Speaker 1: What's up people, That's not how I opened the show,
Speaker 1: but it happened. Now you turn into a tech bro.
Speaker 1: You guys are both really positive about this, but Sophie
Speaker 1: is giving me the thumbs down and looks livid. I'm
Speaker 1: loving casual Evans over. Yeah, it's We're an hour three
Speaker 1: of the zutcast the pod mark this weekend. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell
Speaker 1: you everything you don't know about the very worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history. And again, this is part three,
Speaker 1: so listen to the other two episodes. First, don't like
Speaker 1: Mark like that song about the jeeps. Yeah rules. As
Speaker 1: you can tell, we are all deep into bags of derrito.
Speaker 1: We are deep into bags of Derrito's in order to
Speaker 1: handle the stress of being in a hardcore zuck hoole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fully fully zucked. We're getting in the EU in the
Speaker 1: We're getting z in the E. Thankfully eating a nice
Speaker 1: D helped me deal with that the demon Rito, that
Speaker 1: the D and M. That's what busy people say from
Speaker 1: time to save Rio. It's too much going on in
Speaker 1: this workaday world. In March of two THO, some asshole
Speaker 1: named Robert Evans published an article on cracked dot com
Speaker 1: title five reasons the Internet could die at any moment
Speaker 1: I am not proud of The title was a different time,
Speaker 1: but one of the entries on that ultra clickabilistical is
Speaker 1: relevant to our current topic. It was about the worry
Speaker 1: that something called the strip mall effect was rapidly destroying
Speaker 1: the wild and weird Internet that most of us grew
Speaker 1: up on, the place where each new click was as
Speaker 1: likely to bring you to goatze as it was to
Speaker 1: some dudes meticulously archived coin collection, or a website full
Speaker 1: of roy Orbis and clean wrap fetish fiction and nothing
Speaker 1: in between. Nothing, No, I mean literally everything in between.
Speaker 1: It was a fun place, and ten was the year
Speaker 1: that Facebook hit five million users. People were spending more
Speaker 1: time there than they've ever spent on a website. The
Speaker 1: worry was that Facebook and a few other giant, consolidated
Speaker 1: social media sites would swallow up the weird little websites
Speaker 1: that had given the Internet it's character, much in the
Speaker 1: same way that Walmart and Target had swallowed up the
Speaker 1: tiny shops and a family owned businesses that once dominated
Speaker 1: Main Street America. Fortunately that didn't happen. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I don't need to say that. That's exactly yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: and I didn't make that call. Somebody else that I
Speaker 1: was citing in the article did, but it was prescient.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what happened to the Internet. The term they
Speaker 1: used at the time was splinter neet, which is not
Speaker 1: a term we wound up using, but I kind of
Speaker 1: like it. I defind what Facebook did pretty well now.
Speaker 1: Something else happened, though that almost no one predicted. I
Speaker 1: certainly didn't. Rather than being an engine for the spread
Speaker 1: of knowledge is many techno utopians had hoped at the
Speaker 1: turn of the millennium, the Internet became the greatest engine
Speaker 1: for the spread of bullshit ever conceived. Rather than bringing
Speaker 1: people together, it facilitated division and hatred on an precedented scale.
Speaker 1: Facebook is not the only corporate behind this, but it's
Speaker 1: probably the largest one. I don't think this was inevitable.
Speaker 1: I think most of the negative impacts we've seen Facebook
Speaker 1: have can be tied directly to the things we already
Speaker 1: know about Mark Zuckerberg. Based on the first two parts
Speaker 1: of this podcast, there are a couple of clear facts
Speaker 1: I'm established about the man, and I'm going to list
Speaker 1: number one. He believes Facebook fundamentally is good, and so
Speaker 1: keeping people on the site longer is also fundamentally good.
Speaker 1: Number two because he guessed one thing about the future
Speaker 1: correctly once, he thinks he is always right about where
Speaker 1: the future is headed. And three, he has no problem
Speaker 1: with lying, cheating, and stealing to expand Facebook and further's
Speaker 1: the things he believes to be inevitable. Ha ha ha. Now,
Speaker 1: in April sixteen, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that
Speaker 1: within five years, Facebook would be almost entirely a video. Video.
Speaker 1: He assured us, was how most people now preferred to
Speaker 1: consume their content. This is what the kids wanted. He
Speaker 1: didn't know that, as Jamie Loftus knows, the kids wanted toritos.
Speaker 1: Dorito's hooking up. They're making love when it's doritos. They
Speaker 1: are always making love and never hooking up. Scissor Robert's
Speaker 1: lovingly scissoring. Let them have their beautiful romance. This is
Speaker 1: my christ and a chip, This is my the notebook.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, no, that whole video content worked out great,
Speaker 1: Speaking of someone, aren't we still all employed by all
Speaker 1: worked out? Yeah? I remember when my friends and I
Speaker 1: all had healthcare. Yeah, and then this happened. Rats on
Speaker 1: getting that far. Yeah. Actually I'm a little older than you.
Speaker 1: I had a couple of extra years, you know. I
Speaker 1: hit the internet at its sweet spot. I came in
Speaker 1: too late. They were like, butt chug something, and we'll
Speaker 1: give you seventy five dollars. Okay, and I did, and
Speaker 1: it's there forever and never run for office. No, I
Speaker 1: will say this the one good thing about President Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: There is no way in which you're disqualified from office
Speaker 1: for but chugging. A guy got to the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: and we talked about boofing and co bofing in congresses
Speaker 1: will be the name of my memoir because we're just
Speaker 1: gonna cut the mental manager. Yeah. I was so weirded
Speaker 1: out to hear a term that my friends and I
Speaker 1: used when I was damaging public property as a nineteen
Speaker 1: year old, especially from a band with gigantic pores. Yeah,
Speaker 1: always my favorite term. And again, I don't want the
Speaker 1: creepiness of Brett Kavanaugh to make boofing look like a
Speaker 1: bad thing, because boofing is an inherently noble action. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gorgeous. Yeah, much like to Dorito's making love turn away.
Speaker 1: You guys knows they've started moving, they're moving together, They're
Speaker 1: always moving in your heart. Yeah. So Mark Zuckerberg tells
Speaker 1: everybody that within you know, five years, Facebook is going
Speaker 1: to be almost all video videos. How most people consume content?
Speaker 1: Who tells everyone that is what people want? By this point,
Speaker 1: Facebook had more than one point six billion monthly users.
Speaker 1: The site was increasingly the place where ad dollars are
Speaker 1: being spent. On the first quarter of sixteen, five cents
Speaker 1: out of every dollar spent an online advertising went to
Speaker 1: either Facebook or Google. So what Facebook says, make video?
Speaker 1: You make video now, Maggie, You and I were both
Speaker 1: working for a website named crack right around this time.
Speaker 1: We're not working there anymore. Do you remember that fun
Speaker 1: six months when we all got extra money to make videos?
Speaker 1: You know what? That was really fun? That wasn't fun
Speaker 1: six months fun? That was wild. I didn't get to
Speaker 1: make video, but you guys did. Yeah. I liked those videos,
Speaker 1: quality videos, directed by great people. Yeah. And then anyway,
Speaker 1: video companies that have just shut down suddenly and then
Speaker 1: they're like, I I just contacted them to get like
Speaker 1: tax information, and they're just like, we just destroyed everything.
Speaker 1: We burnt our files. Yeah, the one I was, We're
Speaker 1: going a different company that did like little like news videos,
Speaker 1: um and they too like it was like one minute
Speaker 1: we were working in the office, then my friend and
Speaker 1: I complained about one of our sexist bosses and we
Speaker 1: got told to work from home, and then the company
Speaker 1: went under. Well stuff out. Yeah, yeah, I got paid.
Speaker 1: So Jamie, you have an out. You're going to flee.
