There Are No Girls on the Internet - How to be a whistleblower with Sophie Zhang

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Frances Haugen isn’t the only woman to blow the whistle on Facebook. Meet Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist who blew the whistle on Facebook back in 2020.  Read Sophie’s handbook for whistleblowers in the Guardian. How to blow the whistle on Facebook – from someone who already did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/11/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-guide Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations

about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Intercosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, this is there are no girls on the internet. What does it mean to be a whistleblower? And how do we treat women who speak out against wrongdoing? By now, you've probably heard of Francis Hogan. The former

Facebook employee turned whistleblower, who collected information for a series of exposés about the harm that Facebook has caused in our communities and around the globe. My name is Francis Hogan. I used to work at Facebook. I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us. But I'm here today because I believe. Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy. This week, her findings will be rolled out in what's being called the Facebook papers, a series of coordinated stories in 17 different media outlets based on the internal documents she photographed during her time working at Facebook. But Howgan isn't the first woman to blow

the whistle on Facebook. In September 2020, a year before Howgan spoke out, Sophie Zong, a woman of color who worked as a data scientist at Facebook, uncovered that Facebook was slow to act or in some cases did nothing at all about coordinated fake campaigns by foreign governments that were manipulating citizens and destabilizing democracies. Only, when Sophie spoke up, she didn't get to testify before the Senate, or go on 60 minutes to tell the world what she'd found. And in some cases, media outlets didn't even refer to her as a whistleblower, just some former employee. Sophie is the kind of person who would rather to be at home playing with her two cats than doing interviews.

But that hasn't stopped her. She continues to speak up, including recently testifying before Parliament in the UK. When a whistleblower speaks up, we all see the polished interviews and hear the snappy soundbites. But Sophie wants people to know the reality. That whistleblowing can be thankless, dangerous, personally costly work. Here's Sophie's story. Sophie Zhang, Sri Hur, cat put her. Cat petter. That's absolutely why you wanted me to speak, right? He just wanted me to go on at nines about how good my cats are and how I pet them. Actually, you probably know me but who has a whistleblower and former Facebook employee.

So Sophie, I have to ask, just before we get into everything, just with everything that's going on with Facebook and your role in whistleblowing, how are you? Like, are you feeling supported? Are you feeling overwhelmed? You know, how's Sophie doing? I'm honestly feeling a bit overwhelmed, but like I don't, in case you didn't know, I'm an introvert who hates any and all attention and hates the public spotlight and just wants to stay home and put my cats. And so frankly, I sort of wish that I had gotten a PR firm or something, if nothing else, judging by the difference in responses. I did, I mean, I did ask for, I did ask for when I was starting, they turned me down, and they decided that I would yolo it. As it turns out, you're knowing this does not work. Let me tell you that. Yeah, I mean, that's actually a great place to start, you know, as someone who is an introvert,

as someone who is not really that interested in being in the public eye, what has it been, like, navigating this experience as someone who doesn't really want to put themselves out there like that. It's been difficult. It's it's it's it's honestly a bit like puny but I mean I think many people can relate to the experience in general of doing something that they don't need to don't want to do because it's important like I think most people don't want to wake up at 6 a.m. in the morning to go into the office or something like that but most but many people do it anyways and because they need to make a living to survive and I see this it's just another version of

the same thing like there are parts that they I was surprised at how well I do. Like, frankly, when I started, my greatest worry was that I would have a panic attack on live national television or something. And there's other things that I've learned about myself. Like, apparently, I study when I'm nervous in an interview or something like that, which is, which, I mean, I don't usually doing everyday conversation. And there's no that I notice.

That's actually a good thing to point out. I feel like people don't realize the cost, like the personal cost of whistleblowing that It comes with a lot of work, a lot of physical stress, a lot of challenges. And when you do it, you are kind of taking a lot on that I don't think people really see. People just want to see this like polished, eloquent person speaking truth, but then they don't see the stress and the physical manifestations of what that looks like. Yes, I'm not polished or eloquent. Actually, I have a bit of a lot on my face right here.

My personal excuse is that I have nothing to hide from the people of the world. that is my excuse for not wearing makeup. It's easy to think of tech employees as having tons of lucrative job opportunities at the ready. But that wasn't really Sophie's situation. In fact, when she first started working at Facebook, she just kind of needed a job. And Facebook, with its massive influence on all of our lives,

well, here was a chance, she thought, to make some real change, to have a hand in making Facebook a real tool for good from the inside. Sophie, what brought you to working in tech? How did you wind up working at Facebook in the first place. Frankly, I needed a job to make money to survive.

I applied to a lot of places. Facebook gave me an offer. It's the honest explanation. I applied to a bunch of them. I was expecting a few others to accept. If I had waited a bit, maybe I would have gotten some more offers, but Facebook had offered. And honestly, I was also partly motivated because they wanted to help fix Facebook.

Because it's easy for a lot of people, especially in America and the United States, to say, we should just quit Facebook and not use it. That's not an option for many people in most of the world. In parts of, for instance, rural India in Africa, for instance, Facebook is essentially the internet, and people do not have the option to leave it. And so by refusing to work for a company like this, you essentially relinquish any influence that you could have over it. And they thought it was important for me to try and fix the company from the inside, to give the chance at least. And they think, and they did a competition without more than while I was there than I would have been able to, from outside the

company. For instance, I took down the troll farm operations of two separate world governments. And ultimately, a lot of people have made that consideration. Like, when I joined Facebook and told them a dancing Facebook was good for the world and was joining to try and fix it, they told me you'd be surprised how many people feel that way. And I don't want to say that there are most people. Like, a lot of people just want to do their 96 and go home at the end of the day, which is perfectly understandable. Like, I knew people who were, for instance, on H-WMB visas, which means that their residency is tied to their employment. And so, for instance, some of them were unhappy with a situation but didn't feel comfortable speaking out, because if they did, they could get fired

and immediately deported back home. In other cases, maybe people have families that they need to support back home. Maybe they have sick relatives. Maybe they have children or etc. And like, this of blowing is not for everyone. You take on certain risks, both financial, legal, personal, etc. And even rocking the boat is not something that many people do not feel comfortable with. But there are certainly also people at Facebook who feel strongly about fixing the system, or are they still dead, and try to worry how to do so while they were there. Many of them have since left to the company. Some of them have spoken out to varying extent. Like there's always going to be a self-selection bias, by which I mean, if you think Facebook is the devil, you are less likely to work for Facebook. If you think the Facebook is the greatest sin since sliced bread, you are more likely to work for Facebook. If you think that podcasts are evil, you are not likely to start a podcast or listen to. to when. And so the people who are listening right now probably, mostly, do not have negative opinions about podcasts. And that sort of self-seduction bias happens in everything. Like, Facebook did regular surveys of how many of employees thought that Facebook was making the world better.

That number fluctuated between 50 and 70% of why it was there. It was on the higher end earlier on. It was much lower. It got towards 50% money left. And that may sound very high to you, but it's also important to remember. We have a certain advantage coming from the United States and Europe, presumably. Like, surveys have generally shown people much more positive on Facebook in countries like Indonesia compared to the United States where the mood is very negative, because for many people, Facebook is the internet. It's the way that they connect to people and there aren't any other options,

any other availability like there is here. While working at Facebook, Sophie found that foreign governments in places like India, Ukraine, Spain, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, had been using fake Facebook accounts to generate fake engagement to manipulate their citizens. She found evidence of coordinated campaigns doing this in an attempt to manipulate political outcomes and to help or hinder certain political leaders. And even though this was technically against Facebook's rules, there really wasn't anybody whose job it was to stop it. So Sophie decided to do it herself. On top of her official job at Facebook, she worked to flag these fake accounts. Now, if you ask me, I would say that Facebook

probably should have given her a raise and thanked her for doing this extra work to make their platform that much more secure. But they fired her instead. When you started uncovering, you know, what Facebook calls this inauthentic behavior, you basically were like, oh, you know, we know this is happening, but no one's really enforcing a policy against curbing it. And so you kind of single-handedly made that your business, even though it wasn't really like technically your job. Did you feel sort of motivated by like an internal system, like an internal system of morality where you like, well, this is wrong and I have to stop this. Like what motivated you to take this on? Facebook has no official slogans that not seen at Facebook is someone else's

problem. And that was always what I used internally as an excuse. And what this means is that when you see something wrong, you don't assume it's someone else's problem. You don't assume someone else's fix it. Because when you do that, everyone's like, well, that's like, well, that person can fix it, that person can fix it. I'm not doing it myself. And the idea is that when you see something wrong, you stop in and fix it yourself. And this is a slogan, of course, it does not actually get obeyed very much. But I mean, it gave me some official cover while I was there. Ultimately, of course, I was personally motivated to do this. I mean, it fell in a gray area where I could argue it was within my purview, even though it's what I was expected to do.

Do you think that your work trying to combat these inauthentic profiles, do you think that that's why Facebook let you go? I don't know. I cannot read minds. They don't know the decisions that were made by people hire up. Like, I know people who believe that I was let go for this reason. It's hard to me to personally say. Like, the official reason I was let go, of course, was underperformance. The way I would personally describe this is that it fell into two separate areas. The first was that in the second half of 2019, during performance review season, it was officially decided that the work I was doing outside what my manager told me to do did not count for my performance, and as a result, I was underperforming. The second part of it is that, of course, the pandemic hit in 2020. This resulted in many people working from home, this result. I mean, many people had a lot of difficulty with it.

I was one of them. My mental health and performance suffered, so I was actually anti-performing then. And Facebook had an official policy that in the first half of 2020, they would treat everyone as exceeding expectations because you're all exceeding our expectations by doing so well and braving it through the pandemic or something like that. In my case, they decided, however, that because I was already officially underperforming before the pandemic, they didn't want to give me the way that they would for others. They hope this makes sense. Like Facebook is a company at the end of the day, and ultimately they hired me to do a specific job that I was trying to do in addition to this at the same time. And as anyone who's tried to hold down multiple four-time jobs at the same time can tell you, it's very hard to do that well. Let's take a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman helped make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice. as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get

started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant. that saved his life.

What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations

about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Rider Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV,

who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of this show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor.

I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah. Just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. her back. When an employee leaves Facebook, it's common for them to write what's called a badge post, a goodbye memo published on Workplace, which is kind of like Facebook's internal Facebook for Facebook employees. Now, usually these posts are typical goodbye fare. It's been great working with you.

Keep in touch. Only, Sophie didn't do that. Instead, she posted a 7,000-ish-word screed, laying out exactly what she'd seen during her time at Facebook. In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I found multiple blatant. attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and caused international news on multiple occasions, she wrote. I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight and taken action to enforce against so many

prominent politicians globally that I've lost count. I have blood on my hands. So you leave Facebook. When you're leaving, you publish an internal memo as you're like goodbye badge. And I guess I have to ask, what is going through your head when you hit publish? In this memo, you talk about having blood on, you see that you have blood on your hands. I mean, this memo was earth-shattering. What's going through your mind when you hit publish? Honestly, it was probably that I was very sleep deprived. I hear that.

I mean, I stayed up from midnight until 8 a.m. that morning writing the memo. It was that second decision. And as anyone who has taken an online who to write something can tell you. you, the result is not going to be the greatest. And I took a quick four-hour nap after that because I cannot actually function on no sleep. Unlike some people, I'm very jealous of the people who can. But then again, I don't drink coffee, maybe I should have. And so I posted it, like an hour or two before I left. So this is a bit of a tradition at Facebook. It's called The Badge Post. When you're leaving the company, you post a picture of your Impetal E-Badge

and you write something visit. It's not usually as controversial as mine. of course. Oftentimes it's just a broad statement. I was so happy to work with all of you. You were all great. I am going to Pinterest next. I'm doing this. Thank you for being part of my journey. But sometimes they're also more controversial. And people have criticized the companies in their batch posts before. Like several employees started the idea of hosting a password protected copy on an external website and only sharing the password. and link within initial badge post. This was after the company had taken down a few small controversial internal badge posts. So the idea was that if you share the LinkedIn password, then people can share that even after the company takes down your internal post. And this will dissuade them from doing so and et cetera.

