Facebook makes money off of harming girls: Stuff Mom Never Told You

Published Oct 14, 2021, 11:22 PM

Frances Haugen’s is just the latest former Facebook employee to blow the whistle on the platform’s harms. Bridget talks to Anney and Sam of the Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast about what Facebook knew and why whistleblowing is an identity issue. 


The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of My Heart Radio and Unbust Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. We are back with a little hiatus update, this time all about you, hasted Facebook. Now, if you've been listening to Tyodi for any amount of time, you know that Facebook is the platform I love to Hey, I think it's an evil company that has profited from destabilizing democracies and hurting already marginalized communities. Hate Facebook, hate them, can't stand them. And last week we've learned a lot more about just how aware of Facebook is about the harm their platform causes in our communities. I joined my friends Annie and Samantha at the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You to discuss the harm that Facebook causes young women and girls, revealed in the bombshell Wall Street Journal expose based on documents and data from former Facebook employee turn whistleblower Francis Hagen. But Hagen is not the only person who has blown the whistle on Facebook's shady practices, and next week we'll hear from Sophiejong, a former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on Facebook last year. Trust me when I say you will not want to miss her incredible story. But in the meantime, here's my deep dive and the Facebook's damaging impact on peen girls on stuff Mom never told you. Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. I don't welcome to stuff I've never told your production for I HI Radio Today, we are so thrilled to once again be joined by the amazing Bridget Todd. Hello Bridget, Hello Annie, Hello Sam. I'm so excited to be here back with y'all again. Always a delight. We're so excited to have you because, as we were just discussing, you have brought to the table a topic we wanted to address. We knew super important, but we were like, we've better wait for Bridget, because Bridget, you have got more no no, how then than either of us do. You've worked with Facebook, You've interacted with these social media companies, You've just been a huge activist and a very outspoken in this area, and so so excited where you're talking about this today. Yeah, and also when we're talking about social media, I'm not gonna lie. You're one of the people that I see the most of in all of my social media is whether it's Twitter, Istram typically more Twitter, and then like Instagram. I see your face and the amazing things you're doing, and I have to ask, I cannot figure out how you're doing everything that you are doing because you're constantly on go, Like I see you in all the panels and all the conversations, all the interviews. Everybody wants to talk to you, of course, but also you live what I am seeing to be my fantasy life in the travel, Like, is this your real life? Are you as fantastically living as I see? Because I'm quite jealous of all of the beautiful trips, all of the sunset pictures, all the lovely like sitting by the water pictures. What is this life? What is your life? Bridget I'm so glad you asked. So this is actually such a good segue into the topic, which is that I think if you were going to check out my Instagram, you would be like, oh, this is a person who lives a phenomenal life. It's a lie. I mean, yes, I do the trips, I do the travel. The last few weeks I've been traveling on the road, and I was in the Cats Skills right outside of Woodstock, New York, which is in my favorite places to go. And if you were just observing from social media, you would be like, wow, this person barely works, and when she does work, she's just like sitting on a stage and it looks lovely and then she's like going to the Cat Skills to her lovely cabin. I posted a picture on Instagram of me in a hot tub overlooking like rolling mountains and like very beautiful fall foliage, and to be like, honest, I did spend a lovely week in a lovely cabin in the cat Skills, but I was also working in the entire time, and so like it wasn't really that fun. My partner was there and they were working in the entire time. The picture of me in the hot tub, the hot tub had broken and so we had two good nights with it. And then when I was in it for that picture, I was like, oh, I don't think it's actually on. It's actually kind of cold, even though I looked like very relaxed. So no, I mean, like it's such a like curated greatest hits real. And I'm so glad that you asked, because I think it's important to demonstrate that, you know, Instagram versus reality. It's not always as peche keen rosy as it seems. I have to also put in the fight that not too long ago you injured yourself and you were still like just writing on with all of these activities that you're doing, including the fide that you are pretty much bossing it up everywhere and doing all of these interviews. Because I'm like, when does this woman ever stop? Does she ever stop? Because I'm sitting in my own couch playing the sad phone game that I've been obsessed with while watching things on repeat. I did a lot of that as well. And it's so funny because we did our first live taping of my podcast there are no girls on the internet in New York during that trip, and someone was like, oh, wow, you're you're back on your feet from breaking your ankle, and I was like, no, I just I used my cast and my crutches to get on the stage and I changed my shoes. Because again, you would think that I'm totally healed. It's like no, in actuality, I'm still in the cast. Yeah. I mean that is such a great segue for what we're talking about and this story around Facebook and particularly the damage that it does to young girls, has like caught the national attention reesely the national attention um and like it was a skit on SNL and it's been funny slash sad to see these older politicians trying to make sense of things like Instagram. Oh gosh, oh my gosh. But it's just so much of what you bring in these episodes just demonstrates the real world damage and impact that we often separate our beliefs that the internet doesn't have, but it does. So can you break down this whole thing? I will try my best. There's a lot going on, so you know, Facebook has had a run, I mean a pretty intense few weeks. Is a lot happening, and the thing I really want to focus on is the harm specifically to young girls, like teenage girls. That is not the totality of like what's going