The integrity of the internet is at stake -- what have we lost and how do we get it back?

At the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival, Anil spoke with web scholars and writers about reclaiming the internet through historical context, how we are tethered to social media, the inventive ways marginalized people have always reinvented the platforms available, and more.


Bonus: Live from Texas Tribune Fest: Reclaiming Community On the Web

Anil Dash: Hi, I'm Anil Dash and you're in for a special treat. This is a bonus episode of Function. All season along in Function, we've been wrangling with this question of trust on the internet and the technology in general. And the basic question we're asking is, can we trust the role the technology has in our lives? Well, we wanted to go deep on that topic. And in the middle of this season, I actually went to the Texas Tribune Festival. Now this festival is one of the biggest gatherings in the country that it's just about conversation about politics and policy. And we decided to focus real specifically on kind of policy changes that need to happen if we're going to have tech be accountable to all of us.

Anil Dash: For this conversation, we pulled together for academics who study four completely different areas of the ways that social media impacts the world. First up is Sarah Roberts. She's an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. And she knows pretty much every aspect of social media, but her most recent book is called Behind The Screen. And it's about the content moderators. The people that work to actually try and keep the social networks, well, civilized. She talked to the people who do that work, who clean up after us, who clean up after the worst actors on the internet. And that perspective really informs a deep understanding of how social media looks behind the scenes.

Anil Dash: Next up is Charleton McIlwain. He's a Professor at NYU for Media, Culture, and Communications. And he's also a Vice Provost there. He's written a ton about how social media impacts the world, but what's most striking to me is this most recent book called Black Software. Starting from a perspective of his father, who was the first black engineer at IBM, he's been able to carry forward that connection all the way into the latest evolutions of social media. We also got one of my favorite writers Anne Helen Petersen. She's a Senior Culture Writer for BuzzFeed News. And her newest book is about millennial burnout. But really everything she writes is about perspectives and voices of people who are often overlooked. I love that perspective she brings to thinking about those who get erased in our conversations of social media.

Anil Dash: And finally, there's Siva Vaidhyanathan. Siva is a professor. He's the Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And he's written a whole bunch of books over the years, but his most recent, Antisocial Media. Was one of the most direct and forceful criticisms of Facebook's role in really undermining democracy. That pointed perspective, I think makes this conversation go to a whole another level. All four of these people bring really unique perspectives to a conversation about social media. They go places that pretty much nobody else could. And to get them all on stage together was a really special moment. You're going to hear that in this conversation, especially because the entire audience was super, super engaged. Take a listen.

Anil Dash: I will start with a question for each of you, which I think is usually how these things wrap up, which is your one takeaway. But I think about each of you have stories you tell and particularly detail that when you get a chance to talk to a room full of smart people like this, help them crystallize and understand the work that you do. But also if you can represent the one perspective of somebody that might not be in this room. So I'm going to start Sarah T. Roberts, thank you for joining us. I'd love for you to start with one of those stories that's come out of your work and the people that you get to talk to.

Sarah T. Roberts: So the crux of my work has to do with unveiling the ecosystem behind the technologies that often appear immaterial and other worldly. And I think if I had to say, the one takeaway from the years of that work is that the internet and the technologies we use every day are fundamentally human constructs. And they're often even more closely aligned to human labor than even just that. The things that we presume or assume to be computational are often human processes and even when they are computerized they are reflecting those human norms and positions.

Anil Dash: So we might have a problem that we feel the technology is introducing into our lives or software's introducing into our lives, but the solution is not going to lie and write some more code if you're at Facebook, if you're at Google and solve this problem.

Sarah T. Roberts: I mean that's where I differ from my colleagues in Silicon Valley because they often do believe that that is the solution. But I think that that actually underscores the fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the problem in the first place.

Anil Dash: And so what I want to get to here is we are going to presuppose in the conversation today that there are stresses around the presence of technology in all of our lives. Where I'm not going to do a lot for asking these folks to justify that we sometimes feel creeped out by technology or that we sometimes feel uncomfortable with its impact on our lives and our work. We're going to assume that. So hopefully you can come with us on that journey. And I think that's good context for Sarah, what she say... Charleton I go to sort of your work in, I think giving a historical context but also talking about voices and communities that often get overlooked. I'd love for you to sort of capsulize, give us one of those stories that people don't often hear.

Charlton McIlwain: Sure. And that's a hard question because I have about 50 that I want to jump out and [crosstalk] tell. But I think I'll start with a guy named Derek Brown. He's the guy I met early in my research for this book. Derek Brown is a African-American engineer. Atlanta, Georgia. Went to school at Clemson, Georgia Tech. In 1994 and I'm thinking about my own age at the time, being in a doctoral program and my connection with computing was playing FreeCell, those of you that are similar in age. So that was the extent of mine.

Charlton McIlwain: And so when I discovered Derek, I realized that people in 1994 were using technology to do some very, very cool things that I had no idea. And what I got from Derek, who was a very serious, gentle guy who built a site called Universal Black Pages, 1994, 1995, 1996 and he would talk to me about just the, he'd talk about the web, the internet, computers as something beautiful. And it was beautiful because it enabled him to connect to people, connect to his people. And so I think when you think about community connection and the possibilities of what our present day internet could be, I think we've been where we could still become again someday.

Anil Dash: That's so interesting because we do think about the stresses or the tensions, but also our narrative is really basically shaped around half a dozen big companies and not an individual creator, not the sort of, maybe voices that get overlooked, but also the idea that it can be grounded in traditions that echo what we see in a physical community. What we see in a church, what we see in the community center. Does that seem to connect into traditions that existed long before the internet?

Charlton McIlwain: Yeah, absolutely. And that's what's, that was people's frames of reference. And even if they were on this thing, it was to connect to the people they knew, hung out with in so-called real life. So it was about that connection, was about doing for each other.

Anil Dash: So, and Helen Peterson, I find your work sort of echoes in a similar way, that there are people whose stories are told about them but not by them. And so many times you give voice to them and whether that is because of where they are geographically or demographically, it seems like that's an underpinning to what you're doing. I'm curious about if you have a sort of a galvanizing story that you've found in your work that that crystallizes that idea for people.

Anne Helen Petersen: Well, a story that I heard again and again and also experienced myself, which it's kind of a culmination of going through, I went to U of T to get my PhD. I worked so, so, so hard to try to get an academic job. Was an academia for a while and then went into journalism and just was working so hard all the time. All I wanted was a cool job that would pay me money and have health insurance, right, and allow me to make my student loan payment. But what I found, and this is what my most recent work is on burnout, is that I would end each night in bed just doing like this aimless scroll through Instagram and you look up and you're like, what am I looking at? I used to read before I went to bed, I used to like watch a bunch of episodes of a television show.

Anne Helen Petersen: I did things intentionally, but instead I said I'm too tired to even put down the app and do what I actually want to do. And so many people have told me that they've had similar experiences in terms of why can't I just not, I don't want to be on Facebook. I don't want to be on Twitter. I don't want to be on Instagram. And yet here I am. What is going on? Why can't I do the thing that I actually want to do that would make me less burnt out? And so I spent a lot of time thinking about both what are the mechanisms in place that make it very difficult to put down your endless scroll on Instagram, but also what are the things that make us so exhausted that we don't have the energy not, or to be able to put it down.

Anil Dash: So it's so interesting that sort of rerouting of intention into something that almost happens to you as opposed to something that you're choosing.

