Behind the Bastards - Part One: Mark Zuckerberg Should Be On Trial For Crimes Against Humanity

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus for an update on the crimes of Mark Zuckerberg. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-millions-members-facebook-documents-show-n1236317  https://archive.is/rCvAy#selection-1323.0-1327.269 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo  https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-failed-kenosha?bfsource=relatedmanual https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employee-leaks-show-they-feel-betrayed https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-zuckerberg-what-if-trump-disputes-election-results?bfsource=relatedmanual  https://www.instagram.com/p/CAQ6NpFA-au/?utm_source=ig_embed  https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-explained-augustus-caesar-2019 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/12/what-attracts-mark-zuckerberg-roman-hardman-augustus  https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia/  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg897a/hate-speech-on-facebook-is-pushing-ethiopia-dangerously-close-to-a-genocide  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007MAXH38/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's digging graves for my democracy? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people in all of history. My guest this week for a very special two-parter is the inimitable, which I've introduced you as the inimitable, the very close to Emmy-winning Jamie Loftus.

I lost to Forky, Robert. I don't know who that is, which means you won in my book. I knew I was like, there's no way that Robert knows who Forky is, and that is going to give me peace. I don't know who Forky is. I don't want to know who Forky is. Is it someone the teens like, because you know what I hate is the teens. I don't hate the teens. The teens are obsessed with Forky. They love the Forky.

It's TikTok and Forky. They need their TikTok, they need their cold brew, and they need their Forky. Does this have something to do with whatever 100 gecks is? What is that? It's some music thing that the teens love. The teens who are always starting the fires love 100 gecks. And I love the teens who are always starting the fires. From the teens in Portland. Wait, it's from the fire teens. Wait, is Forky literally a fork?

No, he was a spork. I just... The thing with Forky is I ordered a Forky and I'm going to throw it. I'm going to like, smash it up. I don't need to be a good sport about losing to Forky. No, no, fuck that noise. Let's find his home address and commit federal. I mean, sorry. You crack Forky down and I'm going to commit a crime.

Yeah. I was like, I wonder how many times I would do it. And Minecraft. Oh, the teens love their Minecraft. No, I mean, I'm just saying you should only talk about committing crimes in Minecraft because then you can't get in trouble if you do commit the crime later. That's the way the law works. Well, I've been kicked off of Twitter for threatening the life of someone fictional before.

So I'm wondering if it, if it would happen with Forky, but it seems like Jack is in full agreement that Forky's got to go. Yeah. You know who else has to go, Jimmy? Guess who else has committed crimes and definitely has to go. I opened this episode, you know, saying who's, who's the digging graves from my democracy, you know, and sort of the, you know, that's kind of a little play on my,

one of the ways I introduced the show. Well, the person who's digging graves for our democracy is Mark Zuckerberg. And we have another two-parter about him today. Wow. Yeah, that's right. I can't believe you're doing this to me. Yeah. Yeah.

I wrote another like 10,000 words about Mark Zuckerberg just for you, Jamie. He's done two episodes worth of crime since we last spoke, I think about him. Yeah. He's done more than that. I had to leave like there's, I just finished writing last night and there was still like four articles worth of stuff to include that. I was just like, well, I'm not getting to this because I have to sleep.

Listen, we're all, we're all entitled to sleep. I have wear this. I ordered a horrible shirt with Mark Zuckerberg on it the last time we covered him and I wear it all the time. It's all worn in. Yeah. All the crimes. What with all the crimes?

Yeah. Well, let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg. So we've talked about Mark and his creation Facebook quite a lot on this show already. Last year we did a three-part series on the son of a bitch, but a lot has happened since then and Mark himself has only grown more dangerous. And I, so yeah, we have to talk about him again and his company. And I think that in order to properly tell this story, we're going to need to go back to Mark's backstory because there's a rather critical part of it and a part of

his psychological profile that I left out during the last series of episodes because I'm a hack and a fraud. So I missed this last time. It's well known. But it connects some dots that I think are important, especially in the context. It didn't have to do with him not fucking at Harvard. No. No.

I mean, a lot has to do with him not fucking at Harvard, but this is not specifically about him, although it probably played into the fact that nobody wanted to fuck him at Harvard slash ever. So yeah, let's, we're going to go back in time to what I think is Jamie's favorite period of history, the childhood of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh yeah. I go there in my dreams. Yeah.

We all, yep. In particular, we're going to be talking about his high school years at Williams Exeter Academy. Now at present tuition there costs a little less than $45,000 a year for the day school, which is more than the average American makes. Yeah. As you might expect, young Mark spent a lot of his time there coding, fencing and studying Latin, which is like two out of three things that I did in high school too. So, you know, whatever.

Yeah. The crime of being forced to study Latin, I'll never get over it. Yeah. So it ruined my life except for that one time we got to watch Life of Brian in class, which I feel like the teacher was stretching and justifying, but I was grateful for. So Mark was in particular a really big fan of studying Latin. Unlike us, he loved it. And his study of the language bred a fascination with the history of ancient Rome.

And again, I kind of find this interesting because that's like the opposite of how it happened to me. And because I was a huge history nerd about Roman history, and then I stopped liking Roman history as much because I was so bored of Latin class. Yeah. So Mark fell in love with the language because learning it was fairly similar to coding. And then he kind of fell in love with the history next. And he later explained to a reporter, quote, you have all these good and bad and complex

figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Now, Jamie, the Augustus he's talking about was Augustus Caesar, who is the guy who became the very first Roman emperor in 31 BC. He was Julius Caesar's heir. And yeah, he was Julius Caesar's heir. And he was just 17 years old when his mentor died. And suddenly he found himself in control of like Caesar's armies and like fighting for

control of Rome. And basically kind of as a result of this spent almost his entire life in power. And by the time he was finally emperor, his which like took some years, you know, Caesar dies and there's a bunch of wars and stuff. Like so by the time he's like emperor in his 20s, like the idea like any memory of his life, like think back to when you were like 25, how well you remembered being 15, right? 16 years old, not at all. So by the time he's emperor, like Augustus is like everything that isn't commanding armies

and controlling the destiny of millions would have been like a dim memory. Oh, that sounds healthy. You can see why you can see why Mark has continued after getting out of high school to kind of identify with this guy. Because both of them are people who like, well, they're, you know, very young adults come into unbelievable power and exercise. And largely misuse it. Yeah.

Mark would not say that Augustus largely misused it. Well, of course not. Now, Augustus did go on to become one of the longest serving emperors in Roman history. And he's generally remembered as one of the best, although this is mainly because he hired all of the like a bunch of broke authors and poets to write the history of his reign as opposed to like historians are increasingly critical of Augustus as they analyze actual history and not just like read whatever, I think it was Swatonius just wrote about it. Yeah.

