Science Friday - Coronavirus Preparedness, Facebook’s History. Feb 28, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

This week, the world’s attention has turned to the spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that was first detected in Wuhan, China, late in 2019. More countries are finding cases, and in the United States, a California patient has become the first known case of possible “community spread”—where the patient had not traveled to affected areas or had known exposure to someone who had been infected. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control said Americans should prepare for “significant disruption” and “inevitable” spread of the virus in the U.S. And on Wednesday, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would head the country’s coronavirus response. But what does preparation actually look like for healthcare systems that will be on the frontlines of detecting and responding to any new cases? Ira talks to infection prevention epidemiologist Saskia Popescu and public health expert Jennifer Nuzzo about the practical steps of preparing for a new pathogen, including expanding testing and making sure healthcare workers have necessary protective equipment. Plus, they address why childcare, telecommuting, and community planning may be more important than face masks for individuals who are worried about what they can do. Facebook is a household name globally with nearly 2 billion users. Mark Zuckerberg’s goal was to connect the entire world online when he founded the company in 2006. But 14 years later, Facebook has evolved into more than a social media platform. The company has been involved in debates and scandals around user privacy, outside interference in elections, and the spread of fake news. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for “repeatedly used deceptive disclosures and settings to undermine users’ privacy preferences in violation of its 2012 FTC order.” Journalist Steven Levy has been following Zuckerberg and the company since the beginning. In his new book Facebook: The Inside Story he chronicles Zuckerberg’s growth and data-driven approach and how that influenced the tactics the company applied to the problems that resulted from the platform. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It has been a big week in the life of the 2019-noval coronavirus, which causes the respiratory illness now known more simply as COVID-19. The number of countries where cases have been found is up to at least 54, that's as of today, with more than 83,000 cases confirmed globally. In the U.S., a California patient has tested positive, and this is the important part, no known chain of transmission, a sign of potential undetected spread in the community. And the CDC warned Tuesday that Americans should be ready for significant disruption of their routines as the virus spreads. Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen

and how many people in this country will have severe illness. We will maintain for as long as practical a dual approach where we continue measures to contain this disease, but also employ strategies to minimize the impact on our communities. That's Nancy Messonnier, Director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. And on Wednesday, the President appointed Vice President Mike Pence to head the efforts to combat coronavirus in the U.S. and on Thursday it was announced that government health officials must not speak to reporters on their own,

but now clear their comments to the media through the White House. Just today, the World Health Organization raised its global threat level to very high their most extreme tier. Like I said, a big week. But there's another story here too, which is the practical on-the-ground process of monitoring for further spread, responding to it. Hospitals and clinics, research labs, local health departments, even school systems, all have parts to play. You know, we've seen this before with the H1N1 flu, and we'll no doubt see it again. Health care workers need protective gear and safety protocols. You need guidance on when to get tested and how, and whether you should stay home or go to an emergency room.

And all this talk of politics, what does that chain of command at the federal level actually do for our ability to protect people and communities? So we have a lot to talk about and we're going to talk about these public health measures with my guests. Dr. Saskia Popescu, a senior infection prevention epidemiologist for Hope Health in Phoenix, Arizona. She's also an infectious disease writer and researcher. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Dr. Jennifer Nozo, Associate Professor and Senior Professor and Senior.

senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. Welcome, Dr. Nozo. Thanks so much. And I want to ask our audience, if you're a health care worker, and if you're preparing for coronavirus in the United States, we'd like to hear from you. Give us a call about what it's like on the ground. What are you seeing around you? Our number 844-825-844-Sy-5-8-4-Sai Talk.

As always, you can tweet us at SciFRI. Dr. Nozo, first things first. Let's talk about this thing called community spread. What does it represent? Why is it such an important shift in the progress of the spread of the coronavirus? Well, what we're learning about this patient so far is that she did not travel to any of the places that have been reporting cases of the coronavirus and doesn't seem to have any context, any known cases. So that leaves a bit of a mystery as to where she may have gotten her infection. It's an interesting shift because typically people in this category may not have been tested.

