the get wired podcast, we highlight some of wired's most impactful stories, and we kind of explore the intersection of technology and humanity. that's the best way i would describe it. we will hear a bit more from you and nicola slightly later on in the show. also with us today is madhumita murgia. european tech correspondent at the financial times. maddie, you have been spending a lot of your time following silicon valley at the moment. yes, that's right. we have been part of quite a big i project looking at several hundred documents that were leaked - from facebook, and so we have kind of, it's been a team effort. people have been looking . at them and analysing them together as a group. and last but definitely not least, is emily birnbaum, tech lobbying reporter at politico. so, emily, let's start with you because as maddie just said facebook has been doing a lot of lobbying and pr this past week. we have heard whistle—blower former facebook employee frances haugen has been in the news for several weeks now over her leaked documents. she has had a series of media partnerships starting with the wall streetjournal. what did she do with them and who has she been working with since? yeah, so she says that she first met the wall streetjournal reporter who she would work with to disclose the original documents, she says she has been working with him since december. so it was originally jack horwitz at the wall streetjournal. he came out with a series called the facebook files which essentially, you know, showed that in various ways facebook is aware it has been contributing to social harms and has done little to stop it. and ever since then it has just kind of been a whirlwind. haugen and her team decided it was time to get these documents out there to a broader audience, and she wanted to raise more attention around them. so her pr firm in the us created this sort of ad hoc media consortium. 17 us publications, more in europe. there were all given a certain amount of time to pour over these thousands of documents. and this past week was when most of them published. we invited facebook on the programme but they were not able to make it on. a murdoch owned paper and he has long been a critic of facebook. several publications workers the seem facebook this week and publishing stories. how did all come together? how did it all come together? there has been, you know, - kind of an almost unprecedented collaboration and working together of various media organisations. - i wasn't involved from the very start, but colleagues of mine i were and that i came in and i think that is true of other _ publications as well. we have had different reporters coming in because there's beenj so many different aspects i to the stories that have been pouring out of these documents. we here at the ft see ourselvesl as a global publication so we had reporters in the middle east - and south asia looking at these documents to give some political- context as well and he obviously had people in the us and we had all of the other reporters - from other places as well. so kind of on the ground there has been joint calls and we have - all been trying to understand - what these documents are saying as a group and then trying to go in commit figure out _ what her own stories are _ and which bits we want to highlight. so a big, big global movement. but emily who was leading this, somebody had to be leading it surely? the ap actually took a lot of the sort of leadership from the journalists. and sort of corralling everyone into a group from slacks, and apparently we are a consortium now. a lot of stuff around the branding of the documents, the embargo time decided by the journalists but also obviously there has been a lot of coordination with her pr firm and working with her pr firm on, can we get that document, or her firm arranged a series of briefings with her. it has been really notably sprawling and quite well manicured effort to you know undertake this pretty huge project. so that's the consortium and how it worked. as you said there's a pr firm behind it. but what were the big headlines that came out this week? we did learn some new stuff, didn't we? oh yes. we look to as areas of things that j came out of one of the big things| was what are major like rich - problems that facebook has globally and this is an interest of ours| is a global news organisation. languages spoken by huge swathes of the world, - arabic, hindi, urdu, - pastjune in afghanistan, these are huge numbers of facebook users they don't have enough - in country languagel support moderators. so much of the misinformation, hate speech and, you know, - other types of harmful content - are just falling through the cracks. in most of the world outside of the us, and in fact - there was a number of one of the documents that said the company allocated 87%| of its budget for developing its misinformation detection i algorithms to the us in 2020. 