The Vergecast - The future of Facebook and democracy with Casey Newton and Alex Stamos

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Facebook's former chief security officer Alex Stamos joined Casey Newton onstage at SXSW to discuss the difficult issues that plague Facebook and democracy. Subscribe to The Interface, Casey Newton's newsletter about social platforms and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's the Yon from the Vergecast. Real quick, before we start, do me a favor. Can you go to Voxmedia.com slash pod survey

and just tell us how you listen to a podcast, what you like, what you don't like. You can do me two favors and actually just answer every question and weigh the favors of Virchast. That would make me really happy. Anyhow, it's Voxmedia.com slash Podsurvey. We're trying to make everything better, so your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Okay, this week on the interview episode, I'm actually taking a step back. Casey Newton interviewed Alex Stamos live at South by Southwest. Alex is Facebook's former head of security. Obviously, platforms are in the news. The relationship between our democracy, our culture, and these huge social platforms is more in question than ever. Casey writes a newsletter about that stuff every day called the interface. You can go to the verge.com slash interface.

Check that out. But Casey interviewed Alex live at South by Southwest. It was a pretty amazing conversation. Alex has deep insight in how Facebook thinks and how Mark Zuckerberg thinks. And how Zuckerberg is thinking about this big pivot to privacy that he says Facebook is making. It is well worth your time. You might have to slow down because they both talked really fast,

but check this out. Hey everybody. My name's Casey Newton and I'm Silicon Valley, Editor of the Verge. I'm really excited. Also, I want you all to give yourselves a round of applause for caring about democracy. Just quick.

Wonderful. The title of this panel is saving democracy, so we've given ourselves 30 minutes. Hopefully that will be sufficient. And to help us do it, I'm going to welcome onto the stage Facebook's former chief security officer. He's currently at Stanford. We're going to talk about the work he's doing there as well.

Please welcome Alex Stamos. All right. So the week's big news, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a very long blog post where he pledged to bring encryption and ephemeral messaging to the entire suite of Facebook messaging apps. And you had a couple tweets that I'm going to read quickly here. You said there are fundamental tradeoffs that have to be made here. Openness versus data protection. Privacy versus safety. Platform power versus individual freedom.

Government power versus citizen privacy. Authenticity versus anonymity. And you described these as kind of a series of dials that, and that like for a long time Facebook has been. turning these between three and eight, and now Zuckerberg has decided he wants to slam a bunch of these dials to either one or 11. Talk to us about these tradeoffs and what will be the ramifications for the democracy and the world we live in. Yeah, so one of the big challenges all the social media companies face is there's a bunch of fundamental tradeoffs that are very poorly recognized by the government and media and other critics, right? So the classic tradeoff in engineering

is you can have something done correctly, quickly, or cheaply. pick two of three. And it turns out that if you want to do something like keep people safe online, to do so, you need to know a lot about people to know if they're bad guys. It's very, very hard to build a social network where you only know stuff about bad guys and you ignore the good guys. If you want to respect people's individual rights of free expression, then that means you have to be very careful to have rules around how you do it. And Facebook has, like I said, tweaked back and forth, started as this thing just at Harvard, very closed. News feed made it very open, very open, you know, that the big change of privacy was a huge deal. And so that was kind of like

turning the privacy way down. And it's tweaked it back and forth. But I think from Zuck's perspective, his problem is he's getting it on both sides, right? That whatever decision he makes, he will have people who will criticize it for both. In some cases, the same newspaper, the same week, will make two criticisms. You know, an example of that. The New York Times like to criticize Facebook not keep him safe from committing suicide on Facebook Live, which I think is actually, that's the correct take is that Facebook, we did not do enough, and I was there at the time to properly prepare for the impact of allowing teenagers to stream themselves live. And a lot of the anti-suicide stuff we had done to that point was completely inapplicable to video. But then later

criticized Facebook's being creepy by preventing people from committing suicide and calling 911 when it looks like people might kill themselves. And those are both legitimate takes. You just can't have both at once. And I think what Mark has done is he's decided, I can't be in the middle anymore. The middle is where you lose continuously. So we're going to make this tradeoff incredibly stark, and we're going to slam as far as to one side. And the truth is, if he's going to do that, he only has one choice, which is a slam towards the side of technology, because the other side of keeping everybody safe is probably actually not practical. But you can keep everybody's information private. Right. So what are the ramifications of a world where all of our messages