So the initial reaction was mostly from a lot of people who did not read the memo because reading 7,800 words, it's a very time-consuming affair. There was a lot of initial expressions of support and et cetera. there's of course a self-selection bias, by which I mean people are usually fairly polite and not super rude. And if you have a co-worker that hates you, your guts and you're leaving the company, they are probably not going to go up to your face and say, oh my God, you're finally leaving. I'm so tired of you.

You're like, I'm finally right of you. They're not going to be finally just gone quietly and not tell you anything. And the people who are like, I'm so sorry you're gone. They will tell you that. So that's what I mean by self-selection bias. But there were certainly people who were very sad to hear me gone, and there were certainly people who were upset to hear about the details. And I don't know if there was anyone who was like, more ha-ha, we finally got rid of her, but I mean, I can't read minds. And so anyways, the company took down the internal workplace post a few hours after I posted it.

Then they called me asking me to take it down from my website. I told them they would do that if they restored the internal workplace post. They demurred, and the next thing I heard from them was tomorrow when I was told that my website. website had been taken down. A few days later, they got my domain taken down to by the registrar. So I'm sure the lawyers were very busy that weekend. There was a big employee back toash, because this is not typical at Facebook. I mean, it's been changing, but Facebook has historically been a very open company. That's why we had access as employees to talk to other employees so much at the same time. That's why I was able to brief a company vice president about the

problem in the first place. And so, like most organizations, there's interesting. conflict when it's stated goes coming conflict with the selfish motive. The internal version was restored after some edits and etc. After the employee back touch. I think the official statement from the company was that they took it down because it contained a link because it contained a link to sensitive internal documentation outside of the company reach and they restored it after I agreed to take it down, which is something that makes them look reasonable and also could not be contradicted with me because I no longer had the audience. I know that Facebook offered you a severance if you signed an NDA.

Is there any part of you? Is there like a version of you that would have signed that? Not really. I mean, maybe if I wasn't considering doing anything of this, maybe if I was just doing the 96th in the first place, but then this would have been very different. Like, they offered me about $64,000 in a severance package. They said, a lot of stipulations. One of them was NDA, non-disparishment agreement, etc. And so these are usually worded very broad. These are often worded very broadly in tech companies. In my, in my recollection of the non-disparagement agreement was saying, basically, I couldn't criticize the company in any way, shape, or form. And this was extremely broad. And

so I'm going to give an example of how broadly this applies. So of course, a week a tour of Google Facebook went down worldwide for a few hours. Suppose that during that time period someone asked me, hey, I see Facebook is down for you too? And they check, oh, I can't access Facebook either. It's done. At that moment, I am technically in violation of a non-disparagement agreement because I have said something critical of Facebook.

But, I mean, not that they would ever sue to enforce it because I would be ridiculous, but that is technically something negative or critical about Facebook, that the service has done. Even if it's publicly accessible information or something, it's just that it's worded extremely broadly. And that was my official reason for not signing it. It had the time which they seemed pretty bemused by but accepted.

Before she was fired from Facebook, Sophie was pretty much single-handedly trying to keep foreign governments from abusing the platform to manipulate their citizenry. With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time, Sophie said in her badge post.

A manager had once teased her saying that most of the world outside of the United States was effectively the Wild West, making her their part-time dictator. He meant the statement to be a compliment, Sophie writes, but it illustrated the immense pressure upon me. She started thinking, I can't be the only person on the planet who is responsible for this information. What if something happens to me? What if I get hit by a car?

And kind of by coincidence, she encountered Julia Carey Wong, an accomplished tech reporter for the Guardian U.S. And that's how her findings reached a new audience. So when I started talking to junior, it was two years ago, long before this had happened. It was very coincidental. The first time I met with her in person, I wasn't intending to blow the whistle.

It was more I was setting up because, I mean, single points of failure are bad. What happens if you get run over by a car the next day or it's censored? So it was in central moment's contingency. I gave her some information and made her promise not to use any of it and as I was that or something, she promised that she wouldn't try to kill me with something. I'm joking.

It's a good promise to get before you like spill everything to a journalist. Of course. I'm joking. And anyways, this was in Oakland. I arranged for some friends to be in my alibi. They agreed that if anyone asked, I was at the house petting the cats the entire time. This is something I actually visited them for at other times. I went to Oak and dropped off all my electronic devices with them.

