police write to Facebook and say, you have a problem. Like right now, your system is being used in these following ways. Under the DSA, Facebook should have to disclose that this is a known problem with the platform. And it would have to disclose like, hey, this is what we're going to do to try to deal with this. Because right now, the thing that is driving the problems with these kind of tech platforms is asymmetrical access to information. And under the DSA, you have to disclose enough data in a way that is reproducible. So your academics and independent observers have to be able to access this data for you to be able to see, are you actually making progress to address that problem? And I think that's the kind of rights that we need in the United States. Like right now, consumers work off of basically marketing messages, right? Like we say, oh, aren't all social media platforms kind of bad? No, the reality is they are meaningfully different on issues that matter to people. So I'll give you an example. Jeff Horowitz, who's like the journalist who I did my whistleblowing with, he did a bunch of reporting around Wall Street Journal. He did some reporting maybe two years ago on this thing called self-exploitation. So there were hashtags on Instagram. with half a million followers. So these are not like small communities that slip through the cracks. Half a million followers where people would post to children under the age of 18. Because remember, these are kids who want to be on OnlyFans, but because they're not 18, they can't go on OnlyFans. And they say, if you give me a photo that looks like this, I'll give you 50 bucks. And so these kids are voluntarily going and staging these photos and selling them to adults. When Jeff went and searched for those same hashtags on TikTok to just be like, oh, this is a problem everywhere. after like the third or fourth searches account got banned.

Right.

So TikTok has said, we don't want a whiff. We don't want a whiff of people like you. And Instagram was enough hands off that they were able to get communities that had half a million people in each one. Yeah.

And I take it from our conversation, which really has been amazing that You know, one of the reasons why we don't, it's not just an accident that we don't know the difference between these platforms and who's acting in a way that's admirable and who's acting in a way that's deeply problematic and much worse, really worthy of condemnation. And that's certainly true of the behavior of Facebook during January 6th is because they're hiding it. They don't want us to know. And frankly, it's complicated. It's one of the things I think I have to thank you for. We're talking a lot on this show, both about the threat to democracy, but also about the heroes who are fighting back. And in this realm, it's not the kind of thing that it's, you know, in any way obvious what's happening.

We need somebody to explain it to us.

So that's part of why I want to thank you for, you know, releasing the information that you did of teaching us about it. And we focused on January 6th and the harms to democracy. But of course, there were harms to children and to girls that were coming from Instagram in particular. And a lot of your disclosures helped to generate lawsuits.

To challenge that. So thank you so much for all of that.

What I would chip in on in terms of like market forces that I think are going to end up influencing things, you know, the magnitude of the lawsuits is a lot bigger. We are not actually done with the lawsuits. So, so far, the attorney generals have settled with Facebook. So 47 U.S. states have settled with Facebook. New Mexico is not finished. So they recently got a $ 25 billion settlement based on privacy issues. one state, right, $ 25 billion. We'll see how it stands up on appeal. But there is a very, very large pool of school district lawsuits that are coming down the pike, which I think are likely going to be on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties. And there are still the individual kids and families lawsuits. And for context on that one, so far, we've only had one of those resolve, which is out of California. She got $ 2 million in, I can't remember the classes. There's like, there's punitive and like, I don't know. She got six million in total from Instagram and YouTube. And when you scale that up, you have six million dollars for a 22 year old about allegations of what happened when she was 16. You know, you only need a couple hundred thousand kids. And remember, we're talking about past and future teenagers. You know, you only need a couple hundred thousand kids to have been hurt at that level for it to be like a trillion dollars in damages.

Wow.

Right?

It's wild. And so when we look at how Facebook is behaving today, I think we should be really scared of Because they are making a variety of choices or decisions. And these are just the ones we know about. This is just what we're getting from public reporting. Things like in their quarterly filings, they are increasing the number of ads they are showing by 14% to 19% every quarter for more than the last year.

Oh, delightful.

Oh, wow.

Right?

They are taking the money. They're taking the money and running because they don't know if they're going to be here in the future. Or mark just last week.

Oh, yes. He's not afraid of a billionaire tax, is he? He's not afraid of a billionaire tax.

No. Yeah, we've talked about that. Facebook will just pay the money that he owes. I mean, that is my worry is that they'll see it as.

A cost of doing good.

But it's actually worse than that. It means he can sell half of all of his equity and still remain full control.

Amazing.

Right?

He doesn't have to choose between rich and being king. He could make $ 100 billion selling off his equity over the next eight years and retain full control.

You also used a phrase that I don't want listeners to miss. And then, Chana, I think you might have some final thoughts. But it's that you said something about what we know. And of course, we know about some of these damages to democracy, to girls because of your disclosures. But how much do we not know? You haven't worked at the company now for some time. And the idea that they suddenly reformed themselves because of the lawsuits, I'm not sure that's right.