are encrypted? There's two kinds of bad things, two classes of bad things that happen on social media. One is the bad things that people do to each other where one person is a victim, right? And so that is, if a bad guy reaches out and harasses somebody, if somebody dockses somebody, if they send a death threat, in the case of children, it's to reach out to children and to groom them and to sexually exploit them, which is actually, of all the things, that is the worst thing that happens online every day. We never talk about it. Our society has just kind of moved on, but that is the worst thing that happens every single day is the sexual exploitation of children. Those have victims, right? And so if you have a victim, then you have a participant who does not want to be part of it.

And so in a world where things are encrypted in ephemeral, there are options to keep those people safe. Those options are definitely reduced. We had to deal with this when we rolled out and in encryption as an option for Messenger is things that we had put in place to detect when people are reaching out to teenage girls online and trying to groom them that could be detected. But some of it was able to be replaced through analysis of metadata and that kind of stuff. and then also by really beefing up the ability of the victim to report it

and then to beef up the ability to respond quickly. The other class of issues online are the things that every participant is a volunteering participant. And this ranges from terrorists who want to organize terrorist attacks by talking to each other to anti-vaxxers who want to talk about being anti-vax.

And that is a class of issues that will now, for the most part, disappear from the ability because adults generally are now opting in to be part of a discussion where there might be real-world ramifications, but since all of them have privacy and all of them have consented to it, for the most part, that will be invisible. And that is the entire class of issues that now Facebook is effectively saying that is not our problem. But that's how I'm reading it. I don't have any insight in here,

but when I read that I see him punting on that class of issues, and that's the class of issues where he can't win. And the anti-vaccin, I think, is probably the best example of that, that we've gone to the point of where educated adults, people in the media want their decisions about what data they're able to access and what they're able to say to each other to be controlled by these non-democratically accountable half-tillion dollar companies.

And it's like if you're at that point, anti-vax, we all talk about it because we're all like educated urbanites. I mean, I hate anti-vaxers. I have three kids, one of whom's here, and the idea that one of them is going to get a disease that should have been wiped out in the 19th century makes me sick, right?

But I also know the crappy part of freedom is other people having freedom. me having freedom is easy. Other people having freedom is hard. It's the worst. And I think that's the class of things that he's like, I can't win. So we're going to wipe our ability out to deal with any of those. Sure.

Okay, so I write a newsletter about these issues, and I feel like I'm mostly right about unintended consequences. Facebook is at this enormous scale, it makes a decision, and then we just sort of wait to see what happens next. What you've just described is a world in which life might become much easier for somebody who wants to exploit a child or plot terror. And how do you feel about the fact that this platform is going to have all these ramifications and we just sort of have to wait and see, like, do we have any sense that this is an informed decision? Like, can data inform this? Or is this one where Mark says, well, because I can't win

on this front, like, let's just encrypt everything and see what happens next? Yeah. So again, those are two different. I think on the child stuff, there's a lot that can be done. And so my hope is that they, I was really happy to see that he explicitly, so first, he explicitly talked about child exploitation and terrorism. Facebook traditionally one of things that drove me nuts about the company is the company doesn't want to talk about the fact that the world's a horrible dark place. And so if you don't talk about that, then you can't engage on the issues. And so the fact that he used the magic word terrorism was shocking to me, right? Like that just jumped at the fact that that made it through like the entire comms filter

of all the people who tried to edit that document before it went out, I thought was a good sign. And so the fact that they're going to focus on that is great. But you're right, on the other things where people are able to do. But this is the funny thing is, I think Facebook's in this position where they get blamed for things that are the, this is the emergent property of the fact that every adult in the world is about to have a pocket supercomputer with always on connectivity. This is just the truth, right? The truth is that anti-vax is going to exist. Terrorists are going to be able to communicate with each other. The question is, can you provide a service that is as responsible and where you mitigate as much as the harm as possible, that even if harms are happening

elsewhere, that at least within the place that you're operating, that you're doing the best you can. And I think on the direct stuff they can, but I think on a lot of the content moderation stuff, they're not. And the place where that is going to be most harmful, it's probably not in the United States. It's going to be places like India, right? Like you already see this in India

with violence that has been sparked from rumors that are being spread on WhatsApp. Now, communal violence between ethnic sex in India is as old as India itself, right? The country was born into violence in a horrible split with Pakistan. Like, it's not something, but the internet makes this a bigger issue.