on and like the last few weeks for Facebook and really the last few months for Facebook. But if I were to talk about all the different harmful things that Facebook has done and is doing, you will be here all day. So I really want to focus on the impact that it has on young girls and team girls, because you know, I just think that like it's easy for teen girls and their experiences to be sort of sidelined or marginalized, and so with all the different information coming out, I really want to focus on that, and so just generally kind of like what's happening and sort of why this conversation is taking place. The Wall Street Journal published a series of really bombshell expose is about Facebook called The Facebook Files. Um. It's also a podcast if that's how you prefer to get your media, And it was all based on leaked data from documents from the company gathered by a whistleblower named Francis Hagen who used to work in Facebook's now defunct Civic Integrity Team, And that was a team that was really tasked with combatant things like misinformation and making sure that misinformation and disinformation did not like derail elections, and so it's not surprising to me that they dismantled that team. And it's a nine part series and it pretty much chronicles Facebook's most harmful and trouble link practices and behavior. From this expose a we found out things that like the fact that high profile celebrity Facebook users are pretty much exempt from Facebook's moderation rules, and that Facebook is aware that their platform is used to quote promote human trafficking and domestic servitude, and so I would recommend that anybody either read the entire series or listen to the podcast because there's so much there. It's like every new draft, I'm like wow, wow, wow. And I'm somebody who studies and works on Facebook and the harm that they that they perpetuate. Right, it did seem to be like oh wait and what and what now? And it's interesting to me because I think we've talked about on the show, but just in society in general, it's interesting to me when we make these jokes, but why are we accepting this as the reality. But one is, you know, face book is this place where it is harmful and you're gonna get like your weird uncle giving you some strange conspiracy theory. We're just like, yeah, that's cool, that's what Facebook is. The powers that be were so like, yeah, you know, it doesn't really matter because like you said that, these issues that are impacting teen girls in this case are just seen as sort of frivolous or like they're being emotional, like it's just social media, what's the big deal? Right? Yeah, But apparently it is a big deal and it has been making an impact. And Facebook did this, they knew it, and they kept going on with their platform and they tried to hide it. But now that it's come out, like heavy sigh every side. So can you talk about the scope of the issue here, Yes, So, as you said, I mean, like something to know is that even though we're all talking about it and it's in the news, a lot of this information is really not new except that we've known from prior research or um just from like being a casual user of the platform. If you're a casual user of Facebook, even you probably might have suspected, like, oh, Facebook might be making money off of causing harm, and so this is really not surprising. But exactly as you put it, I think why this is news right now is that we're getting an insight into how much Facebook already knew about the harm that their platform causes in our society and how much they're trying to sort of downplay it. And so another reason why we know that this is not a new issue is that there have been Facebook listle blowers in the past. So Fiesang, she's a former Facebook data scientist who uncovered abusive political manipulation using fake engagement. UM she found a series of multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse the platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizen read which calls international news on multiple occasions. That starts from her report. The summary of that is basically the light you know, accounts belonging to government leaders, we're using fake accounts to engage with their content to make it look like it's more popular than it is. So if I if I'm a government leader and I put out like we have plans to do this, and then I have a bunch of fake accounts who were like, yes, we love this plan, we love this plan, we love this plan. It's like building fake agreement for your policies. And so essentially that's what soap easying uncovered. And you know, Facebook has been allowing and profiting all of these harmful practices forever. So this is really not new. And I always like to remind people that Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg, when he was in college, created a website called face Smash, which basically was like like a way to rank the attractiveness of his female co students, right, and so misogyny and attacks on women and harm against women. This is like not a mistake. It is baked into these platforms like Facebook from the very beginning. Zuckerberg will tell you like, oh, that's not true, that's not true. Like I happened to build a website called facemash that was shut down, and then a few months later created a website that was pretty much the same thing called Facebook. Those are unrelated. Obviously, that's not true, but that's what he would tell you. Um, And so yeah, the fact that that websites and platforms like Facebook are harmful to young women should not be a surprise because in fact, they were created on that harm. Like that is a big part of why they exist in the first place. And reading this this expose, it really gets into the harm that Facebook has done in terms of team girls and young women. So trigger warning. Um, you know this talks about eating disorders, suicide, depression, and so that's something that is tough for you to hear about. Unfortunately, that's a lot of what is going on. And you know, this is really something that is sort of personal to me because you know, I love the Internet. I love being online and I always have and when I first got on the Internet. Like I'm old, so this was the late nineties. I had so many different kinds of experiences. Some of them were negative, you know, I was definitely in chat rooms doing stuff I shouldn't have been doing when I was young, But some of them were also incredibly like liberating and self affirming, Like if not for having the Internet in my in my bedroom and my like small Virginia town, I wouldn't have known that I was like that I'm queer, I wouldn't have known, like I don't know that I would be doing what I'm doing