The Vergecast - Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

We’re sharing the trailer for the new season of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption. Our friends over a Recode along with The Verge explore how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge speak with top Meta executives and some of its biggest critics and ask how the company has shaped our lives, and what lies ahead.  Subscribe to Land of the Giants to get new episodes starting Wednesday, July 13th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. It's your friend David Pierce. The Vergecast is taking a much-needed vacation this week. So instead of this week's episode, we are excited to share with you a trailer for the new season of Land of the Giants. This season, the Facebook meta disruption, is a collaboration between Recode and The Verge. Senior reporters Shereen Gaffari of Recode and Alex Heath of the Verge explore how meta, which you may know is Facebook, is impacting our lives on and off the internet. Take a listen to the trailer and follow Land of the Giants wherever you find your podcasts. New episodes are out every Wednesday starting July 13th. Fun fact about Mark Zuckerberg.

Before he dropped out of Harvard to build his company, the Facebook, he was a psychology major. You know, I basically studied psychology and computer science. So all of the work that I do is sort of at the intersection of those things. What I care about is building technology to help people interact with each other. That was Zuckerberg in an interview earlier this year. And it captures just how optimistic he still is about shaping the way people communicate with each other in the digital future. Even after his company has been accused of stoking misinformation, inciting violence, and polarizing the globe. I'm Shereen Gafari. And I'm Alex Heath. We're hosting Land of the

Giants, a podcast about the biggest tech companies of our time. This season, Meta, formerly known as Facebook. It's a company in a particularly controversial and vulnerable moment. Zuckerberg is placing a multi-billion dollar bet towards an imagined metaverse future. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still grappling with what he has already built. When I think about any kind of abuse, from my perspective, the philosophy should be the company should try to prevent the things that they have done that make those things worse, but not try to fix society itself. This season, we're going to talk to the executive steering meta's biggest decisions. We hope we can marry the best of letting people freely communicate and then figuring out how to do that while keeping people safe. you know, from the worst of the worst.

I think it's like, is the play we're running right now. And I hope it works because the alternatives are all much worse. The first thing to do on elections and on hate speech and on content moderation and on privacy is, of course, to look yourself in the mirror, ask yourself the difficult questions. What did we get wrong? What did we not anticipate and correct that first thing? But second thing is then to have the conviction to push back when the assertions and allegations just are kind of way beyond any reasonable sense of proportionality.

And you'll hear from some of META's sharpest critics, its former employees. There is a system of incentives inside of Facebook the company and incentivizes bad behavior from people who want to curry favor with authoritarian governments or demagogic media figures or just, you know, do what's right for growth for the company in the short term. I was thinking about the fact that the two entities I had spent my career working for, the Republican Party in Facebook, for different reasons, just looked very different than when I had first started working for them.

What I was seen was real. What I was seen was unacceptable. And that the only path forward was to get the public involved. We'll explore why Zuckerberg is taking the company in a bold direction and how Facebook's past will inform its future. Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption. This season is sponsored by Clavio. From Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media, podcast network. Subscribe for free wherever you listen and get our first episode on Wednesday, July 13th.