But this is the flip side. What would it take, I want people in the media to start to engage with the issue here? You have to think, well, what would it actually take to stop people from spreading horrible rumors? Oh, I have such a good idea. So one of the things that these platforms could do is to stop providing viral sharing mechanics that enables someone who is, you know, participated in this centuries-long conflict from, you know, being a suggested group on Facebook, right? And we just saw this with the anti-vaxxers. You join a new mom's group, an algorithm says, hey, why don't you join an anti-vax group, too? And like that was true until this week, right? Which is, and that is where there might be an upside to this move, is that this move probably eliminates a bunch of those different amplification.

The two things that caused the most dangerous application on Facebook are the advertising platform and the recommendation engine, partially because of just the size of the amplification, partially because those are the two products that allow you to put information in front of people where they did not ask for it, especially advertising. Like you can find strangers and put something in front of them. And so that's the riskiest.

But depending on the structure of this, it could evolve in a way where that kind of stuff is much more difficult. And so that might be the safety upside. That's though why exactly the product design is going to be critical. And what I would like to see is I'd like this to happen in public. I don't think they should just go in a room in two years from now. It rolls out. Like my suggestion of Facebook is there needs to be a series of conversations, not just in the United States, not just in the West, where you have all these people. Because there's a lot of people are going to flip out. Law enforcement is going to flip out. but they're going to be against people in civil liberties groups.

You're going to have various governments who want content moderation, various governments who think there's too much moderation. You've got to have this in a public manner. That can't just all be lobbying on the back end. And then we see this weird Frankenstein come out. And then nobody understands why they made the decisions. We should understand what tradeoffs they made. Would all this just be easier if these companies were a lot smaller?

Like Elizabeth Warren just said, why don't we just break these companies up? Well, so I got to give Elizabeth Warren credit in that her paper on this explicitly talks, talks about antitrust being used for competition policy, which is what antitrust should be used for. So we've gone to this weird place where people with completely diametrically opposed motives all believe antitrust is the right deal. So you've got progressive saying, I want more moderation on Facebook, break them up. And then you have the Breitbart crew saying there's too much

moderation on Facebook, break them up. They can't both be right. And the truth is, neither one of them is right. All of these dials exist no matter how big your social platform is. The question is, is it one big guitar amp or multiple small amps. And I think there are tradeoffs here. If it's multiple smaller companies, then you end up with more choice, right? And so you're like, this is the Disney World safe place, and then this is the wild crazy 4chan place,

and I can choose which one I want. The downside is, and when you're talking about organized actors, the going smaller means the chance of catching them is much smaller. So we're living in this world where we look at the 2016 election in Russian interference, through the lens of the fact that we only know about Russian interference that was found and caught by companies that care. Right?

So everything in the Mueller indictment about activity on Facebook, our team found and voluntarily turned over the special counsel's office. That was not found by the government. That was not found by outside researchers. That was found by us. Other companies have not looked, or they've looked and not talked about it. And the truth is I was able to have a team

that had ex-NSA Russian-speaking intel analysts. We had the ability to build a machine learning algorithm to look at every single advertisement run in the 2016 election. Reddit does not. Pinterest does not. 4chan doesn't want to, but they wouldn't even if they did, right? And so that's the other thing that you trade off is if you can have more choice with smaller guitar amps.

God, we're pushing that metaphor, right? You can have smaller companies and more choice. But the flip side is then the capabilities of any one company. And so I think if we're going to end up with smaller companies, then the other thing we have to do is we have to facilitate them working together in a way that they are pooling their resources in a way that's not happening right now. All right.

But that's actually a very complicated legal issue, it turns out too. And we'll talk some more about what the government can do at the end. You know, there's also been this debate that I'm fascinated by. So Zuckerberg has this blog post, and some folks like me say, wow, this seems like a really big deal. He's saying the future of the company is around encrypted messaging. And then you have other people who say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not take this quite so seriously. This is basically just a product roadmap for messaging products.