It's like a hiring like fanfic writers on Fiverr.com to be like, hey, hey, hey. That's literally what the Aeneid is. You know, the Aeneid is like the poem, like it's a ripoff of the Iliad that's supposed to be about the founding of Rome that connects it to the sacking of Troy and was written largely as like largely to glorify Augustus because it was like making the case that his ancestors were all these fucking cool ass people. It's always so frustrating to me that when things like the Aeneid are treated as like unquestionable primary source where it's like, no, people were fucking around with the portrayal

of history always. It was propaganda even more shallow than our propaganda is today. I fell asleep reading it when I was 14. It's it's also bad. It's a bad book. It's boring. It's boring as hell. Unlike the Iliad, which which absolutely slaps like pretty good book.

All things considered. Good shit in there. Some good ideas. Good shit in there. Some pathos. Fuck the Aeneid and Virgil. I don't know. I only remember like half of this stuff and I did check up on that.

I bet he had a ghost writer. Fuck Virgil. I mean, he kind of was the emperor's ghost writer. Anyway, whatever. So yeah, Augustus like propaganda, like hires a bunch of propagandists to make it look like he was he was like, awesome. And that's part of why we remember him as being amazing and part of why Mark is obsessed with him.

And one of the things that's interesting about Augustus is that his birth name was actually Octavian. He took the name Augustus because it meant lofty or serene and he needed everybody to know how cool he was. So it's not it's not hard to see why young Mark would have like both idolized and identified with this guy. By the time he was 30 Augustus controlled basically the entire Western world and Mark Zuckerberg by the time he was 30 controlled an online empire larger than the entire Western world.

He controlled my entire self-esteem for a good half a decade. Yeah. Yeah. And destroyed all of journalism. Anyway. So yeah. So again, you can see like why why Mark idolizes this guy because he's had a lifelong fascination with him in an interview with the New Yorker.

Zuckerberg explained quote, basically through a really harsh approach, he being Augustus established 200 years of world peace. What are the tradeoffs in that? Zuckerberg said growing animated. On one hand, world peace is a long term goal that people talk about today. 200 years feels unattainable. On the other hand, he said that didn't come for free and he had to do certain things. No.

Very funny. Honestly, I got to be you kind of lost me for a second at becoming animated because I cannot really imagine. I can imagine like for him. The only thing that makes him that makes him show human emotion is thinking about dominating the entire world and forcing it into to act the way he wants it to like imagining himself as dictator of the planet is the only thing that brings him excitement. It's what it's what his wife has to like whisper into his ears in order to help in order to

make a child with it. I guess I guess world leaders can have very weak arms. I don't know. Do you think he spits when he talks? Yes. Yes. It's either I feel the same way about how I always think of like, does beetle juice come wet scabs or dry scabs?

I could picture him having a very wet mouth or a very dry mouth. I also think he's a heavy breather. Yeah. He's a nightmare all around. I think we can all agree on that. Sure. But what's most important to note at this point is that Mark Zuckerberg, number one, Augustus and this idea that he brought world peace for 200 years, very important to Mark,

important for him to talk about to journalists and stuff, something he really makes a point of getting out completely inaccurate, wildly inaccurate. There's a number of reasons it's wildly inaccurate for one thing. Like he's talking about he's when he says 200 years of peace, he's talking about 200 years of peace and like the Mediterranean and Western Europe. He's not talking about China. He's not talking about Southeast Asia. He's not talking about Japan.

He's not talking about North America, South America, the Caribbean, all of which were places that had wars and conflicts during this period. Because again, Mark is fundamentally incapable of like, like a lot of Americans, fundamentally incapable about thinking of thinking about those places as as real as as Western history. Yeah. So number one, that's that's a problem right from the jump. But even within the context, even if we give him credit and saying like he's saying,

no, no, he had 200 years of peace within sort of the classical ancient world. That's also complete horseshit because yeah, I'm going to just read a short list of some of the wars that Rome got involved with during the 200 years after Augustus came to power. Hit it. The Roman Parthian War of 58 to 63. Boudicca's uprising, this was like that, that, that English Queen who like led an uprising against Rome. Okay.

60 to 61. It's close together. The first Jewish Roman War, 66 to 73. This is 80. Sorry. The Roman Civil War of 68 to 69 AD. Demidean's Dachlan War, 86 to 88. The first Dacian War, 100 and one to 102.

The second Dacian War, 105 to 106. The Roman Persian Wars, which started in the mid or in the early hundreds. The Kitos War, the second Jewish Revolt from 132 to 135. The Marco Manic Wars from 166 to 180. And of course, the Roman Civil War of 193 to 197. And again. Well, I mean, I think if you put those 20 or so. 200 years of peace.

It's totally peaceful. Yeah, other than all of the wars I just listed. It was a period of total peace. It's like saying after World War II, the U.S. presided over like half a century of global peace. If we ignore the millions who died in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Korea. And of course, all of the hundreds of thousands, potentially millions who died in Latin America. Half a century of peace. Complete peace.

Total peace. I mean, to be fair, he went to Phillips Exeter Academy. So his brain is a bunch of worms and a few empty D batteries. Yeah, his history education was his teacher jacking off with a flag and asking if the class had any questions. Phillips Exeter Academy sucks. There was a boy that was supposed to take me to a skating rink from there once and then he didn't show up. Well, that's all I have to do to urge that people burn down Phillips Exeter Academy. This is, in fact, an incitement to a crime, please.

On behalf of Jamie, not for the Mark Zuckerberg stuff. No. To defend your... Just avenge my date from 2007. Avenge your date from 2007. Wow, 2007. I forget you're younger than me. So, yeah.

So those are... That is a short list of some of the wars that occurred in that 200-year period that Mark describes as world peace. Those were not the only violent conflicts during that period. And outside of those wars, there were a fuckload of battles and campaigns that Roman soldiers fought and died in during this period. Because there were just a lot of times where Romans... There would be a battle that was this conflict. Anyway, my favorite of these conflicts, and I think one that we need to talk about before we get back into the story of Mark Zuckerberg. Because I think this is relevant.

My favorite of these battles that happened during Augustus' 200 years of peace is the Battle of Tudorberg Forest. Have you ever heard of the Battle of Tudorberg Forest? No, good name, though. Yeah, you might also call it why you should never fuck with the Germans. And this happened kind of later on in Augustus' reign when he was an older man. And the basic story is that this general named Varys leads three entire Roman legions, which whole nations were destroyed by forces of that side. Three Roman legions is about 18,000 men and a massively competent armed force.

The Roman legion is the deadliest weapon in the world at this period of time. So this guy Varys, in order to kind of push the Roman borders eastward, and basically is a way to like they've been having issues with these Germanic tribes. Varys is going in there with this massive army to just like fuck shit up and show the Germans who is boss. But they wind up in the middle of these deep, dark German forests, and they're led into an ambush by a German soldier, a guy named Arminius, who actually had gained Roman citizenship, but was like, yeah, working for the other team. And it's this horrible, one of the, one of like the five or six great military disasters in all of human history.