So it also raises questions about how many more people like this patient are out there. Well, that raises more questions, of course, and people have been asking me this a lot, and I'd like to ask you this. How do you identify a person, let's say this one in the woman in California who was infected? How did we know? How did she get into the system? Why wasn't it thought about just that she had the flu or something like that? Well, she had been hospitalized for quite some time before she had actually been tested,

but some astute clinicians thought that it was strongly possible that she had the coronavirus infection. Why exactly they thought that we didn't know? My guess is that they ruled out other infections, but there may have been something about her or her life or work or something that also raised suspicions that those details haven't been reported. But nonetheless, they essentially requested that she be tested. regardless, and I'm really glad that they did because this is quite revealing. And I think it also speaks to the real value and role that astute clinicians can play in terms of spotting some unusual

situations and sort of being the first notice of it for us. Well, one of the key shows we want to talk about today is testing. And in this case, was she tested locally? Do local officials have tests? Or did they have to send her case over down, you know, to NIH for the final results? So CDC is confirming all the tests now. That is supposed to change shortly. There had been some problems with the tests that were being sent out to the state laboratories. CDC had developed a test and sent a test out to the laboratories, and it's required by the FDA that states go through a test of the tests to make sure they're functioning properly.

And there had been some difficulties there, so they had to figure out why that was. And my understanding is they've gotten some new materials to send out to the states and we'll be doing that. And then they'll have to go through a retest to make sure they can do the results themselves. And we're very much looking forward to that because it'll be quite important to have additional testing partners in this. Saskia, on a press call today, the CDC's Dr. Messanier said that test kits are now on their way to state labs. and the CDC has some ambitious goals from making sure they're widely available. Every state and local health department next week and everything we can to try to ensure that. And Susque, how important is it that the states themselves have the test kits?

I think this is vital. First and foremost, the definition for the patients under investigation for testing criteria expanded yesterday from the CDC, which means that we're going to be testing more people. There will be more people that meet this definition. So we need to have the lab capacity to match that. And realistically, we don't want delays in sending a patient's test and then having to wait multiple, multiple days because of that. So if we can bring it to the state and county level, that would be huge. Are the states trusting the CDC with the testing process? For example, New York State said just this week or even today that they were going to develop their own test.

I have not heard any concerns. Sorry, I did actually look into that. And it sounds like the question is not one of mistrust. I think the states who are looking to develop their own tests are looking for the flexibility that developing their own tests affords that allows them to, you know, purchase reagents from other sources. So I don't think it's necessarily a reflection of lack of test trust. I do know that they will be going through their own testing of the new kits that are being sent out by CDC. and if they don't trust those results, then, of course, you know, the tests won't be done.

So they're just, they're sort of backing up the backup coming up with the test of their own. If they can't get enough test kids. This whole process is something that the FDA requires as part of the emergency youth's authorization, which is how this test, it's a kind of regulatory term that governs how tests are used in a public health emergency. Because I think besides the testing, I think one of the issues that's on everybody's mind and what's being asked at the very beginning is, why don't we have a vaccine, right? Everybody wants to talk about getting a vaccine. And Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAI yesterday, Wednesday addressed a question,

basically saying we can't wait for one. Public health measures remain the best protection for people right now. At the earliest, an efficacy trial would take an additional six to eight months. So although this is the fastest, we have ever gone from a sequence, of a virus to a trial, it still would not be any applicable to the epidemic unless we'd really wait about a year to a year and a half. Now, that means two things. One, the answer to containing is public health measures. We can't rely on a vaccine over the next several months to a year. However, if this virus, which we have every reason to believe it is quite conceivable that it will

happen, we'll go beyond just a season and come back and recycle next year. If that's the case, we hope to have a vaccine. Saskia, your day-to-day involves helping hospital workers prevent the spread of infections exactly, you know, like we're talking about. Give us an idea what the normal procedures are when the new potential infection enters the ecosystem. Let me give an example like the H1N1 in 2009 or even Ebola a few years back. Well, I think the first thing is really honing in on that admission and triage process, making sure those staff are aware and really fluid in their screening questions. Now that the definition has expanded, it's not just focusing on travel, but also, you know, wondering in our ICU's

are those patients, you know, that we don't have a reason for having a severe pneumonia looking at them, but we have to start with triage. And then we really need to focus on health care worker PPE education, reiteration, this is not a new form of isolation. We do airborne contact isolation every single day, but it's about reiterating that with staff so that they feel comfortable in the process and they're really addict, really just vigilant and their donning and doffing processes. But I think also now we're really concerned about PPE shortages. PPE for us means what? I'm sorry, personal protective equipment. So those masks, gown, and gloves, there's been an international concern with the shortages of the masks, specifically surgical, and then the N95s that

