Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/17 – Facebook’s Week Of Wall Street Journal Woes

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

A deep dive summary of the rolling Facebook controversies this week from the ongoing Wall Street Journal reporting. Apple and Google remove an app from Russian opposition after their employees were threatened in that country? And of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions, this time with extra NFT goodness. Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Links: Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show. (WSJ) How Facebook Hobbled Mark Zuckerberg’s Bid to Get America Vaccinated (WSJ) The Algorithm Tweaks Won't Save Us (Galaxy Brain/Charlie Warzel) Google and Apple Remove App Aimed at Spurring Protest Voting in Russia (NYTimes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: A Very, Very Crypto Insider-Trading Scandal (Intelligencer) What is Bored Ape Yacht Club? The Celebrity NFT of Choice (Decrypt) Jay-Z’s NFT Feud Spotlights Legal Peril in Hot Investment Trend (Bloomberg) THE PENTAGON’S ARMY OF NERDS (The Atlantic) Greg LeMond and the Amazing Candy-Colored Dream Bike (Wired) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, September 17th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a deep dive summary of the rolling Facebook controversies this week from the ongoing Wall Street Journal reporting. Apple and Google remove an app from Russian opposition after their employees were threatened in that

country. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions, this time with extra NFT goodness. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I've mentioned already this week that Facebook has had a hell of a week, with the Wall Street Journal dropping a bombshell story about them, seemingly every day, often using internal Facebook documents. For example, yesterday the headlines were about how internal docs allegedly revealed Facebook's weak response after staff flagged human traffickers and drug cartels using its platforms for recruitment in developing countries. quote, employees flagged that human traffickers in the Middle East had used the site to lure women into abusive employment situations in which they were treated like slaves or forced to perform sex work.

They warned that armed groups in Ethiopia use the site to incite violence against ethnic minorities. They sent alerts to their bosses on organs selling, pornography, and government action against political dissent, according to the documents. Facebook removes some pages, though many more operate openly, according to the documents. In some countries where Facebook operates, it has few or no people who speak the dialects needed to identify dangerous or criminal uses of the platform the documents show. When problems have surfaced publicly, Facebook has said it addressed them by taking down offending post. But it hasn't fixed the systems that allowed offenders to repeat the bad behavior.

Instead, priority is given to retaining users, helping business partners and at times placating authoritarian governments, whose support Facebook sometimes needs to operate. operate within their borders, the documents show. Facebook treats harm in developing countries as, quote, simply the cost of doing business, end quote, in those places, said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who oversaw partnerships with internet providers in Africa and Asia before resigning at the end of last year. Facebook has focused its safety efforts on wealthier markets, with powerful governments and media institutions, he said, even as it has turned to poorer countries for user growth, end quote. And now, this morning, the headline is that internal documents show

how anti-vax activists flooded vaccine content on Facebook with negative comments, despite Mark Zuckerberg's push to promote COVID-19 vaccines. You might remember how Zuckerberg and Facebook at the beginning of the year made a big show of saying how they were going to promote vaccine outreach. But according to the journal, quote, in the weeks before Mr. Zuckerberg made his announcement, another memo said initial testing concluded that roughly 41% of comments on English language vaccine-related posts risked discouraging vaccinations. Users were seeing comments on vaccine-related posts 775 million times a day, the memo said. And Facebook researchers worried the large proportion of negative comments could influence perceptions of the vaccine safety. Even authoritative sources of

vaccine information were becoming, quote, cesspools of anti-vaccine comments, the authors wrote. That's a huge problem and we need to fix it, they said. goal of protecting the rollout of the COVID vaccines described in one memo as a, quote, top company priority, end quote, was a demonstration of Mr. Zuckerberg's faith that his creation is a force for social good in the world. But the effort ended up demonstrating the gulf between his aspirations and the practical reality of the world's largest social platform, where the company's aims can bring it into conflict with its own users. Despite Mr. Zuckerberg's effort, a cadre of anti-vaccine activists flooded the network with what Facebook calls, quote,

barrier to vaccination, and quote, content, the memo show. They use Facebook's own tools to so doubt about the severity of the pandemic's threat and the safety of authorities' main weapon to combat it, end quote. If new scandalous headlines in the journal every day was not enough, head of Instagram Adam Masseri went on our friend Peter Kafka's podcast yesterday to push back on those earlier Wall Street Journal scoops that suggested that Instagram was bad for teenage girls. girls, and, well, this happened, quoting CNBC. Adam Masseri, the head of Facebook's Instagram service, came under a flurry of criticism Thursday after comparing the value of social networks to society to that of cars.