I'd also dressed up in a cute dress. I do not wear dresses almost ever. And the reason for that was if anyone from, if I ran into anyone I knew by coincidence and they could contradict my first and they buy, then hey, you see someone, they're sneaking around unusually. They also dressed up really and usually nice. What is the thing that goes through your head with the assumption? An affair, right?

Exactly. Exactly. So that was my second dollar buy. I was having a fake. I mean, it wasn't necessary in the end, of course. I mean, it didn't run into anyone. It was just that was a paranoia. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that Francis Hogan got away with digging through

workplace as much as she did. But it sort of makes sense because Facebook is fundamentally, it's fundamentally a company that responds to things rather than acting, proactively, like as I've criticized for it many times before, because they could have easily caught, looked into people who were digging into many documents outside the important areas, outside the area of expertise. But apparently they didn't do that. They only, apparently they only do that when it becomes a PR crisis by the time, but, and it's too late, which has been the practice in many other cases, much more important to the world and democracy. So I suppose it's ironic that

it's the own, that it's apparently the practice for internal security. and employee monitoring as well. If you're going to blow the whistle on a powerful institution, there's a lot of practical things to consider. Like, should you take screenshots on your work computer or phone? No, you shouldn't. Use end-to-end encrypted systems like signal on your personal devices, Sophie suggests. There are bigger picture questions, too.

Like, what should you do about money? Sophie says, consider saving up before you go public. Or how should you protect yourself from harassment? Sophie suggests using a service like delete, me to scrub your public information from the web beforehand. Now, at the time, there weren't really a lot of go-to guides for how to blow the whistle. But now, women like Sophie are helping to protect and guide the next generation of whistleblowers, who hold the powerful accountable. There weren't any guides for how to do this at the time. I was making it owe up. I eventually wrote the guide.

You might have seen it here, and I mean, by now other people have written guides. Your guides are so helpful, you know, and something that I really really, appreciated in your guide is that you talk about how, you know, whistleblowing is not for everybody. It's not everybody can do this. Not everybody would want to take on the kind of scrutiny that you might get when you do this. You know, I think that's a really useful point that, like, it's really not for everybody. Yeah, like, like, I've been asked by other people, and the first thing I always tell them is that it's a personal decision because it's very easy from the outside for people to judge, for people to say, you shouldn't have stayed at the company this now. You shouldn't be working here. You should be coming here.

you should be coming forward, you should be talking to the press, etc. But it's different when it's personal. Different people have personal situations. Like even just turning down a $200,000 a year job, it's very difficult. So many people are in poor of rich situations. Maybe they have specific circumstances, and it's not my place to judge them for not doing what I did. No one is obligated to emulate their career and torture themselves on the peer of broad opinion for the purpose of this.

I don't think that's something we can reasonably expect in most cases. This podcast is all about identity, how our identities really make the difference when it comes to our experiences in tech and how we show up online. And the same thing is true whistleblowers. And I feel like we're really seeing that play out in real time. The more marginalized you are,

the more fraught speaking up can be. Sophie says that one of the biggest parts of her identity that has presented a challenge in her whistleblowing is the fact that she's kind of introverted. When I said earlier that Sophie prefers hanging out with her cats to giving interviews, well, I really meant it. You'll even hear a guest appearance from her cat midnight later on in our conversation.

It's really not difficult for me to see the ways that Sophie is being publicly treated because of her intersecting identities. Even in a lot of well-meaning reporting, I've noticed that some just can't help trying to pit whistleblower Francis Howgan against Sophie, an obviously sexist framing.

Two women can't possibly both be speaking up without there being some kind of catfight between them, right? And what's worse, some simply erase Sophie altogether, implying instead that Francis is the real whistleblower, while Sophie is just some disgruntled former employee, who was fired for being bad at her job. After Francis went public, I saw a flurry of headlines about Sophie

saying a second Facebook whistleblower has come forward. Even though, Sophie actually spoke out a full year earlier than Francis did. And that's kind of the rub. We don't have to buy into these limiting narratives about whose voice matters and whose voice doesn't. And we have got to believe in a world where there's room for more than one woman to speak truth to power. Our identities shouldn't keep us from being heard. Something that I'm really struck by and that we talk about a lot on this show is the way that our identities really intersect when we're talking about these things. And I firmly believe that whistleblowing is an identity issue, that like the more marginalized you are, the trickier it can be.