health care workers wear. So part of my process is not just to educate and make sure staff feel secure and informed in all of this, but also what are our daily supplies looking like? How do we need to plan if we get a surge of patients? And that definitely takes up a lot of worry because you really need to engage your frontline staff, but also your hospital leadership. So this has fallen to local state or local hospitals to do on their own. Yes, the CDC pushes out a lot of really helpful information, and then our county and state, public health agencies do as well. But ultimately, it is up to the hospital to invest in those efforts and make sure they can adequately identify a patient, isolate them,

and then inform the necessary parties. I want to get into those details. More of that when we come back after the break. Our number 8447-24-825, it can also do. Twitter is at SciFri. We'll get into some of the weeds on some of the details about the testing, about what hospitals need to do. Where do they get their money to do this? Is there enough federal money being allocated? They're talking about that political football in Washington right now. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about how the U.S. is preparing for the potential local spread of the novel coronavirus with my guests, Phoenix-based infection Prevention Prevention Epiomyalogist, Dr. Saskia Popescu, Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, and our number, 8447-24-8255. If you're worried about what to do, or you are someone on the front lines, one of the first responders right there in the emergency room, give us a call, 844-7-24-855, and you can tweet us at at Cy Fry. Dr. Pepescu, we were talking about your day-to-day involvement with helping hospitals. prevent the spread of infections, and you were talking about now the battle is being waged by local health departments, the hospitals and the clinics. Are they ready for this?

What else do they need? You mentioned some kinds of shortages. How do they make up for those things? I think any time we have changes on testing criteria, that means we kind of have to shift and adapt, so it's a constant moving target of staying ready. But it's especially difficult when there are shortages of masks that are necessary for health care workers, not only because it's respiratory virus season, but also if we have patients with the novel coronavirus. And that's particularly difficult because a lot of infection prevention efforts focus solely on hospitals, but we also have a lot of urgent cares and outpatient clinics we need to consider. So it's quite a task making sure all of the frontline health care workers feel comfortable in these measures, how to identify and isolate a patient,

but also realistically, how are we planning for surges in the future? Jennifer, I mentioned the federal response earlier this week. There's been a lot of movement, a lot of moving parts here. The president has put Vice President Pence in charge of the response. He's requesting $2.5 billion and all the communications about coronavirus must now be cleared by the White House. How do these political moves at the top trickle down to actual care and containment? There's a few ways. First, talking about the resources, I think that's probably one of the most important.

As Saskia has been describing, there is a lot of activities that need to go on at the state and local level. They're on the front lines of this. Our health care facilities are just part of that, but there's also the health departments that are doing all sorts of things about planning, planning for what measures will use to try to slow down the spread of the virus, being the interface between the laboratories and the health care facilities. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done, and that work is above and beyond all the day-to-day work that these practitioners have to do.

And so that's where we get into a situation where we need to talk about additional resources to support them in that. So I think that's going to be an important place. The other areas where the federal response is important is, first of all, in setting the tone and sort of describing what, should come. And so that we've seen a shift in the messaging, particularly from the CDC, about what to expect has been very important. Talking about this event as something that we should expect to see,

prepare ourselves for there to be additional cases across the country, that's really essential because that sets a signal to the state and local health departments and hospitals who, you know, have day-to-day worries that they have to deal with. But hearing from the federal government that this is coming and this is a priority, that's very essential. I think sending the alternative message of, don't worry, we'll keep this virus out of our country, I think really undermines our preparedness. So I'm very heartened to hear that health authorities at the national level are speaking in realistic terms. In terms of the kind of presidential movement and appointing Vice President Pence to oversee this, first of all, I think it's really essential that there be leadership in the White House on this issue. So for that

reason I think it's important to have somebody named who's above the federal agencies who can coordinate the work of the federal agencies and adjudicate any disagreements that come up to be able to move money and make requests of Congress for money. That's very important. But I think going so far as to, you know, require that all inquiries or messages be cleared from the White House, I think that's probably an overcorrection. And I think that's going to hurt the federal response in the long run. And at press conference on Wednesday, Dr. Nozell's, So the president held up a report from your institute, Johns Hopkins, that said proved that the U.S. was the best prepared country in the world for a global pandemic. And I think that's the big question.

