Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ
the jurogan experience when we take down something that that we're not supposed to i mean that that is like i mean that's the worst i mean that's like discern like how like say like these christian facebook pages i i don't know how they found out that 19 of 20 were fake but if someone just says i am bob smith and they post as bob smith and they have a photograph and they but really what they're doing is trying to uh talk [ __ ] about joe biden and get people to vote republican in the midterms like how what how do you know whether someone's real or not like this is the big argument with elon and twitter because elon asked twitter like what percentage of your website is filled with bots and they say five percent and he says i don't believe you i think it's higher and let's find out how you've come to this conclusion yeah and you know they're i believe they said that they just took a hundred random twitter pages and looked at the interaction and there's some sort of an algorithm they applied to it but how do you discern yeah so i mean i think estimating the overall prevalence is is one thing but i think that the question of you know looking at a page and is this page authentic i think that there's a bunch of signals around that one of the things that we try to do is for large pages we try to make sure that we know who the admin of that page is we don't necessarily if you should be able to run an anonymous page you don't necessarily need to out yourself and say who you are running it but we want to make sure that we sort of have like an identity for that person on file so that way we know like at least behind the scenes that that person is real um for certain political things i think having a sense of what country they're originating from i mean some of that you can do just by looking at where their server traffic comes from like is the ip address coming from romania or you know is or um
because if if it's like an ad in some other country's election then you know you probably want to make sure that that ad is is um you know especially in countries that have laws around that are are like are coming from someone who's a valid citizen or like at least in that place so there's a bunch of i think i don't know what one theme in my world view around this stuff when it gets to some of the stuff that we talked about before it's like i don't think that this stuff is black and white or that you're ever going to have like a perfect ai system um i think it's all trade-offs all the way down right and it's and and you could either you could build a system and you can either be overly aggressive and capture a higher percent of the bad guys but then also by accident take out some number of good guys or you could be a little more lenient and say okay no the cost of taking out any number of good guys is too high so we're going to tolerate having you know just a little bit more like more bad guys on the system these are values questions right around what what do you value more and and those are those are super tricky questions and part of what i've struggled with around this is i didn't get into this to basically judge those things i got into this to design technology that helps people connect right it's like and like i mean you could probably tell when we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the future of basically building this whole technology roadmap to basically give people this realistic sense of presence it's like that's what i'm here to do right um so this whole thing that's like arbitrating what is okay and what is not i obviously have to be involved in that because this is at some level you know i run the company and um and i i can't just abdicate that but but i also don't think that as a matter of governance you want all of that decision-making vested in
one individual so i think one of the things that you know our country and our government gets right is the separation of powers so you know one of the things that i tried to create is we created this oversight board it's an independent board with that basically we appointed people whose kind of paramount value is free expression but they also balance that with things like when is there going to be real harm to others in terms of safety or privacy or other other human rights issues and and basically that board people in our community can appeal cases to when they think that we got it wrong and that board actually gets to make the final binding decision not us so in a way i actually think that that is a more legitimate form of governance than having just a team internally that makes these decisions or you know maybe some of them go up to me although i don't spend a ton of my time on on on this on a day-to-day basis but like i think it's generally good to have some kind of separation of powers where you're architecting the governance so that way you you have different stakeholders and different people who can make these decisions and it's not just like one private company that's making decisions even about what just happens on our platform how do you guys handle things when they're a big news item that's controversial like there was a lot of attention on twitter during the election because of the hunter biden laptop story the new year yeah yeah so you guys censored that as well so we took a different path than twitter um i mean basically the background here is the fbi i think basically came to us some some folks on our team it was like hey um just so you know like you should be on high alert there was we we thought there was a lot of russian propaganda in the 2016 election we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump of of um
uh that's similar to that so just be vigilant so our protocol is different from twitter's what twitter did is they said you can't share this at all um we didn't do that what we do is we have um if something is reported to us as potentially um misinformation important misinformation we also this third party fact-checking program because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false and for the i think it was five or seven days when it was basically being um being determined whether it was false um the distribution on facebook was decreased but people were still allowed to share it so you could still share it you could still consume it so when i say the distribution has decreased it got shared how does that work basically the ranking a news feed was a little bit less so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise so it definitely by what percentage i don't know off the top my head but it's it's it's meaningful but i mean but basically a um a lot of people are still able to share it we got a lot of complaints that that was the case um you know obviously this is a hyper political issue so depending on what side of the political spectrum you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much but right but we weren't sort of as black and white about it as twitter we just kind of thought hey look if if the fbi which i still view as a legitimate institution in this country it's a very professional law enforcement they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something then i want to take that seriously did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story i i no i don't remember if it was that specifically but it was it basically fit the pattern when something like that turns out to be real is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the distribution of that story