Anil Dash: So Siva, you have looked very deeply at a lot of different companies' roles in this, but particularly Facebook, which obviously one of the biggest companies in the history of the world, one of the biggest companies on the internet, owns a lot of the platforms we use. I think there's a pretty broad understanding of they're doing some stuff that we don't trust, that we don't feel good about. I think they even can see that at this point. But you've got so much deeper into understanding how they came to be what they are and what their sort of influences on the system overall. While we don't want to over index on talking about one company or anything like that, I'm curious if there's a story that illustrates what you've found there that people might not be as familiar with.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Well, my story is a speculative fiction or maybe science fiction. So imagine if we all grew up in a country where the only real access to any traditional familiar media form is AM radio and all of the AM radio is controlled by the government. So imagine that you didn't grow up in a world with newspapers and magazines and television networks and MTV and even the worldwide web, right? You basically have AM radio and that's it. And then about five years ago, suddenly you get access to smart phones. You are able to get an Android phone or even an iPhone if you have the money. And now you have this amazing fire hose of images and sounds and text coming through to you and it's all coming through to you governed by a company that happens to control Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, which is Facebook, right? It controls all three of these things.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Imagine what our society would be like. Imagine how much of what Annie's been feeling and describing, right? This weight. I used to think about other things. I used to do other things, right? At least you have the capability to do that. If in this speculative world you didn't have that reference, right? Your entire consciousness, your political consciousness, social consciousness, religious consciousness, ethnic consciousness would be dictated by whatever is being amplified by Facebook's algorithms. Well, I said it was speculative fiction or science fiction. It's actually what just happened in Myanmar, right? In Myanmar in 2014, people went from a situation that was media poor, about as media poor as any place in the world to a place that is media rich, but specifically guided by Facebook. So think about all the different ways that our society has been frayed by, pushed by, distorted by Facebook. We have nothing to complain about compared to what people in Myanmar are encountering right now.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: And not coincidentally in Myanmar we see genocide. We see the frayings of the possibility of this gestational democracy, right? We thought five years ago that democracy is going to take hold in Myanmar and it would be the greatest story of the last two decades. It turns out not so much, right? And we see similar dynamics playing out in other parts of the world where even though there had been other media forms, they've all desiccated as Facebook has taken over everything. Places like Sri Lanka, places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, these are the places where the action is, right? So again, as much as we think we are suffering, nothing, nothing compared to the rest of the world.

Anil Dash: So it's really telling because these are generally communities and countries where they sort of got the pure distilled, like the crack cocaine version of Facebook, right? Sort of handed to them without the general, they didn't get the frog being boiled gradually over time. They're like, we're dropping you in the deep end, you are going to get-

Siva Vaidhyanathan: And there's no counter-narrative right?

Anil Dash: Right. And so that you go from media poor or less technologically fluent, directly into the hyper optimized version of this social media. And you get repeatedly mass violence. Not, oh, this is fake news, but people are killing each other. Right? And that's happened more than once. So if you need the control for your experiment, we've been able to reproduce-

Siva Vaidhyanathan: I do have to point out that here in the United States, we've experienced mass violence as well, perhaps not as directly attributed to one company, but certainly amplified by many of the dynamics that are sort of central to what Facebook does. And so it's not like the world's immune to it, but again, as horrible as things have been, they could be worse and they could get worse. So if you want to know where we're going, look at Brazil, right? Look at India, because that's where you're starting to see media ecosystems that more resembled ours really shift into a Facebook only or an Instagram only or Facebook major or WhatsApp major environment.

Anil Dash: Right. I feel like a lot of us who look at technology deeply are like, it's going to get worse. Right? Which is a very, it's a cheery message, but there's also this sort of thread of optimism and context and one of the things that, two things that really jumped out I think as we were getting ready for this conversation. One was there is another internet that has existed and did exist before all these tools. And so much of the perspective of what you all talk about is a little bit of history, which I think as we record this, most of the people in the room are old enough to remember this. But there was a time before we were all on Facebook and there was a time before even maybe some of us before we had internet access.

Anil Dash: And certainly before smart phones. I don't think we have anybody who's 12 years old in here. And so there's a very recent bias to this where we're like, this is almost the world that we're in is the world we've always had. But we can, if we squint our minds, remember back to a time before this. And I'm curious about one of the things that was the other sort of really interesting thing that jumped out as we prepared for this conversation was that, Siva you are now teaching Sarah's book for your upcoming class.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: It's an excellent book. [crosstalk] behind the screen.

Anil Dash: Get the plug in. Like I said, we'll have all the links, but I'm curious about, why is that a framework that you think we should be teaching? And then obviously, Sarah, I want you to sort of pick up the baton.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Well look, Sarah decided many years ago before anybody else caught on, that something interesting was going on. These companies, Facebook and Google being the most prominent of them, were interested in making sure that garbage doesn't show up on their platform very much. The obvious example is pornography, right? Google and its subsidiary YouTube has never wanted to offer easy access to pornography because that ruins the experience for most people, right? You would not have a level of comfort and faith in how you interact with Google if every search you did came up with some pornography site or multiple pornography sites and given the number of double entendres in English language, that's entirely possible, right? So they've been for a couple of decades now hiring, I'm sorry, outsourcing, the job of filtering what in many cases is an easy call, right? So someone is torturing an animal, someone is committing an obvious sex act, it's in these company's interest to not have that easily available or available at all.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Well, who's going to do this work? Are these companies centered in this place that is incredibly expensive to live and people demand a fairly high wage, going to hire people inside their company and give them access to their cafeteria and their massages and have them do this most horrible of jobs and pay them six figures. Maybe that would be nice. That's not what happened. Sarah tells a story of what happens when they decide to make this someone else's problem, literally in every way, both by outsourcing it to another company and by putting these workers through really debilitating experiences. But it goes beyond that because it goes to all of the questions we should be asking about what the responsibilities are of these companies and of companies in general-

Anil Dash: I want to pause you there because I want to hear Sarah talk about that, what that work entails.

Sarah T. Roberts: Boy, if my trip needed to be made in any way that just did it, let me tell you. Thank you so much. So to kind of draw out on something you were saying to contextualize my work, I think, and I think all of us have this going on to a certain extent. There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to be not only a historical, but I might even say anti historical. To live inside of a mythology that pretends that everything has sort of organically developed for the first time in whatever iteration-

Anil Dash: It's almost the beginning of history.

Sarah T. Roberts: Right. Whatever iteration of the product it is. And what I endeavored to do in the book in so many ways was to show this ecosystem that you've described and its implications for all of us, but also to remind us and to contextualize these platforms as actually being very, very recent phenomena. We're talking about two decades max that these particular companies and their products have really come to dominate and stand in for what we call the internet.

Sarah T. Roberts: And I think what's interesting about all of us, if I may speak for us on the stage, is that this isn't a group of people who are against technology, hate the internet, don't like media. It's actually quite the opposite. We cut our teeth on a nascent internet, most of us, that looked really different from the closed, enclosed ecosystem that is so highly profitable and commercialized today. And so the story of the workers who clean up social media sites, I think really directly connects to a another way, another version of the internet. This isn't a Pollyanna kind of story about how great it was. There were trolls, there was all kinds of nonsense going on. But the scale was different. I think that the impact was different and the-

Anil Dash: The harms couldn't be as broad because the platforms didn't have billions of people on them.

Sarah T. Roberts: Correct. And you know what I'm here to say maybe it might not be a good idea to do that. Right. I think some other folks have that thought too.

Anil Dash: I actually was just thinking about this Charleton, so much of the research you've done are these communities that were vibrant and thriving and meaningful to people. These weren't some one-off sort of thing, but that that narrative goes away because they simply didn't have a billion people on them. You think about there's some of the communities that you have been able to provide evidence of and documentation of, what are some of the ones that jump out that are stories that people don't know?

Charlton McIlwain: Well one I will highlight is this thing that was called the AfroNet, and I'll put that out there because it was built by a guy named Ken Anwar who lives here in Austin, Texas now built it when he was at University of California, San Diego. And the AfroNet was simply a network of all Black folks. They were distributed across the country, but it was a network built for them to connect. So it was still a kind of internet in that we did not, and people did not necessarily know they weren't in the same geographical place, but there was an underlying ethic of care, concern, connection that drove the technology. And it wasn't about the fetishizing of that technology per se. It was what could-

Charlton McIlwain: What could you do with it. And what I could do with it was reach out if I'm in a community where there are not a lot of people like me or people that understand what it is and how I'm living, I could find that person. If I wanted to look for a different love interest, there was some possibility I can get my car and drive out to California from Texas if I met the right person. But again, it was about the people. And I think that was to come back to Sarah's book and I told her before this and I had just finished reading the book and it was so horribly impactful because of the underlying disregard I think for people that was represented in the workers that are driven to do this work.

Anil Dash: But also those communities still echo into current culture and current moments, right? They're the best things that we see online. We talk about something like Black Twitter, which is so culturally generative has this history and these roots in these early communities. One of the standout moments to me that was totally surprising and really exciting as a geek of a certain age was Solange, when she dropped her last record, did it on BlackPlanet, right? And this is a site that gets overlooked. Asian Avenue, BlackPlanet, there was a whole cohort of identity based communities in the early days of social, but it's not a hundred years ago. It's like 15 years ago. [crosstalk] People are still, you know what I mean? It's not like you have to get a stone tablet to see where they were, but you have somebody who's a very vital artist who bridges a lot of really interesting communities and she wanted to evoke what that community meant. What do you think that signify? What is she calling back to there?