today, or like even living the life that I am living today, like that, like the Internet is what allowed me to see myself and fully become myself as an adult. And I keep thinking like this was and so there they're the ecosystem did not exist to have billionaires making money profiting off of my negative experiences and negative feelings. And I don't think I would have been able to use the Internet as this tool of self discovery and self affirmation had that been the case. And I really do think that like the younger generation, they deserve to have an allline experience is not a mark rket place for their pain for their negative feelings, and it does not incentivize them to to be the worst versions of themselves. And I'm really lucky that I came of age when I did, when when there wasn't a marketplace for my pain as a young girl. But today's generation, as these leaks really really demonstrate, is really not so lucky. I know we've talked before about things like spawn Con and how these big celebrities, usually women in this case, will you know, try to sell these items that are all about being thin usually and what I'm thinking of and if I had been young and I had seen that, and it's like all these challenges people have about being super thin like that, I know for a fact that would have impacted me. That would have been something that I would have thought, Okay, this is normal. I need to try to do that, I need to look a certain way. And those messages were already strong without I just know for certain that it would And I am someone who I the internet is. I love the Internet. I think it's beautiful place for a lot of things. And I know when this Facebook outage happened, people were like, well, you know, on one hand, celebrating, but we should also remember, like you know, marginalized people who connect that way, and also businesses that run that way, all these things. But it just has become so for me, like I'm going to feel bad about myself if I engage in this. It's such a weird dichotomy to me because there's this one group of you see things that I really wish I had seen as a kid. Like, so we're talking about people being able to spind themselves and not realizing maybe there is a reason why you are this way. Maybe that doesn't make sense that you're home, but there's a com unity out there that can see you, that knows you and and feels what you feel. But at the same time, you have this other aspect of this untruth. But like you're talking about this fake persona of happiness that doesn't truly exist, and therefore if you haven't reached that, or if you don't try to reach that, then you have failed. So these two like vast differences is such a heartbreak to me because I'm like, yes, this is good, but this is not good. So where do we fall on this line? Because I'm not gonna lie. It wasn't until after that I saw all the notifications that all these things were down that I realized it was even down. I was like, Oh, is that what happened? Okay, well I just assumed me being me, my technology wasn't up and going. So I moved on to whatever the next thing was. But this conversation that we have when we see how much of an influence and that is the influence. There's no real middle ground, especially when we talk about the younger generations about they're going to be influenced, whether it's the positive side that they're on or the negative side that they're on. They're on one of them. And I couldn't imagine what that feels like today. And I'm insecure as hell as an adult, so coming as an attain trying to really figure out who they are and and feeling like maybe their their home life isn't what they want or what they need or is not healthy, and then having to go to the spot to the space and you don't know what's safe anymore. And I think about that with my nieces and nephew that I'm like, oh my god, this is what they're growing up with. And I see that level of like how do we help them, but at the same time not try to pull them away from the world, make them naive and not be a part of the world. Such a weird thing. Yeah, I mean, you just articulated such a tension that I feel as someone who loves social media uses social media, but it's really clearer about these downfalls and these negative aspects of it. It can be used to find community, feel less alone, you know, build movements, but it can also be used in these incredibly damaging and negative ways. And I think you really put it so well, Sam, this idea of like, you know, we know from from this leak and from the Facebook, you know, Facebook's own words and their own data, that platforms, their algorithms really do incentivize, you know, the negative, and so you see more content that is polarizing or that makes you angry or that is insidiary rather than content that is like positive or affirming or that kind of thing. Like algorithms prioritize the bad. And I think that young people can have all different kinds of experiences online, some of them good, some of them bad. But there it's a problem when platforms incentivize the bad, right when they traffic in the bad, when they promote and amplified the bad. So it's not just like a neutral experience where whoever is using the platform can decide if they want to gravitate toward experiences online that are going to be affirming and good and you know all of that stuff or bad, extreme and insidiary and polarizing when you have an algorithm that is prioritizing one over the other, which we know that they are, and you know it's it's in putting together the research for this episode. You know, I'm an adult, right, I am a fully grown person, and I struggle with insecurity. I struggle with, you know, self image. I struggle with comparing myself to my peers. I struggle with all of that stuff. And I'm a fairly like confident, secure person when I was younger. I am so lucky that social media wasn't the way that it was now when I was younger, Like any you were just saying, like, I know that that would have really been hard for me. I know that I would have struggled. I know that that that it just would have been a bad time. It would not the internet would not have been a place of self discovery. It would have been a place where I went to think about all the ways that I didn't measure up. And it makes me so sad that that is exactly the experience that we are allowing for young people today, Like that is just like their experience of being online is one of you know, feeling bad about themselves and I hate that. I hate that for them. They deserve they deserve so much better, right, And you know, as a person who again we've talked about this is like being on the inside to see what that damage can do. Being a