what do you mean evenly distributed i mean evenly in that it's not suppressed it's not yeah yeah yeah i mean it sucks yeah yeah i mean because i mean it turned out after the fact i mean the fact directors looked into it no one was able to say it was false right so so basically it had this period where it was getting less distribution um so yeah i mean i i but i think like i think it probably it sucks though i think in the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks like it still sucks to have have like that you had to go through a criminal trial but at the end you're free um so it's i i don't know if the answer would have been don't do anything or don't have any process i think the process was pretty reasonable you know it's we still let people share it but but obviously you don't want situations like that but certainly much more reasonable than twitter stance and it's probably also the case of armchair quarterbacking right or at least monday morning quarterbacking i should say because in the moment you had reason to believe based on the fbi talking to you that it wasn't real and that there was going to be some propaganda so what do you do yeah and then if you just let it get out there and what if it changes the election it turns out to be [ __ ] that's a real problem and i would imagine that those kind of decisions are the most difficult the decisions of like what is allowed and what is not allowed yeah i mean what would you do in that situation i don't know what i would do i would have to like really thoroughly well first of all you're dealing with the new york post which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country so i would i would say uh i would want to talk to someone uh from the new york post and i would say how did you come up with this data like where where are you getting the information from how do you know whether or not this is correct and then you have to make a decision because they might have got duped it's it's very it's hard because everybody wants to look at it after the fact now that we
know that the laptop was real and it was a legitimate story and there is potential corruption involved with him what we we think oh that should not have been restricted that should not have been banned from sharing on twitter right i think everybody agrees with that even twitter agrees with that but the thing is then they didn't think that in the beginning they thought it was fake so what do they do like if something comes along and the republicans cook up some scheme to make it look like joe biden's a terrible person and they only do it so that they can win the election but it's really just propaganda what what are you supposed to do with that you're supposed to not allow that to be distributed so if they think that's the case it makes sense to me that they would try to stop it but i just don't think that they looked at it hard enough when the new york post is talking about it you know they're pretty smart about what they release and what they don't release if they're do if they're going over some data from a laptop and you could talk to a person but again like this is just one story like one individual store like how many of these pop up every day especially regards to polarizing issues like climate change or covid or or you know foreign policy or ukraine anytime there's like a really controversial issue where some people think that it's imperative that you take a very specific stance and you can't have the other stance like that those moments on social media those trouble a lot of people because they don't know why certain things get censored or certain things get promoted yeah i i agree and it's like to be in your spot and i was one of the things that i really wanted to talk to you about is this because like to be in your spot must be insanely difficult to have no matter what decision you make you're going to have a giant chunk of people that are upset at you
and there might be a right way to handle it but i don't know what the [ __ ] right way is well i think the right way is to establish principles for governance that try to be balanced and not have the decision making too centralized because i think that it's hard for people to to accept that like some team at meta or that i personally am making all these decisions and i think people should be skeptical about any so much concentration around that so that's why a lot of the innovation that i've tried to push for in governance is around things like establishing this oversight board so that way you have people who are luminaries around expression from all over the world but also in in the in the u.s um you know i mean folks like michael mcconnell who's i mean he's a stanford professor he's like just he was afraid which um which republican president appointed him but i mean he was i think going to be considered for the supreme court at some point i mean he's a very um very prominent and and kind of celebrated free expression advocate and he helped me set the thing up and i think like setting up forms of governance around that are independent of us that basically get the final say on a bunch of these decisions and that's that's a step in the right direction i mean in the the hunter biden case that you talked about before you know i don't want our company to decide what's misinformation and what's not so when we work with with third parties and basically let different different organizations do that no i mean then you have the question of are those organizations biased or not and that's that's a that's a very difficult question but at least we're not the ones who are basically sitting here deciding we're not the ministry of truth for the world that's deciding whether everything is true or not so i'd say um this is not a solved problem controversies aren't going away um you know i think that there's
it is interesting that the us um is actually more polarized than than most other countries so i think sitting in the u.s and it's easy to extrapolate and say hey it probably feels this way around the whole world and from the social science research that i've seen that's not actually the case there's a bunch of countries where social media is just as prominent but polarization is either flat or has declined slightly so there's something kind of different happening in the u.s but but for better or worse i mean it does seem like like like the the next several years do seem like they're set up to be quite polarized so i i tend to agree with you there are going to be a bunch of different decisions like this that that come up um because of the scale of what we do almost every major world event has some angle that's like the facebook or instagram or whatsapp angle about how the services are used in it so yeah i think just establishing as much as possible independent governance you