The entire Roman army is massacred, leaving behind a pile of bones that are still being discovered to this day. It was one of the great defeats in Rome's long history, and it basically stopped Rome's expansion to the east. Like this is, this is an incredibly, like it's just a nightmarish military defeat, and it's an incredibly significant battle. And it came after decades of what had been continuous expansion for Augustus, right? He'd gotten used to everything working for him militarily, and then there's just this complete calamitous defeat. And the loss of so many of Rome's best soldiers in a single battle is said by historians to have kind of broken the emperor's mind. One of his own, like private paid historians, wrote that for weeks afterwards,

he would just wander around his palace in a daze, slamming his head into doors and screaming, Varus, give me back my legions. Okay, I will say that this is very similar to what I've been doing with Forky for the past day. Yeah, you can really empathize with Augustus here. Yeah, okay, now I'm starting to see his side of things. In a way, haven't we all gotten 18,000 Italians killed in the woods of Germany? I know I have. 18,000 Italians living in my mind.

Yeah, we're all Italians anyway. So, yeah, so this is a battle that's important, I think, to understand, in part because it occurs during the 200 years of peace, and in part because Augustus is a figure that reminds me a lot of Mark Zuckerberg, and what happened to him in this defeat, the hubris that led him there, is something that I think will happen to Mark eventually. I don't know what Mark's Tudorberg world will be. I don't think it was Cambridge Analytica, but I think it is coming.

Yeah, and I'm sure Mark knows that story. He has to. It's one of the most famous stories in all of Roman history. He's a nerd about this stuff. He absolutely knows about that battle. I've never seen him talk about it, though, but he talks about Augustus a lot. He did note that during that New Yorker article that he and his fiance,

now wife, Priscilla, spent their honeymoon in Rome, quote, my wife was making fun of me saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon, me, her, and Augustus. All of the photos were different sculptures of Augustus. Yeah, they go on vacation to Rome for their honeymoon, and he just keeps taking pictures of sculptures of this dead asshole, because he thinks that he's the new emperor of the world. Wow.

Imagine having your decision. He's going to bring peace. Priscilla having her bad decision shoved in her face over and over, every time they pass. I mean, she's a billionaire now. I mean, she's also the worst. Yeah, I don't have any sympathy for her, really. God.

Yeah. But I do believe, I do believe, like a lot of, you always have to kind of second guess things that Mark says in interviews because he's a liar and because he's trying to get out a propaganda narrative, much like Augustus was by hiring all of those poets to write his story. But I think Mark's being honest when he talks about his fascination with Augustus, because number one, have you seen the picture of him getting that fucking, he keeps getting the haircut.

He keeps getting the fucking haircut that like Augustus has, like the Roman emperor haircut. Is that why he has that shitty haircut? Yes, it is. He makes his wife give it to him. That's so embarrassing. It's the worst thing that's ever happened. And there's a photo as a result of the coronavirus epidemic.

He had his wife start giving him the fucking weird Rome haircut that he gets, the weird Augustus type haircut, the Octavian or whatever. I'm sending you a picture right now. We'll have it up on the site. And it's just his eyes are, he has the dead eyes. Oh, his eyes are made of marble. That's seen in jaws, like dead eyes, like a doll's eyes. He's got a little chuck.

Like Chuck is a more emotive character than him. That is so dark. It is. It's horrible. That's a really funny. He does not have the hairline for that haircut. No, no one has. Like it was a bad haircut for the emperor's to have.

I've seen this question kind of asked about a few times. I saw it most recently asked by Julia Clare. Like, why are all billionaires? Like, why can't they afford to like look okay? Like, why can't they not afford to look okay? Because I don't think any of them, there's a couple of them that I think generally, like, like Richard Branson and Mark Cuban all are able to like dress like human beings. But then you have the guys like, you have like Elon Musk, Bill Gates,

Mark Zuckerberg, who all look like they were like poured into like a skin suit. And I don't know what the difference is because there are clearly some of these guys who are able to at least like imitate being like a person. Mark Cuban does a decent impression of a human being. But he knows how people are supposed to dress. He has a basic concept of like human beings do this. Sometimes he says words in an order. Yeah.

And in a way, are we all pretending to be John Cena? Yeah. I would like Mark Zuckerberg a lot better if he were pretending to be John Cena, but he's pretending to be an emperor with a shitty haircut. I mean, that does answer questions that I had. That is helpful information. Yeah, I don't know what's going on. But yeah, so he's just also the name their second daughter August.

So like whatever. This is Mark's weird thing. I think he's being honest about it. Yeah. And it's it makes sense for him to this to have been like a childhood fascination of him because one of the things you find when you look into people who knew Mark is that kind of since he was a kid, he has always seen himself as rising to greatness.

Which is this kind of narcissism that I think is born from growing up and growing up male, white and upper middle class in a place where mostly affluent people live and then going to a school where they tell you you're gifted. Like a lot of kids wind up with the same sort of delusions of grandeur. Reality has indulged Mark's for so for some time. But like one of his childhood friends told that interview with the New Yorker quote, I think Mark has always seen himself as a man of history, someone who is destined to be great.

And I mean that in the broadest sense of the term, which is a terrible thing to be because when you're that kind of person, you will do almost anything to try to make the reality outside your head correspond with the expectations within it. And Mark has done that. So speaking of history, Jamie, we just talked about some of that. Mark or Facebook at least has made a bit of history since we last discussed Mark and his creation.

There's been new milestones for membership and for page engagement that have been hit, which I'm sure you're very excited about. Especially with this big election coming up. I cannot wait. All sorts of good stuff. But I think some really productive, useful conversation going on as well. It seems like things are very healthy. And speaking of healthy, I think the thing that I want to talk to you,

the history that Facebook has been responsible for that I want to talk about right now is what it's brought to Ethiopia. Have you heard anything about Facebook's recent performance in Ethiopia and what's happened there? I've heard a little bit. I've heard a little bit. I mean, Facebook in any way, I learned most about, which I think we talked about last time was Facebook and Myanmar,

but the Ethiopia stuff, I've got to catch up. Yeah, I don't want to like spoil it right away because it's a fun story, but it rhymes with Schmethnick cleansing. Oh, that was what they were doing over in Myanmar. Yeah. It keeps happening to countries who have Facebook in them. Interesting. Yeah.

So Facebook has been popular in a number of African nations for quite a while now. And in many of these countries like Ethiopia, the internet is basically a synonym for Facebook to millions of people because it's just like the way they interface with the internet. Like Facebook and the internet are the same thing. They don't use a browser. They see everything through Facebook. And despite the popularity of Facebook in Ethiopia,

the country and in Africa in general, because it's become increasingly popular across the entire continent, but despite its popularity, Facebook only opened its first content moderation center on the continent in 2019, which is a problem because Africa is enormous. Like it fits a couple in North America is in there. Yeah. You probably should have had a content center somewhere on the fucking continent.

