Facebook's Social Reckoning: Whistleblowers Frances Haugen & Sarah Wynn-Williams

[00:00:00] Adam Cox: It's October, 2021. A woman walks into a TV studio and tells America what she has discovered. And within 24 hours, Facebook's share price drops by $40 billion

[00:00:13] Kyle Risi: in a day.

[00:00:14] Adam Cox: In a day. Her name is France Haugen, an engineer, a product manager and woman who walked into Facebook believing she could fix it from the inside, and she walked out again with a phone full of documents that Facebook never wanted you to see.

[00:00:28] Kyle Risi: What were they about?

[00:00:29] Adam Cox: Did an algorithm tune for engagement end up finding vulnerable people at their worst moments and serving them content that made things worse? Did it help facilitate a genocide in 2017 and did it help influence the presidential election and put Donald Trump in the White House?

[00:00:47] Kyle Risi: I feel dumb for saying this, but did it.

[00:00:49] Adam Cox: Francis says yes, and Francis isn't the only whistleblower. Two women, one company, and an eely similar warning, and now the company that's had one shield protecting it for over 20 years might finally be starting to crack.

Welcome to the Compendium, an Assembly of fascinating things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

[00:01:39] Kyle Risi: We explore strange, true stories from the worlds of true crime, dark histories, scandals, mysteries, and remarkable people.

[00:01:45] Adam Cox: I'm Adam Cox, your ringmaster for this episode.

[00:01:48] Kyle Risi: And I'm Kyle Risi, the director of performing animal pension schemes for this week.

[00:01:52] Adam Cox: Pension schemes.

[00:01:53] Kyle Risi: Well, I mean there's a real sad situation that's unfolded like just 20 minutes ago,

[00:01:58] Adam Cox: right? Tell us

[00:01:59] Kyle Risi: Gerald, lifelong elephant performer. Uhhuh here, like everyone loves him. There's not a single person, employee or guest there hasn't been impacted by Gerald in some way 43 years in the business.

He retired just six weeks ago and we gave him his obviously complimentary watch as we supposed to. Nice gold plate. It's not real, but sadly, he didn't have a pension and so he's been living on the corner of Smith and Western for the last six weeks, and just yesterday we found his dead body at the back of uh, Toby's Calvary.

So yeah,

[00:02:33] Adam Cox: and hopefully Toby's Calvary haven't like poaching.

[00:02:36] Kyle Risi: Hey, listen, we're not getting involved. Alright. I know we're all about cost cutting and savings, but the memory of what Gerald has contributed to our lives is what we'll stick with. The point is, is that HR has asked me to come in to make sure that all animals have a pension.

For the last six years, we've been classing animals as props, which means they're not, they don't qualify for pension.

[00:02:58] Adam Cox: What about humans? Do we get a pension?

[00:02:59] Kyle Risi: Oh, yeah. Humans get a pension. We care more about humans than we do animals. Unfortunately, for a circus is bad, right?

[00:03:03] Adam Cox: Yeah, very bad.

[00:03:04] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:03:05] Adam Cox: Now, Kyle, you know, our Patreon members get all sorts of lovely things just for joining.

There's early episodes, our fullback catalogue, and even an exclusive episode each month. So there's a lot going on, but let's face it, none of them are really there for that because secretly they all want our compendium. Key chain.

[00:03:22] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that world famous crotch, dangler, that little thing that dangles there covering your crotch

[00:03:28] Adam Cox: a little.

It's big Kyle. It's bold, it's beautiful, and it's,

[00:03:31] Kyle Risi: it's big. It's big enough for the big size, super size Patri members,

[00:03:35] Adam Cox: and it's far too large to serve any practical purpose as a key chain. And yet that's the reason why people become a certified freak and big top tier member so they can get their hands on one.

[00:03:45] Kyle Risi: It's because Adam, they want us there, as you know, dangling lovingly near their crotch.

[00:03:51] Adam Cox: They do indeed. Okay, so that is enough of the housekeeping. 'cause today on the compendium, we are diving into an assembly of Silicon Valley idealism, corporate coverups, and the price of telling the truth about a trillion dollar company.

[00:04:06] Kyle Risi: Ooh, an expose episode.

[00:04:08] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:09] Kyle Risi: Another, what Is this like a whistleblower episode?

[00:04:11] Adam Cox: Something scandalous you might be able to guess is gonna happen? Uh,

[00:04:15] Kyle Risi: well, no, I've already guessed that. I've literally just said, is it a whistleblower episode?

[00:04:19] Adam Cox: It is, yes. Any ideas of the possible company there?

[00:04:22] Kyle Risi: Oh, there's a lot of companies in my head.

So,

[00:04:26] Adam Cox: care to name one

[00:04:27] Kyle Risi: Facebook.

[00:04:28] Adam Cox: Yes. What? I mean, it is probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest tech giant.

[00:04:34] Kyle Risi: Are we talking about Facebook?

[00:04:35] Adam Cox: We are. Because 15 years ago, if you may remember, a film called The Social Network told you how Facebook got built.

[00:04:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah. By that weirdo.

[00:04:44] Adam Cox: Well, mark Zuckerberg.

[00:04:45] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Yeah. Who plays him? What is that actor's name? Who plays him?

[00:04:49] Adam Cox: How is a Jesse someone?

[00:04:51] Kyle Risi: I hate him. I hate him so much. He's so insufferable. And then I saw him on Modern Family as Mitchell and Cam's neighbour, the one that was like really conscious about the environment going, oh, I, I've noticed that you've been running your air conditioning for a long time.

I was like, oh, I've noticed that you've been watering your grass. I don't have grass, I just have cactuses or whatever. It's better for the environment. And I was like, that guy is insufferable. I'm all for the environment, but he just sounds smarmy. And then I saw an interview of him afterwards and I'm like, oh my God.

That's what he is like in real life. And now I hate him. I hate him. And in my mind he's Marcus Zuckerberg, the real life one.

[00:05:26] Adam Cox: Well. It's not

[00:05:29] Kyle Risi: run over.

[00:05:30] Adam Cox: Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so 15 years ago, the social network was released, and now in a cinema right near you, there is a sequel of sorts and it's called The Social Reckoning.

[00:05:41] Kyle Risi: Is it a documentary?

[00:05:42] Adam Cox: No, it's a film. It's kind of a follow up. It's a different cast. The guy that plays Mark Zuckerberg is someone else. Okay. So you might enjoy me, not this

[00:05:49] Kyle Risi: Jesse Guy.

[00:05:50] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Kyle Risi: Hey him.

[00:05:51] Adam Cox: This time it focuses on what it's done once it's got too big for anyone to stop it.

[00:05:57] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's the thing.

[00:05:58] Adam Cox: And the woman at the centre of it, and it's all real. Her name is Francis Hogan. Mm-hmm. I dunno if I've pronounced it. Good name right.

[00:06:04] Kyle Risi: Hogan. Hogan. Is it Hogan?

[00:06:07] Adam Cox: H-A-U-G-E-N. Uh, so she's an engineer, a data scientist, and a product manager who walked into Facebook's offices believing she could help fix it. Oh.

Yet she walked out again two years later with a phone full of photographs and enough paperwork to form the Facebook files, which would wipe roughly 40 to 50 billion off the company's total market value and cost, CEO Mark Zuckerberg 6 billion off his personal wealth in a single day. What were in those photographs?

Well, documents.

[00:06:39] Kyle Risi: Oh, okay. I'm not investing in a company where a CEO E o's got a tiny MicroPen.

[00:06:45] Adam Cox: No, it's, it's a bit more than that.

[00:06:46] Kyle Risi: So, wow. I had no idea that it wipe that much valuation off of the stock price.

[00:06:52] Adam Cox: Mm. I had to,

[00:06:52] Kyle Risi: why have I not heard about this?

[00:06:54] Adam Cox: I had to keep triple checking it. It as like, is it, no, I must have got this wrong.

And I keep saying 40 billion. Wow. Now, if you rewind a second, 'cause if you remember when you first joined Facebook in the noughties, Facebook was once a relatively simple website that helped people keep in touch. Old school friends, university course mates, family around the world. There was no feed built to guess what would keep you scrolling?

[00:07:16] Kyle Risi: No, I came for the pokes.

[00:07:17] Adam Cox: Oh yeah, the pokes. And also people just liked the albums from their nights out and things like that. Yeah. So it was just a place and the

[00:07:24] Kyle Risi: tagging,

[00:07:24] Adam Cox: yeah. To kind of keep in touch. That was the pitch. And then it went public and public companies have shareholders. Shareholders want one thing pretty much every single quarter without fail.

And that is growth

[00:07:36] Kyle Risi: a return. Yeah.

[00:07:37] Adam Cox: So the question stopped being how do we help people connect and became something closer to how do we keep them here longer? Which is a very different question because the answer to that question plays on our attention. Your insecurities and it turns out can influence entire elections.

Did an algorithm tune for engagement end up finding vulnerable people at their worst moments and serving them content that made things worse for them? Did it help facilitate a genocide in 2017 and did it help influence the presidential election in 2016 and put Donald Trump in the White House? Francis says yes.

[00:08:13] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I'm gonna say yes to all of those things as well. All of them. Mm-hmm. Like I don't know what has shifted, but since 2012, I don't think I've come off a session feeling good about what we've just done.

[00:08:24] Adam Cox: Oh yeah. And we'll, we'll touch on some of those things that they do to keep you on the platform for longer.

And now Francis isn't the only high profile whistleblower to come out at this company. There have been several, one in particular worked there years earlier in a completely different job who says she tried to raise the alarm long before France ever did. And her story in some ways is even stranger. And yet she's written a tell all book about the company, yet she's been stopped from saying anything about it to promote it whatsoever.

Well,

[00:08:53] Kyle Risi: like a gag order or like an NDA,

[00:08:55] Adam Cox: I dunno if it is a gag order. I dunno what the exact terminology is.

[00:08:58] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[00:08:58] Adam Cox: But she is not allowed to promote the book. Talk about it. She's not even allowed to go near her book,

[00:09:04] Kyle Risi: but she wrote the book.

[00:09:05] Adam Cox: She's not allowed to set foot in airports that sell her book,

[00:09:09] Kyle Risi: so she can't even be in the same building.

[00:09:11] Adam Cox: Yep.

[00:09:11] Kyle Risi: This is stupid. I don't believe you, but I'm excited to find out more about it.

[00:09:14] Adam Cox: So this episode is about what happens when the people closest to a machine try to tell everyone else exactly how it works and what a trillion dollar company is willing to do to defend itself and to make sure nobody listens.

[00:09:27] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[00:09:28] Adam Cox: Now quick disclaimer before we start Public service answer. It's all

[00:09:31] Kyle Risi: made up.

[00:09:33] Adam Cox: Um, it's kind of a complicated story. We're telling two major whistleblower stories and so we are summarising sort of key points. There's loads more detail. They've got books, both of them that you can go read.

[00:09:43] Kyle Risi: Am I allowed to approach the book?

[00:09:44] Adam Cox: You are allowed to approach the book,

[00:09:45] Kyle Risi: just not the author.

[00:09:46] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:09:47] Kyle Risi: So kind of even get her to sign it.

[00:09:48] Adam Cox: No, definitely not.

[00:09:49] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:09:50] Adam Cox: So yeah. And also there's Facebook side to it, which we will cover some of the things that they come back with. So we'll allow you to make up your own mind about what side you sit on.

[00:09:59] Kyle Risi: Okay. I didn't realise that there was a side to take, but I'm excited for this.

[00:10:04] Adam Cox: Okay. So let's start our story about the woman. Hollywood has just released a movie about France was born in Iowa City in the early 1980s. Her dad was a physician. Her mom interestingly, became, uh, a priest later in life after a career in academia.

So is a household built on two very different kinds of like caring for people, I guess you could say?

[00:10:24] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[00:10:24] Adam Cox: So one was clinical, one spiritual, and Francis herself went a third way entirely. She studied electrical and computer engineering. Graduated in the founding class of small engineering college in Massachusetts and she went straight into big tech.

Now, first up was a role at Google in 2006.

[00:10:43] Kyle Risi: Okay. So she's now broken into the tech sphere properly, like Silicon Valley

[00:10:47] Adam Cox: Tech sphere. Yeah. She's working at Google Ads. I think Google Book search. I wasn't familiar with that one.

[00:10:52] Kyle Risi: Oh, I've not heard of that one.

[00:10:53] Adam Cox: And Google Plus. Do you remember that?

[00:10:56] Kyle Risi: Google Plus?

No, I don't. What was that?

[00:10:57] Adam Cox: That's their attempt at Social Network.

[00:11:00] Kyle Risi: Oh. Oh no. Do you know what? No, actually,

[00:11:03] Adam Cox: yeah,

[00:11:04] Kyle Risi: I'll take that back. I don't remember that.

[00:11:05] Adam Cox: That was a thing that they, everyone like or didn't do anything about. It failed Hip

[00:11:10] Kyle Risi: a bit like Threads. Do you remember when Threads got released and was meant to be Instagram's answer to uh, Twitter and like, it got like a hundred million people downloaded within, I don't know, the first few days and then it just went nowhere.

People were like, it's a shit.

[00:11:23] Adam Cox: But Fred's is still a thing now.

[00:11:25] Kyle Risi: It is. But who's on there?

[00:11:26] Adam Cox: I do not know. Yeah.

[00:11:27] Kyle Risi: I keep getting a notification going, you've got five notifications on Threads. I'm like, fuck off, don't lure me in.

[00:11:35] Adam Cox: So she, yeah, she was pretty successful there. She co-authored a paint on search rankings and on the side she even helped build a dating app called Secret Agent Cupid.

[00:11:44] Kyle Risi: What for? Uh, secret Agents.

[00:11:46] Adam Cox: Secret Agent, I think

[00:11:47] Kyle Risi: Lonely on the Road.

[00:11:49] Adam Cox: Dunno, actually, now that you've said that. Like MI five and Yeah,

[00:11:53] Kyle Risi: the KGB is like, do you know what if we wanna foil all the US moles in Russia, let's just download Secret Agent Qubit and it's got like a, a radius where you can see all these secret agents.

Let's go get 'em.

[00:12:05] Adam Cox: I dunno if it worked out, but eventually it turned into Hinge or was like the, the foundation for Hinge.

[00:12:10] Kyle Risi: Oh. Oh. And she was in directly involved in that. That's impressive. Yeah. I've never been on Hinge. I've never been on any of these dating websites. I went on Tinder once. That was to kind of like find a match for a friend of ours.

[00:12:21] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:22] Kyle Risi: It's fun swiping left and left and left and left.

[00:12:27] Adam Cox: They all know. All right.

[00:12:28] Kyle Risi: I don't know Whether's the yes bit. Okay. You just wanna fuck with your mate. Right. Because women are very selective, so you just wanna swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It's fun. But yeah, we miss the mark on the dating websites.

Really?

[00:12:40] Adam Cox: Thankfully.

[00:12:40] Kyle Risi: Yeah, thankfully. Yeah. Yeah. It's caused a lot of misery for people. A lot of eggs drying up out there.

[00:12:45] Adam Cox: But I was also, a lot of people I know have met through these dating apps and they've been married, so it's how you meet people these days.

[00:12:50] Kyle Risi: True, true.

[00:12:51] Adam Cox: And Google was good to her too. They paid for her MBA at Harvard, but like anyone else, she gets itchy fee and so she moves on to other places.

I think she went to Yelp at one point, and she also worked at Pinterest where she worked on the algorithm behind the home feed itself, deciding on what would show up in what order. And by her own account, she says that what they would do is they understood that if they just showed you the same picture or very similar pictures of things you liked, that wouldn't keep your attention.

They could build a community pretty successfully, but they just couldn't keep you on the platform.

[00:13:24] Kyle Risi: But I'm seeing things I like

[00:13:26] Adam Cox: Drew, but I think it was like two similar. So they then started to sprinkle in different content that they thought you'd be interested in.

[00:13:31] Kyle Risi: So adjacent.

[00:13:32] Adam Cox: Yeah. And what they found, I think she quoted like a 6% uplift in retention, which doesn't sound like a lot, but of

[00:13:39] Kyle Risi: course these things compound, right?

Because now they work on the next algorithm that does a different slight test and then they compare the two. Whichever wins out, that then becomes a defacto one.

[00:13:47] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[00:13:48] Kyle Risi: And then they run another one alongside that one until, so they're always competing these algorithms.

[00:13:52] Adam Cox: Yeah. It kind of keeps you in that infinite scroll and you get that dopamine hit every time you find something engaging.

[00:13:58] Kyle Risi: Scary.

[00:13:58] Adam Cox: Yeah. So by any kind of normal measure, this is a bright woman at the forefront of some of the biggest tech companies in the US or in the world. So why does she end up walking out Facebook's front door with a phone full of stolen documents?

[00:14:12] Kyle Risi: You're gonna tell me?

[00:14:13] Adam Cox: Well, it comes down to one very specific, very personal thing that happened to her years before Facebook ever called around 2014, Francis was hospitalised with a blood clot, and she was also diagnosed around this time with celiac disease, so an autoimmune condition.

And while she was recovering, she hired an old friend to help her out, like day-to-day errands, that kind of thing. So she needed some support, and by her own account they became close friends. But somewhere over the months that followed in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, oh, she says she lost him.

Not to an illness, but to this weird distance that she said that he's just started falling for these conspiracy theories that he would find on social.

[00:14:53] Kyle Risi: Oh, is he falling down the Q Anon rabbit hole?

[00:14:56] Adam Cox: Yeah. Apparently one of the ideas was that this billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, was secretly pulling the strings.

[00:15:04] Kyle Risi: You just have to say George Soros, I think everyone knows who he is. This mystical guy that lives somewhere in America called, I can't pronounce it. George Soros.

[00:15:14] Adam Cox: Not everyone in, I think. Will know who he is.

[00:15:16] Kyle Risi: Surely everyone knows who George Soros is.

[00:15:18] Adam Cox: Okay, let's do

[00:15:19] Kyle Risi: May, maybe it's just me.

[00:15:20] Adam Cox: Let's do a vote.

Let's wait for the people to call in.

[00:15:22] Kyle Risi: Okay. There's the, the switchboard's not lining up at him,

[00:15:26] Adam Cox: but essentially Francis' friend thought that George was pulling the strings of global politics, elections, and migration. Mm. All this stuff, which has not been proven. But at the same point, Francis says that she realised she couldn't reach him.

[00:15:40] Kyle Risi: Oh, interesting. Because this will be round about the point where misinformation and fake news really started coming on the radar with Trump.

[00:15:48] Adam Cox: Yeah. And so this deterioration in her sort of friendship with this guy, basically it forms her new motivation because a few years later in 2018, Facebook comes calling, wanting to recruit her and they make her an offer.

And she said she'd only take the job if she could work specifically on finding misinformation.

[00:16:08] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:16:08] Adam Cox: So not ads or growth or anything like that. 'cause she wanted to stop what happened to her friend from happening to someone else. So she joins Facebook's civic integrity team as a product manager. And by her own account she went in genuinely hopeful to make some change.

She's on record saying she believed Facebook has the potential to bring out the best of us, which perhaps is, I dunno, naive, but then I don't think anyone would know at that point in time what could happen with Facebook. I think,

[00:16:36] Kyle Risi: yeah, it's new territory, right?

[00:16:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. So the civic integrity team's job was exactly what it sounds like.

Protecting elections. Tackling disinformation, and keeping the platform from being weaponized. So it was important work and the kind of work you think a company worth over half a trillion dollars would want to get, right?

[00:16:55] Kyle Risi: Yeah, sure.

[00:16:55] Adam Cox: And so how long do you think that her optimism of like wanting to make a difference lasted?

[00:17:01] Kyle Risi: I reckon day one, when she realised that they only served decaf, she was like, what? I'm outta here.

[00:17:07] Adam Cox: I can't do this job. Um, it was two months.

[00:17:11] Kyle Risi: Wow. Okay.

[00:17:12] Adam Cox: Two months into the role.

[00:17:13] Kyle Risi: And she basically, you're saying is that after two months she realised that she's not gonna be able to get through to these people, or is way worse than she thought?

[00:17:20] Adam Cox: I think it's that because she was starting to raise concerns about what she was seeing and she was being told more or less that she was being too negative essentially.

[00:17:29] Kyle Risi: So what was the point of her job then? Was her job purely just optics?

[00:17:33] Adam Cox: This is what I think it, it, it feels like it's a bit of a box ticking exercise when it comes to these things.

[00:17:38] Kyle Risi: Well, like we're doing our bit, but yeah, don't find anything incriminating on us. Otherwise you're sacked.

[00:17:42] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like you're on payroll. They can say that they've got a team for this, but there's no kind of output to say we saved X or we stopped this from happening. You know, there's no targets for that.

It's always engagement.

[00:17:55] Kyle Risi: How awful. Especially when she like selectively selected this job.

[00:17:59] Adam Cox: Mm.

[00:17:59] Kyle Risi: To do good in the world. And they're like, yeah, we'll let you do that. We won't let you do that.

[00:18:04] Adam Cox: Mm. And around that same time, her team's focus started getting pulled away from the places that arguably needed it the most.

So smaller countries that were overseas and being redirected towards the US election instead. Which is fine because the US election is, is huge, but it left entire regions of the world, essentially. Unmonitored.

[00:18:25] Kyle Risi: Oh, I've got like a flash. Is this, are we going to Myanmar?

[00:18:29] Adam Cox: We are, we're gonna touch on that a couple of times throughout this episode.

Yeah.

[00:18:34] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[00:18:34] Adam Cox: Because what France has found out over the following year wasn't rumour or speculations, she discovered that Facebook's own internal research, their own data scientists had already seen things happening on the platform and documented them.

Mm-hmm.

[00:18:48] Kyle Risi: Like

[00:18:49] Adam Cox: one internal study looked at Instagram and its effect on young teenage girls and Facebook's own researchers wrote in their own words, we make body issues worse.

For one in three teenage girls.

[00:19:01] Kyle Risi: They found that, and that exists in a report somewhere.

[00:19:03] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. And 14% of us teenage boys reported the same kind of negative comparison. So like I said, it's not an external group, it's their own research.

[00:19:12] Kyle Risi: But how is that a positive thing for Facebook in terms of like, could they not make money by helping fix it and creating body positivity?

Why does it have to be a negative? Why can't they spend that into a positive, I don't understand.

[00:19:26] Adam Cox: I guess through their own testing or data or research. I think this is what Francis was trying to uncover is that they knew about it, but changing. It didn't outweigh the goal of increasing engagement numbers.

[00:19:38] Kyle Risi: God. Yeah.

[00:19:40] Adam Cox: Then there's something called crosscheck internally at Facebook. So Facebook's rules get enforced mostly by algorithms and moderators reviewing flag posts at scale millions of times a day. And sometimes that system gets it wrong and it takes down like a senator's post by mistake or it will flag something from a journalist that was totally fine.

So each one of them you might take a couple of minutes to fix, but if it happens to the wrong person, it's also a headline for a famous person that Facebook is censoring their posts. But what Facebook did was kind of build a workaround, a second track for anyone with a profile big enough to make a mistake expensive.

So before the content came down, a real person would double check it first and catch the company's own errors before the world notice. And because the team meant to actually do that double checking was understaffed and overwhelmed. There was a big backlog that built up. And so whatever sat in that backlog waiting a review might never come or stayed up by default.

And by 2020, an estimated 5.8 million of them were on this list. They're not given the same algorithm or moderation that the rest of the world gets.

[00:20:49] Kyle Risi: So it's content that's staying unchecked, is that what you're saying?

[00:20:52] Adam Cox: Yeah, they basically stay up. 'cause according to one internal summary, content protected by this system that had been flagged as rule breaking was viewed something like 16 billion times.

And essentially what it meant was it would damage Facebook more. By not allowing it up 'cause of a big PR issue

[00:21:11] Kyle Risi: and because of how I important that person was, right? Mm-hmm. So they get kind of kicked back, especially in America. They would then be able to say, oh, this is a freedom speech infraction or whatever.

And it looks worse for Facebook in that sense.

[00:21:23] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[00:21:24] Kyle Risi: And so what you're saying is if you've got these big platform people that are on the platform, they get moderated in a slightly different way. Less checks more open and they can post what they want. But because there's so many of them and they have a small team, the amount of content that they're posting that needs to be checked is built up and they can't get through it quick enough.

And therefore it's building up a backlog of misinformation that's on the platform.

[00:21:48] Adam Cox: It could be misinformation, it could be harmful content. A number of things, and I'll give you an example because in 2019, the Brazilian footballer Namar posted nude photos of a woman who had accused him of sexual assault to his own account.

Now that's an immediate flag, right? These images can detect nudity pretty quickly.

[00:22:05] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:22:06] Adam Cox: But because Namar was on this list of ring fenced people, it meant that that post didn't come down straight away. In fact, it was seen close to 60 million times before it was removed.

[00:22:16] Kyle Risi: God, that's so bad because they also need to understand that these are high profile people.

So the Yeah, that backlog is dangerous because it means that millions and millions of people are gonna see this information.

[00:22:27] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:28] Kyle Risi: And out of those millions of people that see that they could also then share that information on as well. They're going to, it's just gonna be mental,

[00:22:35] Adam Cox: you know what? There's a piece of work actually going in, I dunno if it's now, but it's definitely being talked about as an idea of actually reducing the amount of times you can share or reshare content because of the way that misinformation can be spread so quickly.

[00:22:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:22:48] Adam Cox: So I think now you can just click a button, but what they're saying is you have to make it a bit more manual. Copy this, paste it, and that would like slow people down from spreading it so quickly.

[00:22:56] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I was listening to today, explain just yesterday, and there was this girl that was a victim of someone posting explicit images of her.

Mm-hmm. And it then just went viral. So she could go and she could ask Facebook or Twitter to take it down. But the problem is it's then being shared a million other times. Yeah. And now you've gotta go and take it down from those other people's profiles. It just becomes impossible.

[00:23:18] Adam Cox: Exactly. And that's why that moderation is so important to get right straight away to stop that from happening.

And so each of these instances might be ridden off as like, oh, it's a big platform. It's hard to police everything effectively. So the picture Francis was piecing together wasn't a website with some bugs. It was a machine that Facebook knew in detail was doing real world harm. And to decided over and over that fixing it wasn't worth what it might cost the business.

[00:23:44] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:23:44] Adam Cox: And so then came the moment that tipped Francis over in December, 2020, just weeks after the US presidential election, Facebook disbanded the civic integrity team. So her team, which meant they were no longer policing the content.

[00:23:59] Kyle Risi: Do we know why? It was it because of Trump?

[00:24:01] Adam Cox: It was a change or a footstep change, I guess, from Mark who said that putting public good ahead of company profits was now gone.

That's why he always said before.

[00:24:11] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[00:24:11] Adam Cox: And it was kind of now violating their own sort of policies. Now this really frustrated her, but she decided to keep her call. In fact, rather than turning up to work and causing arguments or anything, she just carried on doing her job. But methodically. Building the case.

She knew that she would eventually have to make to people that have no reason to believe her.

[00:24:30] Kyle Risi: So she's planning on being a whistleblower at this point. She's made the decision. She's like, nothing I do is gonna help. Let me start documenting everything. She's taking pictures, she's writing things down, and she's building up

[00:24:41] Adam Cox: a case, essentially.

Yeah. And so when that team is kind of disbanded and then the whole riot at the United States or capital happened,

[00:24:49] Kyle Risi: oh,

[00:24:49] Adam Cox: this is the sort of perfect time where she's like, right, I'm just gonna get all this information and make my case.

[00:24:53] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[00:24:53] Adam Cox: And then the weeks after reporting and internal reviews at Facebook found that they had loosened up some of its election misinformation safeguards right after polling day before that mob organised itself on the platform.

[00:25:06] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:25:07] Adam Cox: France said publicly that watching the Capitol riot unfold weeks after the team that she built to catch exactly this kind of thing and stop it from happening was the moment that she decided that enough's enough.

[00:25:19] Kyle Risi: So that's interesting. So you're saying, and obviously Francis is saying that the January 6th riots we're in a way facilitated or allowed to happen through these platforms like Facebook because they didn't have any of these safeguards.

Her department had been disbanded.

[00:25:35] Adam Cox: That's exactly what she's saying, yeah.

[00:25:37] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:25:38] Adam Cox: Now, luckily for her, and what's interesting is that Facebook has themselves to blame for what kind of happens next because Facebook had this internal culture of being quite open essentially, which meant that all this information that Francis was finding, this internal research was like openly available to a lot of people in Facebook.

So she could just log on to the workspace, find these reports, and then with her phone started taking pictures of them.

[00:26:05] Kyle Risi: Wow, okay. So then I guess when Facebook finds that out, I bet they don't do that anymore.

[00:26:11] Adam Cox: Probably not. I imagine they've locked that down.

[00:26:13] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:26:14] Adam Cox: Now she didn't go straight to the press.

Once she'd collected everything, she went to a lawyer first and organisation called Whistleblower Aid, took her on and helped her to go to Congress, to regulators, and eventually to journalists while protecting her identity.

[00:26:28] Kyle Risi: Yeah, because I think there is a law in America whistleblower kind of laws, which do protect people that exposes type of information.

So she's doing the right things to make sure that she's ticking every single box to make sure she's protected.

[00:26:39] Adam Cox: Exactly. And she's meeting members of Congress on opposing sides. So Democrats and Republicans in a a time when they could barely agree on things, the proof that France had made them come together and actually like sit down and agree on a thing, something, as

[00:26:54] Kyle Risi: the Americans call it, which is so funny.

A bipartisan issue

[00:26:58] Adam Cox: That sounds like a dessert.

[00:26:59] Kyle Risi: It does sound like a dessert.

[00:27:01] Adam Cox: I'll have a bipartisan issue.

[00:27:04] Kyle Risi: Whatcha are you having for dessert issues? Bipartisan issues.

[00:27:08] Adam Cox: So France fed her documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and starting in September, 2021, the journal ran a nine part investigation called the Facebook Files, which was built entirely on what she handed over.

And then October the third, 2021, she stopped hiding and she did a 60 minute interview on tv and she called the dissolution of her old team, a Betrayal of Democracy, and within 24 hours, helped along by a coincidental platform outage. The very next day, Facebook's market value dropped by 40 to $50 billion.

[00:27:41] Kyle Risi: Hang on. So she came on the 60 Minutes, she did this interview the next day. Facebook had an outage and then it lost 60 billion in revenue. I need to understand what was the outage.

[00:27:54] Adam Cox: I think the suspicion is they did that anyway to kind of protect themselves perhaps. I think that's what

[00:27:59] Kyle Risi: were they like trying to reverse things?

[00:28:01] Adam Cox: I dunno what they were protecting at the time, but I think it was just more of a case. If people would be posting stuff on meta, it's bad news. They're perhaps protecting that by having an outage. I think that's the suspicion. Mm-hmm. It's not proven. Sure. It should have just been a technical outage,

[00:28:15] Kyle Risi: but it is very convenient that there's an outage.

Right?

[00:28:17] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:28:17] Kyle Risi: The day after she does this interview,

[00:28:19] Adam Cox: so two days later she sits in front of the US Senate and she doesn't hold back. She says that the company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but they won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.

She went further still telling the communities that Facebook was in her words, literally fanning ethnic violence.

[00:28:39] Kyle Risi: Hmm.

[00:28:40] Adam Cox: So how does a company worth over half a trillion dollars respond to that? You'd think that they lawyer up and really take this quite seriously.

[00:28:47] Kyle Risi: Lemme guess that they don't even deny it.

[00:28:49] Adam Cox: They don't say anything.

[00:28:50] Kyle Risi: Oh,

[00:28:50] Adam Cox: mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO. Yeah. They barely say, is

[00:28:54] Kyle Risi: that like a PR strategy?

[00:28:56] Adam Cox: I think it's kind of,

[00:28:57] Kyle Risi: if we don't acknowledge it, then she's just a crazy mad woman.

[00:28:59] Adam Cox: A little bit. I think that's kind of Yeah, it's bang the flame, isn't it? By talking about it. They let their policy communications chief front, the response instead and his name might ring a bell.

Nick click

[00:29:11] Kyle Risi: what? The The ex liberal Democrats leader?

[00:29:14] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:29:14] Kyle Risi: In the uk.

[00:29:15] Adam Cox: The man whose party support collapsed after the coalition with the conservatives.

[00:29:20] Kyle Risi: Wow. So he's doing this now. He's in America. He's

[00:29:22] Adam Cox: just doing this now. Yeah. Internally, staff were sent a memo insisting the company does not prioritise profit over safety

[00:29:29] Kyle Risi: lies.

[00:29:29] Adam Cox: But obviously, yeah. Francis says, well, that's not true. Zuckerberg himself, rather than engaging directly, posted lighthearted updates about his own life, fencing, surfing, almost as if nothing was happening at the company. Yeah.

[00:29:40] Kyle Risi: Look at me. Yeah. Look how successful I have.

[00:29:42] Adam Cox: This is just normal.

[00:29:43] Kyle Risi: Look at me at my family, a

[00:29:44] Adam Cox: normal day.

He did later push back publicly calling the coverage, a coordinated effort to paint a false picture of Facebook. But in the first crucial week, the loudest voice in the room said almost nothing, which, if you're trying to control the story, is usually the worst thing you can do.

[00:29:59] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:59] Adam Cox: Three weeks later, Facebook announced it was changing its name to meta, which I didn't realise was around this time.

[00:30:06] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So it was a weird overlap. Is that overlap coincidental?

[00:30:09] Adam Cox: Well, they said, you know, they were preparing for the metaverse.

[00:30:12] Kyle Risi: Sure. Look how that went.

[00:30:14] Adam Cox: Yeah. But I feel like it is a bit of a shiny board to distract us, or that's what people suspect, I guess, if their shareholding price had dropped. Does this change things then equally changing your name doesn't distance you enough.

[00:30:26] Kyle Risi: It doesn't, and I think it's a very nice little conspiracy theory that you come up with there, but like a name change, especially for a company as big as this is probably years in the planning.

[00:30:34] Adam Cox: That's what I would've thought.

[00:30:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So I, I think it is just coincidental

[00:30:37] Adam Cox: whether they expedited it, maybe.

[00:30:39] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:30:40] Adam Cox: But I, it doesn't feel like they just did this in three weeks

[00:30:42] Kyle Risi: and it makes sense that, of course, if they're expanding and going to these different avenues. Right. Facebook. Is now no longer the company. It is now a product of obviously their wider adventure under meta. So you'll have like Facebook, and then you've got Instagram and you've got all these other things, the metaverse under meta.

[00:31:01] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:01] Kyle Risi: So that makes sense.

[00:31:02] Adam Cox: Now, France's lawyers filed at least eight separate whistleblower complaints with the SEC, accusing Facebook of misleading investors about its progress on hate speech and misinformation. So that was their kind of angle by saying they were lying to their investors about actually the security measures that they were putting in place.

Documents were handed to Attorney Generals in California, Massachusetts for Vermont, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Then in November, 2021, Ohio's Attorney General went further than any of them suing Meta directly on behalf of shareholders for well over a hundred billion.

[00:31:36] Kyle Risi: Really?

[00:31:37] Adam Cox: So you'd think that that's not great news for meta, except the thing with a lawsuit like that, it doesn't work like a criminal trial.

Instead, meta first gets to argue. The whole case should be thrown out before a jury ever sees it. And that argument sat in front of a judge for nearly three years, and it wasn't actually ruled on until September, 2024. And by then the judge didn't decide who's right. It just basically gets thrown out and nothing actually ever happens with, well,

[00:32:04] Kyle Risi: he doesn't have to even comment on it.

He's just like, yeah, I'm chucking this out.

[00:32:07] Adam Cox: He, yeah, he just needs to basically get the judge to overturn it or not progress it any further, which just seems so unfair.

[00:32:15] Kyle Risi: Wow. So they're trying to like stall things

[00:32:17] Adam Cox: essentially. Yeah. And whenever a decision finally came in September, 2024, most of the case was dismissed.

A couple of narrow claims survive, but essentially it means that everything that's been put forward is just, there's no trial, there's no verdict. It's in this kind of limbo land.

[00:32:33] Kyle Risi: Okay. And that's where it is today. And the judge hasn't decided yet. It's still going on three years later.

[00:32:39] Adam Cox: Pretty much those bits that still are left and say like, okay, there still could be an argument here.

Nothing's happened with it.

[00:32:45] Kyle Risi: The thing is though, as all of this unease around the effects of social media keep bubbling away, it's gonna get to a point where this is going to be a very, very good. Voter topic that a lot of politicians that want to get into politics could potentially use and would probably get a lot of support for.

[00:33:05] Adam Cox: Well, that and AI right now, and I think this is the point that Francis and Sarah who will come on to is why they're still so vocal about this is because if Facebook and social platforms, not just Facebook are damaging back then before the use of ai, what are they gonna be like with ai?