A lot of people are asking, are we ready? Is that report the evidence we need? Well, as one of the senior authors of that report, it was a bit of a surprise that the president held it up. But that's the Global Health Security Index, which we produced in collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is an organization in Washington, D.C., and the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is the research arm of the Economist magazine, but they are experts in indices. And what we found was that no country was fully prepared for a pandemic. Yes, the United States does well compared to others, but there are still places where we need to improve. our preparedness. And I think some of the issues we're seeing now, some of the things we talked about

with the health facilities and the lack of readiness there and concerns, and in particular some of the issues that we're having, I just speaks to the fact that even places like the United States will have struggles in a pandemic. We're starting to get a lot of tweets and I'll try to compress them because they're asking, what do I do as a person? They go with the range from how do I take the tests and my loved ones are immunosuppressed because they, you know, they have kidney transplants, things like this. So let me just throw it out in general. We're at a point in the story where people are really starting to ask what they can and should do as individuals. You know, it sounds like the story is wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Make plans for the possibility of not being

able to go to the grocery store for a week or two or to have your kids school closed. Is there anything else you want us to know about our own role in protecting our communities. Saskia, I mean, people, the first thing they're doing is putting on these masks, and now we're hearing that the masks, probably the kind we see people wearing, don't offer any real protection. No, you really don't want to be wearing a surgical mask unless you're sick, and that's a way for you to protect people around you, people that are buying up, a bunch of masks that's only adding to the shortages. And I think it kind of gives this sense of security that leads to a lot of other infection control failures. I see people wearing masks when they don't need to, but then

they're touching their eyes. They're not washing their hands. So it's those tried and true, you know, flu season prevention strategies people need to be engaging in. But the problem is because this is a novel situation, people want a novel approach. And unfortunately, that's just not the case. That hand hygiene, staying home when you're sick, covering your cough, things like that, that's what's going to make a difference. What about, we talk about tests, you know, why not have a test that everybody can take at home? So you don't have to go out and get infected or infect someone else. How close are we to that, Jennifer?

We don't have a test at home. We're still trying to get the test to the public health laboratories. And I think this need to understand, you know, who has the infection and who doesn't is an important one. I think in particular for doctors and nurses who are seeing patients and treating patients and know how to deal with them, that will be essential. I think the idea of doing a test at home will be some time. And I think the main thing that I want to stress to people is that we would be in a bad situation where additional cases to occur in this country if people just kind of flocked to health

facilities, just wanting to be tested absent any kind of symptoms. First of all, that would put us stress on health facilities because they just wouldn't be able to handle that kind of volume of people coming. But also, we don't typically test people absent systems. symptoms. So the best thing that you can really do is that if you are sick, you should absolutely stay home and don't go out and infect other people. If you get to the point where your symptoms worsen, maybe your cold symptoms get to the point where you feel like you're short of breath, you know, contact your health provider and find out what's the best way you can access care

in a manner that's safe. We don't want people just kind of showing up unannounced. If they can kind of get directed by their health care provider, that would be helpful. And, you know, But otherwise, you know, do the things that you need to do, like wash hands. I agree. It may sound overly simple, but it's probably the best evidence we have right now for how to protect yourself. And people don't even know how to wash their hands correctly, do they? No. If my children are a guide, then the answer to that is very much yes.

I mean, I think the hard part is that everybody thinks hand hygiene is so simple, but then my response is, well, then do it. I do the twinkle-twinkle little star method. You know, 20 seconds, whether that is making a grocery list or singing a song in your head, as long as you're using soap and water for 20 seconds, I'm happy. And it's not just turning the water, robbing your fingers under the water and then pulling it out. You have to really wash your hand for a full 20 seconds. And there are a lot of YouTube videos on how to do that. Okay.

We have run out of time. So many questions, so little time. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Dr. Saskia Pescu, senior infection prevention epidemiologist for Hope Health in Phoenix, also an infectious disease writer and researcher, Dr. Jennifer Noseau, Associate Professor

and Senior Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. And on our Science Friday Vox Pop app, we're going to continue to cover the global spread of the novel coronavirus in coming weeks. So we have a question for you. It's a question of a question. What questions do you still have about this infectious disease? What questions do you still have about this infectious disease? Go to our Science Friday Vox Pop app, download it, and get it and answer that question.