You seem like you took it pretty seriously. Like you call this a burn the boats moment to me. Yeah, yeah, to quote from my favorite movie, right? You know, when Cortez reached the New World, he burned his ships. I avoided doing a Sean Connery impression there. You're welcome. But come up afterwards and I'll do it. Well, I'll do it when it's not being recorded.

Yeah. So I do see it as him being serious. I also don't think he knows what the outcome is, right? Mark Zuckerberg is sitting on more data about what kind of stuff people want to do online than anybody else in the planet, right? So it's somewhat hard for us to reverse engineer his incentives, but knowing that he knows exactly what people are doing of every category of people on the planet

and what direction is going. What this indicates to me is a couple of things. One, he's giving up on newsfeed and giving up on public, right? So apparently his data from this decision shows that the I want to be public or semi-public and to have lots of people be able to read my stuff, that that is a declining desire of consumers. He's giving up on the web.

And so doing end-end encryption in a web browser, effectively impossible. So unless they have some kind of massive crash process, project to change W3C standards and all this kind of stuff. Realistically, they're not going to go mobile first. They're going to have to go mobile only, which is pretty crazy. And he gave up on China, which I think is less about data and more about just realistically under the Xi regime, everything is going the other direction. And there's just no practical way that under any terms of any deal, would they allow

Facebook to operate? WeChat is effectively a part of the state. The Ministry of State Security has people sitting at WeChat. You would not do any deal with any American company when you have that kind of power over your domestic audience. And so I think those are the trends he's probably looking at, but I don't think he knows what the outcome is, because nobody's ever done this before. So we know point-to-point messaging, group messaging, and stories are things you can do over ended encryption. Nobody ever uses it, but WhatsApp has a story, a Snapchat like functionality.

And so we know those things work. Nobody's ever built like a news feed. And I think just conceptually it would be extraordinarily difficult to build something that is a full copy of Facebook that's ended and encrypted. But what you might be able to do is build something that's like Instagram, right? So data is available to you in an encrypted way, and all of the intelligence stuff Instagram does to figure out what you want will have to be done client side. And then the other thing people haven't talked about that has been kind of a quiet thing is there's been a bunch of Facebook research papers on doing AI in the arm processor on CPUs. They actually have released a library to make this super fast. And so they've been researching, can you move a bunch

of the machine learning stuff out of the super expensive Intel server into distributed into the phones? So if you add that plus that, you can probably get there. But from Mark's perspective, he doesn't know. And he's got 18 months of work already. So merging these namespaces, duty and end-end encryption, my guess is they're going to focus on that. They're going to try to build everything to be extensible with open APIs internally.

And then once they know, like, we have this all merge that's working, then he can start to push the Instagram feed, the Instagram public stuff, comments, groups, all those people to port over. The real question is what speed that happens. and as they give up this ad revenue, are they able to find other revenue to match it? Right, right.

And that's a super open question, which is why I think he just kind of committed the company to it because if everybody was worrying about that every day, they would get none of this done. Yeah. Hey, everybody, it's Neil. We've got to take one step away for a quick ad, and then we'll come right back to Casey and Alex Stamos.

Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Heinz to companies just getting started. Their design

tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready to use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today.

You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle. Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work

where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly

has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Gramerly. Right, back to it. Let me ask about content moderation.

Even in this world where everything is end-to-end encrypted, Facebook is going to have to pay attention to this stuff that people are posting in the various feeds as they are today. I recently wrote a story about content moderators and some of the working conditions there, which are really, really rough. How should Facebook and other platforms think about moderation going forward? Should these employees be paid more? Should this be a full-time job? Yeah, so you can always pay people more.

I think specifically for content moderation, you have to think about what the mental health impacts are. I think, I thought your story was great and really helped outline those. I didn't have any content moderators working for me. I had a child safety team. I had a counterterrorism team. And the emotional and psychological impact on those people is pretty extreme, right? We were able to do a bunch of things to support them because they're full-time employees. The fundamental issue here is that the companies, I think they pretty much all do this. They use companies like Accenture to provide their content moderators. And you can't provide that kind of like intense mental health support through the contractual barrier of a different employer.