part of a workforce that worked with at risk teams trying to hold people accountable, I can't imagine. So we have some of these leaked documents that I know, and I've seen a few tweets and articles talking about how these women specifically have felt threatened and are feeling at this point even now like oh this is dangerous. I've come to dangerous grounds that with this happening internally, people have had to know how has this allowed to happen? What are they saying inside of this company that they're like whatever, Like how are they even trying to frame this? Yes, so let's get into that. So one thing to note is that a lot of this pertains to Instagram, but it's important to note that Facebook owns Instagram. They take a lot of steps to try to conceal that fact, but they're the same company. And so here's some of the findings from the Wall Street Journal expose a Since at least twenty nineteen, Facebook has been studying the impact of its platform on younger users. Their research has repeatedly found that it is harmful to a large portion, especially teen girls. Here's a direct quote from a slide from an internal Facebook presentation in twenty nineteen. We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. In another presentation, they internally said of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Another side said teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. They feel the reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. And another leak study found that seventeen percent of teen girls say they're eating disorders got worse after using Instagram. And you know, so this is from their own internal documents and the stuff that they knew that they talked about with each other. Facebook also internally is aware of the link between their platform and things like the pression and suicide according to their internal studies of users who reported suicidal thoughts in the UK and six percent in the US traced them back to Instagram. Another trans Atlantic study found that more than Instagram users who reported feeling unattractive said that they began feeling that way on Instagram, and about a quarter of the teenagers who reported feeling not good enough said it started on Instagram. And again, this is not really like news news, because studies have been showing that Instagram is like the most negative platform for teams for a while. In twenties seventeen, a studied by Young Minds and the Royal Society for Public Health showed that Instagram had the most negative impact on young people's mental health of all the social media networks. And you know, if you're thinking something like, oh, well, maybe this is just a social media problem, maybe all social media platforms are bad. You know, yes, all social media platforms have their negative aspects, but these findings were specific to Instagram. And so that's really because Instagram is one of the only platforms that really sort of encourages what Facebook calls quote social comparison. And so it's this thing where it's like you are feeling pressure to compare your life to someone else, And so think about a platform like TikTok, right, Like that's a platform that is really kind of performance based, right, it does not invite comparison the way that Instagram does. And so again, like I have definitely had times where I wake up and I scroll Instagram and I see all my peers and they're seemingly perfect lives and I put my phone down and I feel like crap. You know, even as an adult, it's so easy to succumb to this pressure that you have to be perfect and have to show your best moments. But I think especially for young people who are so impressionable, you know, it can really morph into things like depression, self esteem, eating issues, food issues, And we should not just be accepting that, Like that should that just be like the cost of those young people being on social media. It should be imperative to create a social media experience that does not profit off of these terrible harms. Our children are kids, right, And I'm not gonna lie. It makes me want to scream, like, what's the point of doing all this research? Obviously they wanted to know, but they haven't really fixed anything. They haven't helped anything. As in fact, when we talk about the spawn con, the whole idea is like they bring on people, they sponsored, people who make it look easy, and it takes incredibly hard to tell what's real and what's not because half the things is like this is definitely add but is it? Because they push it forward and say, this is the ideal situation. These people's lives is what you should seek, and therefore we're going to give you some help by you can allowing you to buy these things to meet that standard. It's such a weird thing because they pushed this is a part of their narrative. Oh absolutely, Like the expose, they showed these internal like slack conversations and um whatever the Facebook internal Slack version of slack as I can't remember what it is. But you have people at Facebook talking about these these studies and these findings being like, oh, like, isn't that the fun of Instagram? You know, comparing yourself to other people and seeing how like the one percent of like really hot people live. Like you know, I thought that was like the whole point and the way that they talk so callously about it, like oh yeah, isn't that what people want from our platform too, constantly be comparing themselves to unattainable error, brushed, filtered versions of the reality that could not possibly exist, you know, and just like they're their inability to see how harmful that would be. You know. I remember when I first realized how often people are using filters and face tune and things like that on their pictures, because I would see these women where it's like, how is it possible to have a waste that thin and a butt that nice? Like how are you? How are you standing up and walking around without falling over? It doesn't make sense? And I was like, oh, it does. It's not real, actually look that way. And let's not talk about the fact that most of these people are white women are white community, and so let's talk about being a person of color, really being ashamed of being a person of color, and realizing, oh, it's still the standard to be white, to be small, to be you know, young, this is the standard that we should be attaining. To thank you one more time of something that I can't change and be absolutely isn't it interesting that when you use what platforms called beauty filter on a non white face, the beauty filter pretty much translates to like, oh, you made your lips and nose thinner, basically made you look white, and it's