Valuetainment - November 11, 2026


Facebook Whistleblower SLAMS Trump’s Two-Year Ban

Trump STUNS 60 Minutes： “We Were Too Tough” on Deportations Facebook Whistleblower Explains How Algorithms Can Fuel Civil Wars

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

195.02

Word count

1,888

Sentence count

124

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00 Trump is president, right?
00:00:02 And Modi and Trump are somewhat close.
00:00:04 They did an event together.
00:00:05 I don't remember when the event was.
00:00:08 They had a big formal state dinner.
00:00:10 Right.
00:00:10 I remember.
00:00:11 And there was also a live event that they were together.
00:00:13 I can't remember what it was.
00:00:14 Maybe it was after that.
00:00:15 So that happens.
00:00:18 Elected official, if they say anything, they can't be removed.
00:00:21 How much longer after that did Facebook and Zuck agree to remove Trump off the platform?
00:00:26 After January 6th.
00:00:28 After January 6th.
00:00:28 So were you were you there to see what was behind the decision making of feeling comfortable to remove Trump?
00:00:34 So by the time that decision came down the pipeline, I had already been moved.
00:00:39 So I was telling you, like, I never thought I would work on ethnic violence.
00:00:43 Within three months of getting that job, they moved us back into the United States to focus on misinformation sent to targeted groups.
00:00:50 Because police officers, it had been found that a Russian foreign interference, like a Russian foreign information operation kind of thing, was sending targeted misinformation to police officers.
00:01:02 And within six months of that, I was on to a different sub-project.
00:01:06 And three months after that, I was on to counter-espionage.
00:01:09 So by the time January 6th came up, I was working within threat intelligence on counter-espionage.
00:01:14 Just because, like I told you, Facebook is chaotic.
00:01:16 Six months.
00:01:17 Constantly moving you around a different thing.
00:01:18 So now were you, but I'm sure the entire company is talking to each other.
00:01:22 When that decision was made, did you guys know that was going to be the decision?
00:01:27 Because you guys were the second to ban him, right?
00:01:28 I don't think you were the first.
00:01:30 Trying to see who was the first that banned him.
00:01:32 I think it was Twitter that banned him first.
00:01:34 And then it was Google, then you, YouTube, then you, one of those.
00:01:37 I don't remember how it was.
00:01:38 But what was the internal decision?
00:01:40 Was it, oh, shoot, Twitter just did that.
00:01:42 Let's follow the lead.
00:01:43 Or was it, you know, this is what we're doing no matter what Twitter and others do.
00:01:47 I all I saw. So I only had visibility at the level of like I was within the group of people that was getting updates.
00:01:57 But I was not like in the war room itself.
00:02:01 Like like this is a virtual thing because it's still during COVID, like everything's still locked down.
00:02:06 All I do know is I documented what protections were on at 10 a.m. on January 6th and what protections were on the next day.
00:02:14 So we had a list of maybe 35 to 40 different little knobs you could turn on Facebook to make it, like, less viral, less heated.
00:02:23 This is not, like, specific ideas.
00:02:25 This is, like, how should the platform perform overall?
00:02:29 In terms of those 35 to 40 knobs, where they were set on Election Day versus on January 6th, because all of the measures had been turned off, like, it was back running at 11, 12, right?
00:02:41 um i on at 10 a.m on january 6th maybe 20 percent of those had been turned on by january 7th all of
00:02:48 them had been turned back on so people had just like been asleep at the wheel like people had
00:02:52 not been paying attention to it until there was actively rioting happening in dc do you think it
00:02:57 was a right move to remove the president off of facebook um i think given the circumstances in
00:03:03 that moment like he had an opportunity he had many opportunities to say go home like de-escalate
00:03:10 and he chose not to.
00:03:12 I think in at least that localized moment,
00:03:15 that was an appropriate decision.
00:03:17 I think I'm very cautious on whether or not hard actions,
00:03:24 like exclusionary policies are appropriate.
00:03:25 Like that has never been,
00:03:27 like a big part of what I brought out
00:03:28 was on how content moderation doesn't work, right?
00:03:31 Like the concept that AI can save us in that way
00:03:33 is just a lie.
00:03:34 But I think in moments where you actively have leaders
00:03:37 leading to fanning the flames of violence
00:03:41 is appropriate in the short term.
00:03:43 So short term for you would be what?
00:03:45 24 hours, 48 hours?
00:03:46 Probably a week or two.
00:03:48 A week or two, but let them back in after a week.
00:03:51 I think in software engineering,
00:03:53 we have a concept known as progressive back off.
00:03:56 So if you have a situation where like,
00:03:59 let's say your server's not responding.
00:04:01 So you're asking a server to send you something.
00:04:03 You might first ask every minute,
00:04:05 then you might ask every two minutes.
00:04:07 They might ask every four minutes.
00:04:08 They might ask every, you know, you progressively go longer and longer.
00:04:11 You can imagine waiting a couple of days and seeing what they do because maybe they need a timeout for a day or two or a week.
00:04:18 And then if they come back and they're like, hey, I was I was really wound up.
00:04:22 Like it was clearly not the right thing to do to attack the Capitol.
00:04:25 That is a very different thing than saying you can never come back again.
00:04:29 Yeah.