Charlton McIlwain: I mean, I think she's calling back to, here's, I want to find my people, which is hard to do when you have platforms and an internet now that is just so beyond scale. And I want to find the people who I know have my back who understand it may not be that they agree with me necessarily, but we got each other. I think that's what that really

Charlton McIlwain: We got each other. I think that's what that really represents. And to think about something that goes into a community that is not always fraught with, kind of, battle and conflict, but, as my friend Andre Brock likes to tell about, just pure joy.

Charlton McIlwain: I can get pleasure in this platform by being with my people and not having the conversation of proving our value, our worth, but [crosstalk]-

Anil Dash: Or defending against trolls and attacks, or whenever [all harms] are coming out there today.

Anil Dash: Yeah. So it's interesting because I think of that example of somebody at [Solange] where we don't think of celebrities, we don't think of artists as having been exploring the early Internet. Right? But it was pretty common. There were millions of people there. It wasn't that wild, but people were there, and Solange just may be alpha millennial, right? Sort of like this is a definer of this culture. And you spent a ton of time thinking about celebrity and about millennial culture. I'm curious about that fluency of, you know, growing up with this and also seeing it evolve. Is that widely understood? Do you feel like that's been erased by the sort of modern era of social platforms?

Anil Dash: Well, yeah, the community. But that there was a prior generation, that there was like this learning process where whether it was an AOL chat room, or they were on Black Planet, or they were on LiveJournal, or whatever these things that were earlier, has that been overshadowed by everything that's come since?

Anne Helen Petersen: I mean, everything now is so immediate that you can know about every artist, you can find Spot- like, every artist is accessible to you on Spotify all the time, which actually creates this overwhelming ...

Anne Helen Petersen: ... amount of information ...

Anne Helen Petersen: [crosstalk] -with anxiety, right? Because ... and also no real way to cultivate taste. Like the way I cultivated taste was either by, you know, through the spare amount of CDs that my parents had, and then maybe some friends, but then also finding that one thing in the record store that you would dare to spend $17 on if you hadn't heard the whole thing.

Anne Helen Petersen: It was a big bet. But then the things that you wagered on and that you fell in love with, those became incredibly pivotal things. And that's not to say that Solange doesn't mean the same to a 17 year old now as Fiona Apple meant to me when I was 17, but it did feel more like a cultivation of tastes. But I do want to go back to something we were talking about earlier, which ... when I was, I just finished the draft for my burnout book and the thing that I found myself wanting to finish every single chapter with, there's two phrases. It was, it doesn't have to be this way, and I don't know how to make you care about other people, which is something that goes around Twitter sometimes in reference to political things, which is, you know ... in order to understand why this matters and why people are mad about it, you have to understand why it matters to care about other people. And that means other people laboring under capitalism. You know?

Anil Dash: So that, it's an interesting framing, right? Because I think there's a tension between that reminder or assertion, we've got to care about other people and the lived experience I think so many of us have had where the Internet was where there were people that cared about me.

Anil Dash: Right? I think, you know, I've certainly had that experience where ... when I was broke, or I had moved to New York city and I didn't know anybody. I could find people online and then form a community. And I'm curious, is that a thing that a modern startup-based tech platform even aspires to? Is that the goal?

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Yeah. So if Mark Zuckerberg were sitting with us right now, he would totally agree with the major themes that we've outlined here. He has shifted his vision and his definition of the purpose of Facebook from connecting people, which turned out to not always have positive repercussions-

Siva Vaidhyanathan: -to building community, a word he does not understand in the least. Right? And he's also convinced that we build community. No, he's convinced that he builds community by designing his code in a certain way, designing an interface in a certain way, nudging us toward his capital F, capital G Facebook Groups, and then letting us loose within these Facebook groups, letting us loose within WhatsApp groups, letting us form more communities through Instagram, and ultimately living our communities through his platform. What he doesn't want to acknowledge is we were already doing that. Right? So if you look at Charlton's work, you look at Annie's work, that's what we were doing and getting really good at it before he came along with his universalizing grand vision of how he was going to structure our lives. And every one of his statements is top-down. Every one of his statements is "I will build this so that you behave a certain way."

Siva Vaidhyanathan: I mean, he was never admit to being paternalistic, but he is fundamentally paternalistic in the way a master engineer is.

Anil Dash: Where are these conversations happening right now? Like, where are the places that are not Instagram, not Facebook, that people are forming community?

Charlton McIlwain: Well, I think there are a lot of places and, I mean, some of them are on Facebook and in Twitter and on-

Anil Dash: But they may be hidden away or not the, sort of, central experience.

Charlton McIlwain: Right, right. And so I think it's, again, about finding it. So as Siva said about Zuckerberg, who I think doesn't, I agree, fundamentally understand the idea of community and just thinks, look, I can build this platform, I can shape, I can build a tool that will point you in this direction. And what we see over and over again with particularly [minoritized] communities and marginalized communities is just give me the tool, I'll figure this shit out. Right? I can do this. I don't need to be directed this way or that way because that's not really what I want to do or who we are.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: What's that James Brown song? Just opened up the door and I'll get it myself.

Charlton McIlwain: And so I think that's where we make the mistake. And you know, the Zuckerbergs of the world and so forth think about and confuse a social network, a social platform, with community. You just create this space, throw a lot of people in there and you've got a community, and that's fundamentally not what community is about.

Sarah T. Roberts: The other thing that the move towards pushing people into self-selected or quote-unquote "groups" is that it-

Siva Vaidhyanathan: They are algorithmically selected groups.

Sarah T. Roberts: Yes, correct. Nudged groups is that, I think, there's a fundamental desire to lessen the responsibility that the platform has to govern content. And so it's a downloading of that responsibility on, say, the person who decides to be the moderator of that group. Or it's a mechanism by which a company might conceivably say, "Gosh, you don't want us to monitor your private dialogues." So we don't know what was flowing through that WhatsApp group, for example, because the problem of managing content is already so far beyond their ability to handle it. To me, these are mechanisms and turns that get them out of that business even more than they are out of it, to a certain extent. Now they're both out and in. It's very odd.

Anil Dash: So the algorithm is like a mechanism of abdicating responsibility. It's not our fault because we've used this as our name, but they make the algorithm.

Anil Dash: It is, right, right. [crosstalk].

Anil Dash: But their argument is the math did this thing, I don't know how it happened, like, who can say? And yet it caused ... they wrote the code, right?

Sarah T. Roberts: I mean, I guess I often come back to your point at the end of the day, which is to what extent was it ever a good idea to render the gamut of human expression into a technological system? That is taking it a step further, made for profit and advertising in the first place?. What a limited worldview that is, right, to put everything inside that frame? And so I think one of the things that we need to do for our students, those of us who teach, or for our constituencies when we're talking to people, is to remind everyone about the capacity of our own imagination, to think about other ways. This has sort of been presented to us over the past 15 years as the way to do it. Folks have been incredibly successful. Obviously they've gotten people across the globe engaged in their systems, but 15 years is a very short time.

Sarah T. Roberts: Yeah. And I think that's actually, again, when I look for those rays of light or hopefulness, I think that's actually a very quick time for humanity in terms of rethinking or creating something new that could take hold, or reinvigorating institutions that already exist that we've let fester and die in the face of some of these other platforms.

Anil Dash: So one of the things that ... I think a framework that often comes up when talking about technology is this analog to food. We talk about a digital diet, right? And many times we say if we look at the major social platforms, this is sort of our factory farmed food, right? Or your fast food. And you know, sometimes moderation. Sure. We all like a good McNugget sometimes, but not for every meal. Not all day, every day.

Anil Dash: And then I think, very personally, that I remember great meals I've had in my life. I remember ones that are from the culture and the tradition I grew up in, the cuisine that I was raised with. I remember once where I knew everybody who was in the kitchen, I knew where the food came from and we grew in the garden. Right. Here's the hard question I have for each of you, which is how much of your digital diet, of you spending time on your phone, is locally grown, organic, made by somebody in your community, home-picked, home-cooked tech? I mean, are you using ... I'll start with you, but it's like, are any of the apps on your phone made by somebody you know?

Anne Helen Petersen: We're all academics or former academics, so no.

Anil Dash: And I have the same thing. I'm not pointing any fingers, because I have the same problem. It's hard for me to think about-

Speaker 1: I mean, I was only thinking, because you've built a few things.

Are social networks downplaying their complicity in the problem that is "fake news?"