like, oh, well, so what are you trying to say? Like what is really what are you trying to say? And I don't know. I'm I have a feeling you and I are in the same boat because oftentimes these filters are like nothing changed. I don't understand what's happening. You can't lighten my dark brown eyes to be blue on what is this and literally being confused about how they look that way? And I was like, oh, these are for white people, Okay, I mean, and that's that's kind of like not to go off on a tangent, but like even that concept alone is so harmful in tech, and it's so common. Like they just came out with a new iPhone a couple of weeks ago, and there are people I don't have it. I still have my old jankie, earlier model iPhone, but apparently this is the first camera that can actually take decent pictures of people with darker skin, and part of me it's like iPhone has been ounce since what two past and seven, and you'll finally realize that people who are not white exist and for so long, if you were somebody who didn't have like light skin, to get a decent picture of yourself on an iPhone, you had to be meticulous about your lighting and your angles, and if you weren't, you came out like a shadow blob monster. And it's like, Wow, finally, after all these years, y'all have developed a technology that can just take my photo and have it not looked wild. So I can't imagine, and I have a feeling that if we looked at the percentage of young teens of color, the numbers would be higher for those who are completely marginal allied in that within that community of seeing like, oh, I really wish that I was not my ethnicity, you know, just just being going beyond that that how uh yeah, Facebook is racist, Like, let's just add that to the caveat of not only are these sexes, not only are they of fat, shame made, not only do they have all of these things, but yeah, they are racist as well because they have again the standard of the white man who yeah, to me, he is the villain in this story. Oh my god, Marcus Zuckerberg is the villain. But also it's it's he's the villain, but also Cheryl Sandberg, Like there are so many villains in this story, and I don't know how Cheryl Sandberg has not been able to be like the public face of villainy here. But it really is like these people are knowingly making lots and lots of money off of the pain and harm and sometimes the deaths of our soil. And it's just when I intellectualize that, it's like, how is that okay? How how is it okay that, like people are getting rich off of harming our kids. It's for all the different ways that we talk about, you know, protecting children and protecting you. It's like, here is a clear way that our kids are being harmed and not just that people are making money off of it, and we've just internalized that, like that's just how it is, and it's completely unacceptable to me. Agreed. Speaking of the villains, what are they saying publicly? Like are they have they made any promises of change anything at all? So this is where it gets juicy, right, So, like all the different harmful things that they do, we kind of knew about that before. It's new to know that how much they knew in terms of their harm. But they also say a completely different thing publicly than they do internally at Facebook. And so when Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in March, he said, the research that we've seen is that using social media apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits. So all of these leaks show he knew that wasn't true. He knew all these different ways that his platform and his product create harm, and he it seems to me, you know, I'm no lawyer, it seems to me that he was actively misleading both Congress lawmakers and the public about what he knew. And we all know, you know, Facebook as a history of really not being honest. Again, if I were to list all the different examples do be here all day. But one that I have like like personal firsthand knowledge of is remember back in like when all these different publications were pivoting to video, Well, basically like that was based on Facebook really deeply exaggerating the metrics of video, and so they were like, oh, video is the thing. Video was getting so much more attraction than any other kind of medium. And so at the time I worked in media, and so many of my coworkers, so many of my colleagues all lost their jobs at media companies because of Facebook over inflated and exaggerated the metric of video content on their platform. And so again I'm no lawyer, but like, that's a lot. This would not be the first time that Facebook has misled the public and others about what's happening at their company, saying one thing when another thing is actually when they know another thing to actually be true. And I remember that time in media, like Facebook made it so difficult to like, I left media because I just felt like media companies were capitulating to whatever Facebook said. And so the Facebook said, it's video. If you didn't do video content, you basically knew that you were gonna get fired. If Facebook said, like, we were just caring to the whims of this massive company, and it's became so impossible to do that work. And so, you know, an entire generation of journalists face such instability and chaos because Facebook misrepresented their own findings. And so, according to Hagen's legal team, Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, misstated and omitted key details about what was known about Facebook's and Instagram's ability to cause harm, and her attorneys also alleged that Facebook violated the US securities laws by lying to investors. And again, like, I'm no lawyer, I'm no expert on this particular part of it. But like when you say one thing in when you're testifying to Congress, when you know another thing to be true, that seems like a problem to me. I don't know, I think that's lying. I don't know. I think so. I think you're right. I know when it comes to like stocks and stuff, that is really really bad and you will get arrested and fire because yeah, you just made up in order to pretend like you have made profit in order to make more profit exactly. Um, It's it is really well to me, It's like and it's one of these things where I feel like I don't know if it's capitalism or just like a nuance of living in a country like America where some things are lies and some things are are true. And I think that you kind of accepted that, like, oh, well, of course a big business has to like misrepresent a few things in public to make a buck. And it's like, wait, no, stop, is that is that really how it should be? That we should just allow that, Like it's okay for businesses