[00:33:22] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And they're already extraordinarily powerful.

And the what they're doing with that power is stalling, accountability. Mm-hmm. Stalling the system that America has from holding these types of companies to account because they're now too powerful.

[00:33:37] Adam Cox: Yeah. And we're gonna go into why there's a specific rule, which is so crazy, and which we'll come onto about why it was so hard to take some of these companies down.

[00:33:47] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[00:33:48] Adam Cox: But we'll get to it, I promise. So France meanwhile has kept going. She testified in the UK and European parliament, started a nonprofit, published a memoir in 2026, and she's watched her own story become a Hollywood movie. And through all of it, Facebook has never taken her to arbitration. They never gagged her, and they never find her for speaking.

And that's all because she was very careful about lawyering up and getting that legal protection before she went public.

[00:34:13] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:34:14] Adam Cox: Which raises a question. What happens to a whistleblower who doesn't have that same protection?

[00:34:19] Kyle Risi: Well, they get gagged.

[00:34:21] Adam Cox: Yeah. Essentially. And that brings us onto our second whistleblower for today, because the information that Francis learned of at our time in Facebook wasn't new.

And actually what we'll go on to find out is that there was another woman that was flagging all the same concerns years prior to Francis.

[00:34:37] Kyle Risi: Wow. Okay.

[00:34:38] Adam Cox: This woman, she's been treated very different Indeed. So her name is Sarah Wynn Williams. Now, until the last couple of years, she probably never would've heard of her, but for six years she had one of the strangest jobs in the world.

She was Facebook's diplomat, the person who sat across the table from presidents and prime ministers representing a company that was on the staggering rise, negotiating with governments all over the world.

[00:35:02] Kyle Risi: Why is Facebook. Who gave us the poke now at the same table as these other diplomats around the world.

Global leaders.

[00:35:12] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:35:12] Kyle Risi: What? It's because the power and the reach they have, which again, should be used as an example of how powerful they are. Like they can say, but we're just a little silicon tech company. No, you are at the table with bloody Putin and China and Georgia and all these different countries around the world.

You've got power and therefore we need to make sure you don't run away with that.

[00:35:36] Adam Cox: Yeah. If your interest or you say your interest in public safety, then you need to show us that you are so, Sarah, she worked at Facebook between the years 2011 and 2017. So yeah, a couple of years. I think just before Francis started, which means for a few years before Francis had even applied for the job, someone else was in that building watching the same machine, making the same mistakes.

Now the thing about Sarah is her story is messier than that. It rests in large part on her own account. The conversations that she had, and Facebook now disputes a lot of that. It's not that she had this physical evidence that she took lots of photos of that obviously held or allowed France's account to be held up in court.

[00:36:16] Kyle Risi: Okay. So they're denying a lot of the things that she said. A, because A, she doesn't have those protections. And B, probably because it might be more damning.

[00:36:23] Adam Cox: Yeah. A lot of the stuff that Sarah says is very similar to what Francis says. But of course, Facebook takes a different angle at Francis. Now let's talk about Sarah, 'cause her story is very different.

Now, one thing you should know about Sarah, when she was 13, she'd already looked deaf in the eye once on a family camping trip to New Zealand, she was attacked by a shark and it pulled her under. She tried to fight her off, but she was bleeding badly from her stomach.

[00:36:50] Kyle Risi: Whoa. At 13 years old?

[00:36:52] Adam Cox: Yeah. There was,

[00:36:52] Kyle Risi: geez,

[00:36:53] Adam Cox: no hospital nearby.

So a local doctor had to stitch her up without anaesthetic and told her parents she'd be fine. But she wasn't. The bite had perforated her bowel.

[00:37:03] Kyle Risi: Okay.

[00:37:04] Adam Cox: So she went into sepsis and her lung collapsed. It was horrific. So she had to be airlifted out, but thankfully she survived, obviously.

[00:37:13] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I'm curious to find out how this chick loops us back into like her fight for, uh, doing good in the world against Facebook.

[00:37:21] Adam Cox: Well,

[00:37:22] Kyle Risi: I was attacked by a shark.

[00:37:23] Adam Cox: The thing is, I think when you're, you're 13 and you nearly die, you gotta ask yourself, well, what else is there to life?

[00:37:31] Kyle Risi: Okay,

[00:37:32] Adam Cox: so she trained in international law.

[00:37:34] Kyle Risi: Okay. At 13,

[00:37:39] Adam Cox: a few years later.

[00:37:40] Kyle Risi: And is this her origin? God, this is

[00:37:42] Adam Cox: her

[00:37:42] Kyle Risi: origin. Everyone needs an origin story.

[00:37:43] Adam Cox: This is her superhero origin story. Okay. And she worked in the un, she became a New Zealand diplomat, but basically she found that life just a bit dull. What changed is what happened in 2011. Now, if you remember, there was the earthquake in Christchurch.

[00:37:58] Kyle Risi: Yes.

[00:37:59] Adam Cox: And Sarah's about to board a flight where she gets a phone call from her sister and her sister can't reach their parents. The phone lines are down and basically the sister is basically saying to Sarah, I think I'm going to die.

[00:38:12] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:38:13] Adam Cox: So for hours they don't hear anything else. There's just silence.

There's no information. And so her family are sick with worry and Sarah's calling like trying to find out what's happened to their sister. They finally get hold of her. But the way that they do is through Facebook. Facebook is the one where she's be able to mark herself safe.

[00:38:31] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:38:31] Adam Cox: But this was before Facebook or um, had that mark yourself safe functionality.

[00:38:36] Kyle Risi: They were just like posting something on Facebook, tagging all their mates going, I'm safe.

[00:38:40] Adam Cox: Yeah. And then speaking to each other where there was like clean water and everything like that. Facebook played a crucial part I think in people communicating. Hang

[00:38:47] Kyle Risi: on. But that sounds really positive.

[00:38:49] Adam Cox: Really positive.

And that's why Sarah wanted to join Facebook because it gave her the reassurance her sister was. Okay,

[00:38:57] Kyle Risi: sure. I see.

[00:38:58] Adam Cox: So very different to France. And so she didn't walk into Facebook suspicious of it. She walked in believing in it completely. And she spent the next 18 months trying to convince them to give her a job at Facebook.

[00:39:11] Kyle Risi: Wow, okay. Please hire me. Send 'em donuts every week.

[00:39:14] Adam Cox: Cold emails, chasing them. I dunno exactly what she did, but eventually in work and in July they offered her a job in 2011.

[00:39:21] Kyle Risi: And was this in the United States or was this in New Zealand?

[00:39:25] Adam Cox: Good question. I think it's in the United States.

[00:39:27] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Okay. So she's off to Silicon Valley.

[00:39:29] Adam Cox: Yeah. And she became more or less Facebook's unofficial ambassador to the world. When she started, new hires were handed something, nicknamed internally called the Little Red Book, and it was full of Zuckerberg.

[00:39:41] Kyle Risi: That sounds awful. It's

[00:39:42] Adam Cox: like the Bible.

[00:39:43] Kyle Risi: No, it sounds like the little red book that they were giving out to the communists in China, under Mao.

[00:39:49] Adam Cox: Oh wow.

[00:39:50] Kyle Risi: Yeah, the cultural, I can't remember what it's called now. And yeah. Horrible stuff in there.

[00:39:54] Adam Cox: Well, this is actually a bit nicer.

[00:39:56] Kyle Risi: Okay.

[00:39:57] Adam Cox: But then I guess maybe it's just lies. It was full of Zuckerberg's own words about mission and connection and purpose. Calling the company a family.

[00:40:06] Kyle Risi: Hate it when they do that.

We're not a family. We're definitely not a family. When I'm not performing. Yeah. Oh, do you? Do you need some support and love? No, it is, get the fuck out. But when I am performing and I'm bringing in lots of money, making great code, we're a family. Yeah. I hate that.

[00:40:24] Adam Cox: Here's some free tickets to Madonna.

[00:40:26] Kyle Risi: We are not family.

We are not even friends. We are in a contract of exchange where you give me money in exchange for my labour. That is as far as it goes, don't ask me to attend the Tiggy bar after work. Not doing it anymore. Anymore.

[00:40:42] Adam Cox: Not after last Christmas. There's also a company that has those kind of perks with food and laundry on site.

[00:40:48] Kyle Risi: Keeps you at work longer.

[00:40:50] Adam Cox: Exactly. And I hate those places. 'cause it, when you go round you think, oh, this is great. Look all the fridge. Yeah. All the free drinks that you can have.

[00:40:56] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And they have a serve of lunch, like fresh salmon and stuff with for lunch. They come around with all like chicken breasts and really lovely lunches.

It's just there to keep you there longer.

[00:41:05] Adam Cox: Exactly. But Sarah, she finds it intoxicating, but in a good way for her. She falls for it completely and she throws her life into it. She even answers emails from her hospital bed while she is in labour with her first child.

[00:41:19] Kyle Risi: Oh God.

[00:41:20] Adam Cox: So that's just how dedicated she was to this role?

[00:41:23] Kyle Risi: Or is she addicted to Facebook?

[00:41:28] Adam Cox: You know,

[00:41:31] Kyle Risi: I imagine that's how it's working. Like people nowadays, they're in labour and they're like scrolling on Instagram. That's how dangerous this addiction has become.

[00:41:37] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:38] Kyle Risi: And she works in the eye of a storm, do you know what I mean?

[00:41:41] Adam Cox: Yeah. She's addicted to it, but maybe in a different way, but things, she's got a young baby, but she's taking her baby around the world and she refers to that period as incredibly humiliating.

I think she's looked at it in hindsight and gone, actually, I didn't value my family, I was just doing this all for my career, is kind of what I get the sense of it.

[00:42:00] Kyle Risi: Okay.

[00:42:00] Adam Cox: But in the moment she's like, I'll take my family wherever I go basically, and not think about steadiness for them.

[00:42:07] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[00:42:07] Adam Cox: But then underneath all the travel around the world and all that chaos, Sarah starts to notice something like a bit of a gap.

And actually this bit is gonna sound very similar to what we talked about with Francis. Now the first thing is in Myanmar. Mm-hmm. So Myanmar, if people don't know, is in Asia and there's a population of around 55 million. And before Facebook arrived, Myanmar had barely any internet at all. So they didn't go through the age of Dialup, A-O-L-M-S-N messenger, like us.

[00:42:36] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:42:37] Adam Cox: And so the country went straight from nothing to mobile phones.

[00:42:41] Kyle Risi: And did they not have a deal where they would have Facebook pre-installed on every single mobile phone?

[00:42:46] Adam Cox: Exactly. I dunno about that, but I know it's pretty much the homepage for most people.

[00:42:50] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:42:51] Adam Cox: And so from that, that's people getting news and information via Facebook.

It's not like what we had like MSN, you'd have that, you'd have a non-biased website that would have all this information.

[00:43:03] Kyle Risi: Sure. And again, if you're looping back to Facebook having this, these group of powerful people that go unchecked in terms of what they post, not moderated, you can quickly see how someone very powerful that has access or was even made sure.

They have got a channel into every person in the population's kind of eyeballs and brain. Mm. They can start using that for misinformation, posting things, propaganda, whatever. A lot of the positive, but a lot of it can be really negative.

[00:43:33] Adam Cox: Exactly. And and we we're lucky to grow up on the internet where there was no algorithms like they are now.

So we've learned to navigate and understand all this.

[00:43:42] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It was back in the day where it was like, oh, you should poke Adams, but I poked him already. The algorithm doesn't know.

[00:43:48] Adam Cox: Yeah, just, just do it again anyway. Just

[00:43:50] Kyle Risi: poke him again.

[00:43:51] Adam Cox: And so the same cannot be said for Myanmar, which meant that when anti Roya hate speech started spreading on the platform, some say there was no other version of the internet to basically balance it out.

[00:44:03] Kyle Risi: Okay. So it was like one channel basically. And that's everything that people were hearing.

[00:44:08] Adam Cox: Yeah. And it was this hate speech that was directed at this Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar. And it was sort of inspiring violence, essentially.

[00:44:17] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[00:44:18] Adam Cox: Sarah says the moderation set up to catch it was hopelessly thin.

Bernie's language content review was outsourced partly in Dublin. And so that's in a different time zone. And once people in Ireland have logged off for the day. Yeah. What, what, what's gonna happen?

[00:44:32] Kyle Risi: That's right. Yeah.