Like you should have one in every country you're doing business in, but you only added one to just one on the fucking continent in 2019, which is absurd. I mean, not surprising from that come, but like that's just, yeah. Now they promised to hire a hundred people to work there through third party companies. And we don't know if they've actually done that. Number one, it's sketchy that it continues to be through third party companies, which is what Facebook does.

Interesting that they're just continuing this whole third party company thing. Doesn't seem like it's gone very well for them in the past. Yeah. That way if an employee makes a decision that gets people killed, it's not a Facebook employee that made a decision that gets got people killed. And so they don't have to care about it, which is very ethical. And then they can release a really cute statement that they're like, we had no idea and we're like really random person made a mistake.

How could we have? Yeah. Fuck you. Human error. Yeah. Yeah. You know what doesn't make errors, Jamie? Products or services.

Products, services and, you know, our longtime sponsor, Raytheon. You might have heard some news lately, Jamie, about how Raytheon's had to live a lot of employees. Okay. You know, Sophie, your antipathy towards the Raytheon Corporation is well noted. But I want to ask you to imagine a world without Raytheon. Imagine a world where children in Afghanistan are able to go to bed at night and not live in terror that clear skies will bring the attack of a predator drone

that could wipe out the entire family. Imagine school buses in Yemen, not being blown up by missiles fired by people in control stations somewhere in a desert in Nevada using Raytheon's wonderful technology. Imagine missiles that aren't full of knives. You know, I don't want to live in that world, which is why I choose to buy Raytheon and why I think you should choose listeners to buy Raytheon too. I'm sorry, I didn't hear anything you said. Raytheon?

I was thinking about nacho cheese Doritos. You know, if Raytheon made Doritos, they would kill a lot of school children in Yemen. Anyway, here's products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Oh my gosh. I don't know about the rest of you, but those products and services really... I just took a hit of Raytheon. Yeah, I've been huffing Raytheon so hard that I... I keep my Raytheon in a little rag and I just shove it against my face. Yeah, I put it in a rag like the paint that I also huff. Once I'm out of paint glue.

Raytheon and huffing paint. Allies in reality abation. That sounds like a really rich person's name. Raytheon huffing paint. Yeah, that's how the rich people huff. So, yeah, Facebook sets up this data center. It's first and only one in Africa. They promised to hire a hundred people and we don't know if they even hired a hundred people to work there. Is there any confirmation that that happens? No, no, because they don't have to be open about any of this. We also don't know which regions of the country any of those folks would have specialized in, which languages they might have spoken.

Again, Africa is the size of several North Americas. There's an enormous variety of nations and cultures and conflicts. Like, I would say anything less than a couple of thousand people focusing on content in that continent would seem just so irresponsible as to be purely ornamental. And like thousands, like a couple of thousand people probably honestly isn't enough because of how many millions of, like, yeah. It's too big a responsibility for a few hundred employees to even take over the context for it. For a hundred employees. That's absurd. Yeah. Yeah, it's just unbelievably shoddy worksmanship they had in, yeah.

So, again, and because Facebook doesn't have to be open about anything, we don't even know which areas of the country were represented by the content moderation team. Vice reports, though, that Facebook's community standards, like the list of their standards, has not been translated into either of Ethiopia's two main languages, which suggests they don't have anybody in the continent who can functionally monitor what's happening in Ethiopia. The company has no full-time employees in the country. Now, this is a problem because Ethiopia, like many countries, has a number of bad actors in its national political scene. And a lot of ethnic conflicts that have been exacerbated by Facebook. One of the bad actors in Ethiopia is a guy named Jawar Mohamed, who is an ethno-nationalist, an eromo ethno-nationalist from the Aromia region of the country. And the Eromo are, like, like one of the peoples in the region or in the country that we call Ethiopia.

And Jamar has started, like, a private TV network based on his success in Facebook. He's got, like, 1.75 million followers on the site, so he's extremely popular. He's a big content creator who basically got famous as a result of his ability to use and manipulate Facebook. And one of his big things is regularly urging people to do horrible violence to folks who are not eromo in Ethiopia. This is a popular approach. Yeah, it keeps happening all over the world, and Facebook keeps failing at handling it. On October 23rd, 2019, he took to Facebook and fired off a series of posts claiming he was about to be arrested by the police for some of his political statements. This appears to have been a lie, but it brought huge crowds of his supporters out into the street, like massive numbers of people.

And they start, horrible violence starts, right? The cops come out and the police wind up killing more than a dozen people. And Jawar supporters wind up committing a bunch of race-based sectarian murders. And something like 70 folks die by the time this is all over. Jesus. So, yeah, he, yeah, so this guy, like, like, incites a series of race riots that kill, like, nearly 70 people. Which is a problem, you might say. Yeah, single Facebook posts.

Yeah, that isn't it. Yeah. So Facebook at this point, if not before, because they hadn't even thought about it for a single second. Like Mark Zuckerberg had never for a moment in his life considered Ethiopia prior to this. In the, what, 15 years of this company's existence. Yeah. Good, good. Why are you?

It's not a major company. It's one of the places, it's like, it's like all of the world outside of the Roman Empire that he assumes was also at peace, because he's sure as hell not going to give a fuck about their history. Yeah. Ask Mark Zuckerberg for how long Ethiopia has been at peace. Yeah, I will, I will let, I will let fucking China know that they were completely at peace and had no wars for the 200 years after Octavian came to power. They will be happy to have this information. Yeah, they'll be able to edit their history books.

Yeah. So Facebook, you know, after this race riot that kills almost 70 people knew they had a problem in Ethiopia. Oh, wow. Yeah. And in true Facebook fashion, they took no action as a result. Oh, wow. All of these deaths. They shifted no meaningful resources into the country as ethnic and political strife there continued to heighten,

fanned by the flames of viral Facebook memes. Now, I'm not going to pretend I have much expertise over what's happening in Ethiopia, because like Facebook's executives, I know very little about the country, which is perhaps why I have not launched a massively influential media product that completely restructures the way a great deal of the nation's communications occur. Because that would be irresponsible, Jamie. That would be yours, but you would maybe want to hire, let's say more than 100 people to. I would want to hire a lot of people if I were attempting to change the entire way this country. I don't understand communicates.

Right. Yeah. That would be the responsible thing to do. But yeah. So as I do understand the conflict, a lot of the ethnic tensions in the country have kind of broken down around the president who is an aromo and a large number of people, many of whom voted for him, who are aromo and who hate the fact that he has not been a giant piece of shit to members of other ethnic groups. Like he hasn't been racist enough for a lot of people and they're very angry about it. And these folks have gotten very like use the vast hate machine that is Facebook to assault the people that they deem at fault for their country's problems.

