Valuetainment - November 12, 2026


Facebook Whistleblower Explains How Algorithms Can Fuel Civil Wars

Facebook Whistleblower SLAMS Trump’s Two-Year Ban

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

194.12

Word count

1,304

Sentence count

56


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00 You're in Silicon Valley, you're doing your thing, you're career-oriented, you high school
00:00:04 debate, you were known for that, you did great, and then you're at Facebook and suddenly you
00:00:10 get to this point where you're like, ah, this data with Instagram that's coming out and
00:00:15 how it's harming young girls, and I think we need to tell the public about this.
00:00:19 Maybe walk me through a story of what happened before you released the 20-something thousand
00:00:23 document.
00:00:23 so in the like january 2019 i get this email from facebook saying hey have you ever considered
00:00:30 working at facebook um where were you at that time where was at the time i think i was i think
00:00:35 i was on a on a break so like i was looking at um like i was thinking about doing a startup like
00:00:42 you know it's like one of these things in silicon valley like sometimes you leave a thing and you're
00:00:45 like oh i'm gonna take a few months and decide what i want to do next and um the i i get this
00:00:51 email from facebook and they're like have you considered working there and i wrote back i had
00:00:55 to reread my old email when i wrote my memoir and i maybe wrote a less polite email than i should
00:01:01 have um but i was very curt about how i would never work at facebook um in the email you said
00:01:06 yeah i was like i would the only thing i would ever work on on facebook is misinformation
00:01:09 because like in 2016 um i had a friend go like way off the deep end um politically politically
00:01:17 So he had been like a Bernie Sanders supporter and Bernie lost the primary.
00:01:22 Which he shouldn't have.
00:01:23 So that's part of what happened.
00:01:24 He should have beaten Hillary.
00:01:26 It was very weird what happened there.
00:01:27 He was dominating.
00:01:28 The DNC.
00:01:29 And so he was sufficiently upset about what the DNC had done and all the other weird things that happened around Hillary that he was looking for comfort online.
00:01:38 And over the course of six months, like he just disconnected from reality.
00:01:42 right like the last conversation i had with him um was like after the 2016 election and he was
00:01:46 talking about things like george soros running the world economy like it was just like and he we
00:01:50 couldn't even have a conversation about was this a conspiracy theory um because he was so disconnected
00:01:55 from um any kind of news source that had a connection to reality um and uh the so i i say
00:02:05 like the only thing i'd work on is misinformation and they come back to me like we have a job for
00:02:08 you we have this thing called civic misinformation and uh so i assumed being it's 2019 my with like
00:02:14 this very u.s centered centered you know i'm a normal silicon valley tech person i don't really
00:02:19 think of the rest of the world i'm just thinking about silicon valley i show up expecting to work
00:02:23 on the u.s 2020 election like you know getting things you know locked down maybe information
00:02:28 operations foreign interference that kind of thing oh no no no i find out the thing i'm going to work
00:02:33 on is all misinformation beyond third-party fact-checking. So third-party fact-checking
00:02:39 is like Hunter Biden laptop, right? It's like journalists get paid to go write fact-checks
00:02:44 and Facebook decides what can and can not be said. So imagine only 300 stories get fact-checked a
00:02:52 month. Like it's very, very few. What do you mean? So Facebook talks this huge game about how these
00:02:57 fact-checkers are the thing between you and chaos. And yet they're only fact-checking a few hundred
00:03:01 stories globally this is in 2019 this is in 2019 so at that time they don't have a way of fact
00:03:09 checking stories automatically these are manually oh yeah they're paying three thousand dollars to
00:03:15 a journalist to go and research it and write a little thing being like no the pope did not
00:03:18 endorse donald trump got it yeah 300 only a multi-trillion dollar company yeah interesting
00:03:25 so uh but there's a bigger problem which is like billions of pieces of content are produced over
00:03:31 the course of a month um and in places like myanmar places like sri lanka places like ethiopia
00:03:36 you know african countries southeast asian countries facebook isn't just like a thing we
00:03:41 go and like look at pictures of cats on it is the internet um and i had been completely oblivious
00:03:48 to the role of like how facebook had evolved in some of the most fragile places on earth so here
00:03:53 i am never having really thought about the idea that algorithms could cause violence
00:03:58 Because remember, part of why I got this job
00:04:00 was I used to run the recommendations,
00:04:02 the algorithms for Pinterest.
00:04:04 Like what's the most dangerous thing
00:04:05 that comes out of Pinterest, right?
00:04:06 Like maybe make a bad dinner.
00:04:08 Like maybe make some fashion choices
00:04:10 you shouldn't have made.
00:04:10 Like what's the most dangerous thing
00:04:12 that comes from this algorithm, right?
00:04:14 So I get to Facebook and I'm sitting down every day
00:04:17 with these researchers who are going into these places
00:04:20 and watching civil wars happen because of misinformation.
00:04:24 So fast forward a year later
00:04:26 and they dissolve the whole part of the company I work in.
00:04:30 The civic integrity as a whole.
00:04:33 Misinformation is under that.
00:04:35 Misinformation is under that.
00:04:36 But by the time that happens,
00:04:38 I've already been moved between three separate projects
00:04:41 because inside of Facebook, things are so chaotic.
00:04:43 People are regularly reassigned every six months.
00:04:47 That's cultural.
00:04:47 That's cultural, yeah.
00:04:48 So you know if I'm doing this, I only have six months here.
00:04:51 Yeah.
00:04:51 And why do they do it that way?
00:04:52 Um, I, I think part of it is, um, a lack of like conviction.
00:04:58 I think it's like, I think it's a little bit like when, so when you don't have, um, when
00:05:02 you don't have market constraints, right?
00:05:04 Like when you have to make profit and you have a 10% profit margin or 5% profit margin,
00:05:08 you have to constantly work on execution.
00:05:11 When you get 35% profit margins, cause you've locked in with a monopoly, you get sloppy.
00:05:17 Um, inside of Facebook, they know the reason why their company succeeds is cause your friends
00:05:21 are there.
00:05:23 Like your friends aren't going anywhere.
00:05:24 You're locked in.
00:05:25 Anything can happen.
00:05:25 That's what they think.
00:05:27 Yeah.
00:05:27 Okay.
00:05:29 Is it sometimes companies move positions within six months
00:05:32 because they want to make in more all-around persons
00:05:35 so they can move you up in better executive positions?
00:05:38 No.
00:05:38 This is the wild thing.
00:05:39 So because the company is so flat and so static,
00:05:41 so remember, the one voice that matters inside Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg.
00:05:44 He has 60% of the votes.
00:05:46 The next tier under him are people are there because they make Mark feel good.
00:05:49 the next tier under them are basically the same people who've been there for five years
00:05:53 right like the people who are running the company are the same people who've been there
00:05:57 since day one with mark or came in five years after that so there's very little movement above
00:06:02 um like maybe you'll get promoted once or twice but the company's flat and static because there's
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