Speaker 1: Now you have to go back. Guys, I didn't want
Speaker 1: to like make a big deal of this, but there
Speaker 1: is someone like waiting from me outside, and I am
Speaker 1: going to go back and have my name kind of
Speaker 1: like leaped down every time it's mentioned, because are you
Speaker 1: on a date with Martha? No, No, Jamie, Look I
Speaker 1: mean to say, no, I'm fucking the Winkle bosses so much.
Speaker 1: When I got to ask before you go. When one
Speaker 1: of them climaxes, does the other make this sound? It's
Speaker 1: it's but like pitch it up in aftive pitch up.
Speaker 1: That's it. And they come bitcoins, which is pretty do
Speaker 1: they go right into your wallet stopping wet, absolutely disgusting.
Speaker 1: Sorry guys, my, they're wedding in their bitcoin. You go,
Speaker 1: you go find love like these Dorito's Goodbye friends, well,
Speaker 1: we've lost a loftus. Yeah, I feel it. I feel
Speaker 1: the absence. We are unfed were but still have a
Speaker 1: Maggie made fish, which is pretty great. I'm alright, No,
Speaker 1: I'm no winkle boss. Well you're one and a half
Speaker 1: winkle Bye you, I would say so, thank you. I'm
Speaker 1: so happy those weird guys are stuck in pop culture forever. Now,
Speaker 1: there's like a permanent fixture. And the only images will
Speaker 1: ever have of them is them rowing in a boat
Speaker 1: and being angry about Facebook. And that's them forever. They'll
Speaker 1: never do anything to and we don't care. We won't
Speaker 1: ever carry yet, I will never care. Beautiful now, uh.
Speaker 1: Facebook offered a lot of incentives to websites that pivoted
Speaker 1: the video for a short time. They even offered a
Speaker 1: partnership where they would pay you to post videos on
Speaker 1: their site. The entire digital media world very quickly swerve
Speaker 1: to oblige what they thought were just the new realities
Speaker 1: of the world. In two thou sixteen and seventeen, MTV
Speaker 1: news vice vocative Mike and Mashable all fired writers and
Speaker 1: editors and put more resources into hiring new video teams. Now,
Speaker 1: Maggie and I both worked for a would say medium
Speaker 1: sized digital media company. At the time. Crack did not
Speaker 1: lay off its editors and writers to hire video people.
Speaker 1: But we started pumping a ton of company resources into
Speaker 1: making videos, and the people who had been writing articles
Speaker 1: started spending more and more of their time pivoting for
Speaker 1: them sweet sweet Facebook dollars, which honestly, like as someone
Speaker 1: who didn't know any of the like tech stuff made sense.
Speaker 1: It seemed great. It seemed great, It seemed to make
Speaker 1: sense with you know, YouTube and you know, so this
Speaker 1: is what the kids wanted. Zuckerberg new, that's what we're
Speaker 1: about to get to. Now. This was not having in
Speaker 1: a vacuum from about two thirteen to do this in fifteen.
Speaker 1: I think Facebook was very good to most of us
Speaker 1: because people like sharing our articles, and Facebook's algorithm and
Speaker 1: share the articles people like to share got shared. The
Speaker 1: huge audiences that really started to shift in two thousands sixteen.
Speaker 1: We started seeing the same kind of traffic from Facebook.
Speaker 1: Every few months, they tweaked their algorithm again and traffic
Speaker 1: but fall this was all part of a strategy. Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg outlined in an internal email that can two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve quote the answer I came to is that we're
Speaker 1: trying to enable people to share everything they want and
Speaker 1: to do it on Facebook. Sometimes the best way to
Speaker 1: enable people to share something is to have a developer
Speaker 1: build a special purpose app or network for that kind
Speaker 1: of content and to make that app social by having
Speaker 1: Facebook plug into it. However, that may be good for
Speaker 1: the world, but it's not good for us unless people
Speaker 1: also share back to Facebook and that content increases the
Speaker 1: value of our network. So ultimately, I think the purpose
Speaker 1: of platform, even the read site, is to increase sharing
Speaker 1: back to Facebook. So Facebook was doing well for us,
Speaker 1: but Facebook did not think they were doing well enough
Speaker 1: by us because they didn't want people ever off of Facebook.
Speaker 1: The splinternet because it is a it is a good
Speaker 1: it is it's inherently good, and it's inherently good if
Speaker 1: like Piste off boomer News x nineteen looks just as
Speaker 1: credible in a headline form as the New York Times
Speaker 1: because it's all on your Facebook timeline and yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: we're not going to check, and we will, we will check,
Speaker 1: but we're not gonna, you know, pull any cards here now.
Speaker 1: For a year or so, there, digital media companies worshiped facebooks, algorithm,
Speaker 1: as if it was some sort of mysterious elder god,
Speaker 1: inscrutable but capable of delivering vast rewards if properly appeased.
Speaker 1: We published Facebook instant articles because Facebook paid us for those.
Speaker 1: Fantacitly promised that they would increase traffic for our other content,
Speaker 1: and of course, we filled the Internet with videos now
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to most of us. In August of two sixteen,
Speaker 1: Facebook quietly published a blog post on its advertising helps
Speaker 1: in admitting that it had wildly overestimated the amount of
Speaker 1: time people spent watching videos on Facebook. It turned out
Speaker 1: they've been counting any video views longer than three seconds
Speaker 1: for their average duration of video viewed metric, and discarding
Speaker 1: any views of less than this amount of time. If
Speaker 1: you understand basic mathematics, you may recognize this as providing
Speaker 1: wildly inaccurate information about how value video adds on Facebook were.
Speaker 1: So they were ignoring anytime someone scrolled past the video
Speaker 1: like you do nine of the time. That didn't count,
Speaker 1: only if you watched it for more than three seconds. Right, Well, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Yeah yeah, doesn't it do for Facebook? Yeah? Now,
Speaker 1: even that blog post had the reality of the situation.
Speaker 1: Here's vanity fair quote. According to a new lawsuit that
Speaker 1: allowed a group of small advertisers in California to review
Speaker 1: some eighty thousand pages of internal Facebook records, it appears
Speaker 1: that Facebook was actually aware of the issue long before
Speaker 1: it claimed. At the time, Facebook told advertisers that it
Speaker 1: had overestimated views by about eighty percent at most, but
Speaker 1: in Tuesday's complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that average viewership metrics
Speaker 1: had been exaggerated by a hundred fifty to nine percent.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's so infuriating. That's my my buddies
Speaker 1: and I don't have health care no more. It's just
Speaker 1: it's so it's wild. Shout out to Tom Ryman and
Speaker 1: David Bell in the game Plan employed network back, I'm
Speaker 1: on Patreon because they don't have health care anymore. Take
Speaker 1: it like like, and they're great people, and it's so
Speaker 1: it's infuriating because it's just how can someone think that
Speaker 1: they are good at business and then do things like
Speaker 1: this like insane? That is that? Okay? That's like if
Speaker 1: Marie Condo came to your apartment and as she was
Speaker 1: cleaning up, just stole most of your clothing and walked away.
Speaker 1: It's not on the ground anymore. Isn't it clean? Isn't
Speaker 1: it anyway? You'll make a profit. I'm gonna go sell
Speaker 1: this ship to Buffalo Exchange. The result of all this
Speaker 1: was the digital media crash we are all still dealing
Speaker 1: with today, which is not to say that companies did
Speaker 1: not make mistakes, like all those companies that fired their
Speaker 1: writers in order to hire on. Errors were made, but
Speaker 1: they were made based on the fact that the company
Speaker 1: that was responsible for all of the ad money lied
Speaker 1: to us blatantly, and so blatantly that I don't think
Speaker 1: anyone could have predicted that they were inflating their numbers
Speaker 1: by a hundred and fifty nine alleged by the advertisers
Speaker 1: who also got screwed over. Although I'm not super simple.
Speaker 1: Actually I love advertisers. They're great well when they are ethical.