Quote, we know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents. But by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy, Masseri said Wednesday on the Recode Media podcast, and I think social media is similar, end quote. Miseri's comparison of Instagram to cars came after podcast host Peter Kafka asked the executive if the service should be pulled or restricted if there's a chance it could really harm people in the same way that say cigarettes can harm people. Quote, absolutely not. And I really don't agree with the comparison to drugs or cigarettes, which have very limited,

if any, upsides, Maseri said. Anything that is going to be used at scale is going to have positive and negative outcomes. Cars have positive and negative outcomes, end quote. Numerous Twitter users criticize Maseri for the comparison and pointed out that, unlike social media, the automobile industry is heavily regulated. Among those critics was former Facebook executive Brian Boland, quote, We have regulations and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for cars. Maybe Adam Messeri should read unsafe at any speed, Boland tweeted. Kafka asked about the regulations surrounding cars to which Maseri responded.

He does believe that some social media regulation is needed. quote, we think you have to be careful because regulation can cause more problems, Maseri said on the podcast. But I do think we are a big enough industry that it's important and we need to evolve it forward, end quote. Mouseri went on the defensive on Twitter after the wave of criticism, calling the car analogy, quote, less than perfect, but saying that Facebook executives stand by the belief that social media connecting people does more harm than bad, quote, headline culture, which, yes I know, social media has contributed to, is exhausting. Messeri said among his series of tweets Thursday morning, end quote. Yes, the endless series of

Facebook controversies can be exhausting. Take it from someone who has to cover these controversies every day, and I've only been doing it for a little under four years, but at the same time, I kind of think that that's the point. And that's why I'm devoting half the show today to this, because, again, there have been new stories and new allegations every single day this week. stop for a second and ask yourself why that is. I mean, Facebook has had controversies from the day it was created, so why is this all coming out now? Well, as everyone in tech has been whispering about this week, it is clear that the calls are coming from inside the Facebook house itself. Clearly, someone either formerly or currently at Facebook is leaking this stuff. So is there a larger rebellion going on inside Facebook than we know about? Let me quote this. tweet thread from former Facebook executive Alex Stamos. Quote, the Facebook files reporting is incredible, necessary, and damning, and misleading the public about it is inexcusable.

But this stuff must exist on other platforms, too, right? Why are they less leaky? Will this disincentivize this kind of research in the future? How do we stop that? I think the big picture is that several mid-level VPs and directors invested and built big quantitative social science teams on the belief that knowing what was wrong would lead to positive change. Those teams have run into the power of the growth and unified policy teams.

Turns out, the knowledge isn't helpful when the top execs haven't changed the way products are measured and employees are compensated. So the only recourse for those teams to affect change is leaking to the Wall Street Journal. I'm sure other products have the same impacts and problems, but they are either too small, Twitter and Snap, to build these big expensive teams that don't drive revenue, or have a strategy of not looking, YouTube, end quote. In other words, if you're a talented, smart, perhaps idealistic person who has gone to work for Facebook, for the last five years at least, you knew that working at Facebook would be, shall we say, controversial. Some folks would look at you sideways if you mentioned where you worked, but maybe you could justify it all to yourself

by saying it's okay, because we can change things. I, by being here, will change things. Social media is new. We just haven't perfected it yet. But what if now you've run into a whole bunch of barriers to change and the scales have fallen from your eyes and you've seen that the truth of it might be either, A, your bosses don't want anything to change, so it never will. Or B, it's the nature of the beast that it can't be changed. Social media might be so flawed in its very nature as to be unredeemable. And so if you're that idealistic worker, might your patience be running out? Let me quote from Charlie Wurzel's substack this morning and leave it at that. He's talking about one of the Facebook controversies from earlier this week about how Facebook changed its algorithms a couple years ago

ostensibly to cut down on the messy political stuff, but maybe just made things worse in reality. I think it's important to note that the Facebook decision to incentivize meaningful social interactions, their term, wasn't necessarily a horrible, nefarious idea, but increasing these interactions without also amplifying divisive incendiary content, thus making people feel awful by consuming it, is a big ask. As former Facebook civic engagement team leader, Samid Chakrabardi, noted on Twitter, this work essentially requires a set of philosophical and ethical values about what good and bad content is and what the network should do to promote the former. Quote, in the absence of an articulated set of values, engagement and growth concerns will win every single

time because they are far easier to measure and defend. But without them, we are left with social networks that are inherently amoral, yet control our information sphere, end quote. Now I'm going to pick up quoting from Charlie Wurzel again. In other words, Facebook had an ambitious goal, increasing meaningful social interactions, and in large part failed to implement its changes in a way that made Facebook less toxic. Going through the history, I'm struck by how Facebook creates shitty outcomes for its users, no matter how you tweak the algorithms. Pre-2018, the platform's architecture incentivized the creation of some of a lot of medium and low-quality news and entertainment content, which performed like crazy on the platform. It sucked users in and kept them engaged in a