to behave in this manner that it's literally killing kids to make money. It's like, I feel like this whole Facebook conversation is a good place for a hard stop of what we will allow businesses to do without any kind of accountability, right, And that's been a piece of this conversation is when people talk about regulating Facebook or how could we potentially deal with this problem, people have brought up other industries and what they have done. Correct. Oh, absolutely, So, after all of this Facebook stuff was going down, Adam Missary, the head of Instagram, who I have a lot of few things about him, I won't get into it now, but like, he just someone who because he runs Instagram, I feel like tries to have a kind of quirky public persona, and it's like, well, your platform is killing kids, So like, I don't really care about your quirky socks. But that's either heard her there. Basically, after all this went down, he went on the podcast Recode and offered a really terrible but also very telling analogy in response to all of this. He said, we know that more people die than otherwise would because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy, and I think social media is similar. So that analogy is wild for a couple of different reasons. One, it's just like cars, that the car industry. We know that industry is incredibly regulated by federal and state governments, right, Like I gotta take my car in every so often to get it inspected by the state, and they have to tell me if it's okay. You know, your car has to have seatbelts, this, that, the third that are all you know, dictated by the state. And we know that, like the auto industry had to be basically forced into adopting safety measures that they knew would save lives. And so I hate this analogy. But if that's the analogy he wants to use, then it sounds like what he is saying is like, oh, we need to be heavily regulated so that we don't harm people the same way that the automobile industry is. Right. It's like, Uh, what's funny is that when he brought that up, the person who was interviewing him was like, oh, well, you know, the car industry is very regulated, and he was like, well, you know, we're open to regulation, but we can't have too much regulation either. It's like well, what do you want. You're just gonna be able to harm people for profits, but no regulation whatsoever. Take my analogy, but don't really take mine alogy. Things. Also, analogy often used in comic books and has always turned around. So this guy clearly doesn't know his X men all right, exactly exactly, Like I feel like once when you make that analogy, you're opening yourself up to so many like you know, uh gotchas and like brickballs, was like why I even go there. But one of one of my favorite folks in the disinformation space, this amazing researcher from the Shortens Scene Institute at Harvard, Dr Joan Donovan. She's like one of my heroes. She actually has a much better analogy, which is big tobacco. So we know the big tobacco companies, they knew internally that their products caused cancer, yet they misled both lawmakers and the public about it for a very long time. And you know, that's why we had the Master's Settlement Agreement in which led to some accountability for the tobacco companies, you know, misleading the public about the link between tobacco and cancer. And so this book is kind of doing the same thing, misleading law makers and the public about the harm that they already have demonstrated that they know their product causes. And so I think that's a really useful analogy, because yeah, like, should a company be able to mislead lawmakers in the public about the harm they know their product causes to make money? If you agree that the big tobacco company, should that have done that? It seems like Facebook is doing something very similar as in fact, is doing something just as similar in that the old school campaign for tobacco were directed towards children and say like, look how cool you are, and wo's It's honestly like, when I heard that comparison, it blew my mind because it's the same thing, marketing towards young people, marketing towards women. Like the way that Facebook and tobacco companies have harmed these specific marginalized groups, groups that don't always get a lot of attention or have the biggest platforms, you know, women, young people, It is so similar. And I think that's something that really really gets me about this whole thing is that, you know, Facebook, We know now that Facebook knew how harmful their product was to young people, and yet they continued to try to market to young people push it to younger and younger audiences. I think on Spanthy months before, I talked about how Facebook had had plans to roll out a version of Instagram specifically for kids, knowing that their product was already so harmful to young people, and they continued to court younger and younger users, Like, straight up, Facebook does not care if kids are being hurt, harmed, killed, whatever, if it makes them more money, and internal documents showed that they had plans to market to kids who were ten to twelve years old. They called ten to twelve year olds a valuable but untapped audience, and another report suggested that Facebook should look into a way to leverage play dates to drive growth among kids. You know, it is so vile that they knew that their products had such a harmful impact on this young demographic, and yet they continue to discuss how they could spread that harm to kids younger and younger, right, because like, you gotta be thirteen ven Instagram account, And they were like, well, you gotta be thirteen Instagram account, but ten to twelve year old, we really got to figure out how to harm them too, And they're doing it for money. They're getting rich off of it. I swear as the skit, I've seen this skit before about this like trying to I don't know if it was like suits or something, but they're like, but we haven't gotten to the toddlers yet, so how do we market? So it's like diaper formal where was like the key and I was like, what is happening? Is this real life? It's an Onion article SNL skit come to life. And I think it's also hilarious and sad that you did. You completely talked about this whole idea that Instagram had of trying to uh get younger audiences essentially and younger buyers, and you talked about the fact that y'all and when it was like, hey, bad idea. And this was even before these reports came out, Yes, And I mean, if they already knew their product was hurting young people to just try to further get that lock on younger and younger communities, it's just I mean, I I think it's just evil like that, Like that's