Speaker 1: When they're ethical by advertising on our podcast Gorito Doritos Now, Uh,
Speaker 1: you're wonderful, Maggie Um. The digital media crash was exacerbated
Speaker 1: by a number of things, including the fact that after
Speaker 1: the election, Facebook de emphasized and limited the spread of
Speaker 1: content from brands, largely his reaction to complaints about the
Speaker 1: spread of fake news on their platform. Thousands upon thousands
Speaker 1: of journalists, writers, and other creatives lost their jobs. The
Speaker 1: results of this were earth shattering, too many of us.
Speaker 1: To Mark Zuckerberg, it all came down to a couple
Speaker 1: of speeches he probably only half remembers. Now. I started
Speaker 1: with this example of a thing Facebook broke because it's
Speaker 1: very personal to me. But the consequences of Mark Zuckerberg's
Speaker 1: bad decision making have amounted to a lot more than
Speaker 1: a few thousand lost jobs. Let's talk about Myanmar. Oh,
Speaker 1: here we go. The ethnic cleansing of the Muslim row
Speaker 1: Hinga and Myanmar by the Buddhist majority has to date
Speaker 1: forced more than six and fifty thousand people out of
Speaker 1: their homes. Tens of thousands have been massacred. Forty three
Speaker 1: thousand dead seems to be the low end of the
Speaker 1: body count estimates. Last year, the United Nations announced that
Speaker 1: Facebook had played a determining role in the massacre United
Speaker 1: Nations determining roles. Other social media was also blamed, but
Speaker 1: Facebook was by far the big cahuna. Quote from the
Speaker 1: United Nations, it is substantively contributed to the level of
Speaker 1: acrimony and dissension and conflict if you will, within the public.
Speaker 1: Hate speech is certainly, of course, a part of that.
Speaker 1: As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media
Speaker 1: is Facebook, and Facebook is social media. The how here
Speaker 1: has a lot in common with the whole issue of
Speaker 1: fake news and the spread of violent, divisive con it
Speaker 1: that's turned American politics upside down. It also has connections
Speaker 1: to Russia, because of course it does. Remember how in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, Facebook introduced that news feed thing. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: In addition to turning the Internet to a walled garden
Speaker 1: sucking in ever more ad dollars, it also ensured that
Speaker 1: divisive content would spread further and faster than it ever
Speaker 1: had before. This is because, per Mark Zuckerberg stated desires
Speaker 1: Facebook's algorithm praise time spent on Facebook more than anything else.
Speaker 1: What kind of content drives that sort of engagement? Why
Speaker 1: the kind of content people argue over and get angry
Speaker 1: over to Facebook? Piste off people are the people who
Speaker 1: aren't going to leave Facebook. They'll keep commenting, fighting, and sharing.
Speaker 1: It took a little while, but oppressive regimes around the
Speaker 1: world realized this. One of those regimes was me and
Speaker 1: Mars military hunt partly pushed out of power into this
Speaker 1: and eleven, but still very powerful and very shitty. Here's
Speaker 1: the New York Times. They began by setting up what
Speaker 1: appeared to be newspages and pages on Facebook that were
Speaker 1: devoted to Burme's pop stars, models and other celebrities like
Speaker 1: a beauty queen with a pin shot for parroting military propaganda.
Speaker 1: They didn't tended the pages to attract large number of followers,
Speaker 1: said the people. They took over one Facebook page devoted
Speaker 1: to a military stiper own monk who had won national
Speaker 1: acclaim after being wounded in battle. They also ran a
Speaker 1: popular blog called Opposite Eyes that had no outward ties
Speaker 1: to the military. Those then became distribution channels for lurid photos,
Speaker 1: false news, and inflammatory posts, often aimed Nean Mars Muslims.
Speaker 1: Troll accounts run by the military helped spread the content,
Speaker 1: shoutdown critics, and fuel arguments between commenters. To rile people up.
Speaker 1: Often they posted sham photos of corpses that they said
Speaker 1: were evidence of Ringa portrayed massacres. This is interesting. So
Speaker 1: you know, we watched the frontline documentary Roach talks a
Speaker 1: little bit about this um. And to bring it back
Speaker 1: to how Zuckerberg never learned and never grows up. The
Speaker 1: way he cheated on his final exam at Harvard was
Speaker 1: to make a fake account on Facebook post a divisive
Speaker 1: article about the art that he was supposed to appraise,
Speaker 1: made another fake Facebook account to stoke arguments on his
Speaker 1: pay each so that he could write an essay made
Speaker 1: off of other people's arguments, and he went on the
Speaker 1: site to make sure people kept talking about it, kept
Speaker 1: fighting over it, and that that's included in the Social
Speaker 1: Network movie. And it's just wild to see him do
Speaker 1: the exact same thing that led to that the military
Speaker 1: of Myanmar did in order to engage in an ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 1: It is the exact same thing. And how he can
Speaker 1: keep claiming that he has no idea in the military
Speaker 1: of Meanmar received training from the Russian government because they
Speaker 1: were pretty good at doing this sort of ship. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: funny for all they do, they're pretty good. It's funny
Speaker 1: that shitty people all think the same. Yeah, good times.
Speaker 1: Oh we are having fun, you know. Every once a while,
Speaker 1: just glanced at the two chips having sex just to
Speaker 1: look remind myself they're still beauty in the world. That's
Speaker 1: what Doritos is there for to remind you of the
Speaker 1: world's wonder splendor of the world deritos. Now, for most
Speaker 1: people in Myanmar, Facebook is the Internet. This is because
Speaker 1: of a plan launched by our man, Mark zuckety Zuck himself,
Speaker 1: the ear Zucker, the ear Zucker. Now we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into that plan, but first we're gonna get into both
Speaker 1: products and occasionally if we have time services products, we're back.
Speaker 1: We've been produced and service. That's not the way to
Speaker 1: frame that. And we were the ads were products. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have me a do rito cover that up. That
Speaker 1: crunchy taste. I like licking the cheese off of the chip. Fantastic.
Speaker 1: This is going to be either the best episode or
Speaker 1: the worst episode for the s mr crowd. It's really
Speaker 1: hard to predict. Dog. He's laying on my coat. She
Speaker 1: likes the way your coat smells. Dogs, it's my sweat.
Speaker 1: I'm Mark Zuckerberg in that interview. I'm just sweating out
Speaker 1: of all of my holes. And dogs love that because
Speaker 1: they don't judge. A dog would love Mark Zuckerberg if
Speaker 1: he were capable of human affection. He has a dog
Speaker 1: named Animal. Oh my god, no, no, that's just I
Speaker 1: don't know if he has a dog or not. If
Speaker 1: he did, he wouldn't name an animal or farm animal
Speaker 1: or farm animal, and then rate whether or not girls
Speaker 1: he met were hotter than it. I don't think I'm
Speaker 1: hotter than a cow. I've been thinking about this entire
Speaker 1: time since part one. He has a dog, it looks
Speaker 1: like a mop. He has an expensive looks like a mop.
Speaker 1: It does look like a mop. He would choose a
Speaker 1: dog that looks like an object because objects are valuable
Speaker 1: to him, and dogs are objects to some people. Now,
Speaker 1: for most people in the animal Facebook is the Internet,
Speaker 1: and this is because of a plan launched by Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: As I stayed in the last one. The plan had
Speaker 1: its roots in two thousand twelve, when Facebook for she
Speaker 1: went public as part of an I p O investors
Speaker 1: get research on both the businesses potential and its potential pitfalls.