And one of these people, one of the people they assaulted was a backer of the president named Hachalo Hundesa, who is an aromo singer who supported and raising up marginalized voices within the aromo ethnic group. So he seems like he was a pretty decent dude. Hachalo Hundesa. So obviously this massive internet hate mob that is formed in Ethiopia turns its sights to this guy because he's a supporter of the president. Earlier this year, they decided he was like at the center of some weird conspiracy. Think of it as like what happened to Tom Hanks with QAnon, right? Like this famous person becomes the center of an online conspiracy and hundreds of Facebook pages start filling up with misinformation about this guy. And I'm going to quote next from a write up advice about what happened next.

Quote, Hundesa was assassinated on June 29th while driving through the capital, Addis Ababa. The man police charged with Hundesa's killing told prosecutors that he was working as an assassin for the Aromo Liberation Front, an armed nationalist group linked to numerous violent attacks, and who told the shooter that Aromia would benefit from the death of one of its most famous singers. Hundesa's death at age 34 set off a wave of violence in the capital and his home region of Aromia. Hundreds of people were killed with minorities like Christian Amharis, Christian Aromos, and garage people suffering the biggest losses. The bloodshed was supercharged by the almost instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people's anger.

Mobs destroyed and burned property. They lynched, beheaded and dismembered their victims. Jesus Christ. So, yeah, who could have predicted this after the last race riot that killed huge numbers of people? Not I, Robert. And not Mark Zuckerberg. It is, I mean, it is truly shocking that this, this is, I mean, I guess not shocking isn't even the word, but this is all happening within about, what, 18 months of the, like a very similar horrific ethnic cleansing being pushed.

Less than that, October of 2019 to June of 2020. Oh, well, there you go. Now, very, very short span of time this is occurring in. Yeah. And again, Facebook does basically nothing. Now, finally, after these race riots that kill hundreds, they do take some action. Yeah, they sent a couple of executives to Ethiopia on a fact finding mission.

And they, yeah. Yeah, they went looking for some facts. Looking for some facts. For a little magnifying glass. Yeah. And the company issued a statement that it is, quote, aware of the complexities both within and outside the country. Oh, these Facebook apologies for ethnic cleansing. It's just. Yeah, complexities.

Yeah. Yeah. What we did, what could be described as complex. Yeah. Facebook says it is deeply concerned about the issues flagged by human rights groups. Meanwhile, human rights groups in Ethiopia are less than positive about the, what the social network has actually done so far. According to Vice quote. Activists say Facebook is instead relying on them in a network of grassroots volunteers to flag content and keep the $750 billion

company up to speed about what's happening on the ground. They ask you to jump on a call so that you can give them more context. But fuck no. I said I'm never going to do that again. One Ethiopian activist who's been repeatedly asked to speak to Facebook employees told Vice news. The activists. Yeah, like they're basically like, hey, we're almost worth a trillion dollars. But can you people who are under the gun and individually endangered by our service provide us with free labor to understand how we're endangering you?

That would be great. Right. They're like, we forgot to put any protections in, but so could you actually do this on the back end because we're getting some rough PR right now. Oh, are you being shot at right now? Yeah. Anyway, we're not going to pay you. We don't, we just don't have the money. It's been a rough year for us.

A trillion dollar. Mark Zuckerberg who bought $45 million of houses that surrounded his house so he could live in property can't afford to pay. More fact checking teams. We're so sorry. Yeah. So this is horrific. You'd think Facebook might have learned something after the last ethnic cleansing their product helped to enable, which if you'll remember from our last episode was in Myanmar. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know about the extent of what was going on in Ethiopia. Pretty bad, Jamie. Pretty bad. Pretty bad, Robert. And of course they helped fuel a genocide and the mastery settlement of nearly a million people in Myanmar, the Rohingya. It's shocking how beat for beat similar a lot of the exact same like missteps and failures are. And what's happening in Ethiopia sounds exactly like what's happening in India where Facebook like nonsense on Facebook lies spreading virally have been responsible for massive like mobs doing racial violence that's caused hundreds of deaths.

It keeps happening. It's a complete oversight of not even having the terms and conditions in every language where the service has provided. It's just like, I don't know, my brain is... Why would you think for even a second about a country that you're introducing a product into that will have a massive impact on the society? Like why would you for even a second consider that and take any actions to responsibly do that? It's just a country that exists outside of Mark Zuckerberg's frame of reference. It's part of the 200 years of peace he's bringing us. So yeah, we're talking about Myanmar because we have to actually go back to Myanmar because some new stuff's happened there. So remember Facebook again fueled a genocide there.

And in fact, a UN report on the genocide in Myanmar said that Facebook's failure to deal with the spread of misinformation turned it into a beast. Complicit and mass human slaughter. The UN called Facebook a beast for its what it contributed to in Myanmar, which is at least I like it when the UN doesn't pull their punches because they often do. That's a fair summary. I appreciate the directness. Yeah. So the hubbub around all this forced Mark to actually sit down in an interview with Ezra Klein and engage directly with some of the criticism for the genocide that his company enabled. Well, he admitted that his network had been used to incite real world harm.

He did admit that and he also stated, quote, this is certainly something that we're paying a lot of attention to. It's a real issue. And we want to, it's a real issue, Jamie. The genocide is a real issue. And we want to make sure that all of the tools that we're bringing to bear on eliminating hate speech and citing violence and basically protecting the integrity of civil discussions that we're doing. In places like Myanmar, as well as places like the U.S. that do get a disproportionate amount of attention. Jamie, let's think back to that guy on his porch firing blindly into the neighborhood around you. Say he hits your child in the throat and she bleeds out slowly over the course of about, you know, let's say five and a half minutes as you desperately try to stop the bleeding.

The ambulance doesn't arrive in time and you approach this man who's continuing to fire blindly into the neighborhood and say, you just murdered my child. And he says, you know, I'm paying a lot of attention to what happened to your kid. It's a real issue. It's pretty serious. Yeah. And I'm going to bring tools to bear on eliminating, you know, some of the problems that might have caused the death once we figure out what they are. So that's what Mark said, but Mark, you know, to his credit, after using all those weasel words, did did agree that Facebook had been used to incite harm in Myanmar. Just the absolute smug assholery of like addressing a genocide you are beyond.

It's an issue. President. So I'm seeing there's a lot of negativity surrounding this that you're just like, shut the fuck up. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's like somebody going to the Germans in like 1944 and being like, you know, it seems like this Auschwitz thing is getting real ugly. And they're like, yeah, we agree. It's an issue. It's definitely an issue.

Yeah. It's an issue. So blood pressure. Yeah. But Mark did, he did admit that, that there was a problem with his service. So there was an issue. I wonder what will happen if we check back in on the story of Myanmar and Facebook. I bet Facebook has turned a new leaf in this.