Accenture is never going to do more than what is minimally contractually required to help their moderators and so in the long run this will reduce the need for growth of content moderation, maybe this change but my guess would be 10 years from now Facebook still has the same number of content moderators

they're doing different kinds of things I think they're going to have to bring most of them in-house so they can provide them with support especially people that work on like the really high-risk stuff the harassment and bullying, the child stuff terrorism like looking all day at beheading videos really starts to mess you up And there's actually some, there's been some psychology research in that people that work in these fields.

It's sometimes gender biased, but like men will get violent. There's more violence at home for people who work in these kinds of jobs. Women sometimes become cutters. Like there's, there are outcomes. And it has been reasonably studied because you have the same problem with police officers, social service workers, for people who have to work with these horrible things. Yeah. And so the company, I think, does have a responsibility to do that. And they can't do it while these people are contractors.

Talk about some of the things that you did for your people who were doing these really kind of high-risk jobs. Yeah. So when I was there, we built like a new resiliency function between a number of different, you know, my team didn't do by ourselves, but we had people who participated in this. And so we brought in like a mental health professional. It turns out the laws here make it hard. Companies can't just employ psychologists and psychiatrists because of HIPAA and a law called ERIS. And so because of the way the laws work, you can't just hire like a PhD, have them on staff to see people as doctors. You have to come up with like a crazy insurance plan. And then you have to offer the insurance plan to all of your employees. It's kind of, it's, it is messed up. I think what I I would like, honestly, it would like the company to come out and say that. Because if Congress is looking for things to do, making small changes to employment law, to make it easier to give mental health services to people is the kind of thing that's actually positive. You know, we did that kind of stuff, but you can't do any of that for contractors because it becomes what's called a co-employment situation. And so legally, you just can't do it. And I think that's why they got to bring them in.

Right. Okay. So taking a quick setback from Facebook, last year you went and you joined Stanford, where among other things you're working on the Stanford Internet Observatory, give us a sense of what you're working on right now. So one thing's going on is effective. effectively everybody in the political sciences and the social sciences wants to study what's going on the internet. But the problem is, is, you know, let's say you're a specialist in the East Asia studies section at Stanford, and they're studying what happened a couple weeks over the last several weeks between Indian Pakistan. You know, I know we were all distracted by the news, but we came close to nuclear war again, which is like a regular thing in the region. Which was like a page five

story in America. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So if they wanted to go study this thing that's immediately happening, the activation energy to understand what is happening on Twitter, on WhatsApp, on Facebook is so high, they can't do it. And so our thesis is, I am not qualified to do that work, right? I am not a social scientist, I'm not political scientists. What I might be qualified to do is hire a bunch of engineers and data scientists, put the contracts in place for the API access and stuff, build the scraping systems for the people that don't have APIs, build a data analysis pipeline and then build a team of data analysts who don't need specialization in the social sciences, but can provide the help.

And so if a professor comes to us and says, man, what's going on India on Twitter, we could say, like, oh, yeah, Sally can go help you with that. And Sally has access to an iPython notebook, and she's able to pull all this stuff and to do all the work. And then we can bind up. And my thesis is if you make the activation energy low, if you make it simple to access those kinds of resources, that we will massively expand the use of it by social science is political scientists, and we want to do this first at Stanford, but maybe it's a model

that other universities can do. Right, and social scientists are salivating for this, right? I mean, they're desperate to get this kind of information. Right, but it's super hard to find somebody, like just the structure of academia does not react well to this kind of stuff. It's very hard for them to find a grad student who goes to write R or Python, right? But they don't need it. They need a grad student who understands Indian politics and who can read Hindi and several other languages, and then we'll give them somebody who can write Python, and then already have the data sitting up in whatever cloud provider wants to give us free cloud services. Please contact me later if you work at Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, that we'll already have, you know,

terabytes and terabytes of data up there that they can go and look at. You know, we talk a lot about Facebook's role in saving democracy. I wonder if you would maybe speak quickly to what role you see for government here and maybe what you think the media should be doing if you want to tee off on us a little bit. So to get a little on my soapbox, there's three groups that really screwed up in 2016. Tech companies screwed up. The government and media also screwed up. And the way I imagine this is you've got Mark Zuckerberg, in a hoodie, you've got a politician in a suit, and you've got a reporter with like a reporter press hat.