So if you're a trans woman, it's going to be harder for you. If you're a woman of color or a black woman, it might be harder for you. Has that been your experience? Have your identities made this experience of being a whistleblower fraught? The identity that has made it the most difficult is being an introvert who hates attention, I would say, in that I don't think it was surprised anyone to say, if you hate attention and want nothing to do with attention and during this, like having T's support, you will be less good at getting attention. And like, frankly, I should have gotten a PR firm. But like, like, at the end of the day, it's hard for me to say, it's hard for me to say how different people have responded differently based based on my message of and who I am.

Like, I'm happy that Francis has come forward. So that's frankly, someone who is more photogenic and thus of an introvert who wants to hide at home can have the torch passed to them and can speak out publicly in my stead. Because I was never the right person from this from the very start and they never wanted to be. That's so interesting. I mean, I've seen, I mean, from following your tweets, I've seen folks will be like, oh, former Facebook. Facebook employee. Oh, there. There's here. It's so cute. Yeah, this is midnight again.

It's a bit funny that I'm being described as second whistleblower now. Right. You were first. Yeah. I mean, Europe thinks I'm first. I testified to the European Parliament last year, and I'm testifying to the UK Parliament next week. But the U.S. is the center of the world, of course. And anyways, here is midnight. He's much more important than myself. He's such a beautiful cat.

He's very dedicated to food. Sometimes when he yells, I can imagine protest slogans. What do we want? Food. What do we want it? Meow! Meow! I would join Vinnight's protest.

I'm also very food-motivated. So I would join that protest anyway. Or maybe he wants equal access to food for everyone. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night, comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odin Kirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group

perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-8-4-4-4. for Eyeheart. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month,

we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill,

and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety

and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the

stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, Now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it?

Yeah. Just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of, ha, hoo. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's get right back into it. When I was coming of age on the Internet, America Online basically was the Internet. It was the end-all and be-all of how I got online. And in many countries, the same as true of Facebook, particularly in the global South, where text messages and cellular data is expensive. Facebook's messaging platform WhatsApp is the way that most people. people communicate digitally. According to data from the Brazilian technology news and research website mobile time, nearly half of Brazilian say WhatsApp is their most used app, followed by Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. In countries like Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Argentina, Malaysia, and

Colombia, it's the same thing. So for all the harm that Facebook has caused in the United States, it's the version of Facebook that Westerners use that is actually kind of the best version of the platform that's out there, which is pretty sad. As Ellen Cushing reported in the Atlantic as part of the Facebook papers. It's the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs, too. It's the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It's also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources. Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world,

places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad, actors have undue influence, the tradeoffs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences. And Sophie's whistleblowing really helps underscore these stark and dangerous differences between how Facebook operates in the West and how it operates in the rest of the world. And the problem is, you kind of have to count on people in the West giving a shit about what happens in the rest of the world for it to make a real difference. In thinking about the amazing work that you've done, pointing out the harms that Facebook was doing around the world. Do you ever feel that one of the reasons why when you spoke out, it didn't really rattle Facebook as much? Is it because like we're kind of trained to not care about

certain countries? Like you're talking about, you know, countries like India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador. Like, are we as Americans just sort of trained to like not give a crap what happens in these places? And so when you're blowing the whistle about the way that Facebook was being used to destabilize these places, people are just like, well, whatever. I think that's a large part of it. Like no one, I mean, no one says it's so crassly, but it's the case that Americans care more about the United States and other Americans. And most countries are the same way. In the People's Republic of China, people care more about the different of Chinese citizens.