Speaker 1: One problem that was noted for Facebook in the future
Speaker 1: is that by the time it went public, it had
Speaker 1: already connected virtually every human being in the parts of
Speaker 1: the world with white spread internet access. There just wasn't
Speaker 1: a lot of room for the company to grow. Everybody
Speaker 1: in Europe and America is everybody in the countries that
Speaker 1: have a lot of Internet money. Yeah where where the
Speaker 1: money comes from, because it gets sucked out the other
Speaker 1: but yeah yeah yeah. Uh So, Zuckerberg realized that in
Speaker 1: order to expand Facebook, he would need to connect the world,
Speaker 1: so he started partnering with makers of cheap mobile phones
Speaker 1: and service providers, initially in the Philippines, providing their customers
Speaker 1: with free data when they used Facebook and just Facebook.
Speaker 1: These first steps seemed to work well, so Mark announced
Speaker 1: a formal plan in two thousand and fourteen at the
Speaker 1: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is a fun week
Speaker 1: if you're in tech journalist. That for another drunken Matt
Speaker 1: vomiting story. I had to go to like deal with
Speaker 1: a bunch of like one of these products showcases at
Speaker 1: a hotel and I got really sick, either because of
Speaker 1: the drinking or because I ate some bad pie am
Speaker 1: and I vomited in front of the hotel and then
Speaker 1: got into a cab and the cab driver asked me
Speaker 1: did you see the King? And I was like, what
Speaker 1: do you mean? Did I see the King? And he
Speaker 1: pointed like a flag flying on top of the hotel,
Speaker 1: and he was like, whenever that flags there the King's
Speaker 1: at the hotel, and I was like, I think I
Speaker 1: might have just puked in front of the King's limousine.
Speaker 1: That's my, that's my. Matt hasn't changed or learned anything,
Speaker 1: and Robert hasn't changed or learned anything. And thirty years story,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of proud of that, thank you. I'm picturing it,
Speaker 1: and I'm proud still have problematic substance and I'm fine
Speaker 1: with that. You know why, I guess who didn't exacerbate
Speaker 1: and ethnic cleansing in this guy? This guy, you're fine exactly.
Speaker 1: You know, you read about these people like Dick Cheney
Speaker 1: or like George Bush who had horrible substance abuse problems
Speaker 1: and then sobered up and then killed millions. What if
Speaker 1: they'd kept drinking and doing coke and died at fifty?
Speaker 1: Better world? If your only other option is drugs with
Speaker 1: the presidency, choose drugs. Lease, Please don't go into politics
Speaker 1: after sobering up. Yeah, oh boy, we are a dangerous
Speaker 1: ground with this podcast. Well, that is funny that Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: did try to incite the idea of presidency. I have
Speaker 1: been on record as saying that I think a great
Speaker 1: TV show idea would be about a time traveling drug
Speaker 1: dealer who finds horrible people in history like Saddam Hussein
Speaker 1: and gets them hooked on pills before they can kill
Speaker 1: people like if Hitler had just had oxy he no
Speaker 1: no Holocaust. There's just sitting in the room listening to
Speaker 1: fucking Wagner into shipload of pills until he dies. World.
Speaker 1: That would what a beautiful world, time traveling drug dealer.
Speaker 1: If anyone listening is worth a network or a time
Speaker 1: traveling drug dealer, go for it and cast Maggie may
Speaker 1: Fish as your lead. I saw those pictures you did
Speaker 1: when you were like a twenties detective. You could you
Speaker 1: could rock the look for the episode in the twenties
Speaker 1: about Hitler. Oh my god, I'll do it. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: do it. It would be great, boy, Hotty. That was
Speaker 1: quite the diggression. Know how we got there? It's it's
Speaker 1: a Facebook status. We keep pausing to discuss and then
Speaker 1: come back to the feed. Yeah, well here's back to
Speaker 1: the feed. So Mark announced his plan to connect the
Speaker 1: world at the Mobile World Congress in two fourteen. Here's
Speaker 1: a quote from The Guardian covering a speech he gave
Speaker 1: that day. This is marked. There was this Deloitte study
Speaker 1: that came out the other day. He told his audience
Speaker 1: that said, if you could connect everyone in emerging markets,
Speaker 1: you could create more than a hundred million jobs and
Speaker 1: bring a lot of people out of poverty. The Deloitte study,
Speaker 1: which did indeed say this, was commissioned by Facebook based
Speaker 1: on data provided by Facebook, and was about Facebook. Now,
Speaker 1: the crux of Mark's plan involved giving people in poor
Speaker 1: countries free internet access to a limited selection of websites.
Speaker 1: Mark started with Zambia, but India was the real prize,
Speaker 1: with six or seven hundred million potential new users. Now,
Speaker 1: there were some signs that just rolling Facebook out for
Speaker 1: free in these places might be bad, and two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: a series of fake images began circulating on Facebook purporting
Speaker 1: to show the massacre of Muslims by Buddhists. This marked
Speaker 1: a riot that left several debt, but Mark did not
Speaker 1: pay this much heat. He rolled right head with Internet
Speaker 1: dot Org and began connecting the world Zambia, India, the Philippines,
Speaker 1: Sri Lanka, and a little country called Myanmar. Now. Last year,
Speaker 1: in an interview with Fox, Mark directly responded to the
Speaker 1: claims made by the United nations about the genocide his
Speaker 1: social network was enabling and making much worse. He brought
Speaker 1: up a recent success story to fake news chain letters
Speaker 1: that had been circulating on Facebook before they were caught
Speaker 1: and deleted. Quote from Mark, So that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing where I think it is clear that people were
Speaker 1: trying to use our tools in order to concite real harm. Now,
Speaker 1: in that case, our systems detect that that's going on,
Speaker 1: we stopped those messages from going through. Now, as soon
Speaker 1: as the interview was published, it provoked fury from activists
Speaker 1: and social media researchers in Myanmar who were actually working
Speaker 1: to stop the spread of fake news and saved lives.
Speaker 1: Their response to Mark is pretty damning. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a healthy excerpt from it. As representatives of Myanmar
Speaker 1: civil society organizations and the people who raised the Facebook
Speaker 1: messenger threat to your team's attention, we were surprised to
Speaker 1: hear you use this case to praise the effectiveness of
Speaker 1: your systems and the context in Myanmar. From where we stand,
Speaker 1: this case exemplifies the very opposite of effective moderation. It
Speaker 1: reveals an overreliance on third parties, a lack of proper
Speaker 1: mechanism for emergency escalation, a reticence to engage in local
Speaker 1: stakeholders around the systemic solutions, and a lack of transparency.
Speaker 1: Far from being an isolated incident, this case further epitomizes
Speaker 1: the kind of issues that have been rife on Facebook
Speaker 1: and Meanmar for more than four years now and the
Speaker 1: inadequate response of the Facebook team. It is therefore instructive
Speaker 1: to examine this Facebook messenger incident in more detail, particularly
Speaker 1: given your personal engagement with the case. The pictures were
Speaker 1: clear examples of your tools being used to incite real harm.
Speaker 1: Far being stopped, they spread in an unprecedented way, reaching
Speaker 1: country wide and causing widespread fear and at least three
Speaker 1: violent incidents in the process. The fact that there was
Speaker 1: no bloodshed as a testament to our communities resilience into
Speaker 1: the wonderful work of peace building and interfaith organizations. This resilience, however,
Speaker 1: is eroding daily as our community continues to be exposed
Speaker 1: to violent hate speech and vicious rumors, which Facebook is
Speaker 1: still not adequately addressing. Damn that eviscerating. They reported those
Speaker 1: posts to Facebook, which eventually a couple of days later
Speaker 1: I think, removed them and then Mark Zuckerberg lied in
Speaker 1: an interview and said that Facebook caught them and removed
Speaker 1: the motherfucker. One of the things that hit Facebook on
Speaker 1: most in that letter was an over alliance on third parties.
Speaker 1: In this case, the third parties, of course, were the
Speaker 1: people writing this open letter quote. We identified the messages
Speaker 1: and escalated them to your legal team via email on
Speaker 1: Saturday the night September Me and mar time. At that point,
Speaker 1: the messages have been circulating for three days, and they
Speaker 1: continued to circulate for several days after they were reported.