[00:44:33] Adam Cox: And so the United Nations investigation later found that Facebook bought significant responsibility for inflaming the violence that followed in that country.

And Meta's position was when it was put to 'em, was that they've built dedicated teams from Wine MA banned the country's military and state media from their apps. And that part of the problem was a lack of standardised text encoding for the Bernese language, which made automated detection harder. So ultimately what Meta wasn't penalised for sort of came down to the Section two three oh of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says if someone else publishes this, we just provide the platform.

It's not us. And so therefore it's kind of a get outta jail free card because it's not them that's actually posted.

[00:45:19] Kyle Risi: So, so we are responsible technically for the platform, but we're not responsible for what people post.

[00:45:23] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[00:45:24] Kyle Risi: Okay.

[00:45:25] Adam Cox: And from that, it means that people can't take down Facebook, Google, or whatever it is, because it's not them that's putting out this information.

[00:45:32] Kyle Risi: Sure. So basically they're saying if you have a problem with something that's on the platform, you have to go after that person individually.

[00:45:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:39] Kyle Risi: And that could be, let's say, in another country.

[00:45:41] Adam Cox: Yeah, exactly. So that means because of that violence, even though Facebook is found guilty of inflaming, what happened there?

[00:45:50] Kyle Risi: Oh, millions of people died is not our problem.

[00:45:51] Adam Cox: Yeah, they're not, they didn't get any financial penalty whatsoever.

[00:45:55] Kyle Risi: Mm. It's so tricky because, I dunno what the right answer is. A part of me kind of agrees with that. Why should Facebook be responsible for what people post on the platform? It depends on where your stances on freedom of speech, right?

[00:46:09] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:09] Kyle Risi: But then at the same time, speech can be really damaging, as we've seen here. Right? It's resulted in, I've heard some places considered like a genocide depending on how you want to interpret it.

[00:46:20] Adam Cox: It's difficult. And I think the thing is, when it comes to freedom of speech, yes, there's that, but then there's the spreading of hate and violence and misinformation.

We can't go and write the same information in, I dunno, the, the daily mirror or whatever it is. There's rules to say that we can't just say what we want in some of those newspapers

[00:46:37] Kyle Risi: here in the uk, but remember, this is a American company.

[00:46:41] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:41] Kyle Risi: That lives by and operates under American values. And one of the American values that they hold very dearly to themselves is freedom of speech.

Now, I think everyone can agree that freedom of speech is important, but where do you draw the line between it becoming potentially detrimental? Like the line is so cloudy that it's difficult to know what's right and wrong. A very good example is that Australia have recently said that these tech giants must allow people to opt out of the algorithm.

They must be allowed to turn it off. I believe, and I could be wrong, but I believe that Facebook or Instagram are now challenging that and are planning on suing the Australian government. Saying that by forcing us to allow people to opt out is an infraction of our. Facebook's freedom of speech.

[00:47:32] Adam Cox: That is just,

[00:47:32] Kyle Risi: so, where is that line and how does that work?

I don't understand that in my head

[00:47:35] Adam Cox: because essentially what you're saying is you can say what you want, but then if you've got an algorithm that's pushing certain messages to people, then that's influencing behaviour in a way. And that's for Facebook's own, as we've said, they're doing it for engagement and profits.

[00:47:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:47:48] Adam Cox: So why can't we opt out of that and just have a timeline that's

[00:47:52] Kyle Risi: in Yeah. Where our free, I feel like there's also freedom of speech on their side of things. Yeah. And I, I don't know. It was so weird. Confusing.

[00:47:58] Adam Cox: Why? Why can't posts be just in sequential order, essentially? So something that was posted, I don't know, last night, like,

[00:48:04] Kyle Risi: like it used to be.

[00:48:05] Adam Cox: Yeah, exactly. But we know the reason that's not that is because that doesn't keep people on the platform.

[00:48:09] Kyle Risi: And the thing is though, as well, like everything that you've said here, like the power that Facebook now has and the money only allows them to keep pushing and keep arguing and keep delaying and keep kind of like interpreting things in different ways that allows 'em to keep operating and keep getting more powerful.

Do you know what I mean?

[00:48:26] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. And it wasn't just this incident, Sarah says, Facebook's own research had found something specific and disturbing about the teenage girls. And if a 13-year-old girl posted a selfie, then deleted it, Facebook could detect that moment that there was a flicker of perhaps insecurity.

Oh. Or there was some sort of pattern. And so therefore they know what to show. Is it a beauty ad or a di ad or something like this? This is what Sarah says. Meta outright says that's not true. They do have the ability to detect what's in a image, right? We know that from like pornographic images and stuff like that.

So if they can go actually. You know, we think our algorithm says that this is an unflattering photo. We can then perhaps put something out

[00:49:10] Kyle Risi: there. You're ugly.

Yeah. It's a mess for cosmetic surgery. Ouch.

[00:49:18] Adam Cox: Yeah. But like I say, meta disputes that they say the allegation was raised back in 2017, disputes it then. And that the underlying research was never used to target advertising. It was based on anonymous, aggregated data and didn't follow the company's own review process for that kind of study.

But remember what Francis's own leaked research said years later, Facebook's own internal data said that we make body issues worse for one in three teenage girls.

[00:49:45] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:49:45] Adam Cox: So a different team practically finding the same thing.

[00:49:49] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:49:49] Adam Cox: It's worth knowing too that Sarah says that plenty of Facebook's own executives don't let their own children anywhere near their products they're building.

[00:49:58] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:49:58] Adam Cox: So that's interesting.

[00:50:00] Kyle Risi: Very interesting.

[00:50:02] Adam Cox: And something that Sarah points out is the staff turnover in Facebook. Now we know that France, she was only there for a couple of years, but she reached a very high level within a couple of years probably. She went in at a high level of course. But what she was saying is that people were, in order to succeed in Silicon Valley, you jump ship every couple of years in order to get that pay rise.

[00:50:20] Kyle Risi: Yeah. You move from one company to the next. Yeah. Rather than relying on them going, do you know what Francis, you've done such a great job. Here's a, here's 10% pay increase. And they go like if you ask then might be okay. The most we can kind of like rummage up is maybe a 1% increase. You're better off jumping, shipping, getting a your 10, 20%.

[00:50:37] Adam Cox: Exactly. And it sounds like there's this rotating sort of cast of ambitious people each trying to make their own mark

[00:50:44] Kyle Risi: each willing to do what maybe the previous one wasn't.

[00:50:47] Adam Cox: Hit KPIs.

[00:50:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:50:49] Adam Cox: Grow things.

[00:50:50] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:50:50] Adam Cox: Even bigger than they were before. So is there anyone there for the long term that's thinking about the long term protection?

I guess

[00:50:58] Kyle Risi: nobody ever in the history of any business or organisation is ever thinking. 20 years down the line. That's why KPIs always, what's our three year plan? What's your five year plan? It's about the short term. And when it comes to these shareholders as well, it's about what can you make me in five years?

Mm. Whatever it might be. They're not thinking, do you know what, in 20 years time this product is gonna make your children's lives incredible. They do not give a shit about that. It's about how much money they can bring in now. And the thing is though, when the company stops making money, then those investors leave.

[00:51:33] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:51:33] Kyle Risi: And then what happens is the company fails.

[00:51:36] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:36] Kyle Risi: So it's always about the short term. It's never about what's the good for humanity.

[00:51:39] Adam Cox: And that kind of rings true. I, I can't remember if it was Francis or Sarah that said this, but they could detect their top users would burn out really quickly. So say for example, you join Facebook, you turn out to be like one of their top 5% users because you're always responding to comments.

You're on there like eight hours a day. They knew within probably a few months you'd go, actually, what am I doing? And you come off the platform. They didn't think to actually, let's try and. Work with you to keep you longer on the platform over like years, let's note to

[00:52:08] Kyle Risi: you,

[00:52:09] Adam Cox: rather

[00:52:09] Kyle Risi: than wear you out.

[00:52:11] Adam Cox: Exactly. And so they were happy to kind of like go through that churn of top users just for the quick buck.

[00:52:17] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. And I'm assuming, just a quick side question there, that the ultimate goal there is the longer you are on the platform, the more ads that they can serve you. That is their business model, right?

They're an advertising company,

[00:52:28] Adam Cox: pretty much. I think you get prioritised with ads straight away and then as you are like scrolling down the feed, you get less relevant ads or less content. So they try and make sure they front load those ads that they think are gonna be relevant for you earlier on so that they can make sure they can make money from you.

[00:52:44] Kyle Risi: Yeah. God, you know, I, I do remember a time when people were like, I don't think Facebook's gonna be around much longer 'cause they're not making money.

[00:52:52] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:52] Kyle Risi: And now they're one of the biggest companies on the entire planet.

[00:52:56] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:52:56] Kyle Risi: And it's because, well, what have they done differently? It's because the ads that they're surfacing, right?

[00:53:00] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:00] Kyle Risi: Sponsored posts is all sorts of things.

[00:53:02] Adam Cox: They know so much about you to target you, so Yeah. Yeah. And so by the mid 2010s, Facebook was chasing the biggest prize left on the board. And that was China because they had millions of people that Facebook thought that they could tap into. People say how serious Zuckerberg was about it.

He visited Beijing repeatedly through that period. He gave speeches in Mandarin, whatever it took to be taken seriously by the people who could actually let Facebook in.

[00:53:29] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:53:30] Adam Cox: And in 2014, he wrote an email laying out a three year plan to get Facebook operating inside China. Now Sarah says that email contained a to-do list essentially, which is basically connect with the unconnected build satellites get into China.

But no real question in her account of whether they should do it, just how they would do it. Um,

[00:53:50] Kyle Risi: why would that be a question With any business, it's surely it's a case of well, there's an opportunity here, there's a population here, there's an audience. We should, that seems like a, a strange question to ask.

I'm not disagreeing with the question. I think we should always be asking and governments should be asking, should we do something rather than let's do this. Right. Do you know what I mean?

[00:54:11] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:54:11] Kyle Risi: So, so what is the rationale there? Why would you bring that up?

[00:54:14] Adam Cox: Well, I'll tell you why.

[00:54:16] Kyle Risi: Okay.

[00:54:17] Adam Cox: Because back in 2016, while all this was apparently happening, the New York Times reported that Facebook had actually built a censorship tool.

One designed to be handed to a local partner in China that could hide posts on banned topics from ever reaching Chinese users in the first place. So we know that China does that, that you know, they are a communist party and they will moderate what their people see.

[00:54:39] Kyle Risi: Sure, I get that. Yes.

[00:54:41] Adam Cox: And so several Facebook staff who had worked on this project reportedly quit over it at the time.

So it all seems to line up with what Sarah says in her book, I guess, and that actually, why were they not asking the questions why we should work with China?

[00:54:55] Kyle Risi: Okay, I get it. I'm gonna say to that is that what this comes down to is a cultural principle difference.

[00:55:02] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:03] Kyle Risi: Alright. You're being led by the, the cultural differences between China and America.

Right? China is shaped by their values and their values are like, well, we wanna, there's certain things we do not want our people to know about whatever reason. And in America it's like, oh, freedom of speech, whatever. Which I think is a little bit of a smoke and mirrors. I don't think freedom of speech really exists the way that Americans think it does in America.

And so that, that's I think, what the issue there. It's a cultural thing. You're asking us to do something for China that goes against American values.

[00:55:37] Adam Cox: Yeah. Essentially.

[00:55:38] Kyle Risi: Not necessarily that it's wrong.

[00:55:39] Adam Cox: Yeah. I think that's true. But then there's this other interesting bit of story that comes out of this. So a Chinese official once asked Facebook whether the account of an exiled Chinese businessman.

So someone that was quite critical of Beijing.

[00:55:53] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:55:53] Adam Cox: His name was Go, could simply be removed from the platform. Now Sarah says that the request went all the way up to the person running the Chinese strategy for Mark Zuckerberg. And options were weighed, like the consequences of being helpful or not, basically by removing this person.

[00:56:10] Kyle Risi: Sure. So I'm assuming that that to remove him from the platform, he must be obviously outspoken against the Chinese Communist Party and he might even have a lot of followers as well, or people interested in what he has to say. So they're like removed from the platform.

[00:56:24] Adam Cox: Yeah. And I think Mark initially was like, oh, is there a middle ground?