You might find your answer or your question on the radio. Facebook. Oh, you know all about Facebook. It is wildly successful. It has billions of members. It's known around the world. And that was the goal to connect the entire world. online when Mark Zuckerberg founded the company in 2006. But 14 years later, Facebook has evolved

into more than just a social media platform. The company has been involved in debates and scandals around user privacy, outside interference and elections, and the spread of fake news. And a person who has watched all of this and followed all of this over the years as my next guest, Stephen Levy. He has been following Mark Zuckerberg and the company since the beginning, and he has chronicle Facebook and its growth and data-driven approach to develop products and the problems that resulted. And he has a new book in which he chronicles the whole thing. It's called What Else? Facebook, the inside story.

We have an excerpt of our book, of that book on our website at Science Friday.com slash Facebook. Stephen Levy, welcome back. It's been a while. It's great to be back. Yeah, yeah. Here I am. I've been working all this book. I think we go back 40 years or more talking about stuff.

Okay, so let's get right into the book. Mark Zuckerberg has a reputation of not being the most interview friendly. He goes into moments of silence, which you talk about these icy stairs in your book. How did you convince him and Facebook to let you follow him around all this time? Well, I knew about, it was almost four years ago. Now, the day he announced a billion people were online on Facebook the same day. That was in 2015. I knew I had to write this book.

So I approached Facebook. First, they said no. No one had never done this before. They'd never given access to their executives for such an extended period of time. But I just kept at it because I had covered Facebook for so long, and I knew Mark and I knew Joel Sandberg. They felt, well, okay, maybe an outsider coming in here would be okay to tell our story. Now, this was before the 2016 election. It got a little dice here after that.

but I got the okay, no strings attached. They didn't get to look at an advanced copy or anything. And I started talking to everybody, both inside and people outside of Facebook, of course, too. He outlined his vision in notebooks that he called, quote, the book of change. I want to read part of a quote where he sums up his vision. He says, using Facebook needs to feel like you're using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth.

User experience needs to feel full. I mean, that idea that it's a futuristic government-style interface, doesn't that set off bells in your own mind? Yeah, it did. And it's amazing to me. I really wanted to get hold of one of his notebooks. It was tough because I had heard it was legendary he would keep these notebooks, but at a certain point he destroyed it. But I heard that he made copies for parts of it for some employee. and I just kept trying really hard to figure out who those people were and whether I can get a piece of it.

And I did. And at the same time, right on the time I first met him in the spring of 2006, he was keep and not able to get an answer of him. He would stare at me when I asked him a question. He was creating these notebooks of great detail to redesign Facebook and for the first time, really, figure out how he was going to scale it to the world. And the thing you just read just shows how, how. ambitious he was. And this wasn't stuff that he was sharing to outsiders at that point. But these notebooks are really a glimpse into his psyche. Our number 8447-8255, if you'd like to talk to Stephen Levy,

author of Facebook The Inside Story, on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. During these early days when he was sketching his grand vision out, how was he thinking of privacy? He talked about these databases. Was he Was he, I'm just thinking like it's a geek tackling a giant thing that he may not be able to hold on to, you know, like a tiger by the tail after a while. Right. Well, you know, Mark has always had this pulse-pole relationship with privacy. Even before Facebook at Harvard, he did this application, this project, which became famous later on called FaceBash, which compared the, how attractive one co-ed or, you know, Harvard student was to another, and he got in trouble for that. And then Facebook itself actually had some privacy built in that he didn't steal the information

from the Harvard servers. He made people bring their own, and they chose what to put on Facebook. But what happened to that information after they put it on Facebook has become a source of huge controversy because Mark just kept pushing things. He always believed that sharing was in itself a good thing, whether or not that it turned not to be a good idea we could talk about, but he would often release products that push privacy issues farther than his users wanted to go. And his motto was move fast and break things. So sometimes he released something and people would object to it and he might either scale it back

or add a little tool to help out or sometimes just say, hey, I think you're going to like this in the long run. And some of the things he introduced were things that people around him said, Mark, that's not a good idea. That isn't very privacy friendly. And we can get in trouble for that or is just wrong. And he would think, well, let's do it anyway. Let's see what happens. And a couple of times some of his employees even refused to be involved with the launch of some of these projects.