passive way that made them feel worse after a Facebook session. Then the company tried to incentivize an opposite platform experience in order to get people to engage with each other. it turned out that this was potentially worse and definitely more politically destabilizing. At the end of the day, Facebook found that two people screaming at each other and accusing the other of being part of a pedophilic cult or stealing an election is, well, a meaningful social interaction. I've come to believe that arguments weighing Facebook's good and bad outcomes are probably a dead end. What seems rather indisputable is that, as currently designed to optimize scale, engagement, profit, there is no way to tweak the platform in a way that doesn't

ultimately make people miserable or that destabilizes big areas of culture and society. The platform is simply too big. Leave it alone and it turns into a dangerous cesspool. Play around with the knobs and risk inadvertently censoring or heaping world historic amounts of attention onto people or movements you never anticipated, creating yet more unanticipated outcomes. If there's any shred of sympathy I have for the company, it's that there don't seem to be any great options. I think there are plenty of overwrought claims about Facebook that are really not about Facebook and mostly about scoring political points. It can feel performative when people say things like Facebook is not compatible with democracy, but I do believe that Facebook at its current scale and in its

current design is not really compatible with humanity, end quote. It's one of those days, I guess, because folks aren't just exasperated by Facebook today. Apple and Google this morning are coming in for their share of controversy because they removed jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's app, which was intended to coordinate protest voting in Russia, bowing to Russian pressure on the eve of a Russian election, quoting the New York Times. Google removed the app Friday morning after the Russian authorities issued a direct threat of criminal prosecution against the company's staff in the country, naming specific individuals, according to a person familiar with the company's decision. The move comes one day after a Russian lawmaker raised the prospect of retribution against

employees of the two technology companies, saying they would be, quote, punished. The person declined to be identified for fear of angering the Russian government. On Friday, Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said, quote, that app is illegal when asked about it on his regular call with journalists. Quote, both platforms have been notified and in accordance with the law, they have made these decisions, it seems, he said. Apple did not respond to request for comment about the availability of the Navalny app in its store. The app disappeared just as voting got underway in the three-day parliamentary election in which Mr. Navalny's team was hoping to use its app called Navalny to coordinate the opposition vote in each of Russia's 225 electoral districts. Quote, removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful

act of political censorship, an aid to Mr. Navalny, Ivan Zandov, said on Twitter, quote, Russian authoritarian government and propaganda will be thrilled, end quote. Now, among the many reasons why I think people are upset about this, quoting Matthew Green on Twitter, Apple spent the entire summer telling the public that they were confident they could resist government pressure when defending their CSAM scanning system. Today, they're pulling voting guides from the Russian app store. What changed in a month? Apple's defense of removing voting guides is that they have to obey the law of the nations they operate in. And yet, if legislators demand they expand their image scanning corpus, they say they will refuse. They intend to break the

law in that case, but not this one, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, this is a story I didn't cover this week, but Intelligencer has a handy layman-friendly summary of the story, so here you go. Allegations of insider trading have rocked the world of NFTs this week. Quote, in simple terms, Zulu was observing that blockchain data, where all transactions are visible, showed that a wallet associated with Chastain's avatar had been buying up specific NFTs just before they were promoted on OpenC's main page and then selling them on the price spike that tended to follow. The tweet immediately blew up in the, of course, extremely online world of NFT enthusiasts, where Chastain was known as an active and friendly participant.

In the hours following, OpenC, all but confirmed Chastain's breach, calling it, quote, incredibly disappointing. By Thursday, Chastain appeared to have stepped down, updating his Twitter profile to, quote, passed at OpenC. OpenC CEO Devin Finzer announced on Thursday afternoon that, quote, we requested and accepted the resignation of an unnamed employee who had violated the company's standards of behavior, end quote. Read the whole thing for more as this story is continuing to evolve as we speak. If you're not familiar, OpenC is probably the most popular NFT marketplace. And as that quote mentions, Nate Chastain was a very prominent employee of OpenC. But, you know, that makes me think that I have to admit that while we've been discussing how

NFTs have been everywhere on Twitter and social media lately and done entire weekend episodes to delve into the craze, I've been remiss in sharing a good primer of some of these projects and what the whole excitement is all about. I just keep referring to things like rocks and punks and stuff like that. So here you go. From Decrypt, I've got a handy explainer of what board ape yacht club is. Quote, developed by Yuga Labs, the board ape yacht club is a collection of 10,000 profile pictures minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. An NFT or non-fundible token acts like a deed of ownership for a digital item, allowing buyers to prove that they own the one and only version of that image. In this case, buyers own an illustration of a disinterested-looking

ape with randomly generated traits and accessories. No two images are exactly alike. As the name suggests, the board ape yacht club is billed as an exclusive society or social organization and owning one of the coveted NFTs unlocks that membership. It earns users access to an exclusive discord server, for example, where fellow owners, including celebrities, hang out and chat. And apes tend to flock together on social media where the increasingly familiar avatars have united a digital brotherhood of sorts. Perhaps more importantly, owning a board ape NFT earns you access to additional NFT collectibles, which can then be resold for potentially considerable amounts of cash. Ugal Labs first offered free board ape kennel club dog NFTs to board ape owners and then later released free mutant serum