And the guy in the hoodie is saying, oh man, we made a lot of mistakes. And the government and me people are like, you're right, you really screwed up. Yeah, right? So the truth is, there were three different branches of Russian interference in 2016. I'm going to skip the attacks against infrastructure,

because that's a whole other thing. The two information operations, one of them was a pure social media information operation by the internet research agency and a bunch of other organizations in that sphere. The org chart's actually quite complicated. That is mostly the responsibility of social media companies to understand that, to understand that,

and to put mitigations in place. There was another, and what is quantitatively, almost certainly the more effective attack was the attack by the GRU. So there's three intelligence agencies in Russia, main intelligence agency. GRU is the main intelligence directorate of the Russian military.

They work for the uniform Kremlin officers. They are the ones who broke into John Podesta's email, who broke into the DNC, who broke into Colin Powell's email. There's a whole interesting problem here of how do you protect guys who used to be in the government and now just grandfathers, but they have national security information in their Gmail account. So that's actually an interesting problem. They took that information and then they planted it in the media via personas on Facebook and other social media sites, and then the media did their job for them. So Politico ran a John Podesta email live blog. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,

Every major newspaper covered the claims of the GRU uncritically. And the problem for the media is that claims were true. It was true that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz wanted Hillary Clinton to win. It was true that John Podesta had a bunch of embarrassing things in his email. But those emails were leaked in a strategic manner with the goal of changing American democracy. And you start to reach this difficult place of, is this disinformation, is it misinformation? It is certainly manipulation. It is certainly an information operation.

Which we should say that journalists did not know at the time. Well, some of them, some of them suspected, right? And so in like the ninth paragraph of Washington Post story, you might have, this might be a Russian information operation, but doesn't matter because people only read the headlines in the first paragraph. Right. So what do we do about that? That's a super hard problem. And first, you've got to protect the stuff. So you got to protect John Podesta and such. You've got to protect the campaigns. So Bob Lord went over to the DNC. He's a very competent security guy. He's doing a bunch of work. I've been talking to people who are building campaigns. Campaigns are super hard in that, you're like, great, we're going to

build an IT infrastructure for two years that's going to be run by 17-year-old volunteers, and we have to stand up against colonels in the German military, or the Russian military. Maybe the Germans, who knows? Oh, God, this is the Germans, too. There's your headline, Sarah, right there. I'm sorry, the Russian military, and then you tear the whole thing down. And so there are things that you can do there. I would like to see the media have one-tenth of the examine themselves, 10 percent, how much of they've examined Facebook and Twitter in this area, right? Like, I'd like them to talk about internally and then publish publicly what happened in the editorial rooms when they decided we're going to massively amplify the claims of the GRU. And what I'd like to see is I'd like to

see two or three newspapers and maybe NBC or like one or two TV networks. There's one, the big problem here is there's one TV network that would never do anything. But like for all the reasonable people to talk about what are our standards when information has been stolen and we believe we're being manipulated. And I am not a journalistic expert, but I work. Play one on Twitter. When I play one on Twitter. Just as a lot of journalists play tech experts on Twitter, so we're all kind of pretending, right?

I think there's a lot that could be done if you say, we will cover things, but we won't over amplify them. We'll cover them once. We'll not cover the scandal. Like newspapers love to do this thing where they're like, horrible thing happened. Next day, people talking about horrible thing that we talked about yesterday, right?

Now, Congress is having hearings about horrible thing we talked about yesterday that we published the first day, right? Like, you don't have to do the media a ladder of we're going to make this into a massive scandal just because it happens to be true. It's a hard issue, but it's something we've got to deal with for 2020

because the companies have done a bunch of stuff around disinformation. The hack and leak, nothing has changed, right? If right now Amy Klobuchar's inbox was released to all the major media organizations, I don't think anything would be different. I think that's right. That's a perfect place to stop.

You guys, thank you so much. Please give a round of applause to Alex Stamos. Thanks, Casey. Thank you so much. All right, so that was Casey Newton and Alex Stamos live at South by Southwest, talking about the future at Facebook. You should subscribe to Casey's newsletter.

It's called The Interface. It is required reading if you are interested in social networks and democracy. We'll be back later this week with another regular Vergecast on Friday. And then next Tuesday, I'm interviewing Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is all about how our modern economy and our regular conception of how money works in this world has been totally upended by data collection. She's super fascinating.

We'll see you on Friday and Tuesday.