You know, just I got a minute for the break. But that's what engineers say, let's just do this thing. Right? Right? Engineers, they say, let's do this to see if it breaks or what happens. but that's not something you might do with people's lives playing. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. And at a certain point, the consequences of these projects became bigger and bigger and bigger as Facebook went around the world. So it wasn't a dorm room anymore. It was something where people can get really hurt, and they did get hurt. All right. We're going to talk more about that. Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry talking with Stephen Levy, author of Facebook, The Inside Story.

and he's also an editor at large. It's Wired here in New York. Again, number 844-724-8255. We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us. Support for Science Friday comes from Bloomberg Philanthropies Beyond Carbon, moving the United States toward a 100% clean energy economy. Learn more at BeyondCarbon.org.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. In case you just joined us, we've been talking with Stephen Levy, editor at large, for Wired, about his new book, Facebook, the inside story. And Steve, one of the stories that is you have really fleshed out in depth, I think, like no one else has, is the Cambridge Analytica scandal two years ago. Give us a profile of what you found there and a little bit about the scandal. Sure. Actually, I had a lot of fun putting that together as a narrative, which I don't think anyone was done in a clear way before like this.

Actually, I believe that Cambridge Analytica, which was the scandal where the information of 87 million Facebook users, their profiles, fell into the hands of a researcher in Cambridge University who then handed them over and licensed them to this company in the UK that was co-funded by an extreme right-wing financier, Robert Mercer, and then was used to help elect Donald Trump. And I actually feel it began in 2010. And that was when Facebook decided to give away this massive amount of information to people who wrote programs to run on top of Facebook, software developers, for what I call this operating system called platform. And Mark had an idea for product called instant personalization, which required a lot of information. So if you clicked on one of these apps that ran on like Spotify or something like. that you are not only giving your own information away but the likes and relationship status and political proclivities of all your friends and since each person has 130 friends on average it doesn't take many people to get a

database of millions so I sort of follow it as this researcher in Cambridge learned how we can make these surveys that a few people would take and then get this massive amount of information that you know can met with a fellow at Cambridge Analytica who who handed it over to the company, and the company went and used it at first to help Ted Cruz. And a journalist actually broke that story in 2015, and Facebook didn't do very much with it. Even though Facebook realized the scandal in December 2015, they just sent these forms to Cambridge Analytica and the researcher saying, can you verify you deleted the data and weren't very aggressive in following this up.

And during the whole election, Cambridge Analytica never bothered to say, yeah, we deleted the information. Meanwhile, Facebook was selling Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars of ads. So they were basically asleep at the wheel. Do they apologize for any of these things? Do they feel? Yeah, they do apologize. But then it happens again. you wonder how since, you know, let's don't say sorry, do something about it.

And the last three years, it's been one thing after another, and I write about all of them, where Facebook is not getting ahead of what's around the corner. And I think if you look at the history of Facebook, that's it. In a nutshell, they would release products, and they wouldn't be asking themselves, what could go wrong? because they were doing unprecedented things in terms of scaling out their system to the world. You know, Facebook has almost 3 billion people now. If it were a country, it would be the biggest country in the world.

And people use it in all sorts of ways. It's in all kinds of countries where people are very sophisticated about digital literacy. They aren't sophisticated about digital literacy here, clearly. And it's up to Facebook, really, to own. what it's created. And you write that they have a threat intelligence team and other departments that focused on security, but it doesn't seem like they're doing much in those departments. Yeah, in this case, we're talking about the discovery that the Russians used Facebook as a platform

to spread misinformation. Basically, they did this disinformation campaign in the 2016 election. you know, Donald Trump is still saying it didn't happen, but the intelligence agencies said it didn't. Facebook understands that it did. And Facebook didn't discover this until well after the election was over. It was actually one of their smart researchers in threat intelligence in D.C. I tell the story. One day how we sort of put it together.

It led to this office in St. Petersburg where this information, you know, information destruction team in, you know, that was part of the Russian intelligence agencies, was putting all this fake stuff on Facebook and trying to get people who were like anti-immigration and people who are pro-immigration to like gather in a demonstration in a city and fight each other, things like that. So how do you read that Facebook is approaching the 2020 election? Are they making any patches or changes or an overhaul of the system?