Anil talks to Fadi Quran of the people-powered social advocacy group Avaaz about how tech is used to target groups of people and spread disinformation that affects our elections, relationships, and social justice movements. Together, they discuss the insidious nature of disinformation and misinformation, meet its victims, and go over solutions.

Listen closely for the steps that platforms can take right now to stem the tide of fake news and fake accounts.

How To Save the 2020 Election: Stopping Fake News

Anil Dash: Welcome to Function. I'm Anil Dash. Trust, it is one of those elusive things that is easy to lose but really hard to get back. All season long, we've been exploring what trust means when it comes to the internet, technology and social media. For a lot of people, the 2016 US election represents the moment when they lost all their trust in social media. Whether it was attention hacking or foreign interference or the way our data were being used against us, you literally could not trust the information that was being presented to you in your timeline. The aspects of the internet that were supposed to help us connect to each other and share information together, were used to undermine the election, and to undermine democracy itself. But if you fast-forward three years, most of us are still on Facebook. We're still on Twitter. We're still on all these networks, and that's despite the fact that all of them have gotten worse. So, we've got to think about why. The bad actors, the people who want to manipulate these networks, they've gotten better at exploiting the weaknesses of social media.

Anil Dash: They know how to exploit the algorithms, and they sure as hell know how to manipulate the social media companies themselves. Because the truth is, these companies are so afraid of accountability that they would rather let themselves be party to rigging elections, and to skewing votes than to actually holding their feet to the fire and saying, "We've got to make some changes." So, as we head into the 2020 election, guess what? Disinformation and misinformation, they haven't been solved. They're at an all time high. But, if you've been listening to this season of Function, you know, I'm interested in how we fix it. How do we rebuild trust on the internet? Because it's not like we can log off. It's not like we can sign out. The internet isn't going anywhere. For this last episode of Function, this season, I reached out to Avaaz. Avaaz is a really interesting nonprofit, and it's because they focus on solutions.

Anil Dash: They are trying to build that world that we all say we want. Part of that world we all want is an internet that doesn't spy on us, and doesn't lie to us, and sure as hell doesn't undermine our elections. But I wasn't sure how we get there. I talked to Fadi Quran. Fadi's a campaign director at Avaaz. He discussed the recent report that they published, which covers the spread of disinformation all around the world. The core question that we dug into is, how do we make sure that 2020 doesn't look like 2016? Fadi, thank you for joining us.

Fadi Quran: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the show.

Anil Dash: Some people might not be familiar with the Avaaz. I want to start there with what the organization is and what is the work that you do, so people have some context.

Fadi Quran: Avaaz is a global civic movement with over 53 million subscribers, and it was established 10 years ago with this idea that the internet is a place where people can connect and create the world the majority of us wish, because we believe humanity, we all share a basic set of values, and the organization campaigns in an extremely democratic way. We ask our members, what are the issues or campaigns that they care about? If our members have an idea, we test it, we poll it, and the ideas that our members care about the most, end up being the campaigns we run. Our members had the wisdom, about two years ago after Brexit, and after the US elections, to say disinformation is becoming a threat to everything that we believe in because whether we are campaigning to stop climate change, whether we are campaigning for LGBT rights, whether we're campaigning for peace in the Middle East, disinformation is creating chaos in all of our political systems. It's making deliberate of democracy, almost impossible. So, we decided to focus, and make this one of our priorities in terms of solving this problem.

Anil Dash: In the report, you outline exactly the ways that disinformation spreads, and then why it's so hard to get out of somebody's head once it's in there. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

Fadi Quran: Imagine your mother or grandmother, and she's sitting on Facebook. She's looking through pictures. She sees you in the party. She's enjoying. Then she sees the story. The story, it's made viral by a network. Oftentimes, this network are coordinated, inauthentic actors, so they're not even real people. They're just a bunch of pages, run by maybe the same person. The way the Facebook algorithm works, is if you share something fast, if 10 people share something at the same time, the algorithm is like, "Oh, this is hot.", and they bring it up to the top of your newsfeed. So now, maybe one of the pages that, or one of the friends of your mother is following one of the pages that spread this fake news, and they see it being shared, so they share it. Facebook will put it on the top of your mother's newsfeed.

Fadi Quran: It will be one of the first things she sees scrolling through. Now, if she sees that story, and then she sees another story about, again Nancy Pelosi, one of the stories we found said that her son also worked in Ukraine. Then there was a third story that she had asked the Ukrainian government to investigate XYZ. So, suddenly your mother or grandmother who's just on Facebook to see her family has seen five horrible, viral stories with thousands of likes saying these things about Nancy Pelosi. Now in politics, what we were taught in any political campaign, is the average person can keep up to three ideas about a certain politician. Maybe they'll keep the idea Nancy Pelosi is a woman with experience. Nancy Pelosi is from California and Nancy Pelosi ... The third will be that she's corrupt because they've seen all these fake news stories about her.

Fadi Quran: If you can just get one bad piece of information about a politician to stick in people's heads, then you've destroyed or you've decreased the amount of support that that politician takes. One thing I want to emphasize here, is this information's not just about making you like or hate a certain politician. It's target voter suppression. So particularly if you're from a minority, let's say you're an African-American for example, they will target you with information that will seek to make you feel frustrated, feel like your voice doesn't matter, feel like your society's broken with the purpose of making you say, "I'm not going to go vote. It doesn't matter who I vote for." That's a type of voter suppression that's specifically targeted at minorities in places like Florida, like Michigan and states that are, let's say, swing states.

Anil Dash: Looking forward at the 2020 election, does it look like there's going to be a repeat of what we saw in 2016?

Fadi Quran: 2020 will probably be worse because there are new disinformation tactics that are being used by the Russians, but also there are now local actors who are using these same tactics. Our findings, to put things in perspective, three to six months ahead of the 2016 elections, the top 20 disinformation stories, and these numbers are approximate, but had about 2.5 million interactions, so likes and shares. Now we're still a year ahead of the 2020 elections and we found about 1.5 times more interactions on the top 20 stories this year. This means if this trend continues, and in 2016 the trend was an exponential curve, it went up very steeply as we got closer to elections. Well, if the trend we're seeing now goes up the same way we saw in 2016, you'll probably have five times as much disinformation in 2020 than 2016, unless the platforms act, unless the platforms implement solutions like correct the record, these elections may be decided by lies.

Anil Dash: Avaaz has decided to take on this challenge of disinformation. One of the big bits of work you've done is as a recent report, really tackling the issue. But what was most extraordinary to me, I think, our listeners are aware that there's misinformation on social networks. They're probably pretty fluent in that and can say, Yeah, there's something wrong with the algorithms. There's something wrong with what gets promoted." What jumps out to me is you get about two thirds of the way through your report, all of a sudden, you start to talk about solutions. What could the big social platforms do? What could the big technology companies do? I feel like this is a thing we just almost never hear. There's a lot of hand-wringing, saying it's all broken and Facebook is terrible or you know, whatever. The Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm is bad. But, very seldom do I see, especially an organization that has so much broad support around the world, say there are things we can do about it.

Fadi Quran: When we began, it was very tough to find strong, like you were saying, strong policy recommendations to these platforms to act. So, we did a massive tour. I spoke with Macedonian young men and women who are creating the fake news in the 2016 elections. I discussed with them how they were doing it. I spoke with Facebook executives, and executives at other platforms. We met with NATO. We met with victims of disinformation, whether they're members of the Rohingya community. What all of this research trying to find solutions, was focused then on four specific tasks that we think if the platforms implement, can severely reduce the threat and reach of disinformation. The first solution is correct the record, and what this means is, imagine in the US South, you had the Russian malicious actors create Facebook pages for Black Lives Matter and pages for Blue Lives Matter.

Fadi Quran: Then you had them create events, and spread hundreds of pieces of fake news that polarized these communities, and had people go to the street, and in some cases get in scuffles. Now Facebook, when they found these groups, when they found this disinformation, they took down these pages. But the truth is, those hundreds of thousands of people who are following those pages just never got informed. They didn't get a notification saying, "Sorry, the page you were following was run by Russia, and these pieces, these stories that you read were all fake stories. Here are some third-party fact-checkers." People never got that, and so what we're calling on all the platforms to do is be transparent. When there's a piece of disinformation spreading, and someone has read it or clicked on it, notify them, and send them Facebook and other platforms are working with fact-checkers.

