divide america was well under way. okay. hi, guys. meet alex stamos. he s a respected figure in security. we survived the last day. today is august 17th, 2018. tough to say good-bye to folks but i m glad for what comes afterwards. it s the last day he ll call himself chief security officer at facebook. he s been there three years. it feels weird to live through history from the inside. naturally, i want to question whether i did everything i could. it was stamos team who discovered russians were weaponizing facebook to influence the election, a pivotal moment for democracy and turning point in facebook history. when i was hired, the job was to protect the platform from attack, keep people data safe. now, i m reading biographies of
argues against it in a public setting. he s more likely to really aggressively go against it or challenge the source or to challenge the assumptions to honestly not believe the bad news. reporter: facebook is in transition and many employees have left over the company s direction including instagram. and should zuckerberg, the ceo and chairman manned jort shareholder of facebook step aside. chairman and majority shareholder of facebook step aside. that s not the plan. reporter: would anything change that? eventually over time. i m not going to be doing this forever. reporter: many employees you met on the show have left, including alex stamos now teaching future entrepreneurs at stanford university. doing better means doing things like this, bringing people together to think about these problems early and not just be reactive. having a real diverse set of
it s november 2018. unexpectedly, i m back on campus. after a blockbuster report raises questions about facebook s business tactics. the company hired an opposition research firm linking them to george soros. the pr firm founded by political strategists and linked facebook to george soros. this is a common tactic used by semitic and alt-right groups and why people were shocked about it. i wasn t particularly happy about that piece of it. that made me want to look into this more deeply. the way they went after george soros, do you approve of that methodology? i don t think this is the type of thing our company should
fake news and the platform. this is another black eye for facebook. reporter: this has users outraged. we had people saying, maybe i shouldn t be spending so much time on facebook. maybe i should delete it. they feel this caused the election to happen the way it did and why people were angry about it. reporter: it all dated back when facebook opened up the platform to developers. i think they built something beyond their wildest dreams and extremely powerful in ways they had no idea it could be powerful. did you think, oh, no, this was based off the platform you were an early architect of? yes. to the answer. i don t think it was something you could have predicted or even thought was a risk. we re talking about a level of nation states and nation state actors. these are countries, right, that have military biggesudgets beyo
everyone said that s a bad idea. and actually it turns out to be a brilliant idea. they got it cheap. this was facebook s biggest acquisition to date. as a startup reporter, at time, i had noeever covered a dl so quick or important. facebook is going to have to find a way to help monetize this. there were a lot of people that doubted whether this was a good acquisition. if you look back now, it makes so much sense. it was an investment in facebook s mobile strategy and help bolster the portfolio ahead of the ipo. it could be the biggest ipo in history. going public is an important milestone. with the world watching, everything that could go wrong went wrong. stock that picked a bad week to go public. when the actual day came, the nasdaq system broke. it was a stunner. let s do this. the nasdaq button was all set up on campus. we re doing a remote to ring the