And To me, anyway, that suggests the need.

Not just for more conversation, but conversation in particular about disclosure, certainly, and other forms of regulation.

John, any last thoughts before we say goodbye to our guests?

I just want to thank you for joining us and at a time when we know, and the film addresses this, about how these platforms are just rewarding engagement and not just directing us to popular content, but that these algorithms that optimize engagement reward outrage and conflict. And it's really... helping us learn to hate each other. And I just want to close by asking you, do you think that these social media platforms should be made to bear responsibility for the political radicalization and the polarization? I mean, they've helped turn a lot of our friends into very mean, angry people.

I do think, you know, a thing that I've suggested before is, so when I worked at Pinterest, so I used to have the job basically of being like the lead product manager for the algorithm that picks out all your pins.

Right.

So like part of why I can like speak with a certain level of compassion for the folks at Facebook is like I never worried about any of these things when I worked at Pinterest. You know, like like we were only kind of dabbling in the ideas of bias, like, you know, where unintentional effects happen with algorithms.

Right.

Like I never wondered if if I was spreading hate with Pinterest algorithmic changes. Right. But one of the things that I did where I gave me a pause, like it made me think was we rolled out a change. And it increased consumption by 10%, like 10 to 11%. So many, many lifetimes were sucked into Pinterest because of one change we made. We improved it that much in a single change. But revenue only went up 3.5%. So there's this question of like, okay, so we just sucked in all this human time, but we only made a little bit more money, like a third as much money as time that we've sucked up.

Why?

And it's because the people that we were able to make the biggest impact on were already consuming a lot. And we made them consume even more. And the most profitable impression that you view on a social network is the first impression you view because they show you the best ads upfront. So as they get three hours, four hours into your session, they're showing you ads that make them less money. Right now, there is no incentive to have you sign off, right? Like every marginal minute they can take of your time, even if they make less and less money off you over time is still worth it to them. you could imagine a world where we said, hey, you have to start funding the real world, like the physical world, like the ability for us to connect face-to-face. Because we used to spend a lot of money on community centers and like places you could go dance and like coffee shops. And like, what would it mean for us to be able to connect in person, right? Little league, I don't know. And, you know, if you said there is a flat syntax, like a fraction of a penny per minute on your platform, at some point, the platform stops making enough money to justify you being on the platform. Right. Then it's worth it to them to get you to, it's like on Netflix when they say, Hey, are you still there?

Right.

Netflix, it's always every minute they have you there costs them money. They don't, they don't want you like not actually being there, you know, in a world where we said, you know, every minute has a syntax of a fraction of a penny that will go into us funding spaces and subsidizing spaces in person. That would be the single most impactful thing we could do for our democracy is Because the way we learn how to take bigger risks, to navigate more complicated things is by trusting each other. And we will not trust each other if we can't see each other face to face. Like we're mammals. Like that's how we work. You're right.

This has been an amazing conversation, Frances Haugen. whistleblower who really gave us all of this information that we've been able to use to digest what's actually happening with these companies, which I think in many ways would have been a black box without this information. And as much as we've talked about the threats to democracy, especially January 6th, the harm to girls that these platforms have caused, and then I love your point at the end, the harm to the real world in our actual social interaction, we've also talked about ways out of this. And I think this is the first step to discussions about reform. It's not going to happen with this president and this Congress, but it might happen soon. And it gives us more reason to think about what we might do and accomplish in the future. So Frances Haugen, the author of the great book, The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook. And of course, her story is now dramatized on the big screen in Aaron Sorkin's amazing.

Film, The Social Reckoning. Thanks so much for joining us on The Oath in the Office. It's really been a pleasure.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Have a great day.

Another great guest, Professor. Wow, now I got to go see that movie. I did a good job of making her think I had seen it, though, don't you think?

Well, I have seen it, and I do recommend that everyone go see it. You'll see the story of her heroism comes through, but as we talked about, they simplify it a little bit. And the real story to me that you heard today is so much more powerful. It really is about somebody who saw the threat to democracy, not just in ways that we're building to extremism, but that we're building to January 6th itself. And then the inside story, too, of how really Facebook was beyond negligent, really active in destroying our democracy that day. And thankfully, we survived it. But it really was an incredible show. So thanks to Francis Haugen. And what a pleasure, John.

Corey, how do our listeners follow you and keep up with your brilliance the other six days of the week?

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And please write to us as well. We'll read your letters on the air. And Corey, thank you so much. Everyone, please subscribe. Tell your friends. And I want to thank Wendy and Bea Wolf and everyone who helps put the pod together every week. And we will see you next time on The Oath and the Office.