Oh, Jamie, it turns out there's a Time Magazine article on the matter from August of 2020. This year. Oh, the title is hit it. Facebook wanted to be a force for good in Myanmar. Now it is rejecting a request to help with the genocide investigation. No. I mean, yes. But that's totally explicable.

Yeah. Christ. So the issue seems to be that the Gambia, which I didn't realize, I think is the proper way you're supposed to say it is the Gambia, not Gambia. So it's kind of the opposite of Ukraine. It seems like that that's what I'm gathering from this article. So the Gambia, which is a West African nation is attempting to hold Myanmar accountable for its ethnic cleansing.

And they filed an application in a U.S. federal court seeking information from Facebook that would help them build their case for the International Court of Justice. So they want to take leaders in Myanmar to the International Court of Justice and hold them accountable. And they're looking for info from Facebook to help them build their case that basically military and governmental leaders in Myanmar were manipulating Facebook in inauthentic ways in order to drive violence deliberately. So quote, specifically, the Gambia is seeking documents and communications from Myanmar

military officials as well as information from hundreds of other pages and accounts that Facebook took down and preserved, because Facebook, to its credit, when they took down a lot of these things associated with pages that were associated with the violence in Myanmar, they did preserve those pages so that they could be potentially used in an investigation, like the Gambia is trying to do. So the Gambia is also seeking documents related to Facebook's internal investigations into the matter, as well as a deposition of a relevant Facebook executive. All of this information could help to prove Myanmar's genocidal intent.

Back in May, the Gambia filed a similar application in U.S. court against Twitter. And the case was polled immediately because Twitter pretty much instantly agreed to cooperate, which is, you know, that's so embarrassing, too, that if Twitter is like, no, we would love to do the right thing. Jack Dorsey is somebody I have intense antipathy for. And he is also objectively the most responsible social media head. When Jack Dorsey has, that's such a bleak sentence, when Jack Dorsey has the moral high ground on you, you're McFucked, like that's just so awful.

Like he is the only person who is in that position, a similar position of power to Mike Mark Zuckerberg, who isn't just like, like drunkenly driving towards the apocalypse. Like Jack Dorsey clearly is capable of feeling guilt and thinks genocide is bad. That's all I'll say about Jack Dorsey. But that's what that he is capable of, of, of caring to some extent, which is why his company cooperated immediately in an investigation about a genocide. Well, and if you're listening to this episode in the future and you're like, how could that be true?

Just, just check the date and maybe he's done something horrible. Yeah, he may have finally completed his robot suit and be carrying out genocide against all of Portugal or something. I don't know what Jack Dorsey's secret desires are. But you know, but yeah, I do know what you do know, Robert. I don't know where I'm going. What I do know. Yeah.

What do you know? Yeah, I know a lot of things that I think would be fun to do in Minecraft, but I guess we shouldn't. Yep. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

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Earlier this month, Facebook filed its opposition to the Gambia's application that they received basic information about, you know, to help them prosecute a genocide. Facebook complained that their requests were extraordinarily broad and unduly intrusive or burdensome. And they called upon the US District Court in DC to reject the application, largely because the Gambia failed to, quote, identify accounts with sufficient specificity. Now this is interesting because the Gambia was incredibly specific, and in fact they named 17 officials, two military units and several dozen very specific pages and accounts

that they wanted the information for. They really could not have been more specific about what they wanted. Right. Yeah. Facebook also takes issue with the fact that the Gambia is seeking information that dates back to 2012, saying that like that's not really relevant. And the Gambia is pointing out that like, well, but the desire of groups of people to commit genocide doesn't just happen overnight.

It builds over time and Facebook is where it built over time. And this is something we have to document both for our court case against the people who committed that genocide and for history's sake. And Facebook is saying that like, well, no, acknowledging that, acknowledging that basically means acknowledging we're currently contributing to what will become genocide in the very near future and that's going to be bad for us. So no. Like the fucking hubris of Facebook attempting to call the shots of like, well, that's not

relevant. It's like, well, you, your whole thing is you've clearly demonstrated, you have no idea what's going on or what the context of this conflict is, but sure, by all means, by all means. So if you actually try to take stock of the scale of the problem of political manipulation on Facebook, you quickly find yourself spiraling into just overwhelmed horror because it's not just like the cases that we've kind of talked about so far where hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people have been murdered. Those are the most spectacular cases and they're the easiest to be like, here is the harm.

This number of people were killed in race riots that started on Facebook. And it, it is contributing to the death of democracies worldwide on a scale that's staggering when you, when you start to lay it out in a year by Janon Honduras, corrupt heads of government and political parties have been caught operating networks of fake accounts to manipulate public opinion in India, Ukraine, Bolivia and Ecuador. There have been coordinated campaigns caught operating and violation of the social networks rules to influence elections. One of the reasons we know about all this is a former Facebook data scientist named Sophie

Zhang. Sophie wrote a 6,600 word memo to her former coworkers after she was let go for desperately blowing the whistle on Facebook's ethically criminal behavior. And Buzzfeed obtained a copy of that memo and they published a really good article on it just days before I started work on this article. It's actually what kind of made me feel like a new episode on Mark was necessary. And I'm going to quote from that article now. This is Sophie writing, in the three years I've spent at Facebook, I found multiple

blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and caused international news on multiple occasions, wrote Zhang. Her LinkedIn profile said she worked as the data scientist for the Facebook site integrity fake engagement team. So that was her job. Now Buzzfeed didn't publish her letter directly because it contained a lot of personal info, but they included a bullet point list summarizing her allegations. And I'm going to read that now because again, it's so it's a nightmare quote.

It took Facebook's leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people. Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of whack-a-mole between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active. In a year by Zhang, Zhang discovered the ruling political party utilized thousands of inauthentic assets to harass the opposition and Moss.

Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is still ongoing. Zhang and her colleagues removed 10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high profile politicians in Brazil and in the US in the 2018 elections. In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that, quote, he'd obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high profile US political figure that we didn't catch. Zhang removed the activity, dousing the immediate fire, she wrote. Zhang discovered inauthentic activity, a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and

coordinated manual accounts in Bolivia and Ecuador, but chose not to prioritize it due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country's political outcomes took a toll on her health. So she consciously realized she was ignoring actions that were shattering the democracies of whole nations because she had bigger fish to fry, and that was a decision she got to make without asking anybody as a mid-level employee at Facebook because they cared so little about what was happening in these countries.

Right. I mean, even the fact that that would be delegated to one person is so absurd. It's unspeakable. After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry's Facebook page during the current COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts acting on similar targets globally, including in the US. In India, she worked to remove a politically sophisticated network of more than 1,000 actors working to influence the local elections taking place in Delhi in February.

