Telephone. i have a telephone. we can call each other. we can make that work, with all of the postings, all of the social media you want to do, but the reason we need to break up facebook is that it s critically important that there not be one worldwide company that basically has all of the information from everyone. because they have made it clear what they care about first, second and third is profits, profits, profits, and if that means doing the dance with dictators, if that means telling donald trump or elizabeth warren you could run ads that lie about your opponents, then they re fine with that as long as they keep raking the bucks in. and they re so damn good at it because they have so much information about everyone. so my view on this is it is time to break up facebook now. is it any more likely that that will happen now than it was in 2019 when you were so vocal
Platform. according to local activists and free speech advocates. that decision, and mark zuckerberg s reportedly personal involvement in it, that is just one of the mounting revelations that has come out of what s being called the facebook papers, a trove of documents provided by facebook whistleblower to a consortium of news outlets around the world. it s been making headlines all weekend and into today. there s dozens of stories that have derived from these documents, dozens of stories, and multiple news outlets, nationwide and worldwide. and i m sure we re going to get a lot more stories out of these documents in the coming days. one of the more harrowing pictures that is starting to form already revolves around what appears to be a fairly routine test to see where it s algorithm is leading its users. in the summer of 2019, a researcher at facebook made a dummy account, a fake account for a person named carol smith. this fake carol smith persona was set up sort of generically.
A politically conservative mom from north carolina, from wilmington, north carolina, she expressed in her facebook profile an interest in politics, and parenting and christianity and followed just a few other facebook accounts, including fox news, and president trump: and that s it. just sort of a bare bones profile, and this fake account, this carol smith account never expressed any interest in conspiracy theories of any kind. but nevertheless it only took two days that facebook recommended that that person, carol smith should join groups dedicated to qanon, that democrats are a secret cabal of satan worshipping pedophiles and will be executed in a mass public execution at guantanamo, really, carol, so soon, and even though the researcher running the fake account did not engage with those groups, with those
Want to buy an ad on facebook, you know who you go to, you go to facebook. you go to the dealers. every part of this is controlled by facebook. the pricing, the buyers, the sellers, every part of it. but the other part is that they understand the political risks that a company like this threatens. also, we now have someone in the justice department who had shown that he has the courage to stand up to monopolists like facebook, so i m really encouraged. we have good laws. i d like to strengthen them, but we have good laws on the books, and we have people who i believe are going to be willing to pick up those laws and start using them. it will be a tough fight, but my money s on them. in terms of getting to the kind of goal that you re talking about, whether or not the breakup of facebook ultimately
Campaign, facebook announced that any ad paid for by a political candidate would be exempt from facebook s fact checking protocols. the practical implication of that is exactly what you think, politicians were formally allowed on facebook to spread any lie they wanted about their opponents with total impunity. that, for example, is how donald trump was allowed to run facebook ads falsely accusing joe biden of corruption. with her deliberately transparently false ads, senator warren set out not only to test the system but also to demonstrate how dangerous facebook could be with only stupid rules in place, without proper safeguards in place to make sure they weren t just spreading known base lies. that was just in response to the policies of facebook that we knew about publicly. as we now start to learn more about how facebook operated behind the scenes, how the company s own recommendations and internal incentives steer everyday people to violence and conspiracies and hate all over