Your Undivided Attention - Spotlight — A Whirlwind Week of Whistleblowing

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

In seven years of working on the problems of runaway technology, we’ve never experienced a week like this! In this bonus episode of Your Undivided Attention, we recap this whirlwind of a week — from Facebook whistleblower France Haugen going public on 60 Minutes on Sunday, to the massive outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Monday, to Haugen’s riveting Congressional testimony on Tuesday. We also make some exciting announcements — including our planned episode with Haugen up next, the Yale social media reform panel we’re participating in on Thursday, and a campaign we’re launching to pressure Facebook to make one immediate change. This week it truly feels like we’re making history — and you’re a part of it.

Wow. For the last seven years working on social media and the problems of runaway technology, I do not think I've experienced a week like this. No, this has been one of those I am experiencing history hour by hour. But for those of you who are new, or if you've been here for years, we're going to recap this week and announce a very exciting next episode. This is Your Individed Attention, a podcast from the Center for Humane Technology, and many of you may know us from the film The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which was released about a year ago. But we have both, I think, not seen as much change and sort of turning upside down the world of the possibility of regulating social media companies and specifically Facebook as we have in the last three days. Let's talk about the whirlwind of the last few days. So Sunday, 60 minutes, all attentions on Facebook as Francis Hogan names herself as the Facebook whistleblower. She's from the Civic Integrity team. It's a bombshell interview.

And we're all wondering what's going to happen next when on Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp go down. We don't know what's happening. It appears from tweets that Facebook employers are locked out of their own building. their badges don't work. And then on Tuesday, we woke up and Francis testified in front of the Senate for three hours, incredibly clear, incredibly poised. And a really incredible moment for me was when Senator Markey said, Francis, you are a 21st century American hero. And in that moment, my eyes got really wet. Yeah, I was in New York City and woke up in the morning to watch Francis testimony. And I watched Francis for three hours testified before the Senate and just blew them away

with clear, incontrovertible evidence of, you know, many of the things that we have been talking about on this podcast with Facebook's own research and evidence proving the things that so many people have known and felt that it makes political parties more divisive, that it fundamentally has changed the life outcomes of teenage girls. The stuff that everybody has, heard, but made personal. I didn't hear a single senator move into kind of a partisan accusation of the platforms. I saw senators come together for the first time. I mean, literally sort of cheering each other on saying, you know, we need to talk afterwards about how we're actually going to get this done. I've never, in the years that I've testified for the

Senate and for Congress, heard them talk that way. And so I was just so blown away. I'm so, I honestly think people are going to look back at this moment and say that France, Howgan helped change the world. During my time at Facebook, I came to realize a devastating truth. Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside of Facebook. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government, and from governments around the world. The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public

about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages. I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of the truth. And I'm excited to announce that our plan is to have Francis, the whistleblower herself, on this podcast coming next. In fact, Francis, myself, and Mattali Jane from Reset Tech

are going to be on a Yale social media reform panel this Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. We're going to be followed by a panel of academics, including Jack Balkin, Nathan Priscilla, Zephyr Teachout, and Shoshana Zuboff, the author of Surveillance Capitalism. I really recommend everyone sign up for the event. Go to humanetech.com slash get involved. There is so much that has to change for Facebook to become a benign force in our world, from the governance level to internal policies, to regulation, to the cultural zeitgeist that gives it form. But there is one specific.

change that we are really excited to launch a campaign around to pressure Facebook to make, and we'll be talking about that then, too. So thank you for being on this wild ride with us. Stay tuned as history continues. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Stephanie Lep, and our associate producer is Nur al-Samurai. Dan Kedmi is our editor at large. Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday

and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible.