Using technology to complete to compete for our attention which they then sell to advertisers but heres a question from someone that has worked on television for most of her life hasnt he been doing the same thing for decades now i mean i mean weve heard the same arguments against brainwashing its manipulating break throw it out isnt social media just. New sort of t. V. Yeah i think its a great question. There are a couple things that id say one is that t. V. Is just not as good at being as addictive as social media and thats for thats for a couple reasons one is its not interactive and 2 is its not personalize to us right the content that i see on t. V. Is not about my social world it doesnt it doesnt reflect. My popularity and my standing it doesnt it doesnt allow me to compare myself to other friends or colleagues in the way that social media does so social media really allows me it really it really preys on a bunch of things in kind of my animal brain that really get me addicted you know for just hard data you know the fiftys. People watched about 4 hours of t. V. A day and now that stat on average at least in the United States is about the same its about 4 hours. Just to show that the difference with social media in 2010 people spent 12 and a half minutes per day on social media in today they spend 2 and a half hours per day and so its gone up 10 times in 10 years per person well the number of people using social media has grown from about 500000000 to 3000000000 people so its its explosive in in that sense and its addictive and. You know the data the the Mental Health data on t. V. Just looks very different than then social media just in terms of the impact that social media usage has on my Mental Wellbeing we know that it makes me depressed and we know that it makes me anxious. Youre saying that the average downer is 2 and a half hours i wish it was that low in my case actually its much more than that 2 and a half hours well thats nothing compared to what happens to me now like we agree right that this sort of a concept of catching my attention and being by manipulating is really an old concept and old thread but really on steroids like its sort of sitting right absolutely i mean i think that. You know probably Artificial Intelligence in fact is already doing this with with Netflix Netflix not only are their recommendations powered by Artificial Intelligence but some of the programming some of the Show Development in creation is now being powered by data that they have about how you and i watch their shows and what what appeals to us and so i think its kind of a matter of time before Traditional Television starts becoming so personalized it starts to suck our attention and in those sorts of ways i think traditional t. V. Just isnt nearly as good at it as social media is it kind of stealing our attention. You mentioned before we started this interview about america being poly arise like never before and i said well the world is paul or america heres the thing you also said a political consequences of social media are scary that the way this goes not could lead to a civil war but we once again im going to bring up the traditional media like fox news has been around since 1996 and there was no facebook or you tube and the media was already paul arising the landscape because i think style sells in the media more blood to more ratings and moderation and object to they just dont interest people you know that they dont bring grading so why are we saying that Tech Companies need to change but were ok with with like fox and n. B. C. Destroying journalism in america and completely polarizing the country as well yeah i think that the beginning of all of this was cable t. V. It was in 1906 when fox and c. N. N. And s m s n b c started fracturing us into different groups that had a different set of facts. I think what were what were saying is that social media is just that on steroids because instead of there being 3 versions of the truth in United States there are 100000000 versions of the truth i mean you see this you see this even on the left or on the right which is that. Republicans cant even a line and neither can democrats right there completely fractured part of the reason that theyre fractured is that the facts there is not in they talk about this in the film we dont theres no concept anymore of of truths theres no concept of a shared truth but i dont. I think i am i blame i blame cable t. V. Is for starting this whole big in terms of polarization so i think youre right that that is a problem social media by virtue of the technology in the ability to make to to create your own c. N. N. Right you know your personal news Network Makes it even worse. But im trying to pinpoint something here help me out because im talking about whether was should be targeting in this case. Tech giants or something more narrow and particular for instance weve heard accusations and facebook volunteered offline ethnic cleansing in myanmar right like an Old FashionedRadio Program has funded as legit graver genocide in rwanda for instance and whiskey broadcasters being held responsible not the Radio Technology what is the argument for treating the Top Companies of today differently you know what i mean. Well the argument in the United States and i testified in front of congress about this very issue the army United States back in 1906 around the same time coincidentally that cable was you know fracturing us there is a theres a law called section 230. 00 and what it does is it allows these Tech Companies to propagate and publish any content they want and theyre not liable for it its simply freedom of freedom of information decency act. I may be getting that name wrong but its section 230 and that the testimony that i gave basically suggested that that needs to be they need to look at 230 and they need to amend to 30 because youre right news organizations are liable. If you Say Something that you know is you know libel factually incorrect etc you you have a liability you are held accountable if anyone can say anything and anyone can propagate anything thats popular in inflammatory. We can create some really serious societal problems. Here is that question turned from the other side for instance to cocreator of the Facebook Like button tells us in the silm that his team just wanted to create something that will be good that would will foster good will enable people to reassure each other and that he didnt expect teenage depression or the like addiction to come out of it right but addiction is being liked one way or another and once again nothing to do with instagram its human nature right. So im just wondering are we survey of scapegoating the big tech because were just too embarrassed to admit that our behavior is ugly at times urges blaming our ages old vanity and facebook. I think its a good i think its a good point i mean my takeaway from the film is is twofold one is that maybe 3 full the Companies Need to take more responsibility and accountability that governments may need to step in if they dont do that quickly enough in in we as individuals are responsible to we are making choices that are not in our best interests and weve lost control of our fans and. We know it for a number of the reasons that you mentioned right weve lost control of our phones because weve let them prey on our vanity our need our need to be right our need for recognition our need for other people to inflate our reputation all of these things are sort of human tendencies that on social media get really tapped into and we have we have personal responsibility to make i think different choices if we conclude that these things have taken over our lives in the same way that i response ability if i drink too much to figure out a path to get that back in control because i dont like the consequences its creating in my life i think the same the same is true of cigarettes the same is true of of eating too much sugar so i agree with you i dont think i think its silly and i dont agree with people who just say look at some my fault social Media Company there theyre the ones are making me pick this thing up to talk about cigarettes or a facebook set of lunches ation and youve admitted in the documentary that you helped make facebook as addictive as cigarettes that sounds quote so sunday is it a figure of speech or are those 2 addictions and theyre driven by same processes in a brain the point that i was trying to make is just that theres a theres a theres a threshold at which big tobacco realized what they were doing and that they continued to do it they continued to put more and more things into cigarettes that made them more addictive and made me want to smoke more of them and the point im trying to make is that social media and in particular these artificially intelligent algorithms are doing the same thing. They are moving along looking for new additives to inject into social media so that you and i want to use it more because the algorithms being told get more of tims attention tomorrow and then he goes off and thinks cant do that week he spent 2 and a half hours on it yesterday how can we get him to spend 3 hours on it today and sort of oil that i was making was that these algorithms are going off and finding new additives like the Cigarette Companies used to do right it started with if we were 1000 years ago it started with as i said earlier popularity in comparison and now were in a different realm of misinformation Conspiracy Theory polarized content right were were stepping up the ladder of things that. Really trigger any gauge the most primal part of my brain so that i spend more time and im more engaged to take a short break right now when were back well continue talking to team kandel former facebook director online to zation expresident of contrasts and the c ls moment app stay with us. As the u. S. Economy was booming growing numbers of people were made homeless. You can work 40 hours in a week and still not have enough to get housing everybody believes america still is the land of opportunity the reality of the were not financial ecology and the lack of Affordable Housing for a living minimum wage gave many people no choice so thats been a problem with the city will always turn him excited told me stay away id almost call it the food that there is no answer because yes that requires the source most vulnerable or abandoned on the streets to become invisible comes. And were back with tina kandel former facebook director of lunches aisha next president of contrasts and c. E. O. Of mom and app team so tell me so that we know what are the most sophisticated tills that keep users on the hill i mean are engineers in a big tech consciously using your scientific knowledge to keep us in gauged. No i i mean i think part of what is scary is that ringback there really are cumin beings on the other side of of of these services right its really an algorithm thats not very well in my opinion not very well supervised that is being given an instruction which is make him spend more time on the service tomorrow you have this universe of billions of pieces of content hes got a couple 100 friends theyre publishing content lets figure out what to put in front of him thats going to get him sucked in and we also have push notifications and we can play with the time of day that we send those push notifications to him and if things get really bad we have his phone number so we can text message him in what really bad i mean he hasnt come back for a few days when i go off a spoke for several days or week i get a text message from that with something was something that really tries to pull me back. So those are the tricks right its its its and its preying on i mean one of the most effective things that facebook figured out to 15 years ago was they censure an email that says hey theres a new photo of you on facebook. I dont send you the photo. I dont know why they dont why dont we send you photos i want them send you the photo because they want you to come come to the service see this photo which by the way 100 Percent People do and then once youre there you stay longer and when you stay longer they can show you more outs in the show you morons they make more money. You know not so long ago i spoke to the father of modern marketing economist Philip Cutler i dont know if youve heard of it and we talked about how commercials are to blame for our growing dissatisfaction with our lives in a way that they see it as the idea that the product theyre offering is what we need and without it our lives are just incomplete is social media working in a same way or are its ways more complex than that. I think its more complex i think it used to work in that way and only along those dimensions which was which was it great they tapped into our natural tendency to compare. And thats right i mean that was that was kind of early commercial commercials and and marketing was a global look at your life it could be better if you bought this product. And look thats it thats a very effective way to to manipulate someone and change their mind and get them to spend money now i think its gone even further in that in that its really starting to tap into whether you are right or wrong whether your view of the world is right or wrong whether and by the way these services really help convince you that youre right. Because thats good for business and they make you angry at the other side because they put information in front of you that proves that the other side is wrong and its doing the inverse to the other side and thats whats thats whats thats whats so scary you know i think Tristan Harris is in the film you know recently has said something that i think is really helpful which is a system magine that you picked up there for your phone and there were 2 options there was a feed of information that that showed you things it basically validated your worldview based seat showed you that you were right there firm of the things that that you believed and then there was another feed that actually challenge to put information in front of you that shall and the views that you helped so if you believe the earth the earth is round in this feed it would actually show you data that that illustrates how the world might be flat people dont want to read that 2nd feed that 2nd feed is not that engaging people dont want to be told that theyre wrong. They want to be validated and so. I think its gone one step further then just you know convincing you that your life is is could be better if you buy a product its almost a further its convincing you that youre right and the other is wrong and not only wrong theyre bad. So another scary thing that i gathered from the documentaries on to her and you say that despite the fact that you helped architect all those manipulative tills you yourself. To them yourself what does it mean for the rest of us i mean does that mean that being aware of all those things social media duty is just not enough i think its pretty. I think like a lot of things that are picked of its not very helpful to know how bad they are i mean i think 15 or 20 percent of people still smoke and i mean i think the biggest reason people dont smoke now has less to do with the fact that it kills them more to do with the fact that its socially just not acceptable that thats thats at least my experience the United States. And so i dont know that its so helpful necessarily to know that its bad for you in that in the medium to long term what what i think can be really helpful is for everybody in this is how you know we we build tools and focus on apps that my new Company Moment is that there are if youre aware sort of 3 things that we say it at moment and the whole idea of moment is were trying to help you get back control of this thing and how you use it. The whole idea is basically its to help you develop awareness for how much you spend how much time you spend on your phone most people spend this is an aggregate so says social media long Everything Else most people spend 4 foreign a half hours on their phone a day but if you ask all those people most of them say 2 hours so theres a disconnect between reality and perception and pointing that out can be really useful because it shows the loss of control right there is sort of this moment that happens like oh my gosh i really dont have control because im not even correctly perceiving reality and then the 2nd thing that we suggest and this does this in our app moment is just a bunch of ways of tweaking out. The most useful and basic one and it actually like moves the needle the most in terms of social media usage is dont bring your phone into the room where you sleep just set a rule. Yes yourself done ok i know that stuff. You dont want to talk to journalists really are but it is this is most alarming our actions are done on a phone yeah all of our work is done on phone i mean especially now that were all working you know. Online because we dont go to record in person interviews or we dont travel that much to do reports that everythings happening in our sun own i guess i get it by the way like i work on this all day long and i you should see my phone usage especially since this film has come out what so here is c. E. O. Of moment now an app which according to the description said helps people build healthier relationships with their phones. So if i delete all social networks from my phone how will my relationship with it become healthier exactly i mean because you know i can really just check twitter on desktop yeah. Well 1st of all i wouldnt recommend it to lee we dont we dont actually think the leading social media is realistic or the or the best thing necessarily i just think that we want to help people be more deliberate about how often they use it we all had this experience of going to our phones to send an email or look at the weather for a few minutes and then we we we come to about 45 minutes later and weve been screaming instagram. We need to get on our phones to go on instagram. So 45 minutes passes im going to gram i dont feel any better for it i actually feel worse i feel a little bit guilty and i dont feel like ive accomplished a whole lot. Ive looked at pictures of my friends. Presumably having a more interesting life than me this isnt bad this is of bad experience and so but i cant really help myself and so i think what we suggest are ways of setting limits or think for experiences like that so that hey its ok if you spend a few minutes on an instagram but we let people go through a process of trial and error when they realize that yeah when i just limit myself to 10 or 15 minutes on instagram i feel better how exactly do you do them its a great idea but how does that work when applied yeah yeah well so there are 2 things 11 is that in general i think i think reducing your phone limit phone usage overall is helpful and so thats what we really help people do because this gets insists you know that how do you how would you help a journalist like myself how to reduce the risk we give you the tips to set some limits and then heres the most important part and this is the newest part of the the experience we have you create a group on moment with several friends. And they all have moments and then you go through a mole type day guide that helps you develop an awareness and helps you play with certain things as a group to try to reduce your usage and that whole time we show you in your friends how much everyone is using their phone so the idea is that and this is true of a lot of behavioral addiction in terms of how people sustainably change behavior is if they commit with a group of people and thats how we came up and developed the feature was look you you probably have talked about this was colleagues of yours you probably talked about this issue with friends of yours. Agreed that youre going to even at the very least just show each other how much use your vote added of itself we see can help reduce usage definitely. Top today good thanks a lot of luck with everything. New become a battleground in the us in vermont people are demanding the shutdown of a local plant. Is right now my focus because its a very dangerous oh no care power plant the owner is attempting to run the reactor beyond its operational limit this case just sort of puts a magnifying glass on wheres the power in this country wheres it going is it moving more towards corporate interests or is it more in the idea of a traditional participatory democracy with the people this case demonstrates that struggle in very real ways. As. The only one. Of the. Daily mirror. But there are also friends. The us are still so. To do something this year. Which will. Be about the possible alan kohler but whats up with that one of that kind of a look at. Breaking news armenia and azerbaijan agreed to talks here in moscow to stop the fighting in the god of the political and its called for an end to all. Of the Stores Across today shelling rue in the historic cathedral nagornokarabakh civilian losses are growing with journalists also being hit there now theyre close by the time we talk to mothers whose sons are fighting on both sides of the frontline that. We all have kids serving i can ringback share my emotions in church only i feel bad i havent slept properly since september 27th as a soldiers mother and as a citizen of is there is a myself am on the front line the way from the conflict to french president running across the once arab