Well, they're under such pressure that they, They've had to do quite a lot. And they have put in a lot of extra monitors, and they're a little more aggressive now about trying to identify what fake news is. A problem is that some fake news is perfectly acceptable on Facebook. If you or I were to post something totally made up, Facebook wouldn't say, uh-uh, uh, you can't do that. They would wait to see if people complained about it.

And then if they did, they might hire some fact checkers. They have these fact checkers on call to say whether it was true or not. And even then they wouldn't take it down. They might put extra information for people when they came across it to say, hey, you might want to think carefully whether this is true or not. So given that the basic problem with this kind of manipulation is the fake news appearing, cutting it down doesn't really solve the problem 100%. You know, Twitter announced that they're considering putting a red flag under political tweets that could be misleading.

Facebook might think about something like that? Well, at first they did. They said, well, if the fact checkers find this is fake, we'll put a little extra little note on it saying, hey, this is under dispute. But they found the people clicked on it more in that case. Oh, gee. Do you still have a Facebook account? Yeah, I do. Do you ever think about erasing it?

Well, I mean, look, I write it out Facebook. It's a good way to find people on Facebook. I mean... But I do. I'm very careful about setting the privacy settings. And Facebook has responded to claims. You know, one person who worked in privacy at Facebook early on told me you almost needed a PhD to figure out how to use their privacy controls. And they have improved that. So if you find those things that's saying settings, privacy settings, you can go and limit who's sees your stuff. Of course, Facebook will see all your stuff. Here's a tweet from Wolfgang who says, if there are laws against propaganda speech,

would Facebook be banned for promoting false information in the country's wise enough to have such law? Well, you know, I guess any law would have to follow our First Amendment. And that's the issue. When you're a platform which distributes what people say in a wide manner, legally, all your required to do is follow, you know, the First Amendment protections, and the limitations are things like libel or terrorism, you know, things like that. Facebook has to actually do more to make their platform a place that people would even think of going on. So they try to get rid of hate speech and bullying and things like that. And they have a rule book that they set up. I described the

evolution of that rule book from, you know, first of it was almost like a dorm room conference. in their office between a few people who were in charge of fielding complaints. But now they have tens of thousands of people around the world trying to moderate these things and making these decisions in bulk is kind of tough. They make a lot of mistakes. But in short, I can't imagine without changing the Constitution putting an edict against, quote, propaganda. Let's go to the phones to Fresno with Karen. Welcome to Science Friday.

Oh, hello. Hi there. Go ahead. I was just asking how, you know, with Facebook, they claim that it's, you know, actually swayed the election and stuff like that. With that kind of platform, I mean, if it's a social media, why would it, you know, how could it possibly, where would that come into? swang in election. Swaying an election. Yeah.

Well, yeah, so no one is 100% sure whether in particular the fake news or the Russians' information, what impact that had on it. It's very tough to measure. But we do know that Facebook had it probably did have a very big impact in that one campaign, the Trump campaign, used it much better than the Clinton campaign. And I talk about this, how the Trump campaign, you know, played it like a Stradivarius. and the Clinton campaign played Facebook, maybe like a homemade banjo. The Trump campaign would sometimes put as many as 175,000 ads a day on Facebook.

And they were using a lot of information they had on people, which is the way you circulate ads on Facebook. He used all the information that Facebook has and sometimes merge it with photo registration data or things like that. So they were able to target ads to the people saying, hmm, are you pro-gun? So let's see if you'll respond to this. Or you care about immigration. You don't like immigration? Let's see if we can get you to vote for Trump this way. And the people they figured who were hopeless in terms of voting for Trump, then they would send ads to them that made them sort of disgusted with the whole situation in general and hopes that they wouldn't vote at all.

So they did a really good job of using Facebook the way it's supposed to be used, which is sort of disturbing in itself. And so Facebook knew all about this. Yeah, they did. They sat there and watched as Trump used it so brilliantly in their thing. They described to me in awe about how Trump was using it, but they really didn't think he was going to win. Like a lot of people, they thought, well, he's doing a great job on Facebook, but he couldn't possibly win. So they just let it happen and, you know, weren't upset about it. And to be fair, it wouldn't be right for Facebook to say, we're going to give you our services on one side and not you on the other.