But eventually they did remove him. And so Meta's response to that removal has been on public record since 2017 and that it followed a violation of the standard rules essentially, and that's why they removed him from the platform. But in one internal document weighing up the broader risk of the kind of cooperation with Beijing, Sarah says there's original wording acknowledging plainly that it could make Facebook responsible for user data requests that led to torture, death and incarceration.

[00:56:57] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:56:58] Adam Cox: And that's not paraphrasing, that's exactly what she said was in the document. But then there's a marked change that basically said we are responsible for directly responding to requests for data from government that does not respect international standards for human rights.

[00:57:13] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[00:57:13] Adam Cox: So that's why I think she was championing, why would we do this in the first place?

Mm-hmm. Just because we can, maybe we shouldn't.

[00:57:21] Kyle Risi: Yeah. But

[00:57:21] Adam Cox: I also think if you are a business. You do plan for the worst case scenario, and maybe you would document that plan. But I think what matters is you put measures in place to stop that worst case scenario from happening. But it feels like this wording change just tries to soften the blow and make it feel more corporate, I guess.

So, so far we've been talking about Facebook as a single thing, one company making a set of choices, but every one of those choices ultimately ran through one man. And Sarah's picture of Mark Zuckerberg isn't like a cartoon villain. In fact, sometimes she sympathises with him, thinks he's a bit naive, maybe associated himself with the wrong people.

But then that picture of him does change over time. It's weird. She speaks quite fondly. She doesn't hate Mark, she just thinks that he could be doing better. He's the person that could do it, but he's just, he's not, essentially.

[00:58:12] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I see.

[00:58:13] Adam Cox: She describes him almost as apolitical an engineer, not like a, an ideologist.

[00:58:18] Kyle Risi: He is. Right. He was a, I believe Harvard or Yale kind of graduate. So he's a developer at the end of the day. He's not like a born diplomat.

[00:58:26] Adam Cox: No.

[00:58:27] Kyle Risi: And he's dealing with very big, very powerful people all over the world and dangerous people.

[00:58:32] Adam Cox: Yeah. And she said early on he was quite nervous sitting around these heads of state.

And when Facebook's own staff told him how much his platform had shaped the 2016 US election, which elected Trump, he didn't believe it at first. He pushed back hard and it reportedly took hours, like with examples, after examples before he came round to the idea.

[00:58:54] Kyle Risi: Have you got any of those examples?

[00:58:55] Adam Cox: Yeah, we do.

And his initial reaction wasn't that he was. Gobsmacked door, kind of like, oh wow, this is concerning. In fact, he kind of became fascinated with it, whereas Sarah herself just wanted to be sick. She just did not feel comfortable with this at all.

[00:59:11] Kyle Risi: But the thing that I want to know is to what degree is it purely like messages in support of Trump were being peed by other people that supported him?

Or was it an orchestrated attempt by the Trump administration to try and sway the public?

[00:59:28] Adam Cox: So there's two examples that I've got here. Essentially, they're just leveraging the platform to push out a message. I don't think they're necessarily using it to kind of spread misinformation.

[00:59:40] Kyle Risi: Well, that doesn't sound dodgy to me at all.

I mean, it is an advertising platform. It is a communication channel that you can reach a lot of people in a very effective way. And so I fail to see the nefarious there. I can see the nefarious there. If you are a Democrat and you are very anti-Republican, why you might say that. But at the same time, even there was going, there's gonna be another election where the Democrats will year use the platform.

Where's the nefarious in that?

[01:00:09] Adam Cox: So I'll give you two examples then. So Facebook staff, Sarah says, where embedded directly with the Trump campaign in 2016, running data and targeting strategy alongside the campaign's own team, which like you say, is there. That's

[01:00:24] Kyle Risi: business, right? Yeah. That's what you sell. Oh, they have Facebook ads.

I can create a campaign that's gonna target a specific demographic that's going to help me get a message to them that I believe is going to help persuade them to vote for us. That sounds all above board.

[01:00:38] Adam Cox: Yeah. Now she says it wasn't like the usual account management support team. So if you've ever worked with Facebook as an advertiser, you get assigned someone who then disappears after two months.

But yeah, it's not that. Instead she says it was Facebook's own staff, physically sitting inside Trump's campaign headquarters in San Antonio alongside their digital team, not advising from a distance, but in the room, telling them, in her words, every trick they knew how to target people, how to find the exact voters.

[01:01:07] Kyle Risi: Now, okay, so I'd like to push back on that again because I also don't see the problem with that. There's loads of software companies out there that you can approach if you want enterprise services, right? Mm-hmm. You don't wanna use the product as it is off the shelf. You want an account manager, you want an advisor.

You want someone to help build a strategy. I don't see any problem with that. Where I probably do see the problem with that is if the Democrats had also asked Facebook to do something similar for them and they said no, or they were prevented from doing so because of maybe a non-complete clause in the contract that they had with the Republicans.

[01:01:40] Adam Cox: Yeah, absolutely. Is like this fairness to do business with both parties. And that's what Meta actually says, that both parties received identical support and identical tools, both Trump and Clinton campaign. So it wasn't as if Facebook was working full-time exclusively with either side.

[01:01:58] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:01:58] Adam Cox: So yeah, like you say, I think that's fair.

But what's worth knowing, and this is nothing to do with Sarah's account, it's a completely different story. In 2020, a UK investigation from channel four called Deterring Democracy got hold of Trump's own 2016 campaign targeting data.

[01:02:16] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:02:16] Adam Cox: And inside it a category labelled Simply Deterrence and around three and a half million black American voters identified by name and targeted with ads, not to win them over, but to put them off voting Hillary Clinton altogether.

[01:02:32] Kyle Risi: That is interesting. And I don't know whether or not there is a a question of ethics around that, but you're still targeting, I don't know, is that bad? Is that good? I don't know

[01:02:40] Adam Cox: on first assumption that surely is bad, but yeah, like of course you're gonna try and target different areas of the country, which you're probably not gonna get the vote.

But I guess we would expect them to try and sway the vote saying, don't vote Hillary, vote us because of X, Y, Z. What they seem to be doing is more of a smear campaign to say, just don't vote Hillary.

[01:03:00] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[01:03:00] Adam Cox: And

[01:03:01] Kyle Risi: if it's factual,

[01:03:03] Adam Cox: yes,

[01:03:03] Kyle Risi: then I don't see any problem with that. Like if what they're saying, don't vote for Hillary because she doesn't have your best interest at heart, here are the examples of why.

And there's evidence backed. I get it. It's factual. You want to be informing. The voter base about what they might be potentially voting for. And the reason why I say that is because I think typically, and I could be wrong at this, African Americans and minorities, they will typically vote Democrats, right?

[01:03:29] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:03:29] Kyle Risi: And so maybe this is to help people to say, well, don't go for what you've always done. Look at the facts. Look at what this person has done, who, where their affiliations lie. And then make up your own mind. That sounds fair to me.

[01:03:43] Adam Cox: It does.

[01:03:43] Kyle Risi: Are you saying this is not what they're doing?

[01:03:45] Adam Cox: It didn't go into like the specifics, but then I recall going back to that election, remember you'd see Hillary Clinton and like she'd almost have a fit or in public and there was questions whether it was even her or if it was an imposter posing as her.

Mm-hmm. And it kind of just undermines her credibility. It does. That's what it feels like. And you had the same thing with the last Democrat president, uh, Biden Biden. Even I couldn't remember his name. Like falling asleep, not remembering his words.

[01:04:13] Kyle Risi: Yes. Now, okay, let me push back on that again 'cause this is really fun because to what degree I've seen those posts, I don't know what you're talking about, but to what degree is that the meme culture then taken over this information is then put out there and then people on the internet, on Reddit or wherever, then start creating memes from this and then start disseminating that.

Right? So that is not the Trump administration doing that. That is Republicans voters. So I think that's okay. But then at what point is it that the Trump administration have gone, if we put this out there, this will then become a meme and then they will do the heavy lifting for us?

[01:04:50] Adam Cox: That's what I think it could be.

[01:04:51] Kyle Risi: But is that again, is that wrong? I don't know. It's uncharted territory.

[01:04:56] Adam Cox: It is. 'cause I kind of feel like. Is it wrong if you go by the book? Maybe not. But they're doing, it feels like they're doing something slightly underhand to sway an audience rather than just having a pure debate by going, we'll do this.

No you won't. We'll do this.

[01:05:10] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And it's also a case of like them having so much information about what is persuasive, what is not, what kind of pushes people in a different direction. And it could be something as stupid as make the background of that meme blue.

[01:05:26] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:26] Kyle Risi: And they're the only ones with that information, right?

[01:05:29] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:29] Kyle Risi: I don't know. That's where it's a bit shady for me.

[01:05:32] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:32] Kyle Risi: But I don't know if it's wrong or not.

[01:05:34] Adam Cox: I mean, if it was all above board and factual information, then maybe it's okay, but I just don't like to believe that it was

[01:05:41] Kyle Risi: Yes. And the reason why I'm inclined to say that is really wrong is because it's the Trump administration that won.

Do you know what I mean?

[01:05:49] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:49] Kyle Risi: If it was the Democrats that are won, who I think views we more aligned with as like people in the UK looking at America, then would I say that they're strong? I'd say, well, I mean, they played the game and they did it well. They managed to reach their people in the right way and convince them to vote.

I just don't know.

[01:06:06] Adam Cox: So you'd consider them or you'd look at it with a different viewpoint?

[01:06:08] Kyle Risi: Yes. What I am really worried about is the fact that they're so huge and they have so much power that there should be highly regulated in terms of what they're allowed to do and how much they're allowed to help these different political figures that control.

The futures of millions and millions of people that needs to be highly regulated. But at the same time, it's a very highly unregulated industry right now. And also depending on who's in power, Republicans are very anti regulations.

[01:06:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:38] Kyle Risi: And so I, yeah, I dunno, I dunno what the answer is.

[01:06:40] Adam Cox: You only have to look at the Farage in the UK in the, the backhand sort of money that he's been receiving.

You think like, well how would he use that in his campaign? You know? And then with Brexit, we were told information about, oh, it's gonna be better. Or you're not gonna be like governed under eve rules. I remember one of our friends was like, yeah, why should they tell us what power hair dryers we can use?

It was kinda like just pointless information that actually, what did it actually mean?

[01:07:05] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:07:06] Adam Cox: It just made people think there was gonna be a better,

[01:07:08] Kyle Risi: and the answer is, I don't know the, I dunno the answers to these questions and how we move forward, but it's a very scary time. And a new superpower is definitely emerging where that power is firmly in the hands of these tech billionaires.

[01:07:21] Adam Cox: Yeah. And so that brings us onto the part of Sarah's story that has nothing to do with governments or censorship. Mm-hmm. Or geopolitics at all. In fact, it's about Sarah's pregnancy. So she was having her second child in 2016. Now Sarah says her direct boss, a man named Joel Kaplan, made her working life increasingly difficult, inappropriate comments about her husband turning up to video calls from his bed, and then questions about her body after childbirth that very nearly killed her, in fact.

So not the comments, the actual childbirth being

[01:07:54] Kyle Risi: sensitivity of it, is that what you're saying?

[01:07:56] Adam Cox: Yeah. And so she said they had no place in a professional conversation.

[01:08:01] Kyle Risi: Sure. I see.

[01:08:02] Adam Cox: Now, Joel Kaplan now runs Meta's entire global policy operation, a promotion that he got in January, 2025, which apparently now positions him as the Trump friendly executive within Facebook's team.

[01:08:15] Kyle Risi: Okay. Conservatives, why is it just a border to Trump?

[01:08:19] Adam Cox: Yeah, I dunno. It is a very good question and I dunno the answer to that.

[01:08:23] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[01:08:24] Adam Cox: So back to Sarah's childbirth. During the delivery of her second child, Sarah suffered an amniotic fluid embolism.

[01:08:31] Kyle Risi: Ooh.

[01:08:31] Adam Cox: Which is a rare catastrophic complication, and she was in a coma for four days.

Wow. She needed around 30 blood transfusions and she kept bleeding on and off for close to a year afterward, which meant that she was kind of coming and toing from being on leave and back at work and stuff like that.

[01:08:49] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[01:08:49] Adam Cox: Which found herself on a performance review essentially.

[01:08:52] Kyle Risi: Oh. Because, sorry, my uterus has had a problem and so I'm gonna get penalised for that.

[01:08:57] Adam Cox: Yeah. We can't reach you. I'm sorry. I've been in a coma.

[01:08:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah. God. God, that's not our problem. Have your coma in your own time.

