Big Technology Podcast - The Motivations of Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen — With Her Lawyer Lawrence Lessig

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Lawrence Lessig is Frances Haguen's lawyer and a Harvard Law School professor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to address the various questions about Haugen's motivations, backers, and intent that have percolated since she came forward. We start by addressing whether the the leaked documents should be available to all and move into the conspiracies about her. A lively discussion follows.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. The Facebook whistleblower has been making a lot of news. You might have heard of her, Francis Howigan. She is the source of an avalanche of news that we're seeing come across our friends. feeds about Facebook based off of a cache of internal documents that she's released to a handful of news organizations. So what does this all mean? What's going on with the release strategy? Who is Francis? Who's backing her? Lots of questions around it. You're probably wondering a lot about what is the true nature of the source behind these leaks. Well, to discuss it, we have a great guest. His name is Lawrence Lessig. We're going to call Mary in the interview. He is a professor of

law at Harvard Law School. Also, former candidate for president. Remember your campaign very well. And he's acting as a lawyer for Francis Howg. And so he has great insight into what she's up to and what she's aiming for. Lots of questions that I've been percolating. And I am super thrilled to get into them and I'm very appreciative that he's decided to come on. Larry, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Well, I was going to start with, thanks for being here. Well, I was going to start with your relationship with Francis. But I want to leave that for the second part of this conversation because I think the most pressing issue that a lot of people are wondering about right now is what's going on with this document release strategy. So just to catch

people up, Francis brought, you know, essentially a laptop of information to the Wall Street Journal, if I'm right about that. They wrote a handful of stories that they labeled the Facebook files based off of the documents. They were able to redact a handful of them. Now they're in the possession of a consortium, small group of publications. I'm pretty sure they're entirely from North America and Europe, thankfully big technology is part of this consortium, which I'm thrilled about, but also raises some serious questions about what's going on with the document rollout and why these documents aren't widely available

to everyone. So, you know, Professor, Larry, you've been deeply involved in this strategy. Just give our listeners an idea of, you know, why Francis is taking this route and when the public can expect to see these documents in full, if ever. Yeah, so I think it's really important you're being careful about how we understand what happened. And I apologize, I'm going to be a little bit of a legal nerd. restate what you said to make it precise and accurate. Francis obviously had a bunch of Facebook, well, documents, materials, which she turned over to the SEC and has released to Congress in a redacted form.

And these are the documents that the Wall Street Journal has used to write their pieces. And then it is Congress. It was a congressional staffer in Congress who, determined that they would be willing to make the documents that were turned over to Congress available to journalists. And that's when Francis's communication team, a firm of Bryce and Gillette, reached out to a couple journalists to say that this was what the Congress was willing to do, and they then formed this consortium.

So it's important legally to recognize Francis has not handed the documents to the consortium. Francis handed the documents redacted to preserve the privacy of members in the Facebook community who are named in the documents to Congress, and it's Congress that's now making them available to the consortium. How does Congress get in touch with Bryson Gillette, which is run, I'm pretty sure, by a former Obama staffer? Yeah, so how does Congress settle on that firm? Or did Francis have a hand in that?

And then as a follow-up to that, how were the publications that were selected? How did that process go? Was that Congress's decision or was that Bryson-Jillett's decision? So I don't think it was either decision. What I know, and, you know, I retained Bryson to Bryce and Gillette as an attorney in my role representing strategy and communications with Francis. And they took the first steps, and, you know, I didn't, it's above my pay grade to be monitoring every step they took. But Congress at that point was eager to get the documents because they were going to be hearing her testimony. And in the context of getting the documents and discussing the testimony, the suggestion was raised, and I frankly don't know who raised it, that it should be more broadly available.

And I think all of us, I mean, your piece about how it should be. be available to everybody. I think all of us have a desire that this information be as broadly disseminated as possible. I think that intuition is what led people on Capitol Hill to think, well, how could we do it in an effective way? What I think is useful about this is to compare it to, you know, other whistleblower-like events. I mean, you know, you can think about the simplest way to be a whistleblower, which would be to dump everything into WikiLeaks. Yeah, not in favor of that. Yeah.

Sorry? Not in favor of that. Yeah, because it's hard to interpret a lot of these documents. It's hard to make sense of them and put them in context and know what they mean. And obviously, that's what Edward Snowden recognized when Edward Snowden did his release, and he picked a relatively small number of journalists to take the documents and to digest them and make them available in that form. And he was very careful to make sure he protected the innocent in that sense

so that people who might have been outed were not. And I think that was a very important strategy. This feels to me like the next step in the evolution of figuring out how best to do this. Because I think with these documents, too, at least in the initial round, there needs to be a filter of careful journalists, people who are looking at them and studying them and comparing them and figuring out exactly what is, is meant. And, you know, they're not all self-interpreting. Some of them are hard to understand when was this and what does this exactly say? And I think the idea of developing the consortium

and making it available wasn't my idea, but I think it's a great idea. And I think it's on the way to achieving what all of us want, which is full public transparency about what, in fact, is going on in this extremely important company. Yeah, so let's just pause on the consortium for a minute. Can you shed any light into how it was developed and who's making decisions of who to let in? Because I'll just give you a sense. I mean, I obviously have advocated for these documents to be made publicly available to everyone. And, you know, of course, after careful redaction to make sure that privacy is, you know, people's privacy is retained. But the reason why I'm asking about the makeup here is because a lot of these documents apply to countries, populations outside