They offered it to both. And so I would imagine since it worked so well for the Trump campaign in the last election, everybody's going to try it in 2020. Yeah, they are, but Trump people have a head start. And it looks like the Democratic side still, you know, you have to go candidate by candidate. but still hasn't caught up on really using Facebook to the maximum, like the Trump did. Does one candidate have a better team than the other? Well, I probably have all the candidates on the Democratic side. I would think the Bloomberg would know how to use this stuff.

They put terminals and, you know, all the campaign offices. They did. Myra Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Stephen Levy, author of the book, Facebook, The Inside Story, he's also editor at large for Wired. We have an excerpt on our website at Science Friday.com slash Facebook. Why did Facebook, you know, why did Facebook succeed when you had all those others before the other social, that we don't even remember their names?

Well, Fredster, MySpace. Yeah. Why did Facebook become such a big hit and none of those survived? I think one reason was it started in a smaller community. From the get-go, it didn't try to connect the whole world. That wasn't something that occurred to Mark until he was a couple of years in. So it was a community where people knew each other. So there was a degree of trust. And the people you didn't know were only a couple friends away. So and it was limited. It had a privacy benefit built in because it was only the people on. your college internet domain that could see things like your profile. So he was able to test out and perfect his product within this little Petri Lab. And then when he extended it outwards, he had a good grasp on how to do that stuff. Hey, you know, there are a lot of people.

There's somebody I don't want to call any one caller online or tweeting to say, you know, you have free will. If you don't like Facebook, just get off the system. Well, you know, Facebook, whether you're on Facebook or not, Facebook is big in your life. So many people are on it. The discussions are on it affect you. And as we talked about on things like elections, you know, that affects you whether you like it or not. You know, and there's been, you know, but the thing is that for everything that Facebook does, we complain about,

this is what I found in the book that was sort of frustrating, that they had been warned about that. So things like anti-vax posts. Someone told me, gee, in 2015, I was complaining about that. And in things like they went into other countries before people at Facebook even knew how to speak that language. They didn't hire native speakers in the countries they went. And they didn't know when content was put on there that in some cases would start riots and people would die. It wasn't until 2015, for instance. You know, a few years after violence had broken out over Facebook posts, that they even bother to translate the rule book into Burmese.

Well, it's all on, Steve. Stephen Levy's a huge tome of a book. It's called Facebook, The Insight Story. Thank you, Stephen, for taking time to be with us today. Great book. Always a pleasure, Ira. And you can read an excerpt, as I say, up on our website at Science Friday.com slash Facebook. One last thing before we go.

Former NASA mathematician Catherine Johnson passed away this week. She was one of a group of African-American human computers. Remember her featured in the 2016 film and book Hidden Figures. In her decades at NASA, Johnson's calculations charted the safe. and early space flights for astronauts like Alan Shepard and John Glenn. And in 1969, her trajectories took the Apollo 11 crew to the moon and back. We spoke with the Hidden Figures author Margaret, Margo Ali Shadilly, about Johnson's story back in 2016. It's an almost unbelievable thing.

I mean, we have a situation where in Virginia, which is still a segregated state. And yet, here is Catherine Johnson, a black woman working with white male engineers and saying, listen, I'm the one to finish the report that describes the orbital flight, you know, that was upcoming. You know, when they were counting down to the 1962 orbital flight of astronaut John Glenn, you can imagine the kind of checklists and anxiety around that, you know, this is a very complicated mission that they had. One of the checklist items was having Catherine Johnson basically take a set of data that went through the computer, you know, basically, simulating the upcoming flight, having Catherine Johnson take the raw numbers and run them through

all of the equations that have been programmed in the computer by hand to make sure that the computer's results were the same as her results. Margot Lee, shadowly talking about Catherine Johnson on Science Friday back in 2016. Catherine Johnson passed away on Monday at the age of 101. We also got word today of the passing of the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, known scientifically for his work on quantum electrodynamics, but more widely for his outside-the-box ideas on topics from energy to space exploration to the nature of humanity. He wanted to, for example, genetic engineer a turtle that had teeth of steel

so you could do away with waste. Freeman Dyson died this week at the age of 96. That's about all we have for this week. If you missed any part, you can hear it again. Subscribe to our podcast. You can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday so you can make every day. Science Friday, and of course we're on social media all week, week long. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.