Facebook never publicly disclosed this network, or that it had been taken down. So I want you to remember here, yeah, what, are you just trying to cope with all that right now? I'm just like, I'm looking through this story as well, and yeah, four days ago. It's unbelievable. I mean, just this should be the number one story in the world and Mark Zuckerberg should be in custody as a result of it. I have no fucking clue this just happened there.

I mean, just okay, this is, and I am not, first off, I understand that Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish. I am not exaggerating when I say most of the Nazis, individual Nazis tried in Nuremberg were not personally guilty of crimes on this scale. Absolutely, I mean, and the fact that I just, I'm just wrapping my head around the fact that if, you know, while she was employed there, if this, if this employee got a cold, if this employee like caught a bug, yeah, peep, there would be a body count attached to it.

Like that is just fucking unconscionable and to put that on, I just, yeah. It's unbelievable. Now, remember, how is he a free man right now? We're just getting started, Jamie. This is absolutely sick. Okay. I want you to remember Zang was just one employee whose time was severely limited. This is just a selection of the things she uncovered and these, you know, yeah, a mid-level

employee. Now, the, the scale at which Facebook is being used by a variety of actors to manipulate and hack global politics is truly unprecedented. The social network feels so little responsibility to deal with this that Zang was essentially alone in her work and her findings were never publicized unless doing so brought some material benefit to Facebook. While attempting to lay out the scale of the problem, Zang noted, quote, there was so much violating behavior worldwide that it was left to my personal assessment of which cases to

further investigate, to file tasks and to escalate for prioritization afterwards. Now, despite the fact that Zang found evidence of vast influence networks actively subverting dozens of democratic elections, the higher ups in Facebook showed basically no interest in this and she was again left alone to make decisions that would influence the lives and futures of tens of millions of people. Zang wrote, quote, with no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time. A manager on strategic response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was

effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator. He meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures on me. And how many people were working in this capacity and other regions? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the fact is, I don't think very many, she was basically the only person dealing with the world outside of the West at this level of responsibility because they cared so little about having anyone monitor it.

Right. And like the fact that one of her managers just kind of blithely walked by and said, like casually, oh, you're kind of like the dictator of the entire world outside of the West right now, neat. And then walks off like, that's a problem. Do you want to go to an oxygen bar later? Yeah. It's staggering.

I'm struggling to wrap my head around this. The outrageous, I can't go into too much detail at this, but I've known a lot of Facebook employees and I've worked with a number of them. I've been to Facebook facilities. I've spent a lot more time around the people who work at Facebook than a lot of people. And they tend to be very nice people. I like almost everyone I've met who is a Facebook employee. Very intelligent, motivated people who care a lot about what they do in the ethics of

it. The problem is the people at the top who refuse to allow this to be hard, who have the resources to do what they are doing with at least a modicum of responsibility and refuse to do it and actively stymie their employees who, again, are mostly decent people from acting responsibly. Well, sure. The decent people enact the agendas of indecent people all the time. It speaks to, we talked about this the entire last time we covered this fucking guy too,

but just the fact that something so gigantic can exist with such little oversight period is just like, what body count does that start to matter to anybody? Yeah. The reason Mark Zuckerberg and his executives felt safe ignoring many of these individual cases of abuse is that they tend to occur in foreign countries that Americans didn't care about. And again, all Mark Zuckerberg gives a shit about is the West. And I think China too will give him credit for that.

He clearly cares about what happens in China. He does speak great Chinese. So the West in China and everything outside of it might as well be a fucking dial tone to him. Yeah. So we've got about three people on the rest of the planet. Yeah. They wrote from Buzzfeed's write up of Zang's letter again, quote, it is an open secret

within the civic integrity space, which is where she worked in that Facebook short term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative decisions. She wrote noting that she was told directly at a 2020 summit that anything published in the New York Times or the Washington Post would obtain elevated priority. It's why I've seen priorities of escalation shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful, they would have attracted attention, became a press fire and convinced the company to devote more

attention to the space. So unless white journalists write about something Facebook's done that got people killed, it doesn't matter. Don't care. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, we did, we did, we did know that. But I mean, just on, on this, but she was told that by someone who was her boss. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That is just I. It's a lot of pressure on the post in the New York Times too. Right. I know that's true. Yeah. Okay.

So I guess I hope I speak for everyone when I say I care about this. Yeah. This is important. Yeah. I give a shit about Ethiopia. Please stop enabling race riots, Mark. So in February of 2019, a NATO strategic communications researcher, like I said, reached out and like warned the company that he'd, that was the thing about like he'd, he'd seen

evidence of inauthentic Russian activity backing like a high profile US figure. And yeah, the researcher warned them that he would be briefing Congress with his findings the next day. And this the company cared about. So Zang was sent in to minimize the fallout. She was able to investigate the case, figure out what was going on and remove the activity immediately so that by the time this guy went up in front of Congress, they had taken care of the issue.

And shortly thereafter, the same researcher tried another experiment where he like made a report to them, but didn't include a threat and nothing happened for six months. So eventually he sent a report to the press and it finally caused a PR fire. But he just like, just kind of to prove that like, yeah, they don't care unless there's a chance that they will get publicly yelled at. The actual harm means nothing to them. And even so, when someone publicly yells at them, you'd get that fucking speech again of like, you realize that there is a problem.

There is a problem. So Zang came to feel that the main focus of her job rather than actually combating this behavior and reducing harm was to help the company deal with what she called large scale problems. And this doesn't mean a more serious problem. It means a problem that affects enough people that they have to care about it. So we're actually not talking about genocides here. We're talking about spam networks because spam networks impact a lot of people.

And so they're a larger priority than disinformation going viral and leading to race riots. Spam is a big problem. So it outweighs tiny problems like say election fraud by the president of Honduras. Zang came to feel that the main focus of her job rather than combating this behavior, reducing harm was to help the company deal with these problems. And yeah, this meant that spam networks were a bigger issue than things that cause death. Yeah, so let's zoom in on Honduras on the thing that is less of a problem than spam networks.

I don't say this lately. This is the most upset I've ever been during this show. It's horrible. So Zang finds evidence that the president of Honduras and his party are using multiple fake accounts to boost engagement and spread content that is benefiting them in the lead up to a presidential election. And Zang was able to make a connection to the Honduran leader because an administrator for the president's Facebook page had been was caught.

She caught him basically running hundreds of fake assets, not even trying to hide it. And she reported all of these thousands of fake accounts in a clear attempt to manipulate a national election to Facebook's threat intelligence and policy review teams, both of which took months to give any sort of response. And yeah, it so it took almost a year to take down this operation, which Facebook announced in July of 2019 and taking it down didn't actually do anything because the operation got set back up again, which Facebook never disclosed and they didn't take it down again. So it took about two weeks.

