the board that the biden administration is moving forward. well, i hope that your optimism is well earned, ultimately. thank you so much for your time today, sir. and thank you for your service as always. a new book reveals the ugly truth about how facebook amplified misinformation, enabled russian hackers, and the details are, quite frankly, shocking. the book s authors will join me, next. oh, focaccia! ah, there s no place like panera. enjoy the toasty, saucy chipotle chicken avocado melt on freshly baked bread. panera. order on the app today. up here, success depends on the choices you make. but i know i ve got this.
officials and expanding the security team that looks for it. but they haven t solved their misinformation problem. they haven t solved americans spreading conspiracies, false rumors and highly partisan news to one another. and in the leadup to january 6th, that was the problem. they were allowing president trump himself to spread all sorts of conspiracies about voter fraud, about the election being stolen. and to this day they don t really have a clear policy on what they re going to do. it s just a matter of time before this happens again. i think that s the important thing to take out of this book is that unless the policies change, unless really the executives making the policies change, how is this just not going to repeat itself over and over again? this is not a company that is struggling. it s not like they don t have the money to hire people. they make tens of billions of dollars. so, what s holding them back? what is holding zuckerberg back from actually hiring the people th
before they actually became public, went public with their discoveries. and really one very important thing that we tried to do in this book is show how this particular incident, we really spool out that anecdote was part of a pattern, a pattern of warnings to top executives and the warnings that the executives not heeding the warnings or taking action. and so sheera can explain a little bit more about some of the background of that. they find the russian hackers in the spring of 2017, and it takes them until the summer to find the ira, the trolls that were buying advertisements. and still the american public has to wait a number of months before they find out. i think in one very telling scene, you have facebook s security team actually finding russian ads in one part of the building and then just down the hallway you have a member of facebook s pr team telling journalists that there were still no russian ads found. really? in the days after the 2016 election, facebook was being b
some of the reports that the security team had been trying to push up to him? i want to read this response from facebook just out of fairness because we asked facebook for a response to the book s claims about russian interference and facebook, and they said, quote, much has been written about the fact that in 2016 we and those in the government and media did not fully recognize the nature and scope of foreign interference in our elections since 2017 we ve removed over 150 covert influence operations originating in more than 50 countries, and a dedicated team continues to vigilantly protect democracy on our platform both here and abroad. do you have faith that they ve done enough? weren t a bunch of the january 6th insurrectionists a bunch of those violent white supremacist groups, weren t they messaging and posting on facebook? right. facebook is very good at answering the question that they want to answer. so have they fixed some of the problems around disinformation and specific
coming days. jacqueline charles has been immaculate reporting from the beginning. thank you. after 20 days, army commander scott charles officially stepped down in afghanistan, and at a ceremony general miller handed over control to his boss central command general frank mckenzie. miller said that the afghan people will be in his heart and mind for the rest of his life. the full withdrawal is scheduled to be complete by the end of august according to president biden, and more than 90% of the u.s. troops and equipment are out of afghanistan. all right. still ahead, richard branson wins race to space, and what that successful mission could mean for the future of space tourism. and inside the ugly truth