of the U.S., outside of Europe, there was an Atlantic story that talked about how, like, 90% of this stuff is about people outside the United States. Yet, this consortium is consisting entirely publications in the U.S. in Europe. Apparently, there's no Spanish-speaking publications out there. So, you know, I'd be, I guess I'd be more in favor of the idea this can, or I'd be more open to your argument that this is the exact right way to go about things, you know, if we had more global representations. So, yeah, so maybe you can shed light on that. Who's making the decisions about who to let in? And, you know, why no one outside of North America and Europe? Because I'll tell you what my inbox looks like today. It's, you know,

editors in chief from publications everywhere from Italy to Russia. I just got another one from another country, you know, of, you know, lots of publications that are interested in reviewing these documents and interpreting what they mean for their populations. Yeah. So I don't think there's any disagreement that it needs to be made available in consortia around the world. And, you know, part of what happened in this rollout was the product of, you know, having to make decisions fast and moving as quickly as you could in the context of, you know, an exploding story. The initial consortium that was put together was actually a European consortium. Because there was some tension, the Wall Street Journal had an exclusive on a

bunch of these documents that they were rolling out slowly after an initial dump of five or six articles. And the concern was, to be fair, to the Wall Street Journal, since they had done the heavy lifting of putting this together initially and making it available. And then, you know, there's a certain point. I know when people on the, in the team said, you know, we can't preserve the Wall Street Journal forever in this exclusive English language space. So that's what opened up the American consortium. And I know that there's conversations about how to expand it even further. So there's never been a moment where the decision was made to restrict. Yes. It's only been a difficult process to figure out how best to deploy as broadly,

you know, step forward as we can. And, you know, you're a journalist. You know that there's a complexity with even something like a consortium because, you know, journalists are spending a lot of time to understand this. And I think they feel, and I think rightfully so, they need some opportunity to recoup that investment, not through money, but at least for the chance to say something intelligent. You know, if they only had 30 seconds, what they would say wouldn't be useful. What they need is time to think and reflect and write things that are valuable and publish them and have a sense that they're not going to be scooped, you know, from half the story being released too early. So it's a complicated process. And I think we're

all committed to exactly what you identified as, well, your article is about making it available to the public. I agree with that too. But what you've just identified right now is let's expand this as broadly as we can around the world because the critical fact is the number you said. 90% of Facebook's audience is not from the United States. Yeah. And the terrifying reality for the rest of the world is 90% of Facebook's safety budget is in the United States. So Facebook is making Facebook as safe as it can for the United States, and it's still not very good. But for the rest of the world, it can be literally a disaster. Yeah, I agree with you.

And in fact, the other country, I feel like a fool for forgetting it. It was India. I got a message right before I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to talk. And someone, a friend in India said, please ask him about Facebook's largest user-based market, aka India. I'd like to know more about what all these disclosures mean for the global. South, quote unquote, given that they aren't aimed at us. My guess is they're aimed at U.S. lawmakers. It hasn't even sparked a conversation here. Well, you know, this is part of the problem of like interpreting what's happening as if it's a plan driven, written, you know, 15 years

ago. We were thinking through every step. This is, you're exactly, you're exactly right. We've got to get, and I think the plan is, to get these documents in every place around the world where Facebook is affecting them, so that those governments can make the same judgments that EU is making that Britain, when they had Francis yesterday testifying, will be making. And the United States, for all of our pathology in Congress, is at least in this respect, focused in a common way, both left and right, on the problems that this platform is creating for democracy and for our society and trying to think about whether they can do something about it. So we're not disagreeing at all about the objective. It's just a hard thing to execute, given the complexity of the egos involved

in, you know, the world of great journalists. Oh, yeah, there are plenty of those. And I'll just, like, for the record, my perspective in having these, and the importance of having these documents made widely available to the public, I definitely see your point. Like, there is a concern, you know, in terms of interpretation. But I do think we sort of get into trouble when we have like a class of gatekeepers and elite that sort of say only we can, you know, view these and interpret them. Yeah, Alex, let's be clear. I completely agree with that. I don't think there are gatekeepers. There's just release that gives people a chance to digest. Yes. My objective, my personal objective, I'm not speaking for Francis or for the consortium

anything, but my personal objective is that everybody be able to read them. And the reason I think everybody should read them, it's kind of bizarre, but I think if you read them, you have actually see how great a company Facebook is. I mean, what's striking about this is to see the integrity and the good faith of the engineers inside that company trying to work out what makes sense, like what works, and the frustration they feel as they complain about the fact that their systems are being interfered with by the politico types who reach down and overrule their decisions for political reasons. And they're like, look, we just let us apply our rules. Let us do our job. And I think when you see that, you know, it makes it easier to understand the complexity of a

company like that. It's not filled with evil people. It's not filled with people trying to destroy American democracy. Putin doesn't control that company. But it's a company that's a mix between people doing as much as they can to make the platform safe and leadership, who's focused on primarily how do we increase the commitment that the audience gives to that so that they can make more money. Yeah. And look, I've been covering Facebook for the better part of a decade. I've been into the offices in Menlo Park, you know, countless times. Sat was Zuckerberg. I haven't understood the company. Well, let me just put it this way. My understanding of the company is far deeper now after reading these documents. And I had heard the conversations. But I do think that you're right. When you see the amount of research this company does into each and every little decision that we sit and pontificate about, but there's data behind it. It's totally astonishing. And, you know, we'll get to what Francis is trying to accomplish here in a minute, but I think purely for the public's sake to have access to these documents and be able to see

this, you know, I'm already on Team Francis, you know, being able to read through these because I know, I know my journalism is going to improve and my understanding of the company is going to be able to, you know, be more, more complete. And, you know, I hope people who get a chance to view these things, and I hope everyone gets a chance to view them, but are able to, like, look at them with, you know, with an open mind and, like, and be able to take a look at the mechanations of the company and learn from that. Yes, I, we're, we're in agreement. So I, now let's talk a little bit, you know, people, there have been articles. We need to understand Francis and her political motivations and who's backing her. It makes it sound a little bit more nefarious.

than I think what's actually going on, but it's good to address and you're the perfect person to be here to talk about it. So let's start with your relationship with her. You are a, yeah, I mean, you ran for president as Democrat. How do you, how do you, you know, a former presidential candidate, you know, obviously someone, you know, align with the party, you know, come into contact with Francis. Did you like reach out when you saw the journal story? Did she reach out to you? I'm going to say that the concern that people have, and I don't, you know, believe this, but I feel like it's important to bring up, is that people are saying she's an instrument of Democratic Party and the association is something people question. My job is to put the question to you. Well, of all the things

I've done, I think the least significant is I'm trying to become a candidate for president of the United States. I liked your box video. It was fun. I mean, I believe in the cause, and I would do it again just to make that issue central to the Democratic Party. But the other part of that is the Democratic Party doesn't like me. They kind of hate me for what I did. Yeah. You ran on like campaign finance reform.

I can't ran on an anti-corruption platform. Like, we've got to fix the democracy. Fix democracy first was my slogan. Yeah. No wonder they didn't like you. Yeah. So I'm no tool of the Democratic Party. But I think that, you know, I came to know France.

is because of the work that I've been doing about, you know, technology policy since the 1990s. I mean, you know, I've been writing and thinking about this forever. And one of her close friends who knew my work asked if I would talk to her at a point sometime in August when, you know, she was, this was all going to happen. And I, of course, at that point, knew nothing about what was happening. But she at that point had been working for with whistleblower's aid, which is, you know, public, is a charity. a nonprofit, which helps whistleblowers, so pro bono, they've been giving her legal advice about the strategy to protect herself, given what she was doing, both releasing documents and also going up against one of the most powerful companies in the history of humanity.

So they had been advising on that strategy, and she was asking me about the bigger questions of, you know, the legal strategy, what other issues she was going to face, what possible steps she could take. And that's the scope of what I was originally talking to her about. And it was also part of what I would do to think about what support she would need. And so I was in the position of just deciding what kind of firm would make sense here. And I had known Bill Burden forever. And I knew him, you know, the thing that stands out for me was not that he worked for Obama, but that he had been in a wide range of political context. It seemed to me he was a perfect person to make calls here. And I reached out to him. So at this stage, there's no Democratic

Party that has anything to do with this, except when I reach out to Bill and I say, would you be willing to step in? And I hired Bill my firm. I mean, my sole practitioner, I'm doing my work for Francis Pro Bono, but I hired Bill's firm. And that's when Bill became involved and his colleague Emily Schwartz came involved to begin to give her advice about the strategy. Because, you know, obviously on the other side was a trillion-dollar company that was going to be spending endless amounts of money trying to develop the other side of the argument. So we were trying to do as much as we can, we could. And up to the moment that she announced came out public, she had no support from anybody

except the pro bono support she was getting from me and from whistleblower aid. After she came out and testified, after 60 minutes and then her decision to testify, then other people decided that they were going to step up and try to help her to make sure that she could tell her story and that this information could be spread broadly without the fear of, you know, criminal penalties or whatever else might be on the table. And that's when Pierre Midiar's foundation stepped in. And I hope others do too. I mean, because, you know, for the same reason you said these documents should be out there and read by everybody. I think many people, even people inside Silicon Valley who support Facebook ought to be keen that this event helps us reflect in an informed way about technology and helps us, you know, help guide us about what kind of policy changes we should make.

So that's the story of how I was involved and what I've been doing. And it's funny to watch to read all these conspiracy theory things. That's why we're here to talk about them. Yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Right. Because, you know, maybe I don't even know about the conspiracy. Maybe the conspiracy is so deep that it's controlling me without me even being aware of it. But I don't feel like that's likely. Yeah. So I guess do you, just from an optics standpoint, do you worry that, you know, yes, I know Bill Burton isn't involved with the Obama administration now. And, you know, you're apparently on the outs with Democratic Party. But do you worry that the People will look at this and say that this is, you know, we address that it's, you know, your perspective that it's not. But do you worry about the, this potentially, the Obama Association, potentially, and the fact that Richard Blumenthal set up a hearing right away, right after the 60 minutes interview? Do you worry this could potentially take away from what Francis is trying to do by, you know,

we live in a pretty polarized time, you would agree. So by taking this and turning it polarized, because what I'm seeing. from, you know, one segment of the people that are viewing this is that they say that it is a operation to censor more on social media. I don't believe that what it, that's what it is. But I'm curious if you think that it does, you know, potentially open it up to that criticism. Well, I completely agree with you that we're in a moment where it's hard to see anything not seeing it in left and right terms. And, you know, I think one striking thing about the hearings is that both majority and minority leaders, Marsha Blackburn, too, was like keen.