Indians care more about other Indians. Turkey thinks that the world revolves around Turkey. The Turks think that the world revolves around Turkey, et cetera. And this is the way this is the way that the world. works. And so if, if, if 10 people die in, in, if 10 people die in Tennessee, were treated much more seriously than if 100 people die in Bangladesh. I mean, there's no one around adding, adding, adding notes to articles like 100 people died in Bangladesh yesterday, parentheses, the equivalent of 5.2 Americans and parentheses. But I mean, in practice, people do, in practice, people do have this

sort of mental calculation and approach. And this is. extremely and fortunately and sadly the way that the world is right now. But it's also true that it's also true that the world tends to change over time. Like I live with my girlfriend who's white and our relationship would be illegal on multiple counts in California 100 years ago. Like slavery was sadly commonplace in the United States 160 years ago. I mean there have been there have been words fought over religion. and looking back, we shake our heads and say, how could have we been so barbaric?

It's nature for each generation to look back and look back and check the head of the list. And I can't, and I don't know the future, I don't know what it holds. But if I were to speculate and guess, I would say that hundreds of years from now, when people look back on us today, what they will find most barbaric

is the way we treat people differently based on factors as arbitrary, as the lines drawn on. map when they were born. And they firmly believe that everyone should have equal rights and it should be treated equally regarding the national origin or other characteristics. But that's me and I'm an idealist. I'd say part of the reason I haven't been listened to as much is also just that I just like

sound bites and and sensationalist statements and they like nuance. and it's the nature of the current world that this is the opposite track from what you should take to get attention as anyone who's used social media can tell you. Like some of the criticism about Facebook right now is frankly a bit sensational list and not the most accurate and that has been rightly criticized, but part of it also is, part of it also.

also feels a bit ironic because this is a role that Facebook built. This is what gets attention. And it's not surprising that of the criticism of Facebook, this is what gets attention in the first place. God, that's such a good point, that like, they definitely traffic in the idea that what's the most sensational, what's the most polarizing, what's the most extreme, that gets the most attention. And that economy that they have really propped up is kind of like, it's not any wonder that people are defaulting to extreme state. about their platform. Yeah. Like, I don't know if it was intentional from the start from Facebook,

but certainly a lot of people have the, a lot of people have the idea, that, that, that, that, that, that there's, that there's, that there's, that, that there's, and the approach is inherently neutral somehow and any deviation from it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, is the, it's the, is the, it's the, is the,

it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's, ultimately I don't know if, if, if mark or others have ideological reasons for wanting this, if it was just the idea, if it was just made the most sense for making money that they justified or what. But it does seem pretty ironic, a bit ironic to me, even if it's because of the specific criticism that I find to be counterproductive or not substantial. So you said earlier that you're an idealist. When you think about Facebook, are you, is there part of you that is hopeful? Do you think that it can be saved?

Can it be a force for good? Or is it just too late? Anything can be theoretically changed. The question is, will it happen? Maybe Mark will have a change of heart tomorrow. I can't read his mind. I can't read the future. But fundamentally, I think, I realize that cynicism and nihilism is invoked in the modern day.

It's very attractive for people to say, the road is fundamentally totally broken and can't be fixed, therefore I'm not going to do anything, and thus it becomes a self-fulfurning prophecy, and then you can say, look, look, I was right, nothing changed. Because in the end, nothing will happen, and as we the people make it happen. If you want things to happen, you should try to make it happen, so you can say that you tried at the very least, even if it fails. Because if everyone writes it off and says it's Facebook, it's broken, then what's the point? We already know that.

It's already awful. We can't do anything. Then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and no because no one was up for where to fix it or change it in the first place. And so the question of will anything happen? That's really up to us. It's up to yourself.

It's up to me. It's up to the people listening. And am I working myself? Yes, I am. But that doesn't mean I can do it alone. I'm not a superhero. Sophie is amazing, but she's right. She's not a superhero.

And she shouldn't have to be. She can't take on a massive, powerful, global institution like Facebook all on her own. But the question is, what will we do? How will we honor women like Sophie who have risked everything to speak truth to power? Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.

It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide.

Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Tolodano. it's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season.

And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was hungry. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in to you, he's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs.

This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult. place to live. This is David Eagelman with the Inner Cosmos podcast and for Mental Health Awareness Month we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started

living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. Therapy is fantastic. But once again, it does not have a monopoly on healing. That's why I create the resources and that's why I create the community because I really just want you to have more access. On the podcast, Cultivating Her Space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. It's tough because we're suppressing our emotions and so many of us are like high-achieving

individuals. Listen to Cultivating Her Space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.