[01:09:03] Adam Cox: Yeah, exactly. Sarah filed a complaint against Kaplan and the complaint triggered a formal investigation into him, not her by her account, but Meta's version is different. They say the investigation found her allegations of harassment unsubstantiated, and she was then later fired in 2017 for poor performance and toxic behaviour.

[01:09:25] Kyle Risi: Sure.

[01:09:26] Adam Cox: And that she was, in their words, being paid by anti-Facebook activists ever since.

[01:09:32] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[01:09:32] Adam Cox: So Sarah says the truth is closer to a woman who raised a complaint and then was managed out shortly afterwards.

[01:09:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I mean, that is standard. We've seen it all happen before. 'cause I've seen people sitting around a ball table going, how do we get this person out?

[01:09:46] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:47] Kyle Risi: And there's a process that gets initiated. Oh, we have to make sure we don't break any rules. That's managing them out. Yeah. Starts with the paperwork, starts with the performance reviews, and then the meetings. Have you actually hit this? And the answer is always gonna be, no. It's an inevitability.

If they want you out, they can get you out. But they have to follow the right procedure. And that sounds like what's happened here.

[01:10:06] Adam Cox: Yeah. And so Sarah, she's obviously not happy about it and not happy with the stuff that she had seen at Facebook. So in 2025, she publishes a memoir called Careless People.

She kept it so secret that even her own mother didn't know it existed until the week it came out. And the book basically tells all the details, everything we sort of covered today and a whole lot more. So Myanmar, the teenage girl at targeting China, the 2016 election, and then her experience with Joel and then Meta came back at her almost immediately.

Not with the defamation lawsuit, which is interesting. 'cause if there were real grounds for defamation, you'd think that they would've acted on it.

[01:10:47] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:10:47] Adam Cox: But as far as the public record shows, they've never filed one. Instead they went to emergency arbitration using the exit agreement Sarah signed when she left in 2017, which was a severance payment essentially, which was worth $780,000.

Wow. So in March, 2025, an arbitrator sided with meta, which meant that Sarah is barred from promoting her book. She's barred from discussing it and barred from making disparaging comments about meta. And this part is interesting, regardless of factual accuracy.

[01:11:20] Kyle Risi: Okay. So it all hinges on the fact that. We're not saying what you've written in your book is inaccurate because if it was, they would've come out with them with a defamation lawsuit.

What they're saying is there's a little clause in your exit contract that hinges on this $700,000 exit payment.

[01:11:37] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:11:37] Kyle Risi: That means that your book infringes upon that. And so if you want to keep that money or if you don't wanna get sued, then you have to not talk about your book.

[01:11:45] Adam Cox: Exactly. And for every violation she would have to pay $50,000.

[01:11:50] Kyle Risi: Okay. So

[01:11:51] Adam Cox: that would stack up.

[01:11:52] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[01:11:52] Adam Cox: But the thing is, if she got an exit payment, and this is someone that was on supposedly performance review mm-hmm. You don't give someone an exit payment if they're on performance review.

[01:12:01] Kyle Risi: Well, I mean maybe they just got to an agreement where they were like, this isn't going very well.

It's probably better if we just make you redundant. Mm-hmm. Or if you just exit. Maybe it's just easier for them to, rather than dragging on the performance

[01:12:12] Adam Cox: possibly. Yeah. She describes being served legal papers at her own home in front of her own children. She described being effectively unable to go near an airport where her own book happens to be on sale.

I'm

[01:12:24] Kyle Risi: really, I'm really interested by that. Do you know any more about what the terms say?

[01:12:28] Adam Cox: Well, I dunno how you police that.

[01:12:30] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[01:12:31] Adam Cox: Unless I think she said that people did follow her for a period to make sure that she wasn't doing what she shouldn't be doing

[01:12:37] Kyle Risi: going near her book.

[01:12:38] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like

[01:12:39] Kyle Risi: so dumb.

[01:12:40] Adam Cox: Do you call up the airport and say, is my book in stock?

[01:12:42] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:12:42] Adam Cox: Can you take it off the shelves? I need to fly to, I dunno, Mexico.

[01:12:45] Kyle Risi: Sure. And also there's gotta be a degree of, um, common sense in these things. Right? Like if you are deliberately going to the airport, 'cause you know your book is there, then sure. But if you don't know, then surely there's common sense there.

[01:12:58] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[01:12:58] Kyle Risi: They can't come after you. No judge is gonna go listen, she can't check every single place that she goes to see if there's stock a book.

[01:13:05] Adam Cox: Can I just, do you then have to drive or take a train or I, I have no idea.

[01:13:09] Kyle Risi: How does this work in interviews then?

[01:13:11] Adam Cox: Well, she's invited onto a British podcast called The News Agents and one of the hosts, Emily Matis, the journalist behind the infamous Andrew Mount Batten interview.

Remember her? She's blonde.

[01:13:22] Kyle Risi: Yes. Wow.

[01:13:24] Adam Cox: So partway through introducing Sarah, the presenter has to read out a letter from Sarah's lawyer asking,

[01:13:30] Kyle Risi: so Sarah's in the room.

[01:13:31] Adam Cox: Yeah. So Sarah's in the room and partway through introducing Sarah, the presenter has to read out a letter from Sarah's lawyer asking Emily not to discuss meta directly with Sarah or her own book whilst Sarah's seeing opposite her.

Wow. So she has to then go, well, I need you to leave the room. They leave the room. And she said she's had no interview ever like this before, which is had to ask the main guest to not be there while she talks about that.

[01:13:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah. But at the same time, I'm, I'm going to be sceptical here. I understand that they could still do the interview.

They didn't have to invite in there, but it's so much more powerful. Mm-hmm. Really drums the message home.

[01:14:08] Adam Cox: It does

[01:14:09] Kyle Risi: actually. If they say, come in, we'll read the letter out and then I'll ask you to leave live on air, whatever it is, it'll be amazing. That sounds amazing.

[01:14:17] Adam Cox: It's true. 'cause when you listen to it, you're like, what the hell?

[01:14:20] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It sounds unprecedented. Like this is so weird. And then it really makes the subject matter about what they're about to discuss, I'm assuming. Seem way more serious.

[01:14:28] Adam Cox: Yeah, I think you're right. And one of the hosts, I think it might have been, Emily, actually says that it's an attempt to erode someone's life slowly through legal fees and through surveillance.

[01:14:40] Kyle Risi: That's what they say. They say. There was a brilliant line in Yellowstone where John Dutton was speaking to his son. He was like, why do you want me to become a lawyer rather than work on the farm like the rest of the family? And he was like, this is the 21st century. The battleground is no longer fought in the battlefield.

[01:14:59] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:59] Kyle Risi: Fought in courts.

[01:15:00] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:15:01] Kyle Risi: And so, yeah, that is where, yeah, the battles happen now. This is where everything happens.

[01:15:06] Adam Cox: Absolutely. And it's interesting 'cause Sarah compares her situation a little bit to Virginia Guffey.

[01:15:12] Kyle Risi: They have seen victim.

[01:15:14] Adam Cox: Yeah. I guess the fact that her voice was fought over or she wasn't allowed to say anything for a very long time.

And at an award ceremony for both of their books. Sarah puts it like this. When you try that hard to silence a woman who's telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous. Indeed.

[01:15:32] Kyle Risi: Okay. I've got a, a slight problem with that statement. I completely agree with what she's saying, but she's using the fact that she's a woman where they do it to a man.

I think it doesn't matter if it was a man or a woman that was trying to whistle blow. We've seen this time again with, who's the Edward Snowden guy? With Julian Assange? Um,

[01:15:49] Adam Cox: the whistleblower with Theranos as well. He, well, how his family reacted I

[01:15:53] Kyle Risi: guess.

[01:15:53] Adam Cox: Yeah. So,

[01:15:54] Kyle Risi: but I guess in the climate that we're in, by saying as a woman, I think it does hit a nerve.

So it probably helps in terms of a PR point of view. But yes, what she's saying is completely right for any person. Like if what you're saying is the truth and someone is trying to raise that, it doesn't matter if your gender.

[01:16:11] Adam Cox: Yeah. And I think also if she's saying, well actually the reason they got rid of me is 'cause I complained about my boss who's being inappropriate.

[01:16:17] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:16:17] Adam Cox: Then they're just going, oh, it's just a woman, you know?

[01:16:20] Kyle Risi: Correct.

[01:16:20] Adam Cox: Being inconvenient.

[01:16:21] Kyle Risi: And I do have a, another slight problem with her likening herself to Virginia as well, the Epstein victim.

[01:16:28] Adam Cox: It is a very different case.

[01:16:29] Kyle Risi: It's a very different case. Oh, sorry. You got served papers in front of your children.

Like I really do sympathise with her because she has been silenced from that aspect. But to kind of pull in these very sensitive issues around the fact that I'm a woman and like myself to Virginia, I think, Hmm, that's a little bit, it's a little bit orchestrated.

[01:16:50] Adam Cox: So in June, 2026, she sues MEbA in federal court arguing the gag order was extracted under duress and violates her constitutional right to speak.

And in September, 2026, so just a few weeks ago, a judge ruled against her on every account. Wow. Sending the whole dispute back into arbitration.

[01:17:10] Kyle Risi: Basically what you're saying there is the reason why he pushed back on it is because he was saying human rights don't trump business and contract law.

[01:17:18] Adam Cox: Basically. Basically, yeah, exactly.

[01:17:20] Kyle Risi: Fuck.

[01:17:20] Adam Cox: And that's where I'm just like, I have a huge amount of sympathy for her because she's trying to actually do some

[01:17:26] Kyle Risi: good people need to be aware.

[01:17:29] Adam Cox: Apparently both sides are now reportedly talking a settlement. So that's where we leave Sarah Win Williams for now. And we should say that clearly meta disputes large parts of her account and it's never been found in open court to have done the things that she alleges, but step back from the specifics for a second, two women, two different decades or the same decade and different jobs inside the same building, pretty much flagging very similar, dangerous patterns.

[01:17:56] Kyle Risi: There is no smoke without fire. It is scary. And I'm really interested by this settlement that they're trying to reach. Like what kind of settlement? I really hope. That it's not a case that she just wants to pay out and she'd be happy with, let's say a million dollars or whatever.

[01:18:10] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:10] Kyle Risi: That it is a case of what's the compromise for me to be able to get my message out there rather than her conceding with a settlement?

Monetarily settlement to kind of just disappear.

[01:18:21] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:18:21] Kyle Risi: Because that's not right. But what is really metaphoric here is that she's almost like a silent warrior. 'cause she can't speak. Right. But yet she's fighting.

[01:18:31] Adam Cox: Yes.

[01:18:31] Kyle Risi: That's interesting.

[01:18:32] Adam Cox: And her book is there for you to all read. So at least she's done some of the work to get out.

[01:18:37] Kyle Risi: You're gonna plug the book for us?

[01:18:39] Adam Cox: Yeah. Careless people.

[01:18:40] Kyle Risi: Okay. Go read it.

[01:18:42] Adam Cox: It's, it's available in all airports that she's not allowed to travel. So one more thing before we close the tent. So neither Francis or Sarah have actually had the win that they were campaigning for. Not really, I don't think. Not yet.

But that doesn't mean nothing has happened because they're not the only ones that have been taking on meta. So for years, one line of law in the US from 1996, that section 230 had made cases like this almost impossible to win that sort of legal shield that meta used with Myanmar, if you remember.

[01:19:15] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:15] Adam Cox: So even with everything that France had leaked, sitting there in public record, the rule was hard for lawyers to use or build a case on it until they found something different. So stop suing over what users have posted and start suing over how the product itself was built. So infinite scroll also play notifications engineer to pull a 14-year-old back into their phone at 1:00 AM That's not speech, that's a feature.

And a defective product isn't protected by a law about who publishes what.

[01:19:47] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[01:19:48] Adam Cox: So families started suing then school districts and then state after state. And it's first, can

[01:19:53] Kyle Risi: I sue

[01:19:54] Adam Cox: get in line? And it's fair to say that Frances Sesame probably helped to light the fuse here. It's one of the moments lawyers point back to, but by the time this really gets moving, it wasn't about one whistleblower anymore.

It was thousands of families and their lawyers all pulling from the same thread at once. And so in March this year, it produced its first real result. A jury in New Mexico found meta had committed 75,000 violations of the state's consumer protection law tied to how it marketed itself to children and their parents.