to have her on as quickly as possible. So there at least, we started in a nonpartisan way around these issues. But, you know, the striking thing that Francis taught me from the very beginning of my relationship with her in this matter is that what's important to her is not her. She's not running for president. She's not running to be senator. She's not running to be czar of technology. She's trying to make the documents understandable to the world.

And what she wants is the documents. to speak for themselves. And I think part of, I know part of our thinking and like getting the consortium going and getting hundreds of journalists to be writing about this was to shift the attention beyond her to the substance and let the documents speak for themselves and let the substance be the debate rather than imagining that we're trying to choreograph, you know, this really phenom. She's a phenom, right? It's astonishing how good she is at what she does. But, you know, the objective here is not to turn her into a figure. media figure or like somebody who's supposed to be the oracle of all wisdom about everything

to do with the Internet. The objective here is to enable the information to be out there in a way that helps the public and governments on the left and the right and north and the south. Think about what the right policy response to this problem should be. Yeah. And that's why I started that question with a certain that I don't agree that's what this is. Because I even found in the document stuff that doesn't really go along with what Francis believes, but it was there. So that was interesting. The other thing that people say, and, you know, I guess let's end this segment on this, is that she's, I mean, it's kind of wild, but people have said she's like a tool of the company.

I mean, we're going through the conspiracy theory. So let's just, you know, touch them all because you're the person to ask about them, right? And that, you know, a lot of, she believes Facebook is good and a lot of the policies that she wants to see are the policies the company wants to see it, including the agency, an agency to overlook social media staffed by former social media folks, which people say it would just empower Facebook to be even stronger. So what's your response to that? I can't believe it. You know, I get why people think this way. I mean, I thought the most of hilarious conspiracy was that she was, you know, from intelligence. You know, she was CIA because she was so good. I agree.

She is so good at what she's doing. It looks like she'd been training for this for the last 20 years. But, you know, what I know is that when this was unraveling, you know, unraveling in the sense of, like, the story was opening up and we were, it was going to come out, this was not somebody who was confident, and none of us are confident that the company is happy and going to go along and pat her on the back for this. to the contrary. Like, the company has been pretty clear about, you know, if there's criminal actions to be pursued, they should be pursued. It's been pretty clear that the data that's coming out, they don't agree, is a fair representation of the fact.

So I think those conspiracies would be more plausible if the company were responding differently. But I just, you know, having been up close and watching the stuff. sausage being made, I just can't believe. It's anything like that except, you know, a woman who decided she had to do something to help us understand what we didn't understand. I mean, many people have been predicting what her documents demonstrated. Renee Doresta at Stanford had been talking about the rabbit hole effects, you know, for five years. But now we have the data. And, you know, I think what we had in Francis was somebody whose moral compass was clear enough

that she realized she had to sacrifice whatever career she might have in Silicon Valley, which of course is a very attractive career to many tech wizards in order to help us understand the political threat that we faced better. Yeah, one follow up on that. Don't you think that she's going to be in a better place now than she was working as an integrity staffer? I mean, she's like you mentioned, she's a phenom now. And she'll probably have like a very successful career writing books and giving speeches,

don't you think? If you add up all the whistleblowers and you do the average of like what the net effect of whistleblowing is for them, it is wildly bad. It is terrible. So, you know, I agree she's in a very good position because she's done her job so effectively. And I think people are persuaded by her integrity and by her good faith. But, you know, before any of this happened, if you had been, I had, I wasn't advising her at that point, but if she had said to me, so what do you think my chances are? I'd say, look at every other whistleblower. Where's Edward Snowden right now? What happened to Chelsea Manning? And any number of these whistleblowers whose careers are destroyed and they basically fall into oblivion.

And, you know, what are they going to do? They don't do what they're doing because they're trying to get a book contract. They do what they're doing because they think what they're doing is right. And that's what motivated her. And I think she's right about that. And I think, fortunately for her, her message is resonating around the world. old in a way that I think will have some good effect. All right, Leslie is here with us on the big technology podcast.