Yeah. And it's still going on right now. And this president who created this massive, you know, or who had this massive fraudulent network set up to help him regain election, one reelection under circumstances, international monitors and basically everyone describes as fraudulent. Facebook felt comfortable letting this slide after their first week because in the grand scheme of things, Honduras is a small country. As Zang wrote, the civic aspect was discounted because of its small volume, its disproportionate

impact ignored. The civic aspect, of course, being that a president with dictatorial ambitions fraudulently won an election in part due to what he was able to do on Facebook. So yeah, it's it's frustrating. The civic aspect is like the term Facebook uses for entire nation's democracies, which are less of a priority to them than like a spam network. And this is something Zang came to understand. She got a pretty good eye for how Mark and her other bosses thought during her time doing

this job. And how long was she in this position? Sorry. I'm like three years. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So face, she figured out over time kind of how to manipulate Mark and other executives

in the company in order to get them to act on certain things they would otherwise ignore. Fair cut compliments. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, mainly making them think that there might be some sort of like outcry against them. Facebook uses an internal company messaging app for employee communications. And since reporting her concerns about potential genocides didn't seem to matter, Zang started

skipping the steps to officially report problems and just posting openly to her coworkers about specific things she was finding. Because if she could get her colleagues outraged and talking, she could force management to care. And in the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren't respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole. So Zang asked Facebook to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity.

And she says that she was turned down because human resources are limited. She was then ordered to stop focusing on civic work. I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused. Okay. Okay. So stop talking about the genocide or... We'll fire you. Or you don't have health insurance.

Got it. Another terrifying case she ran into was Azure by Zhan. Now in that country, Zang discovered another vast network of inauthentic accounts being used by the president and his party to spread propaganda and influence an election. The whole operation is very similar to the one run by Russia's Internet Research Agency. It involved, quote, dedicated employees who work nine to six Monday through Friday work to create millions of comments targeting members of the opposition and reporters critical to the president.

Facebook never publicized what Zang found there, nor did they take any action against it. Zang wrote that they didn't care enough to stop it because it's like it's fucking Azure by Zhan. Do you even know where Azure by Zhan is? No. Fuck them. Fuck their democracy.

It's 200 years of peace. Yeah. 200 years of peace. That's what we're getting. Buzzfeed actually reached out to some journalists in Azure by Zhan about their experiences with this network and about Facebook. And those journalists pointed out that in addition to not stopping this inauthentic activity network, Facebook sometimes removed the pages of human rights activists due to reports from trolls

and ignored journalists begging them that this is a real person doing important work. Please restore their account because why would they care? Right. Now, none of this is unique to Azure by Zhan. And in fact, all of it happens to some extent in the United States too. Facebook just feels more pressure to act here. The difference with the United States, yeah, is again that they have to pretend that they care here.

Right. As soon as they operate somewhere off the beaten path from an American's perspective, anything goes. In Bolivia, for example, Zang found inauthentic activity supporting the opposition presidential candidate in 2019. She chose not to focus on it because she just had so many other genocides to deal with. In a month later, a coup racked the nation, leading to widespread protests and dozens of deaths.

Nice. Great. She made the same call in Ecuador after a 2017 election that many claim was fraudulent. Prior to the vote, Zang found massive inauthentic activity supporting the ruling party, who later won the election under suspicious circumstances. There were horrifying consequences to this. Three years later, the coronavirus hit, and this fraudulent government was in charge. They did not do a good job of being in charge.

And I'm going to quote now from a New York Times article on Ecuador's response to the coronavirus. Quote, With bodies abandoned on sidewalks, slumped in wheelchairs, packed into cardboard coffins and stacked by the hundreds and morgues, it is clear that Ecuador has been devastated by the coronavirus. But the epidemic is even worse than many people in the country recognize. The death toll in Ecuador during the outbreak was 15 times higher than the official number

of COVID-19 deaths reported by the government, according to an analysis of mortality data by the New York Times. The numbers suggest that the South American country is suffering one of the worst outbreaks in the world. Thanks in large part to the incompetent government that was fraudulently elected. There's a significant part to the Facebook campaign, the illegal and fraudulent Facebook campaign. It ran that Facebook and didn't have time to care about.

Where one mid-level employee was threatened with having her livelihood removed if she didn't shut the hell up about it. I am certain Mark Zuckerberg lost no sleep over Ecuador, or Bolivia, or any of these other places. Absolutely. But Sophie Zhang definitely did and probably will for the rest of her life. As she wrote in that letter, I have made countless decisions in this vein, from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador.

Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place. Although I made the best decision I could based on the knowledge available at the time, ultimately I was the one who made the decision not to push more or prioritize further in each case. And I know that I have blood on my hands by now. It's, I mean, she's not wrong, but that's just... Yeah. She's doing...

Before she was fired, Facebook offered Sophie $64,000 in severance if she would agree to sign a non-desperagement clause, which would state that she basically couldn't talk at all about her work. Which is just... Yeah. Putting a price on the lives of people. Yeah. It's just...

Yeah. And not a high one. No. She turned down the money. Clearly, so that she'd be able to sleep at night in the future. Yeah. Yeah. I mean...

I mean, getting into the ethics of that is just a fucking disaster, because it is that thing where it's like... It is a waking nightmare. She, I mean, she definitely should not be sleeping well. No. And then on the other hand, if she was not the one pulling the levers on something like that, they would have found someone else to do it. And probably someone worse at it who cared less.

Like I don't... Yeah. Less of a conscience. I actually don't attribute much moral blame to her other than maybe not blowing the whistle earlier, just because when you're in that position, there's a strong case to be made that if I'm here, I can at least do something, and if I leave, even less will be done. Yes. Which seems verifiably true in the case of Facebook.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, Jamie, that's part one. Awesome. What could pot... I'm like, what could pot... What could... I don't...

Well, I guess I'll find out. Yeah. Yeah. This has been truly horrible. Yep. Do you have anything you want to plug? Yeah. What do you want to sell today, Jamie?

Absolutely fucking not. Well, okay. Wait, does this come out next week? When does this come out? Well, this is next week. We have no backlog anymore because I decided to spend 60 or 70 nights out rioting. Just... Okay.

Well, you know, things come up. Things come up. Things come up. To put it like Mark Zuckerberg would. Things come up. There was an issue. There was an issue, and we're actually keeping a really close eye on it. That's you right now.

Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram if you want. The Bechtelcast, my podcast is doing a fundraiser for a candidate named Fatima Iqbal Zubair. Hell yeah. She's wonderful. She's the best. She's running in District 64 in California, so we're doing a fundraiser for her. We're reading the entire script of Twilight this Friday. So if you donate to her at the...

Who will you be playing? I purchased all of my Edward Cullen cosplay this morning, extremely tall and incredibly toxic. These are traits that we share, and so I am playing Edward Cullen. So yeah, I would just say go to that, donate to Fatima's campaign, and fuck Forky, baby. Yeah. All right. Well, let's end on that note.

I don't know who Forky is, but let's fucking... Fucking! Fucking! ...episode's done. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. End Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that

tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.