only like I think that Facebook is an evil company and that they are making money by spreading harm to younger and younger folks and it's just vile, But I think it's also kind of telling them because it kind of leads me to believe that Facebook might not be as powerful as we maybe once thought. You know, young people are not really into Facebook. They use Instagram a lot more, but like a regular Facebook, Facebook is where you go to like see your weird old aunt's like nonsensical Facebook posts or your dad's if you're if you're me, my dad's Facebook post. It just says the word test like it's like not where you're going to have cool experiences. And the fact that they filled the need to lock in and market to younger and younger audiences kind of makes me think that like, maybe they're not as as big as we think they are. They don't have as much of a hold on certain demographics as they might need to write into. Like social media companies that are doing well don't need to aggressively find all of these little scams to lock in younger and younger users. And we know something about Facebook is that they're m o is kind of I don't want to say stealing, but like adopting things from other platforms that are more successful with younger users. And so when Instagram rolled out stories like disappearing stories. That was essentially, you know, them copying Snapchat, which was very popular with young people. When they started doing reels, that was essentially them copying TikTok, which we know is very very popular with young people. And so the fact that they're doing all of these little things to lock in younger and younger users might actually mean that their business model is suffering because they're not getting new user base. They would need to keep their their platforms relevant, and that like if they have an older and aging user base, you know that models only sustained for so long. And it also means that maybe they're kind of against the ropes and we might actually get somewhere in terms of creating accountability for the kind of harm that we know they are spreading and mitigating further harm, which I hope is accurate. I hope that like the fact that they're doing these like increasingly more desperate ways to court increasingly younger audiences means that they're not actually as powerful of a text bohemus as we might have thought. Recently, we have seen you know, these bombshell accounts and this whistleblower in Congress testifying, and it seems like this is an issue that has touched people across all lines, and people can relate to and and I care about um want to do something about. Is that a correct? Oh? Absolutely? And that's actually one of the things that kind of excites me and gives me a lot of hope is that there is actually rare bipartisan support for the idea that something needs to be done about Facebook. Democrats and Republicans are actually very much united with the idea of regulating Facebook. After this Wall Street Journal expose came out on Capitol Hill, Hagen testified at a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. Uh, that's nowtful And at this hearing, after she testified, her testimony was amazing, but Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told the subcommittee chair, Richard Blumenthal, a Democrats from Connecticut, that they should put aside their partisan differences to tackle this common goal of reigning and Facebook. And they agreed. They agreed that they had more similarities than differences on the issue, that the differences they did have were very, very minor. And so Blumenthal said this at the testimony. If you closed your eyes, you wouldn't know if it was a Republican or a Democrat. Every part of the country has the harms that are inflicted by Facebook and Instagram, and I think it is really heartening to see an issue where everybody's on the same side. It doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat. Everybody can agree that our kids should not there should not be a marketplace for the pain and the harm of our children, and then it needs to stop. And honestly, I think they're exactly right. We should reject this idea that it's just okay for companies to be making profit off of hurting our kids. Our kids deserve better. Um, I don't really care what happens to the finances of Mark Zuckerberg or an Adam Massari or Cheryl Sandberg if it means creating a safer ecosystem for our children, and I think they deserve it. I mean, let's be honest, if they stop making money today, they'd be fine. They'll be fine. They'll be fine, Like they have enough money, they'll be fine. But yeah, I find it interesting that this is that conversation, that this is the one thing that's tied everyone together, because yeah, I think if you go to either side when it comes to the controversial or even the conspiracy theory level, the one thing you can agree upon is that the other believes that the other is out to get them and giving misinformation because of these social media's. Oh my gosh, that is so true, and it's actually like in working in like tech accountability. That's the thing that I always find kind of funny is that like hardcore conservatives believe they are being censored on Facebook, super progressive lefty folks believe they're being censored on Facebook. If you've never seen that meme where it's a black hand and a white hand, like like shaking hands and they both agree, it's like everybody kind of agrees they don't like what's going down on a faceboo. It doesn't matter what side you're on, what you know, we all agree we don't like what's happening on the Facebook. So it feels good to be united against a clear common enemy. Speaking of tech accountability, I mean, we wouldn't know about a lot of this, even though that we had kind of known, but we wouldn't have had like the hard data and facts. If this whistleblower hadn't come out and taken that risk and determined for herself, like we the people need to know this. Yeah. So like the importance of whistleblowers for this whole conversation. Um, and I know that's something that you have talked about before. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm so glad that you brought that up. I so obviously this is like bombshell news, and I'm so glad that folks are discussing it. But it is so important to not lose sight of the fact that whistleblowers are really especially in tech, are really important. On my podcast, there are No Girls on the Internet, we have a series highlighting women of color whistleblowers in tech, and it does not surprise me that so many whistleblowers are women and women of color, and I think that it is so important to some court them and to highlight their stories. Um. One of my favorite tech whistle blowers is one of them. Again, one of my like heroes, e Foma Uzoma. She blew the whistle on gender and racial discrimination at the company Pinterest and just actually passed groundbreaking legislation in California to free the victims of racial and gender discrimination at tech companies from non disclosure acts. So if you signed an n d A but you were the victim of discrimination you previously it could be sued if you talked about that experience. But because of this legislation, the Silent No More Act, she is actually freed victims of discrimination up to talk about their experiences. And so, you know, I would encourage everybody to. You know, you can listen to the series that we have on whistleblowers, but also in addition to listening to Frances Higgen's testimony, make sure that you read about Sophie zaang story. You know, I mentioned Sophie Zaying earlier. She was a former Facebook employee. She's a trans woman of color who was a previous Facebook whistle blower, and she deserves so much praise for the work of identifying harm that Facebook was doing when she worked there, working internally to try to mitigate it, and when that did not work, speaking up about it after she left. And you know, whistle blowing is scary, thankless dangerous work, and it's often the work of women, and I think that it's work that is it becomes even more dangerous the more marginalized you are. So if you're a woman, it's more it's more dangerous to do to be a whistle blower as a woman than as a man. It is more dangerous to be whistle blower as a woman of color than as a white woman. And it's more dangerous to be a whistle blower as a trans woman than assist woman. Right, And so whistle blowing is not this like gender neutral, race neutral, identity neutral thing. It really does take into account our identities. And so you know, I've already seen these attacks on Hagen that are like, oh, she must just be a disgruntled employee, or she doesn't really know what she's talking about. Like in their response, a Facebook comms person was like, oh, well, you know she never had any direct reports, she didn't really worked on this, or that, you know, really trying to minimize her experiences and her voice, or saying that she's just doing it for publicity or for money. And it's like people do not do the scary, thankless danger as the work of whistle blowing because they want to get a check, right, Like, it is incredibly destabilizing to your entire life and often like your family life to blow the whistle like this, and so I think it's important that we remember that there are women and women of color who risk so much and take on such a huge personal cost to get us this information, and I think we owe it to them to do something about it once they do. And the story just what you were saying alone reminds me of the Google employee you had brought to us as well in that same like they just want to discredit instead of acknowledge the problems, and so many are used to discrediting women and women of color and women who are moginal lies in the LGBTQ community, Like it's just such ah almost by the playbook when it comes to the misogynist, racist ideals of the US. The Unfortunately, it's still kind of works. Yes, I mean exactly like the situation that Google was tim nant, Jabru like she, I think that it's for a lot of women and women of color were already seen as margin We're already marginalized, We're already seen as like perpetual outsiders. And so when we speak up, when we practice public courage and public morality and say like this bad thing is happening and it's not great, we should it shouldn't be happening. It's so easy for people to discredit us, the crap on us, to say like, oh, they don't know what we're talking about, like, and I think, like it is so important that in the face of that, that we support women who speak up. It's because, you know, it's just there's already a an attitude waiting and ready and willing to suppress their voices. Absolutely, and I thank you so much for bringing their names to our attention and for bringing this topic to our attention. And do you want to Are there any resources you want to shout out? And also where can the good listeners find you? One thing I want to note is there are some organizations and initiatives that you can follow if you're interested in knowing more. So I can always check out my work at Ultra Violet um we are a gender justice organization of feminist organization that is really working to keep gender at the forefront of tech harms. You can go to we are ultraviolet dot org to find out more. And the Cairos Foundation is actually putting together a campaign asking folks to log out Facebook this November. And so if you're if you're someone who's thinking like, gee, I don't like what I'm hearing about Facebook, and I want to do whatever I can to divest from Facebook a little bit more. Check out Cairos campaign this November about how you can do that. And Yeah, if you want to hear more conversations about women whistleblowers and this women in tech who are trying to speak up and trying to practice moral courage um and trying to act as the conscious of tech platforms in the tech industry, you can check out my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet where we are having conversations about what it means to practice that kind of public courage and public bravery in tech. So we would love to have you. Yes, definitely, definitely go check it out. It's amazing. You can find Bridget online. Also, it always feels so weird when you're like, does social media platform problems? But find me on there if you pretty much, every like every like tech accountability organization right now and activists and organizing right now is going through the same thing of like, well, I hate Facebook, but I'm on Facebook. What do I do? But if you want to follow me, you can follow me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in d C and on Twitter at Bridget Murray and thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure. As always, listeners, if you would like to contact us, you can our emails, Stuff you Need Your Mom and Stuff at I Hurt Me You dot com. You can find us on Instagram at Stuff I've Never Told You or on Twitter at Mom Stuff Podcast. Thanks It's always to our super producer Christina, Thank you, and thanks to you for listening Stuff I Never Told You This production by High Radio. For more podcast on my heart radio is the Heart Radio, ap Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite ships.

There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
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