We are going to take a quick break and come back and talk a little bit about Francis's funding. You mentioned that in the first part and then her political goals. So we will be back right after this here on the big technology podcast. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, a podcast filled

The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back on the Big Technology podcast. With Larry Lessig, he is a professor at Harvard Law School, also the lawyer for Francis Hagen advising her on her whistleblowing activities after she's leaked a ton of documents from Facebook. We talked in the first half about funding. Larry, you mentioned that you encourage other people

to come and help fund this, the concerns that have been brought up in some places. And by the way, first of all, I appreciate you rolling with all this stuff. I think it's important to ask these questions because we want to really attack all the concerns that folks have had, and I appreciate you responding to them, help us get a better picture of what's going on here. So, you know, speaking of those concerns, you know, people talked about the Piero Midyard funding. You mentioned you want to see other funders come on board. Is there a concern that people with, people will try to push a political agenda by funding this, you know, in one way or the other, like, I don't know if the Chinese government came, you know, with a truck of money, you know, do you think that's a

good thing to take? Well, you know, let's be clear, nobody's running a GoFundMe campaign. Yes, they are. Whistleblower aid is to fund whistleblower aid. But, I mean, what I'm saying is for Francis Howard. I'm not talking about paying Francis Hogan. Yeah. You know, money is being raised for the purpose of, for example, buying plane tickets and hotels.

as she's traveling to, you know, Europe to speak to the EU commission and into Britain to speak to the parliament. So, you know, that's, you know, again, to emphasize the point we talked about before the break, nobody's into this to make money from it. And certainly the funding that I'm talking about is not the funding to pay or off. It's just to make it possible to tell, to protect the story enough so that it gets out there wrongly enough so journalists have access to it. I agree with you that understanding funding is a critical part of understanding the integrity of the message you're hearing. I mean, I spent six years running an Ethics Center at Harvard, the Safra Center for Ethics, focused on what we called institutional corruption,

which is not illegal corruption, but legal corruption, the way in which, you know, academics, doctors, politicians, everybody gets inside of relationships that are dependent on corrupting influences, primarily influences of money. And so one of the striking things, for example, about academics is if you go around to academics who are studying the internet, and you ask, so where have you gotten your money? An extraordinary number have gotten their money from the very people they're supposed to be writing about, right, of Facebook or Google. And I think that's a deeply troubling reality of modern life. And so I completely support your questions, Alex about, you know, what exactly is behind this. What I've seen is that there's not been a lot

of money, you know, Whistleblower Aid is an incredible shop. I mean, the lawyers in there are working 24-7, but they're not big and they're not wealthy and they, you know, it's hard to keep the lights on, especially, you know, the numbers, the money to, for example, redact these documents is not cheap. You got to pay not real lawyers who are charging $200 an hour, but people who are qualified enough to make the judgments about what have to be redacted. So it's It's all very expensive. And then, you know, I'm not in here for the money. And, you know, obviously professional firms like Bryce and Gillette is doing their job,

and, you know, they're going to be compensated for their job. But this has not been a project where money has been slushes of money that have been pushed around to drive the agenda one way or the other. Now, is she pushing a political agenda? Well, I think the agenda she's pushing is better understanding of the truth. about Facebook because there has been a political agenda on the other side. We've seen again and again, Mark Zuckerberg now on down, telling a story about that company that turns out not to be correct, that the dynamics of what's going on inside that company among good lawyers, among

engineers acting in good faith, is a story of an extraordinary struggle time and again, the tradeoff between safety and profits. And time and again, the choice being made in favor of profits over safety to the great frustration of many of those engineers. That story needs to be told, and is that an agenda? I don't know. It's like it's the agenda to make more understandable a reality that is affecting all of us. Yeah, and I'm definitely not suggesting that this was like a way to get rich quick scheme. But yeah, I do think it's important to talk about the motivations of the funders.

And the point that you just brought up about the academics, I mean, you talk about the third-party organizations that are out there, that you know look legit there's like a thousand of them and they fight every anti big tech every anti-facebook initiative well not even anti reform and every reform initiative and they're all funded by these companies and i was speaking to you know a source close to the antitrust initiative in congress and there was boasting about how they were going to come after you know representative david cecelini and you know then they turned on all the agencies once some of this antitrust stuff got going. So, yeah, but the money is, you know, you follow the money.

I guess this has been your thing for a while, right? So, and you find pretty wild stuff. So is there anybody that this campaign would turn money down from? Like, again, like, I'll just bring up the China example of China. We haven't had that conversation because, you know, we haven't had a problem of like ending coming in. But I'm sure there would be. Yeah.

I'm sure there would be. I mean, I certainly would recommend, but because, you know, the sensitivity that you're revealing is a valid one. It's an important one. And we ought, now, I think Pierre Amidiar, nobody's embarrassed about taking money from Pierre and Mityar. Right. And I have incredible respect for his integrity and his extraordinary, you know, what he did, what he built. But I think the question is an important one. Let's keep on asking it.

And ask it on all sides. You know, it's not just Francis, right? But, you know, people who are going to be supporting Facebook. Why are they supporting Facebook? What is going on behind that? And let's keep that question on front and center to make sure that we have a clear sense of who's responsible to whom. Yeah. And if people want to hear the question on the other side, I recommend them going back in this podcast and listening to the episode with Adam Kovac.

That might be of interest. I want to touch on the Bitcoin stuff. It came up in Ben Smith's column. Francis apparently is self-funding this in some way with Bitcoin winnings and living in Puerto Rico with her crypto friends. People, I have to ask, people have brought up the fact that, like, Puerto Rico is kind of like a tax shelter for people who've, like, made big money on capital gains. How do you feel about that? Is Francis, you know, excited about it? I mean, we talk about the big tech companies paying a little bit of tax.

on the money they make, you know, is this even a valid question? I mean, it's definitely a valid question. What do you think about it? Well, remember, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It's a poorly treated territory of the United States. It's not been attributed, it's not been given equal rights. Citizens from Puerto Rico are not given equal rights. So we owe Puerto Rico a lot.