Speaker 1: So let me be clear exactly about what happened. Number one.
Speaker 1: After years of bloodshed and racism spread by Facebook, local
Speaker 1: activists managed to warn Facebook in a timely manner about
Speaker 1: a new threat. Number two. In a miracle, Facebook listened
Speaker 1: to them and remove the threat days after it had
Speaker 1: first been posted. Number three. When Mark Zuckerberg took flak
Speaker 1: for enabling an ethnic cleansing, he touted this as a
Speaker 1: success erasing the existence of local activists in Me and Martin,
Speaker 1: pretending Facebook itself had done this. Yes. The way that
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg speaks, because he does view himself as such a genius,
Speaker 1: he often says no one could have seen it coming.
Speaker 1: No one could of It's been happening for years, for years.
Speaker 1: People have been telling you for years. Several people could
Speaker 1: have stepped in at various moments. Now, Facebook, not Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: did issue a response and apologize for racing the local activists.
Speaker 1: In Mark's first response, uh now, manmar is the most
Speaker 1: shocking example of Facebook enabling unspeakable evil, but it is
Speaker 1: not the only one. While Internet dot org seems to
Speaker 1: be something of a failure in India, oddly enough, in
Speaker 1: part because of a massive grassroots net neutrality campaign. They
Speaker 1: got a bunch of Indian peasants to understand net neutrality
Speaker 1: and realize they wanted it. And like, it's a really
Speaker 1: cool story, but we will not cover in enough to
Speaker 1: tie because this is a sad podcast about bad people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it is a cool story. Check it out. Fake
Speaker 1: news spread through Facebook has exacerbated ethnic tensions between Muslims
Speaker 1: and Buddhist as well as Muslims and Hindus, leading to
Speaker 1: numerous angry mobs and several deaths. There has been quite
Speaker 1: a lot of bloodshed as a result of Mark's relentless
Speaker 1: desire to connect the world. Here's a quote from the fantastic,
Speaker 1: utterly indispensable New York Times article where countries are tender
Speaker 1: boxes and Facebook is a match, solid time, solid titling.
Speaker 1: That's sexy. Title. Almost makes me forget that they platformed
Speaker 1: the Dictator of Turkey and an op ed recently. But
Speaker 1: that's but that's on the op ed section. You know,
Speaker 1: that's different from these guys get hard working journalists. Quote.
Speaker 1: Last year, in rural Indonesia, rimors spread on Facebook and WhatsApp,
Speaker 1: a Facebook down messaging tool, that gangs were kidnapping local
Speaker 1: children and selling their organs. Some messages included photos of
Speaker 1: dismembered bodies or fake police flyers. Almost immediately, locals and
Speaker 1: nine villages lynched outsiders they suspected of coming for their children.
Speaker 1: Near identical social media rumors have also led to attacks
Speaker 1: in India and Mexico. Lynchings are increasingly filmed and posted
Speaker 1: back to Facebook, where they go viral as grizzly tutorials.
Speaker 1: That kind of content does really well. You don't get
Speaker 1: to five million friends about making a few enemies. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. One of the spokes people that um Facebook
Speaker 1: put up for front Line, if she was confronted with
Speaker 1: that she would say, um, yes, act so we are aware.
Speaker 1: We are aware. We are gangs. We just I mean,
Speaker 1: we're a company that came from a dorm room. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you saw the movie A dorm Room quirky,
Speaker 1: isn't that quirky? We're just like you know, we're found
Speaker 1: the doom. And now college students are being dragged out
Speaker 1: of their dorm rooms and beaten to death in several
Speaker 1: countries for being gay. We hear you, hear you. It's
Speaker 1: not our fault that fake news about them assaulting people
Speaker 1: spread on Facebook and then they got murdered. It is
Speaker 1: our fault. We like dorm rooms and if you try
Speaker 1: to put in any law to stop us, we'll just
Speaker 1: get slower and worse at doing this. So don't you
Speaker 1: fucking dare dare. We're Facebook now. This ship has happened
Speaker 1: in Sri Lanka to last year in the capital city
Speaker 1: of Colombo, and anti Muslim video went viral. Activists and
Speaker 1: government officials watched in horror as prominent racist posted things
Speaker 1: like kill all Muslims, don't even save an infant, and
Speaker 1: let Facebook's algorithm carry it off to millions of angry,
Speaker 1: armed people. Now, social media analysts in Sri Lanka flagged
Speaker 1: the video and that baby killing post and then sort
Speaker 1: of sat back to see if anything would happen. Despite
Speaker 1: repeatedly complaining about the horrific violence unleashed by Facebook, the
Speaker 1: company had not provided these activists with any kind of
Speaker 1: direct line. Facebook had assured them the tool would work
Speaker 1: well enough. The anti Muslim video and the kill even
Speaker 1: babies post were found not in violation of Facebook standards.
Speaker 1: One of these researchers who helped flag the videos told
Speaker 1: The New York Times, quote, you report to Facebook, they
Speaker 1: do nothing. There's incitements to violence against entire communities, and
Speaker 1: Facebook says it doesn't violate community standards. Now, Facebook standards
Speaker 1: can be hard to parse out or understand unlike a
Speaker 1: human and emotional level. Yeah, since they are a private company,
Speaker 1: we have no right to that information. The best that
Speaker 1: we can do is looked at some of the comments
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg himself has made on similar matters. Yeah, let
Speaker 1: us shall. In an interview with The Guardian, he was
Speaker 1: asked about the proliferation of Holocaust denial talking points on
Speaker 1: his site. He called such content deeply offensive, but said quote,
Speaker 1: I don't believe that our platforms should take that down
Speaker 1: because I think there are things that different people get wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong. It's
Speaker 1: hard to impute an intent and to understand the intent.
Speaker 1: I just think, as a part as some of those
Speaker 1: examples are, I think the reality is that I also
Speaker 1: get things wrong when I speak publicly. Oh so, oh well,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense. He is a liar and
Speaker 1: a thief, so he should allow a site that allows
Speaker 1: other liars and thieves, because that is, he's a billionaire.
Speaker 1: I get things wrong and accidentally claim credit for the
Speaker 1: work of diligent activists who are trying to stop the
Speaker 1: damages of my platform. And so also holocausts get things
Speaker 1: wrong too, And I can't can't be angry at him,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't, because who am I to get
Speaker 1: angry at that? Now? Facebook is a private company. They
Speaker 1: are publicly traded, but they're a private company, and they
Speaker 1: can set a policy of sense ship for any of
Speaker 1: their like any of this internal stuff. They can claim
Speaker 1: that this is all like our standards and stuff is
Speaker 1: like a business like thing that we need to keep
Speaker 1: secret otherwise other social media companies computer exactly. So I
Speaker 1: just love that quote that like, well, if they're honest
Speaker 1: holocaust deniers, why why would we censor them? If they
Speaker 1: honestly think Muslim babies should be killed, why why would
Speaker 1: we censor them. It's their opinion that Muslim babies should
Speaker 1: be murdered, and that's okay on Facebook in my online country.
Speaker 1: That's okay with me. That's okay now. In the interview,
Speaker 1: Zucky zuck Zuckaru state his opinion and presumably Facebook stance,
Speaker 1: that offensive speech only crossed the line when it endangered people.
Speaker 1: We are moving towards a policy of misinformation that is
Speaker 1: aimed at or going to induce violence. We are going
Speaker 1: to take down if it's going to result in real harm,
Speaker 1: real physical harm, or if you're attacking individuals, and that
Speaker 1: content shouldn't be on the platform. So it's sweet to
Speaker 1: know that killed these Muslims and their babies did not
Speaker 1: cross that line. Yeah, for him personally cross that line,
Speaker 1: I don't he understands what danger or danger across means
Speaker 1: or is No, his life would change irrevocably if someone
Speaker 1: just punched him in the face want which is why
Speaker 1: I am in favor of punching rich young men in
Speaker 1: the face. I agree. I think he would therefore maybe understand, oh,
Speaker 1: what these people in Sri Lanka and Myanmar are going through.