Fadi Quran: Send them a correction saying, "PolitiFact or Snopes or AP have debunked the story, and this is the true story." If you do that, a lot of, what we have found looking at the research, the academic research is number one, corrections work, and they work effectively. Number two, we're running currently with professors at Ohio State University and at George Washington, a few other places, a study where we show people an exact replica of the Facebook newsfeed with disinformation. Then we show them what corrections could look like. So, another newsfeed but with corrections. What we've found is that corrections can slash by over 50%, in some cases by over 80%, the amount of people who believe this information. The other two solutions that I think deserve emphasis are what we call, detoxing the algorithm, which means just redesigning certain recommendation algorithms that the platforms have put forward, so that disinformation actors or malicious actors are downgraded significantly, and where more authoritative content is pushed upwards. The platforms have begun to move in this direction in the last year, but still not effectively.

Fadi Quran: The last bit is, we think there must be transparency. The platforms need to be transparent about the amount of active fake accounts, and how those fake accounts are functioning on their platforms, and how they have functioned. The platforms need to be transparent about certain design aspects of their algorithms. They need to be transparent about ... In our report, we say just the top 100 fake news stories have reached in the US, over 158 million views, but that number is the tip of the iceberg, and Facebook should tell us actually how many people were reached by these stories and other stories.

Anil Dash: You talk about reach and impact. 158 million impressions in the US alone, of known misinformation being targeted. As you said, the tip of the iceberg. One of the things I want to call out there is, well, like a lot of institutions defending themselves, Facebook for example, will start by saying, "Oh it's a problem, but it's small. It was a couple thousand, maybe it was 3 million" Then a couple months later, "Maybe it was 10 million." Then a couple months later, "Maybe it was 100 million.", right? There's this creeping confession, but the first thing is almost a straight denial, and push and response as a pushback to your initial identification of this issue, is they'll sort of minimize it, diminish it, dismiss it. Then usually, in the fullness of time it comes out that actually the problem was as serious as you've said, or sometimes even worse. Have you seen that pattern play out with the activism and the advocacy that you've been doing?

Fadi Quran: Yeah, I mean, we've definitely seen that and it kind of breaks our hearts, because I think the impression that a lot of us have of these big companies in Silicon Valley, or at least had, is that they're companies that wanted to do good, that were transparent, that wanted to serve the big causes that we care about, whether democracy or human connection or human rights. When they come out and put a very well-designed public relations statement instead of just speaking authentically and truthfully to the size and scale of this issue, it hurts our trust in the companies. That's why, polls showed that the trust in these big Silicon Valley companies, the trust in their brand is continuously deteriorating, and it's a pattern. They always try to exaggerate what they're doing, and underplay the problems underneath that they still haven't dealt with.

Anil Dash: Yeah. It's funny, I hear such an earnestness to what you're saying, which is like, "I wanted to think that they were doing good. We were told they wanted to make the world better and that's why they made this tech." It's funny because I just identify with that so much because I spent time in Silicon Valley. I know people at all these companies. I sometimes know the founders, and I think I had that same impulse for a long time. I'm like, "But they want to do good, and they're nice people, and they told me it's not that bad a problem."

Anil Dash: Want to do good and they're nice people, and they told me it's not that bad a problem. And then, over and over and over they keep diminishing it. They keep sort of saying, "No, no, no, it's not as serious as we said." And yet, you've got the data and you've got the information, and you can show this is a problem that is incredibly serious. It's extraordinary to hear that still you have that desire, that impulse, to assume good intent and to think the best. But, after a while, don't we have to say, "This is a strategy." This isn't just, they keep making the same mistake over and over. This is an intentional, and so far pretty effective, attempt to downplay their complicity in this.

Fadi Quran: I think these companies are full of earnest, whether they're product designers or engineers, or data scientists or policy people, they are packed with wonderful people who want to see this issue solved as much as you and I. And I think the elephant in the room here is that I'm at least beginning to get a sense, and a lot of people working in this space are beginning to get a sense, that there's a huge divide between the leadership of these companies, who are risk averse, who don't want to move fast to solve these problems, who may be afraid of certain political repercussions, and the hundreds or thousands of people that work for them that did join these companies for the promise that you and I and others felt that these companies had for humanity.

Fadi Quran: But, as leaders of these companies, they also need to realize it's not them against civil society, or them against government, or them against the people. By not solving these issues at scale and at the level that they know they should be solving them with, they're also changing and poisoning the culture inside of their own organizations. And that's a danger to democracy that we care about, but it's also a danger to the sustainability of the companies themselves.

Anil Dash: That's extraordinary to hear. And I think it does match what we see bubbling up, whether it's the Google walkout, which I think was also catalyzed around a lot of labor issues, around harassment and things inside the company. But, certainly a background to that, at all of these big tech companies, is their employees are the most expensive resource they have and the thing they have the least control over, and it seems like accountability might come from the bottoms up there.

Anil Dash: I want to return to one of those other threads that you talked about and what ... You advocate for ways to correct or try to solve some of these issues. One of the things you flag is ... When I think of it from a software standpoint, it's almost a feature in the product, which is go into the newsfeed, go into the alerts and tell people, "Hey, it turns out that thing you saw was false." And you literally are talking about that, right? You're talking about, in the same place in the app where we see whatever headlines people are sharing, we would see a correction, a flag, a notification.

Fadi Quran: We actually built this handy website. If you go to factbook.org, F A C T book dot org, then you can see what this design would look like. You'll see a design that looks like Facebook today and what Facebook corrected, and it's a simple addition.

Anil Dash: Okay, so we'll include a link to factbook in the show notes here so people can check it out. But, one of the things that, when we talk about these kinds of solutions as people say, "Well, one, there are people that believe in conspiracy theories and if a fact checker says this is false, doesn't that make them double down?"

Fadi Quran: So, what we've found, going through the historical research and the behavioral and sociological research on this topic, is in every society in every group, probably at your Thanksgiving dinner, there's one or two people that are very strong. They believe a certain conspiracy very powerfully. And in society, that number is between 2% to 7% of people will believe a conspiracy, like Elvis was abducted and now lives on Mars or something like that. Now, with that group of people, you're right. You do not want ... It will be very, very tough to convince them. If they get a correction, even if the correction came from Jesus Christ, they probably wouldn't believe it. So, with that group of people, but that's a minority. And what this information particularly is focused on is not that small group of people who are often politically not extremely influential, but it's infecting the rest of society. And the same thing with misinformation about anti vaccinations, for example.

Fadi Quran: Now, what Corrections do is, the rest of society, the 95% to 97% of society that don't have these strong conspiracy theory beliefs, are defended when they get a correction. So, if someone's saying that vaccines cause autism, and someone's spreading that significantly on Facebook and so forth, they can spread that within their small group. But the rest of the population on Facebook won't believe it if they get corrections. And where we think the focus should be is on that population, that disinformation and misinformation is trying to infect the broader population of society, not the minority in the corner who we think, of course, it's worth doing research about how to change beliefs and transform beliefs. But, if we want to talk about impacting the political discourse, polarizing society, it's not that group that you look at. You look at the broader sample of society.

Anil Dash: Right, so it's dissemination. It's what we call reach or amplification.

Fadi Quran: Exactly. And you isolate. It's kind of like corrections create a quarantine that offer people more information. And the average person who sees a correction, sees this information, sees a correction, will be like, "Oh, what I read is wrong." And they'll stop believing it. And so, you isolate that piece of bad information.

Anil Dash: So the platform companies, and I talk to them a lot, and they all tell me, "Oh we're doing all this. We're doing this work. We're starting to flag things. We're starting to reduce the reach of things that are known misinformation." And they keep insisting they're fixing a lot of this stuff. And then, at the same time, they'll be a little defensive. So they'll say, "Well, yeah, okay. If Macedonian teenagers made pages for Black Lives Matter and for Blue Lives Matter, isn't that okay?" Because aren't there really supporters for Black Lives Matter and aren't there people who are pro police? Those exist, so why shouldn't teenagers in Eastern Europe be able to make such pages?

Fadi Quran: This, I feel, is a divergent tactic, right? Because nobody is claiming that these Eastern European teenagers don't have a right to create these pages. They have a right. Let them create these pages. The problem becomes when these pages are used to spread disinformation with a purpose of malicious harm or for economic gain, because then the creation of these pages stops becoming about, "I want to share my opinion," or, "I want to bring people together in this group to talk about Blue Lives Matter." It becomes about manipulating and deceiving people for profit or for political goals. And that's what we're trying to stop.