And of course, the United States government has taken steps to try to encourage entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico. And I think that's a great thing. And if an American citizen wants to go live in a part of America called Puerto Rico and do their work, I'm all for it. You know, they could go to South Dakota and evade all sorts of regulations. I mean, there's an extraordinary ability to hide your assets in South Dakota, like it's the great laundering location of America today. Are people troubled by the fact that you go to South Dakota? I mean, it's part of the United States.

So, you know, I don't, I've never talked to Francis about the tax implications. I'm sure that there are investment incentives for entrepreneurs. It's like why all the crypto people are there. Yeah. I'm glad they're there rather than the Grand Caymans or something like that. Yeah. You know, it's part of the United States. Let's keep it here.

Okay. So we've touched on funding. Let's talk again about the political goals. In particular, you know, are there any specific political outcomes, you know, that Francis would like to see. Does she have like a wish list here? Or is it something that like you mentioned, like maybe the best way to go about this is to turn the documents over to civil society and like have them come up with the solutions? Well, I think the main goal Francis has, as she said, is that the platform become safer.

And how that's brought about is complicated by the dysfunction of governments around the world. So, you know, we have dreams about what the United States. States government might do, but we have a recognition that the United States government is wildly crippled in its capacity to legislate. And the chances of real legislation happening anytime soon, I think are scary to contemplate. But there's a lot that could be done before legislation. Center for Maine Technology has launched a campaign to try to get, for example, Apple, to insist that Facebook implement changes to make it so that the platform is not so poisonously viral. And one really important, one really interesting and important bit of information in the Facebook files is the research about reshares on Facebook.

And so what this basically shows is that if you have something that's been reshared twice, it's four times more likely to be misinformation. And as the reshares go up, that probability goes up to almost 10 times more likely to be information. And the proposal in response to that is to say, let's just limit reshares to two. Now, that doesn't mean that once it's been shared twice, it can't be shared again. It just means that you've got to copy the URL and paste it into your message and send it on your own. And so here's a very simple technical way that's completely content neutral. It's not looking at conservative reshares versus liberal shares. It's just any reshare and saying that let's, let's,

put a speed limit, almost, on the platform. Slow it down so humans can, like, catch up. And that would deal with a huge amount of the misinformation. And my point is that, and I think with CHT is suggesting, is that actually companies could begin to insist on that tomorrow. You know, if Tim Cook said tomorrow, that Facebook won't be on the platform unless it takes steps against these poisonously viral aspects of their platform.

That would change pretty quickly. Now, other governments are actually capable of governing. I think Britain is close to being able to pass legislation here. And I think the Europeans as well are of the position of passing legislation. I've not studied the bills that are being considered, so I don't want to give any support or opposition to them. But I'm just saying that they have functioning governments in the way that I don't think we have a functioning government.

And so I think that we could see legislation in Europe, But I think we could see, you know, not Facebook regulating yourself. We tried that. Turns out that doesn't work. But we can see other companies stepping up and trying to create a standard of safety so that we see Facebook actually changing their behavior. Yeah, I'm so glad you bring up the reshare. This is something I've been standing on the table about for years now. And I spoke with the guy who built the retweet or who helped lead the project team that built the retweet in Twitter.

and he said it was like handing, I think his words were, it was like handing a machine gun to four-year-olds. And the same thing is the situation with Facebook, where when you start to hit that chair button, it's geared entirely towards emotion and not thoughtfulness. And this is another one of those things where we've known it for a while, but to see the documents is good. Actually, I should follow up with you after this

because I'd like to find the document name and look into writing something about this because that's pretty revelatory. You should. It's really important. important and emphasizes an important difference that I think lawyers are sometimes like slow to grab. I mean, not because lawyers are slow, but because we like to think of things in traditional ways. You know, everybody looks at this debate about how do we deal with Facebook and thinks this is a debate about censoring. Even, you know, Glenn Greenwald is like obsessed with the idea that anything against Facebook would be about censoring speech. But, you know, the problem with

Facebook is not that there are particularly bad messages on Facebook. The problem with Facebook is not the speech. It's the amplification. It's the manipulation engine that amplifies some speech and suppresses other speech. And of course, they're not amplifying speech on the basis of anything anybody would recognize is a good reason to amplify speech. They're not amplifying liberal speech or conservative speech, not amplifying well-thought-out arguments. They're amplifying the things that they know will trigger more engagement. And what is that? It's anger. It's emotion, it's ignorance, it's falsehood. And that dynamic of amplifying the worst of us is the essence of the problem. And with some people, like with kids, when you look at the stories about how teens are fed even more body dysphoric images when they're identified as body dysphoric because that just drives them to a focus even more, at a certain point you're like, well, you know, this is a platform which is doing harm for those people. And one thing Francis said that I think is really brilliant in our testimony in Britain

was to say, you know, for many years, drug companies in the United States, you know, in the 19th century would make drugs, and then governments would have to come along and prove that the drugs were harmful. And Francis said that at a certain stage, the frame was reversed. And drug companies had to prove their product was safe before they could bring it to the market. And for some of these contexts, you know, like algorithms with children, maybe we ought to start thinking about a regime where you've got to demonstrate safety before you can deploy an algorithm, a manipulation machine for children, especially when we see the consequences of this unregulated