Speaker 1: It might be like that one time I got hit
Speaker 1: in the face and I hated that. Maybe that would help,
Speaker 1: oh boy. In that same interview, Marzuck also addressed the
Speaker 1: hate speech ethnic cleansing problem in Myanmar. But people use
Speaker 1: tools for good and bad. But I think that we
Speaker 1: have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good
Speaker 1: is amplified and do everything we can to mitigate the bad.
Speaker 1: Because they're one of their um, I don't don't know,
Speaker 1: spokesperson Verbatim said about the mean mar Um. They had
Speaker 1: a bad experienced experience with some death mobs in an
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing, and so we as a company, we want
Speaker 1: to make sure that we want to reduce the bad
Speaker 1: and increase the increase the good. Now, don't ask me
Speaker 1: any more question. Just to imagine, who were like a
Speaker 1: microphone talking to some lady who's been beaten to death
Speaker 1: in the street for being a Muslim in me and marche, So,
Speaker 1: could you tell us how could Facebook improve your experience?
Speaker 1: How can we make this better? How can we how
Speaker 1: can we fix this just a little bit, No, not
Speaker 1: that we're not gonna take it down. We're not gonna
Speaker 1: take it down. When he said your baby should die,
Speaker 1: that was not a violation of our terms. But because
Speaker 1: maybe your baby should die. If I improved the timeline,
Speaker 1: would that help you how that we can make it
Speaker 1: easier for you to tell people that your baby gut murder. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So maybe that does not all clear up exactly what
Speaker 1: Facebook's line is, But thankfully an internal guy they handed
Speaker 1: out to their content moderators did leak out, and it
Speaker 1: included the clearest statement from the company yet on when
Speaker 1: violent hateful speech crosses a line. It's like a power
Speaker 1: point slide. Introduction is up at the top and then
Speaker 1: it says why do we I p block content, and
Speaker 1: then there's some bullet points the content does not violate
Speaker 1: our policies. We face the risk of getting blocked in
Speaker 1: a country or a legal risk. We've respect local laws
Speaker 1: when the government has made clear its intention to pursue
Speaker 1: its enforcement. Holocaust denial illegal and fourteen countries. We only
Speaker 1: consider it for the four countries that actively pursue the
Speaker 1: issue with US. So Facebook will only block the spreaders
Speaker 1: of dangerous content with the governments of those countries actively
Speaker 1: go after them. We don't care that it's illegal in
Speaker 1: your country to deny the Holocaust. Only if you threaten
Speaker 1: Facebook's bottom line. Will we block Holocaust denial content? Yes,
Speaker 1: then and only then then and only the freedom of speech.
Speaker 1: But also if you're a sex worker, you can't use
Speaker 1: Facebook and stuff that's not okay. Deny the Holocaust? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: do it all day long. Advertise your business as a
Speaker 1: sex worker. No, no, no, sir or madam. No violence
Speaker 1: yes sex, sex no, very American, very American, very, Mark Zuckerber,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg. Violence, yes, sex No. Actually that should be
Speaker 1: our T shirt. That should be a violence yes, sex no,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg's face in the middle. I think we got
Speaker 1: us a T shirt. Oh my god, I'd wear it.
Speaker 1: I'd wear it twice. I'll buy it and then I'll
Speaker 1: donate money to my local sex workers. There you go.
Speaker 1: They will appreciate. Yeah, alright, we got some ads, some products,
Speaker 1: maybe a service or three, and uh, well will we
Speaker 1: wait for that? Are you just licking that Derina? This
Speaker 1: is I actually looked it earlier, and this is my
Speaker 1: second leg maximizing the flavor potential. Yeah, this is oh
Speaker 1: my god, that's what we call him. The bisin. Yeah, products,
Speaker 1: we're back. We we just finished talking about when Facebook's
Speaker 1: cool with holocaust and and the answer is usually usually
Speaker 1: usually unless you're Germany and you threatened to go after him,
Speaker 1: which good on Germany. Good on Germany. And also I
Speaker 1: realized there must have been a day or someone wrote
Speaker 1: down the four countries that will come out where we
Speaker 1: have to stop holocaust and paceswhere is illegal but we
Speaker 1: don't care. Yeah, but it won't affect us. But it
Speaker 1: won't affect us, so we're fine with it. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: it would be unfair of me to acknowledge all of
Speaker 1: this without acknowledging that Mark Zuckerberg himself does not want
Speaker 1: any of this ship to spread. There are anecdotal stories
Speaker 1: that when Donald Trump first announced his run for president
Speaker 1: with that uber racist wall speech, Mark wanted to ban
Speaker 1: Trump from Facebook and his campaign from Facebook. He was
Speaker 1: reported kock down from this. I have no doubt that
Speaker 1: if Mark Zuckerberg had been on the other end of
Speaker 1: that flagged murdered the Baby's post when it came through,
Speaker 1: he himself would have deleted the comment and I p
Speaker 1: banned that person. Any mun would, but Mark didn't put
Speaker 1: a human in charge of that job. He chose a robot.
Speaker 1: The biggest problem with Internet dot org, the reason that
Speaker 1: has been responsible for so much bloodshed. It was also,
Speaker 1: by the way, absolutely critical to the rise of Rodrigo
Speaker 1: de Tarte. He was now killed twenty people. He has
Speaker 1: a social media army who harasses him since death threats
Speaker 1: to be a Facebook to his detractors. Anyway, Facebook also
Speaker 1: sent people out to help train his team and how
Speaker 1: to use Facebook. That's fun. They do that don't. But
Speaker 1: the big reason that all of this violence has been
Speaker 1: possible is that Mark Zuckerberg launched his groundbreaking society altering
Speaker 1: technology into countries that neither he nor anyone else at
Speaker 1: his company understood. This is the Silicon Valley equivalent of
Speaker 1: the Iraq War, which by the way, was planned without
Speaker 1: the input of anybody who spoke Arabic, let alone understood
Speaker 1: Iraqi culture. Uh, they didn't have one guy who wanted
Speaker 1: to take Saddam down so that he could make a
Speaker 1: bunch of money because he's a crupt motherfucker and to
Speaker 1: be Bouer himself. But they didn't. They didn't. They didn't
Speaker 1: have any like experts on the culture. And other than that.
Speaker 1: This is what Mark zuckerbig dig two, you know, when
Speaker 1: he brought the Internet via Facebook. It's there's a very
Speaker 1: short distance for a tool to become a weapon. You
Speaker 1: just to hold it above your head. And there was
Speaker 1: no people from me and war, no people from Zambia,
Speaker 1: and no people who were like working for Facebook and
Speaker 1: like on the ground in the company. They're letting algorithms
Speaker 1: deal with it, figuring that I'll be fine now. Victoria Rio,
Speaker 1: a social media analyst in Myanmar, told The New York
Speaker 1: Times a major issue in the spread of violent rhetoric
Speaker 1: via Facebook in that country was the fact that Facebook
Speaker 1: had almost no Burmese speakers that local watchdogs could communicate with.
Speaker 1: The few people who speak that language and work for
Speaker 1: Facebook are based in Dublin, which you may note as
Speaker 1: not me and mar not at all, not at all. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is where we see, in my opinion, the
Speaker 1: clearest downside of the move fast and break things ethos.