[01:20:27] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[01:20:27] Adam Cox: $375 million in penalties. Then in August, a judge added a second ruling on top calling Meta's platform a public nuisance to the mental health of an entire generation. And so 567 million more, plus a five year overhaul of how the company has to run its products for teenagers.

[01:20:50] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[01:20:51] Adam Cox: So in total $942 million.

Now meta is appealing the entire amount.

[01:20:58] Kyle Risi: Of course they are. And will go on for years.

[01:21:00] Adam Cox: Yeah. They've asked the court to pause collecting the money altogether while their appeal plays out. So as of right now, New Mexico hasn't actually seen a scent of it. Now, the very next day, a jury in Los Angeles reached its own verdict.

There was a young woman known in court only as KGM hooked on YouTube by six, and then Instagram at nine years old. And the jury agreed and found meta and YouTube, by the way, both negligent and that was $6 million was the fine. So it's a smaller number, but the first jury verdict anywhere of this kind and that kind of claim.

And then again, same story here. A judge throughout Meta's attempt to have the verdict overturned and meta's appealing anyway, so it's still unpaid to that person.

[01:21:43] Kyle Risi: Mm.

[01:21:44] Adam Cox: And so there's thousands of nearly identical cases still queued up behind them, which is presumably why five months later meta agreed to a much bigger number rather than fight them all individually.

So $17.1 billion to settle with a long list of US states except notice the word, they settle not bound guilty or admitting anything wrong. In fact, they deny the allegations completely and a federal judge still hasn't signed off on it. So it's a proposal, not a done deal yet.

[01:22:14] Kyle Risi: Wow.

[01:22:15] Adam Cox: And across the globe, countries are taking action.

So Australia's already banned social media for under sixteens? I think it is,

[01:22:22] Kyle Risi: yeah. But apparently it's very easy to circumvent

[01:22:25] Adam Cox: probably. But it probably does still deter a good proportion.

[01:22:29] Kyle Risi: Not really. Doesn't sound like it. I was listened to an episode off today explaining they interviewed a bunch of, uh, kids in Australia and they were like, it, it's easy

[01:22:36] Adam Cox: What?

VPNs and things like that.

[01:22:37] Kyle Risi: Yeah. One kid was like, he. Set up the little age profile thing, and then he just says, oh dad, just scan your face for a second and just use his dad's. It was simple.

[01:22:48] Adam Cox: But then they must be able to detect kids interacting with other kids based on the conversations they

[01:22:53] Kyle Risi: and interests.

Algorithms can detect whether or not you are likely to be someone underage, but that's when they then say, we think that you might be underage. Can you just do a verification check?

[01:23:03] Adam Cox: Oh, and then they do that with dad, and

[01:23:04] Kyle Risi: then they do that with their dad,

[01:23:05] Adam Cox: sneaky.

[01:23:06] Kyle Risi: So it's very easy to circumvent.

[01:23:08] Adam Cox: Maybe it's the start.

UK have got something very similar coming in next year, and even in the us, meta has agreed to make changes, which include a two hour daily cap on Instagram and Facebook combined, plus any account that's flagged under 18 and teenagers can't switch off themselves, only a pair in cap.

[01:23:26] Kyle Risi: But there is a caveat with that.

[01:23:27] Adam Cox: What's that?

[01:23:28] Kyle Risi: They've agreed to do that, but only if all the other social media platforms do exactly the same.

[01:23:34] Adam Cox: That's right.

[01:23:35] Kyle Risi: And that means that now the government now has to go and pursue these other companies, YouTube and all these other social media companies to agree to the same thing. The reason why they say that they will only do it once these other companies do it is because they say, we can put a cap on there, but it's not gonna stop someone from just spending that same amount of time on another platform.

So who's helping us? Only hurting us? It's not helping anyone.

[01:23:57] Adam Cox: And does that still mean you get two hours on Facebook, two hours on YouTube, two hours on Snapchat?

[01:24:02] Kyle Risi: You can fill up a whole day.

[01:24:03] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:24:03] Kyle Risi: Yeah. There was a time, I remember where in the early naughts and early 2000 tens where there was these figures going around on the news where people were saying, young people are increasingly spending up to 40 minutes a day on social media.

I'm like, bitch, the school holidays come around and my nephew is on there from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed, I come in in the middle of the night to no attack him as I do as an uncle. And he's like under his covers on his phone, scrolling on TikTok or Snapchat all day.

[01:24:36] Adam Cox: It's hard. I mean, I guess that's the thing, like you've got your friends, it's how you connect.

But even though I've had to delete Instagram and some of the social media off my phone, and thankfully I am happier for it, I still have it, but it's harder for me to go access.

[01:24:49] Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure. And I read a stat the other day that someone said, if we keep going the way that we are, by the end of a young person's life, they would've wasted eight years of their entire life.

On these social media platforms at the rate that we're going at the moment. And on that day I was like, do you know what every single app that I have on my phone that cannot be done on a computer, I'm getting rid of it. Mm-hmm. And so I've gotten rid of all of those. And then everything is now a bookmark on my laptop because I'm sitting down and the time that I'm sitting down is, is valuable.

And so I've got like, if I need to check my banking app, I'll go on my banking app and check it. If I need to go on Instagram, it should only be to be posting on our poxy stupid little Instagram account where I post our little images. We only have like 800 followers. And then check, see if we've got any messages there.

But that is it rather than me going through and scrolling. 'cause you end up in this doom loop.

[01:25:39] Adam Cox: Yeah. You have like a finite amount of time that you give yourself to do that. That's what we used to do, right? Yeah. You sit on there and then you're like, I'm go watch TV or go out or something afterwards.

[01:25:46] Kyle Risi: But the danger is, is that I use YouTube and Reddit to do a lot of our research for our stories.

And in between doing that research I end up falling down rabbit holes in all sorts of other places. And I never spending hours when I don't need to be.

[01:25:59] Adam Cox: Exactly. Yeah. So I guess is it progress? It's maybe a step in the right direction. At least. We're having these conversations now and

[01:26:07] Kyle Risi: serious conversations that are reaching court and settlements are being paid out.

Whether or not they're being fulfilled is probably significant right now in that people are going, what's the point? And then maybe the laws will change to say, actually what are these lawsuits even for? They're not actually hitting them where it hurts and that's in their pocket. I think it will progress.

[01:26:26] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:26:26] Kyle Risi: In the right way.

[01:26:27] Adam Cox: I hope so. But then ask yourself this, if a smoker only allows themselves to two hours a day smoking, is that cured or is it just the exact same problem in just a condensed amount of time? And also we don't let gamblers just gamble a little. We stop them all together because a society, we've decided some products are dangerous enough that use responsibly isn't good enough on its own.

[01:26:51] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:26:51] Adam Cox: So I still don't know if what would, it's better, but it doesn't. It's not gonna protect everyone.

[01:26:57] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I see what you're saying.

[01:26:59] Adam Cox: Also, the moment Meta agreed to that $17.1 billion number, do you know what happened to their share price?

[01:27:06] Kyle Risi: It fell by $40 billion

[01:27:07] Adam Cox: now it went up. Wall Street's read was, oh, that's a relief.

The uncertainty of how much money you're gonna pay out is gone 'cause we now know what it is. And $17.1 billion against a company reaching three and a half billion people around the world and pulling in around 200 billion a year sitting on a market value passed a trillion is probably a bill that they.

Happy to afford if they have to pay it.

[01:27:31] Kyle Risi: So interesting. So that could be interpreted in two very different ways, right? People could say, yeah, this share price went up, it shows that they're on the right track moving forward. But actually the reality is, is that we now know how much the fine is and it's a small drop in the ocean.

Mm. And that's what the truth is. But you can easily spin that. 'cause soon as you said that, I thought, wow, that's really positive. It, it shows that shareholders want this. Shareholders want Facebook and Meta and all these different companies to be more responsible. But it's not case of that at all. It's still about the damn money.

[01:28:07] Adam Cox: Mm. And you know, it's not just meta, it's these other tech giants as well. And you gotta add AI into this probably as well.

[01:28:14] Kyle Risi: AI's only gonna make it more optimised, more efficient, more addictive.

[01:28:18] Adam Cox: Mm.

[01:28:18] Kyle Risi: Do you know what I mean? It is so scary.

[01:28:21] Adam Cox: And so for now, that is the story of two of the whistleblowers from Facebook, France, Haugen, and Sarah Wynn Williams.

[01:28:28] Kyle Risi: Wow. Yeah. It's so shit.

[01:28:31] Adam Cox: It does, when you think about it, you're like, oh, this is kind of gross. Why

[01:28:34] Kyle Risi: are we doing It's too powerful. And get off social media. Lois are a wonderful cleaner who cleans our studio, told me that she is completely off social media. She doesn't have any of it, but at the same time she's like, it's impossible to do a lot of things.

[01:28:48] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. Like logging in for things. Mm-hmm. That's another way, obviously they get you. It's easy to set up a new account. Okay. Use my Facebook account to do that. Yeah. For my work, I have to use it. But yeah, it's, it's hard to pull away.

[01:29:00] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. And it's everything. It's the entire ecosystem. It's not just these apps and these platforms.

It's also the devices that your smartphones that are so designed to be addictive.

[01:29:11] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:29:11] Kyle Risi: I was very excited to be getting the new iPhone duo until I found out that by the end of my life, I would've spent eight years on social media and these platforms. And that scared me. And I'm like, well, I don't wanna get this new phone, even though I really want it because it's just going to persuade me to get all the apps on there again.

Mm. I don't wanna do it. It's a very scary period of time. And yeah, too much power being funnelled into these different tech giants, but also these smartphones as well. Someone was floating around a couple memes a few weeks ago showing some of the biggest tech giants on the planet, Peter Thiel, mark Zuckerberg, all these different big people.

And they're saying. What do you notice about all these photographs and Mark Zuckerberg, they're on his laptop, Peter Thiel in uh, airport on his phone. And the thing that they had in common was that they had covered up their camera on their phone. Peter Thiel on the back of his phone taped over the back of his, I don't know if that's genuine, but he's basically saying that these devices are being used to spy on everyone very easily.

It doesn't matter who you are. And they're more successful because they're powerful people.

[01:30:15] Adam Cox: Do you know what, in like a hundred years time, there's gonna be some stuff that comes out about what is happening right now?

[01:30:21] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:30:21] Adam Cox: Or at least verify what we think could be happening.

[01:30:23] Kyle Risi: But it's about how much information gets released, right?

Remember when the, is the NSA in America, that big black big building in maybe in Arlington or wherever in in America, where it's like, oh, they've been, they listen to everyone in America's phone calls and they store it all. And that was huge. I think that was the Edward Snowden stuff.

[01:30:42] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:30:43] Kyle Risi: And, and people this's outrageous.

Now people don't bat on eyelid and Oh yeah, yeah. America listen to all our phone calls and people around the world. It, yeah, it's just normalise the whole thing and it shouldn't,

[01:30:53] Adam Cox: you have to put

[01:30:54] Kyle Risi: up, I'm telling you like with the social media, this is the new MK Ultra. This is what MK Ultra became. 'cause it was all about mind control, right?

It's all about how do we harness the human mind and then MK Ultra disappeared and then boom,

[01:31:08] Adam Cox: maybe they got in touch

[01:31:09] Kyle Risi: of

[01:31:09] Adam Cox: Mark.

[01:31:10] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:31:10] Adam Cox: Should we run the outro?

[01:31:12] Kyle Risi: I'm ready to run the outro. Let's do it.

[01:31:13] Adam Cox: And that brings us to the end of another fascinating phay into the compendium, an assembly of fascinating things.

[01:31:19] Kyle Risi: It's, today's episode has sparked your curiosity. Then please do us a favour and follow us on your favourite podcasting app.

[01:31:27] Adam Cox: So Instagram and Facebook, and for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget, next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon, and it's completely free to access.

[01:31:38] Kyle Risi: But if you want even more than join US certified Freaks here to unlock our entire archive where you get to delve into exclusive content, including your one exclusive Patreon episode per month. We have a brand new one coming out, which just let me say, includes a fisting scene.

[01:31:53] Adam Cox: It might have already come out at this point.

[01:31:55] Kyle Risi: It has. Yes. So dive into that. If you haven't.

[01:31:58] Adam Cox: We drop new episodes every Tuesday. So until then, next time someone tells you a company's problem was just one bad Apple, ask them how many it takes before it's the orchard.

[01:32:11] Kyle Risi: That was lame. See you next time.

[01:32:13] Adam Cox: See ya.