NFTs that generated a mutant ape yacht club image. It's almost like paying a one-time fee for an on-goyp subscription plan for NFTs and perks." But also, we've covered some controversies surrounding NFTs in the past. For example, what if someone tries to sell an NFT of a piece of art that they maybe don't own? Funny enough, just this week, there's been another controversy about that, quoting Bloomberg. As a young rapper, Jay-Z once teamed up with Damon Dash to sell CDs of his music out of a car in the Brooklyn Projects. Today, the co-founders of Rockefeller Records are embroiled in a legal fight involving one of the most cutting-edge investments, non-fungible tokens. The dispute began in June when Rockefeller sued Dash, seeking to stop him from auctioning off the copyright to Jay-Z's debut album, Reasonable Doubt, as an NFT, which represents ownership of a digital object on a blockchain.

Rockefeller says that while Dash holds a one-third stake in the company, it owns the album itself, and he has no legal right to sell the NFT. The JZ suit should serve as a warning to buyers and sellers of NFTs to make sure both sides know exactly what's being sold, said Christopher A. Cole, a partner with Cromwell and Mooring LLP in Washington, end quote. Next, I've also spoken before about how the U.S. government needs help from Silicon Valley in this age of cyber warfare, but also the Pentagon needs technologists too, the age when U.S. armies had assumed technological superiority over most of, adversaries has probably come to an end, and there are worries now that we might be falling behind for the first time. From the Atlantic, quote, today's militaries can deal a physical blow with a digital signal. With the right lines of code, you can disable a nuclear reactor, destroy a munitions factory, or knockout power to an entire country. You can infiltrate the computer networks of your enemy, surveil their every move, and stop them from launching attacks on you. The digital

warrior never needs to look up from their keyboard. Cyberweapons are not. the only digital technology that is transforming national security. Artificial intelligence is also revolutionizing how militaries do battle and spy agencies conduct espionage. Using AI systems, governments can spot individuals in a crowd, locate facilities to attack, detect intrusions on a computer network, predict civil uprisings, and identify potentially violent extremists. Although the United States can best any other country in the traditional physical domains, it faces a much more level playing field in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been slower to adopt national security technologies like artificial intelligence than certain other countries,

including China. One major reason is that the leading developers of these new digital tools are not members of the traditional military industrial complex, companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Instead, they are in the technology industry, end quote. And finally, remember Greg Lamond, a legend of the Tour de France, and I believe, after all of those doping scandals. Currently, the only U.S. person ever to win the Tour de France? Well, he's a startup guy now. From Wired Magazine, learn about his vision of creating an ultralight e-bike that he hopes will be the Model T or Tesla, pick your metaphor, of the modern micromobility era. In 2010, when LeMond started researching how to manufacture carbon fiber frames for an e-bike

that would feel just like his racing days, he realized he didn't have a design problem. He had a global supply chain problem. That's when LeMond decided that along with a carbon fiber e-bike, he would make the carbon fiber himself. As it turns out, the United States government has been desperate to promote domestic carbon fiber manufacturing since the 1990s. If you could make carbon fiber at home, at scale, you could do much more than just make bikes. You could build affordable giant wind turbines to produce cheap, clean energy. You could reinforce crumbling infrastructure or reduce shipping costs in every industry free from trade wars and tariffs, you could create hundreds of American jobs. If you don't know much about carbon fiber, that's by design. Carbon fiber manufacturing is a highly

lucrative, highly capital-intensive, and very secretive process. Different applications, cars, planes, tennis rackets all require different ultra-specific formulations. Each of these recipes takes a lot of time, effort, and money to develop, and companies guard their intellectual property fiercely, end quote. And actually, I'm going to stop there because that's really the main reason why I chose this long read. It's a cool entrepreneurial and startup story, but it's just as much about supply chains and materials and carbon fiber as technology as it is about e-bikes and Greg Lamond. It's really great. This week's bonus episode is part one of our two-part special from our hashtag World Cup of Entrepreneurs Thing, which you also helpfully participated in.

I've been podcasting for seven and a half years now, and this is maybe one of the best things I've ever been a part of. The conversation is very nerdy, but it's also so thoughtful, so fun. I kind of had an inkling, the silly tournament conceit would allow us to talk about startups and technologies in a fun way. And boy, was I correct, this is maybe the most fun I've had in front of a microphone ever. Enjoy and talk to you on Monday.