Speaker 1: Sometimes things you break are people. Maybe, if you're going
Speaker 1: to introduce a service to a new country and that
Speaker 1: service has the potential to absolutely revolutionize the way they communicate,
Speaker 1: you should not do that until you have a sizeable
Speaker 1: team of people who speak the language and understand the
Speaker 1: country actually working for you. Maybe doing anything else is
Speaker 1: unspeakably irresponsible and perhaps even evil. This is why Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg is my pick for the worst monster of the
Speaker 1: twenty first century so far. He is not a murderous,
Speaker 1: violent man like Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Jutarte. In fact, many,
Speaker 1: if not most, of the people who spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time around him, describe him as warm, decent, a
Speaker 1: good listener, and an empathetic person. But the twenty first
Speaker 1: century so far is a period defined by arrogant, mostly
Speaker 1: men making rash decisions based on little evidence that have
Speaker 1: a shattering, violent impact on the lives of millions of
Speaker 1: people who live far away from them. Mark Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: the equivalent of a little kid who asked for a
Speaker 1: bb gun for Christmas and was given a nuclear warhead,
Speaker 1: when that is the positive way to spend this the
Speaker 1: conclusion that gives him the most credit as a human being.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of evidence that this is exactly
Speaker 1: what Mark wanted, that his dream all along was to
Speaker 1: become basically the dictator of a digital nation, and that
Speaker 1: connecting people has been less important to him this entire
Speaker 1: time than building an empire. An October of two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair declared Mark Zuckerberg our new Caesar, and an
Speaker 1: article lauding him as the greatest of the Silicon Valley Titans.
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess that was a comparison Mark really enjoyed.
Speaker 1: Here's another quote from that fabulous New Yorker article. He
Speaker 1: first read the Inid while he was studying Latin in
Speaker 1: high school, and he recounted the story of Enius's quest
Speaker 1: in his desire to build a city. That he said,
Speaker 1: quoting the text in English, knows no boundaries in time
Speaker 1: and greatness. Zuckerberg has always had a classical streak, his
Speaker 1: friends and family told me. Sean Parker, a close friend
Speaker 1: of Zuckerberg who served as Facebook's president when the company
Speaker 1: was incorporated, said, there's a part of him that it
Speaker 1: was present even when he was twenty one, that this
Speaker 1: kind of imperial tendency. He was really into Greek odyssees
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. At a product meeting a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago, Zuckerberg quoted some lines from the INID.
Speaker 1: On the phone, Zuckerberg tried to remember the Latin of
Speaker 1: the particular phrases. Later that night he I aimed me
Speaker 1: to tell me two phrases he remembered, giving me the
Speaker 1: Latin and then the English. Fortune favors the bold and
Speaker 1: a nation empire without bound. We are all duly aware
Speaker 1: of how fake news spreads on Facebook and the impact
Speaker 1: it may have had on the election in the United States,
Speaker 1: and for some of us are relationships with our family members.
Speaker 1: Mark denied this at first, but he has gradually copped
Speaker 1: to a tiny amount of responsibility for the hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of fake news pieces Russia's Internet research agency managed
Speaker 1: to promote, although he thinks it's silly to blame the
Speaker 1: results of the election on that. There have been numerous
Speaker 1: calls since two thousand and sixteen from Mark to step
Speaker 1: down from his creation. He has so far refused them
Speaker 1: all At present, despite a falling stock price and uh
Speaker 1: all the corpses, Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to give
Speaker 1: up his empire, and I don't think he ever will
Speaker 1: know why would he at this point? Yeah, he is
Speaker 1: my pick for worst person of the twenty one century
Speaker 1: because he's like, it's like Hitler. Pretty much, everyone's gonna
Speaker 1: call the worst person the twentieth century now killed more people,
Speaker 1: but now killed more people mostly by accident. Hitler killed
Speaker 1: them because he wanted to kill them, and killed them faster,
Speaker 1: like concentration camps are a huge deal in that country.
Speaker 1: Hitler is the guy who really figured out how to
Speaker 1: make the most efficient, most vile, most like terrible and effective.
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg is the greatest thing thing. George Bush is
Speaker 1: another one. Just a dumbass guy, got in power, fucked
Speaker 1: with a place he didn't understand and caused unspeakable height.
Speaker 1: And Mark Zuckerberg is that guy. But for the world,
Speaker 1: it's just fascinating. The reason I kept saying that Marker
Speaker 1: marker Berg, Markatberg, zuck is dumb is because I think
Speaker 1: one it would hurt his feelings the most. Yah, that's
Speaker 1: the thing he clearly values. He clearly values it, and too,
Speaker 1: I don't understand how he just blatantly didn't want to
Speaker 1: consider anything outside of his I'm gonna connect this country,
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to have an office in this
Speaker 1: country where there are people who can deal with, say,
Speaker 1: the spread of violent and like racist propaganda. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: would reduce my stock value because it's more expensive. It's
Speaker 1: just it's baffling. Uh, And I don't know if a
Speaker 1: cautionary tale is correct, but kind of just like a diagnosis,
Speaker 1: like a problem. It's a problem like Facebook is here.
Speaker 1: You're not going to stop people from connecting on social media.
Speaker 1: He needs to be removed, right, he needs to be gone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we need to understand like a different set of
Speaker 1: values for what our online space is going to look
Speaker 1: like and how the tool is going to be used.
Speaker 1: If you have to put a guy in charge, pick
Speaker 1: someone like Hamdi Ulakai at the Chobani CEO who was
Speaker 1: a refugee as a kid and understands the dangers of
Speaker 1: hateful rhetoric spreading like wildfire. Yeah, it's just it's sad.
Speaker 1: It's sad and also speaks to the problem when power
Speaker 1: is hand in hand with money, because this will always
Speaker 1: be a problem when that's the case. And Mark will
Speaker 1: always have power because he will always be one of
Speaker 1: the richest people in the world, and he will do
Speaker 1: god knows what with it next what God knows. But
Speaker 1: I'll bet you he doesn't think it's I bet he's
Speaker 1: not going to do like what Lebron James did and
Speaker 1: just start good free schools. From four kids, even though
Speaker 1: he could he could do hundreds of him. There could
Speaker 1: be for his book, schools all over, but instead there
Speaker 1: is a Facebook hospital that does not accept anybody's insurance,
Speaker 1: but does it accept bitcoin. Um yeah, you know. Also
Speaker 1: a good time to point out that he doesn't have
Speaker 1: a charity. He has an LLC. Everything is for profit.
Speaker 1: He's giving away his wealth. Yes, sure, yeah, are you
Speaker 1: telling me that when he said he was making a
Speaker 1: charity he actually built a perpetual money machine for himself
Speaker 1: and his family. Is like what I'm saying that sounds
Speaker 1: like oh Zucky Zuck Oh man, you crazy fuck yeah? Wow.
Speaker 1: It Also it's fascinating, um, you know, watching all these
Speaker 1: interviews of Zuccherberg, how many times he cites his origin
Speaker 1: story um as portrayed by Yeah, even though he says
Speaker 1: he doesn't like it. Yeah, he has really glommed onto
Speaker 1: that idea of himself. And there's again just a snake
Speaker 1: eating its own tail. He believed is the mythos of
Speaker 1: his own gene. Mark the zuck zuckman with a Samurai
Speaker 1: sword in one hand and dead Burmese baby in the other.
Speaker 1: That's how we should start picturing z That's the shirt.
Speaker 1: That's the shirt. That's the shirt. That's the shirt. Sophie
Speaker 1: looks like he thinks this is a terrible idea, and
Speaker 1: it may be. It may be. Let let's do it anyway.
Speaker 1: Let's do it anyway. My income is no longer tied
Speaker 1: to Facebook. Boy, Maggie, do you have any research that
Speaker 1: you didn't get to in this podcast, because I know
Speaker 1: you did a bunch you and they're normally our guests
Speaker 1: coming cold, which allows me to have the illusion of
Speaker 1: being smart. Right. Well, again, I think we did basically
Speaker 1: cover all everything the idea that he um buys into
Speaker 1: his mythosum when there was talk of him running for president,
Speaker 1: that motherfucking that he was running off of the reputation
Speaker 1: that the film and the book gave him, none of
Speaker 1: his own work, or the fact this is a personal opinion.