dynamic are so tragic for so many. Yeah. Last question in this segment, I don't want to let you off the hook with this Apple. idea without asking you a question about it. Apple's a pretty serious competitor to Facebook. And actually, from my understanding, you know, wants to see it go away. Aren't you a little uncomfortable with the fact that, you know, the Center for Humane Technology is asking, you know, essentially for an anti-competitive move here, relying on a, you know, sort of unchecked, you call it a monopoly or a member of a duopoly in terms

of operating systems, you know, that could potentially, you know, kneecap Facebook. Now, we can talk all about the share button all day long, but this is, again, a power question. So I'm wondering what you feel about that. I think all of us wish we were in the first best world where we had a well-functioning government. And if we had a well-functioning government, I'm sure we would have a very different face on Silicon Valley. You know, I, for a brief time, a nanosecond was a special master in the Microsoft case. The Microsoft case was the last time we had an antitrust enforcement action against Silicon Valley company. I mean, you know, technology companies.

That was more than 20 years ago. And so I completely agree with you that we should be, we should, first thing we should be looking for is the government to do the right thing. But if we realize the government's not going to do the right thing in, you know, the next six months, the next year, whatever. And we realize there's extraordinary risk created by this platform right now. Then what should we do? And I have no problem, hesitation, saying that we should do whatever we can. And if that means saying to Apple, like, you're trying to be the safety company, you're trying to demonstrate safety.

I mean, I've written skeptical pieces about Apple and what they're doing, and, you know, they're all businesses. They're all in it, ultimately, to figure out what the right way to make money is. So I'm not praising Apple because it's Apple, but I'm saying they have an extraordinary opportunity to leverage their brand around safety in a way that could actually help make the Internet platform safer. And why not? Why not do whatever we can to make it so that we don't lead into the next election cycle with a engine, a manipulation engine that is just focused exclusively on how to turn us

into crazy people? Because we've seen the consequence of that. And it's not pretty. I would say we're very sane. No, I'm just kidding. All right. After the break, I want to, there are a few more issues I want to talk to you about. So let's do that. We have like another 10 minutes or so. So we're here with Larry Lessig. And we're talking about Francis Hagen and the Facebook files, the Facebook papers. Depends on your persuasion on that front. We'll be back right after this. And we're back here for one final segment on the big technology podcast with Larry Lessig. He's a professor at Harvard. law school, an advisor and lawyer for Francis Hagen, the Facebook whistleblower, graciously here to talk to us about all the issues. Speaking of the issues, we just had Farad Manjou on, he is an opinion columnist for the times, and he describes what's happening around the Instagram stuff in particular,

the way that it impacts teens as something of a moral panic. and basically says every time there's been a new technology, comic books, television, people have said, oh, it's ruining the kids. Why is this time different, in your opinion? January 6th. Say more about that. Look, we live at a time when half of a part of a political party, the Republican Party, believe something which we know is completely false. Half the Republican Party believes the election was stolen.

More than half the Republican Party believes there's clear evidence that the election was stolen. We know that's not true. We just know that's not true. We should pause and ask, how is it the infrastructure of the media? And, you know, Facebook isn't the media. There's lots more. But how is it we have an infrastructure that can lead to this fundamental misunderstanding about something so incredibly important in the world?

And I think a big part of it, is the ad-driven character of media generally. You know, if you look at, in my book, they don't represent us, which came out in 2019, before all of this, but there's a section where I describe what I think of as the scariest graph in American politics, which is a graph that marks the ideological content of the three broadcast cable networks,

Fox and MSNBC and CNN. And in 2000, the ideological content is basically the same. But from the period 2000 to 2010, you see a radical divergence as Fox becomes extremely conservative, MSNBC becomes liberal, and CNN is trying to bounce between them. And that's because the business model of driving to a really engaged base so that they could better sell ads on their network produces this as the sensible result. The politics of hate pays. It pays on cable television. It pays on the platform of the Internet. And I don't think it's moral panic to ask, what do we do when the infrastructure of democracy

is being driven by a machine that cares only about how to turn us into people who hate our neighbors? I think that is a really important question. There was a panic around comic books in the 1950s. I don't remember anybody storming the Capitol on the belief that Superman was being kept in the basement of the Capitol someplace. I just don't think that happened. And so the fact that there were panics before doesn't make everything that's happening now just as insignificant. Oh, man, I have so many questions I want to ask you about that. So first of all, well, let's just go to the obvious question as a follow-up. Why are we focused

on Facebook or not the cable networks if you diagnosed that as the issue? I think we should be focused on both. I mean, you know, my colleague, Yochai Banclare after 2016 wrote a book about whether it was Facebook that gave us the election of Donald Trump or the cable networks and said, you know, I don't think it's Facebook. I don't think it's the internet. I think it's the cable networks, and we ought to be focusing on the loss of journalistic standards by that cable network in particular. I think we need to be talking about all of them together, but the fact that this is the one that's now has our attention, given our limited attention as a public, is no reason to pretend that it's not a significant issue. It's an extremely significant issue. It's just one part