00:04:30 So I think if you want to go back to the timeline, Twitter did it first on J6 account.
00:04:36 they suspended for 12 hours and then removed three tweets and then facebook and instagram
00:04:41 followed suit for 24 hours and then snapchat indefinitely suspended trump's account and then
00:04:46 facebook and instagram extended the suspension lasting at least through the presidential
00:04:51 transition and twitter became the first of three uh these major platforms to announce permanent
00:04:56 ban of trump's personal account and in january 13 snapchat made its ban and then everybody else
00:05:01 followed suit and how long did the ban last was it two or three years i feel like it was a couple
00:05:06 years that he couldn't get back on yeah i don't think that's appropriate to to not keep him on
00:05:11 for that long like permanent bans are not appropriate because like period for people
00:05:15 or for elected officials i think for people like i think this idea like i think right now we have
00:05:22 this notion in our society that like there are good people and there are bad people and that
00:05:26 denies the chance for growth and change so take the two extremists politically let's just say
00:05:30 some would say hassan piker america deserved 9-11 yeah or nick fuentes you know he says what he says
00:05:36 you're from the position that let them speak,
00:05:39 let the audience decide for themselves.
00:05:40 I'm of the position that you can give people timeouts.
00:05:44 The idea that that person doesn't change,
00:05:47 that they're not going to be different in a year.
00:05:48 They're not going to be different in six months.
00:05:50 I think it's one of these things where we're saying,
00:05:52 hey, you have to have rules in social spaces.
00:05:55 There's a saying, if you create a space that bans witch hunts,
00:05:59 the problem is it becomes full of only witches. 0.71
00:06:03 We need to have rules,
00:06:04 But the idea that people don't change or they don't grow, that excludes a future.
00:06:11 And in the United States, we have this idea that we can cancel people forever.
00:06:14 We need to have consequences, but we need to have the idea that someone can come back
00:06:18 and say, I'm a different person.
00:06:20 And so an indefinite ban doesn't give you an opportunity to grow and change.
00:06:23 Would you consider yourself a freedom of speech absolutist?
00:06:29 That is a very inflammatory phrase, right?
00:06:33 So there's this question of, like, let's say you do see something like an ethnic violence incident, like Myanmar.
00:06:39 Are you really telling me that the—so we know now that the Myanmarese government sent governmental officials, people in their military, to Russia to learn how to run information operations on their own people.
00:06:51 They came back.
00:06:52 They triggered an information operation. 1.00
00:06:54 They built it for years, saying, let's kill the Muslims in our country. 0.98
00:06:58 I think it is appropriate for Facebook to cut off that speech. 0.92
00:07:01 Like, I don't think your tool, I think private entities have a right to say, I don't have to be part of killing someone else.
00:07:09 At the same time, I don't think it's appropriate to, I think people need to be more uncomfortable than they are today.
00:07:16 Right?
00:07:17 Due to free speech.
00:07:18 Yeah.
00:07:18 Hear what people are going to say.
00:07:20 Make up your own mind.
00:07:21 I think it's a question of we don't get to grow and change if we are not challenged.
00:07:25 And this idea that there are ideas that are too dangerous for us to talk about them, that is a great way to stop having ideas.
00:07:30 Like we need to be able to, like, so my husband likes to say that we have a very traditional
00:07:37 marriage in that it used to be people were married to people who didn't agree.
00:07:42 Like you'd have a Republican married to a Democrat, and that almost never happens anymore.
00:07:45 And I would say both my husband and I are political orphans.
00:07:48 Like we are part of the large number of Americans who don't really associate with either party.
00:07:51 But we definitely don't agree politically either.
00:07:54 Like we're both like very opinionated people in our own different ways.
00:07:58 But we can have arguments and learn from each other.
00:08:00 And I think that is one of the greatest gifts that the world has.
00:08:03 The idea that you can be exposed to an idea that challenges you and makes you think, and you, you both grow and you both change.
00:08:09 So maybe, let me restate what I'm thinking you're saying is when it comes down to violence, that is calls for violence.
00:08:17 Yeah.
00:08:17 Calls for violence.
00:08:19 I think reasonable people can say, I don't have to participate.
00:08:22 I don't, I don't have to platform you.
00:08:24 So reasonable people would say, I understand if Facebook or Twitter or somebody takes them down.
00:08:29 Okay.
00:08:30 Now, the suspension for Trump, I think the only one that still has it is Snapchat.
00:08:35 They still haven't lifted it.
00:08:37 Twitter's lasted one year and 10 months, and he came back November 19, 2022, I think a
00:08:42 month after Elon bought X.
00:08:44 Facebook was two years and a month, 763 days.
00:08:47 Instagram, same day.
00:08:48 YouTube was two years and two months, a month after the other guys did it, and Snap still
00:08:52 hasn't lifted it.
00:08:53 So you would have only kept him off for one week.
00:08:56 Now, let me ask the-
00:08:57 I would come and see what he does, right?
00:08:59 Because if he comes back after a week and he starts delegitimizing the election again and calling for violence, then you have to be like, OK, now I have to go for two weeks.
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