Speaker 1: I have no problem with that picture of Trump and
Speaker 1: a truck. I have a huge problem with that thing
Speaker 1: of Mark on a tractor because with Trump in the truck,
Speaker 1: he's clearly having a great time. He got a chance
Speaker 1: to be behind the wheel of a big truck. Of course,
Speaker 1: why not any that's the most human thing he's ever done.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, I want to be this fine mark
Speaker 1: looks like a fucking ah. This is how you humans
Speaker 1: make money? Yes, yeah, um. And it's also crazy he
Speaker 1: wanted to run for president and yet when you hear
Speaker 1: him talk, he's a void of charis who it is
Speaker 1: a just as straight as a run should be on
Speaker 1: the T shirt holding up a ball. It's it's wild
Speaker 1: the way that he was able to um adopt his
Speaker 1: own I don't know. He became a Greek legend in
Speaker 1: his own mind. Um. And so literally nothing will stop him.
Speaker 1: He will keep stealing and keep breaking until there are
Speaker 1: laws in place, which, again their company, every way they
Speaker 1: word their responses is basically a warning like, look, these
Speaker 1: are problems that we like may have could have fixed.
Speaker 1: But one first of all, like who, you've seen it
Speaker 1: coming and nowhere coming? Yeah, like who? And then secondly, um, basically,
Speaker 1: we just don't have a lot of resources, so like,
Speaker 1: you better not try to like regulate us or like
Speaker 1: more people. We don't need to be regulated. Why would
Speaker 1: that be necessary with the utility, which we're not, even
Speaker 1: though people use us in their daily life and we're indispensable.
Speaker 1: Now we're not a utility, so we can't be regulated
Speaker 1: or controlled in any way, shape or form. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a problematic mindset that comes from his background and who
Speaker 1: he is and his early success. And you know the
Speaker 1: way that he talked about women being compared to farm animals.
Speaker 1: What are people signing up for Facebook? But more farm animals,
Speaker 1: more dumb in his mind, people giving us their data
Speaker 1: to hand off to others for profit, um and for
Speaker 1: the sake of completion, which I do think is a
Speaker 1: big fact. He just wants, he wants, he wants six billions,
Speaker 1: He wants six billions, he wants all of it. He wants.
Speaker 1: You know, when we tried to take over America, what
Speaker 1: is that called the expansion manifest destiny. Yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right. This is that exact attitude. It's manifest destiny
Speaker 1: for the Internet and people's um data. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: really good comparison to drum. Yeah. I want to amend
Speaker 1: that we were choking a little bit earlier about you know,
Speaker 1: people who have drug problems and then sober up and
Speaker 1: do terrible things. I think the answer is really really
Speaker 1: rich kids should be encouraged. Just no, don't go, don't
Speaker 1: start an app, don't start a company. She's doing your
Speaker 1: dad's got all the money to do shipload a drugs markets. Fine, fine,
Speaker 1: it's fine, be lazy and be by yourself. Let some
Speaker 1: kid who's been at the other end of the hate
Speaker 1: mob and survived start the social network and be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but we gotta make sure it can't be used to
Speaker 1: do this, because that's because that's true. I know how
Speaker 1: bad that is. Yeah, yeah, I mean again, it's just
Speaker 1: like another one in a long line of why, like
Speaker 1: diversity will make your company, yeah better, not just will
Speaker 1: make it better. We'll stop it from committing horrific crimes
Speaker 1: against humanity. Were ruining itself. We're ruining itself and its
Speaker 1: brand by contributing to horrible crimes against humanity. Well, Maggie,
Speaker 1: as we close this out, I'm want to propose something.
Speaker 1: We have these these two derritos, which are merged in
Speaker 1: the dorrito equivalent of coitus. I'm gonna grab one and
Speaker 1: to grab the other. We'll pull them apart and we'll
Speaker 1: have these last derritos here we go. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: m morgen, a cigarette that three episodes of a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff and to toritos derito's with a lot of
Speaker 1: loving them because Derito's I love my friends, Maggie. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna plug your plug doubles before we close this episode out,
Speaker 1: I do um. Well, first, I will say, since the
Speaker 1: Loftest left, the Lofton left for her new life with
Speaker 1: the Winkle Boss with the wink Um, so do make
Speaker 1: sure to follow her on Twitter Jamie Loft, Jamie loft Is,
Speaker 1: Help You Get and Jamie Christ Superstar Jamie Christ Superstar
Speaker 1: um please and also check out her podcast Bechtel Canist.
Speaker 1: If you ever see her in public, don't say anything
Speaker 1: to her, but hand her a single orange and then
Speaker 1: wordlessly walk away. Oh my god, she'll love it. That's
Speaker 1: so Godfather's gonna be assassinated the day. Well should listen
Speaker 1: to the episode probably and that ruins the joke, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't a nice joke. Do that or break a
Speaker 1: light bulb or a light bulbs See this is this
Speaker 1: is why you need a diverse crew around you. Otherwise
Speaker 1: I'd just be a ruinous lightbulb chucking orange throwing wreck there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would also be terrible without the people around me.
Speaker 1: We all are. That's why society exists. Because we're gross
Speaker 1: monsters on our own. We need to help each other
Speaker 1: be better. Um. Yeah, so to follow follower follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Maggie may Fish and Instagram. Uh. You
Speaker 1: can find out my video essays on film and cultural
Speaker 1: phenomenons on YouTube at Maggie may Fish. Um, including a
Speaker 1: really fantastic one on David Fincher's by Flight Club. It's great. Also,
Speaker 1: when I was rewatching the social network, Uh, what a
Speaker 1: heavy lifting off of Fight Club. And I will say,
Speaker 1: much as Zuckerberg stole a lot of his data and ideas,
Speaker 1: Fincher stole a lot of his ideas from lesser known
Speaker 1: French and Russian filmmakers. Well, who among us hasn't stolen
Speaker 1: from a Russian? Hey, that's that's why they're so angry.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why they're so mad. Sophie's admitting to
Speaker 1: stealing from any Russian. I don't know where your dog
Speaker 1: came from genetically, I don't know. That's true, entirely possible
Speaker 1: it came from some wolf on the Siberian steps. Could
Speaker 1: be no way to know. I mean, probably a way
Speaker 1: to know, but I don't know. I don't know. And
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, which
Speaker 1: you can find on the internet at Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: dot com, where they will be the copious source list
Speaker 1: for this episode wealth these episodes, Um, you can find
Speaker 1: us on The Graham courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg at at
Speaker 1: Bastard's Pod. You can find us on Twitter courtesy of
Speaker 1: another creepy guy at at Bastard's Pot. And I agree
Speaker 1: with guy who seems to have a real perfose for Nazis.
Speaker 1: And uh, you can find my book A Brief History
Speaker 1: of Ice on Amazon. And there's a Bizos episode coming.
Speaker 1: I mean, how could there not be? How could they're
Speaker 1: not very excited whatever, I'm glad she's getting a bunch
Speaker 1: of money. I mean, that's what I'm excited. She might
Speaker 1: become the richest woman in the world. I hope you recognize,
Speaker 1: like you got a hundred and thirty billion, White Fight
Speaker 1: billion are the same amount of money. Yeah, maybe maybe,
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know the man anyway, I know the man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all kind of do. Don't wait, we know him.
Speaker 1: We know him. I do love. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: things is to look at pictures of Silicon Valley billionaires
Speaker 1: backward before they were billionaires, like like Elon Musk, before
Speaker 1: he got money. It's so cute. Oh he's a totally
Speaker 1: different man. He looks like Dana Carvey in that movie
Speaker 1: where Dana Carvey played a turtle. God. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, oh my god. Oh that's a good
Speaker 1: note to end on a little bit of joy. Look
Speaker 1: up Elon Musk before you get rich, and just have
Speaker 1: you a good time until next week. I'm Robert Evans
Speaker 1: and I love roughly h