Fadi Quran: And again, the solution, correcting the record, we don't say remove content, we don't say remove pages, because we do believe in freedom of expression and it can become very dangerous if pages are being removed or deleted. What we're saying is just add more information to the information ecosystem. When you see these types of tactics, when you see these types of pages spreading this disinformation and you add corrections, what will happen is, your average American man or woman who's following one of these pages, if they get a correction once, twice, three times that says, "The content on this page is XYZ or is disinformation, and here's a correction," they'll stop trusting that page. If they stop trusting that page, you remove the malicious incentives and you move people towards better content, more healthy content, without taking away the right of the Macedonian teenager to create a Facebook page. That should never happen.

Anil Dash: We'll have more with Fadi after the break. Welcome back to Function. I just want to give you a heads up. In this next part of the interview with Fadi, we're going to talk about some pretty graphic and fairly violent things that have happened to people online as a result of disinformation, so take a moment if you need it, but then please do listen.

Anil Dash: I want to get into your experience of doing this work a little bit. Right, so as we are talking right now, the report's been out about a week. And you've done similar reports in the past, but this is one that is having some impact. People were seeing it. People are sharing it. I see it on social media. I'm curious. From your standpoint, you are advocating what seems like pretty reasonable suggestions, right? This doesn't seem that wild. You're not saying burn it all down, destroy anything. You're like, "Could you add a couple of features and a little bit of information, and make a couple tweaks to the algorithm? That might have big impact without silencing anybody," like I said, "... Without shutting anything down." And I'm curious. I'm sure it's got to feel good to see people sharing the report and talking to one another. What's your sense about whether this is going to have the impact you hope? Are you being heard? Do you get back channel conversations from people at the big platforms saying, "We see you. We hear you."

Fadi Quran: One of the most effective things that Avaaz has done on this front was not just the reports, but it was bringing survivors and victims of disinformation, members of or a representative from the Sandy Hook Families, many of whom are in hiding because of the malicious disinformation that spread against them, people from the Rohingya community, and taking them to Silicon Valley to meet with the teams working on this, and the platform leaders working on this topic. And people had tears in their eyes because a lot of them have never really interacted directly, physically, with the painful consequences of their platforms. And I think winning people's minds with these types of policy solutions has been key, and these reports, but also bringing in the heart, bringing in the real on the ground tangible consequences, so that people can see and touch them, has really led the platforms, and particularly employees at the platforms, to become more passionate about solutions.

Anil Dash: Should it take that much? Should it have to go that far? Should people have to perform their pain for a product manager before this stuff changes?

Fadi Quran: No. I had tears in my eyes the first time we sat with these disinformation survivors, and they were telling their stories. Because, I just know how traumatic it is. Losing your six year old son and then not being able to live a normal life or not feeling capable of protecting the rest of your family because you've come under more attack. And then, from hiding, having to come out and speak to a product manager because everything you've done over the last five, six, seven years of sending messages, of reporting every single video on YouTube attacking you. None of it was impactful and-

Anil Dash: No, none of it amounted to anything until they met them.

Fadi Quran: Until they met them. This shouldn't be the case. The companies should invest in going ... Going down to Assam right now, or to the indigenous communities in the Amazon who are being just massacred and also massacred online, and they don't have Facebook. They can't report the attacks against them and the lies spreading about them.

Fadi Quran: And the same thing in other places like Nigeria or Uganda and so forth. Communities, minority communities, coming under attack. They can't report any of that. The platforms, when they're spreading in these countries, they should have their teams go and see the direct consequences. It shouldn't have to be Avaaz or any organization that brings these survivors to Silicon Valley. But, we also need to commend the bravery of a lot of the disinformation survivors-

Fadi Quran: ... Who made this trip and who went into those meetings with their head raised high and said, "This happened to me and I'm here to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else."

Anil Dash: That's such a powerful point, that associating a name and a face and a real story takes that cost of disinformation and makes it real and impossible to ignore. Are there other stories that you've heard from survivors of this kind of disinformation?

Fadi Quran: One of the stories that I remember is this young man, high school student. His name is Ethan Lindenberger, and his story is heartbreaking because it's about his relationship with his mother. So his mother has been targeted with misinformation about vaccines, anti-vaccination content. She deeply believes this anti-vax content. And she decided not to vaccinate him or his younger brother. Now, going to school and in reading and learning it, middle school, high school student, he learned that vaccinations were important, that he had to take them. He wanted his siblings to take them to be safe. But he came under attack online from anti disinformation actors, and they said that he was working for the government, that he was a spy, that he was paid. And it came to the point where his mother believed the lies that were being spread against him.

Fadi Quran: Him just saying that story. This young kid's super sweet. He volunteers at the church in his town. And it's destroyed, in many ways, interfamilial relations. And the bigger story is that now you have measles outbreaks because ... He sees it as a biological weapon. He sees what happened to his mother. But if you have a thousand mothers who believed the same thing in one city, then that city becomes prone to disease. So, that's one story.

Fadi Quran: Maybe I'll just mention another story, which is the story from the Rohingya community in Myanmar. And here we had the leader from the community, and he spoke about how, at a refugee camp, a woman who had been raped and who had her husband lynched, slaughtered and lynched, in front of her because on ...

Fadi Quran: In front of her. Because on Facebook, the government shared the picture of her husband, who was just a normal farmer, saying that this guy is a terrorist and he's planning a coup and an attack [inaudible 00:32:16] and the government used that, manipulated that story, made it go viral, and then all the villages around where that woman lived, we're just looking for her husband to kill and lynch him. And so this woman was crying. She didn't have anything to live for anymore because of disinformation that had gone against her. And now she's a refugee. Her whole village was destroyed. Now she doesn't have anywhere to live. She's a refugees in Bangladesh.

Anil Dash: So, these stories are heartbreaking and I think it leaves us feeling gutted, but maybe even a little powerless. Is there something I can do as a user, if I'm on a social platform, how can I hold them accountable?

Fadi Quran: So there are three steps. The first I would say is contact your representative. And here I'm speaking to particularly US audience, whether it's the Senate or the House, those who are responsible for defending our democracy are not doing their job, particularly when it comes to these platforms. So the first thing I would say is contact your representatives and say, "We want Facebook, we want Twitter, we want Google to implement Correct the Record. And we want you as our representative to push them to do that," because the platforms do listen to these decision makers largely because they fear strong and strict regulation coming their way. So, that's step number one.

Fadi Quran: Step number two is communicate this to the platforms themselves and we can share and we'll share a link to our campaign and you can join this campaign. You can become part of it. And that way we can send you when the right opportunity comes, for example, for you to reach out to Mark Zuckerberg and say, "We want XYZ to happen," or for you to reach out to Jack Dorsey and you can become part of this campaign where we can help make sure that your voice goes directly to the leaders of these companies and it's not a lone voice. It's a voice that's magnified by millions around it.

Fadi Quran: And the third thing is, and this is more broadly speaking, particularly to the audience of this podcast, we need to begin speaking with the big advertisers. So you have companies like Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Mars and others that together control a big chunk of the revenue, the ad revenue that these companies get. When these companies come together and say, as advertisers, "We want these platforms to be safe and responsible places, we want them to implement solutions like Correct the Record."

Fadi Quran: The leaders of these platforms have to listen because we're threatening their bottom line, we're threatening a big portion of their income. And for those in the industry, I'd say, when you go to marketing events, when you go to any type of event that includes these types of organizations, go up to them and tell them, as advertisers, we believe you have a responsibility. You should push platforms to move into X, Y, and Z direction.

Fadi Quran: No, those are the kind of three things I would focus on at this time period. There's a bigger picture, which I think is a challenge to all of us. And that's what is the social media that we want to create and that humanity deserves and will make humanity better. And there's a question, right? You know, we now have these companies that have their pros and a lot of cons. Is there a way for us to rethink social media? Not in a for profit model, but in a way to say, how can we bring humanity closer together using the technology that exists today? And we may need a revolution on that front. We may need a new type of social media that is built to serve humanity, not built to serve profits. And that's an open question.

Anil Dash: Fadi, I love you leaving us with a big question, because you've done so much of the groundwork of really digging into a problem that seems almost intractably complicated. And, you have the moral authority of tens of millions of people standing behind the work Avaaz does around the world. And also, of course, the moral authority of being able to take victims and let them in some ways confront people who've been complicit in their harm. And I think that's an extraordinary moment. In reading the report and then seeing the things you all have shared over the years, there is almost an optimism to it. Like it really feels like despite you talking about some of the worst things that happen, well Avaaz broadly, right? Some of the worst things that happened in the world, right? Some of the biggest challenges we face as societies.