of an even bigger issue and an even bigger threat. Okay, that's really interesting. So it's what's in front of us right now that that's driving this uh and then the the part of the moral panic that farred was talking about in particular looked at the instagram story about its uh issues with with teen mental health his his and that's what he was talking about in terms of the moral panic the other stuff we didn't really touch on neither did his column uh but uh essentially yeah that that's been his idea and also he said that um that this was all self-reported data which is notoriously unreliable And actually, I think if you look into it, some of it wasn't, you know, as terrible as people made it out to be, for instance, like the numbers were big, but it was, you know, drawn from people who were already having a bad experience. And, you know, maybe a third of them said into Instagram made them feel worse. Two-thirds said it made them feel better. What's the baseline there? So, so, yeah, can you address that one in particular? Well, look, I think the Facebook files, which Francis has released, should trigger a bunch of other releases, too, because I think it's a fair question, whether we have the full picture and how do we analyze all the data once we do have the full picture.

In lawyer speak, though, I think the prima facie case has been made. I think there's enough data out there to say there's something here to worry about. You know, it's not to condemn, but to worry about. The fact that two-thirds of people say they like the platform when one-third say they don't is no justification for the platform. Look, 90% of people don't get cancer from cigarettes. That's not an endorsement of cigarettes. So I think that the challenge in understanding the criticism is to recognize the precision of the criticism

And the precision is when there are design choices that could make the platform safer, but less profitable, or more profitable and less safe, the choice has been to follow profit rather than safety. It's that choice that is the criticism. It's not saying that overall we should dump something because it's terrible for kids. Now, you know, I'm somebody who has kids, my youngest is 12, my oldest is 18. I think my kids are in the in the generation where it's impossible not to believe that these platforms are having a profound effect on their lives. And as a parent, it's extremely frustrating to try to think about the constant fight you've got to make to reclaim some order and some space for your kids. So, you know, from my perspective, it's hard not to believe that there's an effect here.

But I think it's right to say, as far hard as saying, that we need to run this through the same kind of scientific evaluations that, you know, the claims about cancer and cigarettes rent through. Let's run it all through that. The difference is with cigarettes, we didn't depend upon the tobacco companies to give us the data to evaluate whether cigarettes produce cancer. We could do that on our own. We don't have the data to know whether Instagram is causing kids to commit suicide. We don't have that data because they consider. consider it their secret. Well, Francis has given us an opening into that. Let's get more and let's let the academics, those not paid by Facebook or Instagram at least, to evaluate it and decide what, in fact, the truth is. Yeah, you might have to look pretty far and why to get to those academics, but I'm confident we can get there. You talk about precision. So one thing that people have talked about, sort of in vogue discussion has been, you know, just remove the algorithm, remove the news feed algorithm. Give us like the reverse chronological feed. That's not sorted. by anything Facebook would want us to see and, you know, let people do the work themselves and

we'll be living in a better society. Well, one of the documents I saw this week and wrote about in big technology was that Facebook did do that experiment. And here's what they found. They found that integrity issues spiked. They found that ad views spiked because people were scrolling through the feed, you know, far more than they were beforehand, just trying to find something interesting. They found that content from groups, which we know of all sorts of problems, ended up in the news feed before a lot of other stuff. And yeah, and they found that people hid posts 50% more, meaning they just didn't want to see them. So I would love to hear your perspective on this algorithm question. Is it just a matter of removing the algorithm or, or, you know,

is that too simple of a solution and a nice soundbite, but not a real way for us to get past some of the issues we see on Facebook? It's a great way to frame it. Is it too simple? Yes. Because the algorithm problem is really complicated. And I don't think there's a silver bullet here. And I don't think that, you know, what Francis has tried to do is to sort of suggest that she

knows the answer to all of these problems. What we're trying to do, what she's trying to do, is to make it clear that there are problems that we've got to find a better way to address. And what drives these problems at their core is a business model, not just with Facebook, but TikTok and every one of these platforms that's focused on grabbing as much of our attention as they possibly can. That's what pays, that keeps the lights on, right? And as long as that's the business model and surveillance capitalism is the mechanism,

we're going to have a lot of complicated problems we have to untangle. But let's find a way of delivering content that is least destructive of our democracy, our understanding of issues, and, you know, our own mental health. I mean, that's the objective. And however you have to tweak the algorithm to get there, let's tweak to get there. Well, this has been fun. Yes, it has a lot of time. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate you rolling with it. And I definitely feel much better informed about Francis's strategy and what's going on here than I was beforehand. That's why we love to have these conversations. And I'm sure, because I know how these things go, that there are a ton of listeners that hit play at the beginning of this hour and are still with us now, which is very exciting. So thank you for being here.

It's really great to get a chance to chat with you. I hope we could do it again. And every time you ask, Alex, I say yes. Okay. Well, we're one for one. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you, Nate Gwattany for editing and mastering the audio.

Thank you, Red Circle, for hosting the podcast. and selling the ads. And thanks most importantly to you, the listener, for coming back every week and engaging with us here on big technology podcast. Wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for you, and I appreciate you spending time with me every week. And I guess that's going to do it for us here.

So we'll be back next week with another interview with the tech insider or outside agitator. We know which category Larry falls in. And so we hope you stick with us. First timers, please subscribe if you are a longtime listener and haven't hit a rating yet. We appreciate it. And that will do it for us here on the big technology podcast.