Anil Dash: But then in this particular case about disinformation and technology, you're talking about one of the biggest problems that the technology world faces. And yet what I see kind of threaded through everything in the way you do this activism, the way you share these reports and the way you galvanize action is a bit of an optimism that you think change can happen and that you can have a positive impact. And I'm curious, you know, as maybe a final note, do you really see impact happening? Do you think we can fix problems this big, this severe?

Fadi Quran: Oh definitely. I mean, the problems we face are huge, but they're not intractable. And what gives us hope and optimism is people like you and the team that's developing this show, for example, you try to bring more information, more knowledge, open debate to society. That's a beautiful thing. And there are many, many, many people around the world who want to see a better world for their children, for themselves, for their loved ones and for their communities. And that's the source of our optimism, this broad and interconnected network of humanity who, no matter what they face, no matter the difficulties thrown at them, decide to persevere to create the world that we all seek and we all want. And so these problems will be solved. The question that we have is, can we solve them fast enough to limit the amount of pain caused by them? But we will solve them and we will overcome as a people, not just as an organization, not just as Avaaz, not just as a global community, but as a broader interconnection of humanity.

Anil Dash: Fadi, thank you so much for joining us on Function.

Anil Dash: This season of Function has been really personal for me. I mean, we started talking about trust on the internet and yeah, everybody cares about that, but what I've realized is we dove into it is I really give a damn about this because we've seen the consequences of what goes wrong when you can't trust technology. It's not abstract. It's not about just data and privacy. It's about people's lives being ruined. It's about really changing the world for the worse in big ways. We're talking about elections, we're talking about journalism, I'm talking about things that matter. And these consequences are felt by some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Anil Dash: Honestly, it makes me furious. It makes me mad as hell because one, I got into technology because I thought it was going to be a force for good, but two, I feel that burden. I feel that weight. I feel that responsibility. When I make technology, when I lead a technology company, that is my job, is to think about those things. So why the hell aren't these other people doing that? Especially when they've got a lot more resources and a lot more reach. I see some of the most vulnerable people thinking deeply about these questions. I see activists doing the work, trying to hold technology companies accountable.

Anil Dash: But I don't yet see the leaders at the big companies really feeling the pain yet. And it comes back to one of the topics Fadi talked about in this episode where we discussed the idea of whether people should feel uncomfortable when they're at a cocktail party, if they mentioned that they work at one of these social media companies. And that's a good place to start. I mean, yes, we need policy and regulation. Yes, we need to see Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress. Yes, we need all kinds of methods of accountability and maybe some of it is deleting some apps off our phones.

Anil Dash: But I think a lot of it comes down to the personal level. We really, really have to think about how individual people can put pressure on those who are creating technology to say, "This matters and you have a choice and you need to be the ones to make a change."

Anil Dash: It's especially personal to me because I started talking about this stuff like 10 years ago, maybe more, and at the time I felt like I was honestly burning down my entire career in Silicon Valley. I left San Francisco with people literally saying to me, "You will never work in this town again." All for offering criticisms that now, well, everybody thinks they're common sense. Yeah, of course it's a little creepy what these companies are doing. Yeah, of course they should be a little more accountable. And I'm not saying that like, "Oh, I was ahead of my time, I got this thing right." I think there were a lot of people that got it right. I think there were a lot of people that were waving red flags.

Anil Dash: But it took time for society to change. It took time for society to catch up and to see some of those risks and those harms. And lots and lots of people got hurt along the way. Lots of people. They didn't need to, they didn't need to be. It didn't have to be this way. So the urgency, the fight now is because we can't let more people get hurt.

Anil Dash: And the funny thing is, even though all these stories we've heard about, the harms that people face when confronting technology that they can't trust. Those things get me down. But every single one of these stories also has an element of hope for me. There's an optimism. Because I listened to the activists, I listened to the researchers, I listened to the experts and they all talk about solutions. They all talk about things we can actually do. Especially that idea of holding technology accountable.

Anil Dash: I see increasing movements of people saying, "I want to be personally accountable about what I make and what I put out in the world." And those are the seeds that are planted that are going to grow into what I think are going to be movements and I hope those are what flourish. I hope that's something we can all take action on. Because the truth is even when I lose faith, I still do think technology is a force for good. I think that's what it was meant to be and I think if we can all join together and holding people's feet to the fire, especially the people that make these big technology platforms. And hopefully tech can be as good for us as we were promised it would be in the beginning.

Anil Dash: Function is produced by Bridget Armstrong, our Glitch producers, Kesha TK Dutes. Nishat Kurwa is the Executive Producer of Audio for the Vox Media Podcast Network and our theme music was composed by Brandon McFarland. Thanks to [inaudible 00:44:05] and the engineering team at Vox. And huge thanks to our team at Glitch. You can follow me on Twitter @anildash and you can follow the show @podcastfunction and we do read all of our mentions. We listen to everything you say. So share your ideas and your feedback.

Anil Dash: You can also visit glitch.com/function, we've got full transcripts of every episode. There's even apps for certain episodes. It's really cool to check out. Thank you so much for listening to Function this season. If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate and review the show. It makes a big, big difference and stay subscribed to Function because we've got bonus episodes and interviews coming up too.

What happens when social networks become social media, and tech starts making editorial decisions?

Anil talks with NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen about the priorities of tech companies and how their faux neutrality and feigned ignorance has taken a toll on our news cycles and elections. Together, they identify the problems that the press is facing, like attention hacking and misinformation, in order to focus on how the press and us as citizens can reclaim “the news” and what they care about.

How to Save the 2020 Election: Journalism and Social Media

Anil Dash: Welcome to Function. I'm Anil Dash. All season long, we've been talking about trust on the internet. Whether we've got it, and how it gets broken. I'm super interested in that topic, because the internet and social media are so embedded in our lives. All of us rely on it for our work, to stay connected to our family and friends, and especially just to understand the world around us. These days, two thirds of Americans say that they get at least some of their news, from social media.

Anil Dash: Those social networks weren't originally created to enable news to be shared. Sure, you could always post a link on Facebook or Twitter since they've been around, and I know because I was on them pretty much from the beginning. But the people making the technology really saw that as no different than sharing a photo or anything else. They didn't have a special treatment for news. Then things evolved over time.

Anil Dash: You know, really out of good intent. They thought they want to make it easier to discover things, or they wanted to make sure to emphasize the information that's most important to you. But they made algorithms that started to make decisions about what information we see, and when. Which sources are considered credible or not. These are choices and a choice about what information matters, and what information is accurate. That's an editorial choice.

Anil Dash: You know, I used to work at a newspaper. That was the decisions that editors were making. So what you've got is, the major tech companies, the social media platforms, making journalistic decisions about the world. Even though, well, pretty much none of the people making those decisions were journalists. They were computer programmers, or product managers, or designers, all well-intentioned. I really do think they wanted to do good, but the reality is you can't do well in a very complicated field that you know nothing about. We saw the results of those choices in 2016.

Donald Trump: I've just received a call from secretary Clinton. She congratulated us, it's about us, on our victory.

Speaker 2: I'm sickened, I'm without words. I thought for sure that Hillary would win this election, that Hillary would win Florida.

Speaker 3: Social media played a huge part in the 2016 election. It was used to get the message out, but then candidate Trump-

Speaker 4: What we're talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election, and sew conflict and discontent, all over this country.

Speaker 5: Starting in 2014, Cambridge Analytica funded a personality test on Facebook, and paid people to take it. The alleged goal, influence the views of the American electorate.

Anil Dash: The election surprised everybody, but also prompted this deeper examination into the impact that technology broadly, and social media specifically, were having on our lives. Tech is suddenly realizing it has to confront the value of journalism in society, but also the challenges of making it happen.

Anil Dash: There's also the question of how journalism has adapted. As soon as that question came up, I thought the one person I'd most want to talk to about this is a professor of journalism at NYU, Jay Rosen. He's written a couple of different books about journalism in this new era.

Jay Rosen: I studied the press as an institution, and the pressures that come to bear on it.

Anil Dash: Social media has fundamentally changed the way that news is disseminated these days. So I talked to Jay to find out how we got here and also where we go from here. I'm very glad to welcome Jay Rosen.

Anil Dash: There are people that have this deep and abiding reverence for journalism as an institution, and almost like a priesthood, and that you have to protect it. You've never had that. You've, you've always been a little bit challenging of that. I think one of the seminal sort of phrases, that to me sort of typified your challenge of, okay, what is journalism's role in the ecosystem and how do people within this institution see themselves, was the view from nowhere? Can you sort of, for people who may not be familiar, can you succinctly describe the view from nowhere?

Jay Rosen: Well, that's my term for very well known pattern in the American press, but also other countries press, where journalists tried to persuade us to believe in them by making a claim like this, "I don't have a stake, I don't have an interest. I don't have an assumption. I don't have a party."

Jay Rosen: I have no dog in this fight. I'm just telling you the way it is, so you should believe it because I have no view.

Anil Dash: My impartiality is my credential.

Jay Rosen: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I sometimes called this viewlessness, as a presumed good. So it happened within the evolution of American journalism, that this became the dominant way to persuade people to accept your account, is to demonstrate that it has no stake, interest, bias in. So not only was a profession built on that claim, but a market force was built on that claim, which is the metropolitan newspaper, which eventually became more or less a monopoly product by appealing to everyone. So there was a commercial logic to it.

Jay Rosen: There was a status logic to it, which is in American culture, if you want higher status, you can make more money, but also you have to start acting like a profession. You have to say that you would deliver a public good, that you had some sort of elevated roles, elevated commitment, you see? What is that based on? Like how do you persuade Americans that you offer a public good?

Anil Dash: So there's a rhetoric or a narrative that you have to perform, you have to say, if you want America to believe that your institution, your business, your industry, is good and important, and must be defended. It seems like the sort of the pillars of that are one, there is a public, two, you're serving that public, and three, you do so from above the fray. Being neutral, having no point of view. And it's interesting because it's been more than a dozen years since you sort of formed this narrative of-

Anil Dash: ... view from nowhere. Even if it's not phrased that way, that framing of the political discourse of the cultural discourse, has become all pervasive. Everybody sort of intuitively knows it. These days I think it's usually phrased as bothsidesism, right?

Anil Dash: So if we have a, a white supremacist gathering, then the news has to say, "Well we got to hear from both sides." It ignores sort of the value that even attention and amplification in an ecosystem, have value, separate from even what the substance of the messages.

Jay Rosen: Right. That is one example of many, where the view from nowhere as I have called it, breaks down or doesn't address what's going on. So that's what I've tried to do, is name the part of what academics would call newsroom objectivity or professional objectivity. Name the part of it that we don't really need, so that we can save the parts of it that are good. So like when people talk about objectivity in journalism, it means a lot of different things. Some of them I think are like, "Yeah, these are virtues." Like being able to step back from your upbringing and see how other people live, that's a kind of objectivity. Like I definitely want journalist who can do that, right?

Jay Rosen: So what we have to do with this beast objectivity, which is like this, it's like a blob, is you have to start naming the parts of it that work and the parts that don't. So that's why I developed-

Anil Dash: Yeah, it didn't come off a bad impulse. They didn't- [crosstalk 00:08:40].

Anil Dash: They didn't aspire to this objectivity.

Jay Rosen: No. Many things that are called objectivity, are the impulse to tell the truth, to get evidence to show you don't have to rely just on my word, look for yourself. All those things, increase objectivity. The kind of objectivity we don't need is when the journalists pretends to be above it all. When they treat everyone else as if everyone else has an argument, but they just have facts. These kinds of patterns don't do the press any good. They enrage users, and then with the coming of internet as the baseline for discourse on this, the people who are really dissatisfied by press practice have a way to give voice to them. That you know, it's different than when there are an atomized group that can't contact each other.

Anil Dash: Right. Now all of a sudden they can say, "Do you feel this way too? Do you feel disconnected too."[Crosstalk 00:09:32]

Jay Rosen: There's evidence that many other people feel this way, and they can "talk back", and writers emerge that represent their dissatisfactions. All that's a very different environment than when I started studying the press. But the view from nowhere is increasingly under attack by events themselves, as well as lots of critics, as well as a general evolution in the way people think about this. That yeah, you know, there probably isn't a place above all the action from which to work, from which to view it.

Jay Rosen: Yeah. Probably not a good thing to go about like claiming that.

Anil Dash: So thank you for that framework because that gives us a sort of a common ground, where we have a vocabulary now, we have a perspective. There's an interesting thing here too, because one of the reasons it's so important to me to understand journalism and media institutions as a starting point, is that we talk about a lot of technology as social media. It used to be called social networking, and even before that social software in the tradition of, Microsoft Word on Windows in the 90s.

Anil Dash: You fast forward 20 years from there, and what we have with media is a whole different set of assumptions. But also people building this technology, frame what they do, in the language of media and journalism. So Mark Zuckerberg goes to Congress and talks about serving the public.

Mark Zuckerburg: Our policy is that we do not fact check politician's speech, and the reason for that is, that we believe that in a democracy it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying.

Mark Zuckerburg: Exactly right. We didn't have conversations about freedom of speech, when Microsoft was making Microsoft Word in the 90s, and you were copying it off of a floppy disc onto your computer. So, something changed to make technology media. Again, Bill Gates, when he was sitting in front of Congress and being examined by the Department of Justice, these issues never came out. He didn't ever have to talk about freedom of speech, freedom of expression, our first amendment rights. Like that stuff didn't come up.

Mark Zuckerburg: Zuckerberg, it seems like every six months, is awkwardly drinking water while sweating it out in front of the cameras in Congress, and keeps going back to these trips. So that seems like a radical shift. Yet, all these folks are still, well in their case they're both dropouts, for Gates and Zuckerberg. But for the rest of them, are folks that have computer science degrees, and have probably never once sat in a room of a journalism school or taken a journalism class, or have any fluency in media. That's weird. Right?

Jay Rosen: Well, it is because what started as a technology company with a engineering culture, and origin on a college campus, gradually came to be a media company, or a company that disrupts, pardon the expression, media hugely. Just as it became, slightly different term, it became I think an editorial company, when for example, it began explicitly hiring journalists to do journalistic things. You are an editorial company, right?

Anil Dash: Right. When YouTube chooses what's on their homepage, they're an editorial company.

Jay Rosen: Yes, in some way they are. When Twitter says, "We're going to do Moments now, and hire journalists to curate them," you just created a newsroom.

Anil Dash: And send you notifications about them.

Anil Dash: It's the same as the push notification for the New York Times in a way.

Jay Rosen: I think this will address your question. When Twitter first announced that this team was being hired, and they were going to do this thing, which became Moments, and they now curate. I happened to have been booked to interview Twitter's Head of News, just by chance. So it was the day that this was announced and I said,-

Jay Rosen: "I'm really fascinated by this team of journalists you've hired. I think it's a really interesting direction for Twitter. In my view, this is actually the moment when Twitter has kind of crossed over into an editorial company. So you're the Head of News, I want to know when Twitter does this, when it creates an editorial culture inside a tech company, what vision of journalism is it operating from? What tradition does it see itself as standing within?"

Jay Rosen: "What's your conceptual model, and also what are your priorities? Where are you coming from?" So I just asked a very general question like that. Like, "What are you thinking when you..." and what I observed was that there was literally no way to get an answer to that. They had literally not thought about that. They instead had done something very, very predictable, very easy to do, which is to simply say, well what do you mean, we are hiring professionals? They're going to exercise their professional judgment.

Anil Dash: Huh. That's really interesting because in technology, if you say, "We are Apple, and we're going to make a better camera in the iPhone," and then you say, "What is it going to be able to do?" "Oh, it's going to work at low light, and low light means this much, this many candle power and lux, and whatever, and it's going to be able to pick up the colors" and that's it, right? So you're given this answer, which is very knowable. But if you said iPhone 14 is going to have a better camera, and they said, "Well, in what way?" and they said, "Well, we're going to hire professionals, and they're going to make a camera, and how dare you interrogate our magic." It would be a little weird, wouldn't it?

Jay Rosen: Yeah. But nonetheless, this was a perfectly fine answer from the Head of News's, his point of view, from Twitter's point of view.

Anil Dash: Because that was their mandate. Their mandate was like, give us-

Jay Rosen: Give us some professional credit here. [crosstalk 00:15:21] Now I was very surprised, for example, that they didn't say something like when they gave rise to Moments, it became a kind of an editorial company, that they didn't say, for example, that universal human rights were part of a part of their grounding. You know, because Twitter is very associated with that in other ways. That would seem like a natural to me, if you had, right?

Function with Anil Dash

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