13% to the entire rest of the world. for me that was kind of one of the big takeaways, - and the fact that i don't really understand how their- own algorithms work. there were documents in there that showed that when they were shown| less political content compared to men but they did _ not really know why. also said that there was certainly a major systemic biases based i on the rates of different users - and that people who share frequently are shown more in the news feed rankings and certain races - are prioritised over others in terms of their speech being amplified. i the did not know what that bias look like or how to fix it. _ you mentioned hate speech and we were not able to get facebook on a programme but they have released a statement in relation to the criticisms. with regards to hate speech they said they have built teams with expertise on issues such as human rights. and that they do have industry—leading processes for reviewing and prioritising countries with the highest risk of off—line harm and violence. if we go back to the mechanics of how this all worked, emily, and has been a very slick operation in terms of how it came together. who is backing frances haugen? i did some reporting this week of some of the money behind her. there is no indication about anything about this was an authentic or inorganic. she was working at facebook, she has been clear that she spent a long time preparing to bring documents out of the company, but as soon as she went public she revealed her identity on a 60 minutes episode that was one of the most widely watched episodes in the show�*s history. that's been a lot of people came out of the woodwork to help and support her. the whole time she has been working with an organisation called whistle—blower aid they said that since going forward with her they have gotten attention from a lot of big donors. they are now able to pay for a lot of her expenses. and beyond that, the founder of ebay has come out and offered a lot of support for her. he is a billionaire, he has spent a lot of recent years bankrolling anti—big tech efforts. he has given millions of dollars overall to advocacy groups and digital rights groups. so basically his philanthropic group is running her government and press relations in europe. he previously did give money to whistle—blower aid and has pledged that he will continue to support her in many different ways including travel expenses and including amplifying her message through a lot of his big organisations. so he's only one of many. just to clarify, she has not said publicly that he is backing haugen. but they don't specifically comment on this case. emily, what have facebook said in response to the slew of stories? they keep coming and coming. facebook has taken a very defensive posture in response to all of this. i've spoken to a lot of people this week that say companies in crisis have choices that they can make. they can either make structural change, they can apologise. facebook has chosen that will not be their approach, they say we are proud of what we have done, we are a company that tries to do good. we have invested more in trust and safety than our rivals. and we are being mischaracterized in the press. mischaracterised in the press. mark zuckerberg earlier this week said all of this amounts to basically a coordinated smear campaign. and that it will dis— incentivise some kind of similar research in the future. as this negative press continues maybe able take a different tact but for now they are not going to apologise when they are being attacked. three of my panel all come from papers that were part of this consortium, but surely facebook do have a point here. isn't this a case of the old media going after new media? facebook is still the new kid on the block and they're not even 20 years old yet? it's hard to call them the new kid on the block when you look- at the scale of, even if we don't call that harm the scale of, - that we see in terms - of who they touch globally. i'm not quite sure we evenl have a quarter of that reach even at the consortium i with 17 new organisations. there were efforts from facebook researchers to try and wrangle . with ways to solve these really- extremely thorny issues like ethnic violence and civil war. commit gender issues, religious inflammatory material. and in each context this is _ so complex and different and unique. the company is based - in silicon valley in the us. they don't have that sense of - context and every similar country. they don't have that sense - of context and every single country. so there were efforts to try| and understand this better. what is clear from the documents is that these efforts have - been stymied internally. even when researchers were saying look, there are problems— that we are trying to show you, - that things were not done about it. i have spoken to another— whistle—blower who came out a few months ago and she had uncovered several instances of political - manipulation on the platform - in places like honduras for example. she thought it was really difficult to get anyone to take any actioni and it just sort of fizzled out - on that she did something about it. there is an internal lack of, - or an internal apathy even though |there have been good—faith efforts| from researchers in the company to understand what is going on better. facebook would say their technology is having a big impact in reducing how much hate speech people see on their platform. they said that they use the technology to proactively detect it and routed to reviewers and remove it when it violates their policies. lauren goode, senior writer at wired, your profile says you are a lover a plot twist, can it get any worse for facebook? i think we have yet to see the plot twist. i don't think it bodes well for facebook but i don't know how impact much we will be seeing right away. as emily mentioned facebookjust reported the third quarter earnings a few days ago, the company is shockingly still making money, and any concerns about selling revenue came from this side of targeted advertising. because there's been changes that apple made to its operative system on phones where it's limiting some of the targeted advertising that people see on a platform like facebook. consumers can now opt out. facebook warned of that. facebook has some real concerns or should have real concerns about whether or not younger users are adding onto the services the way some of us elders have done. i think there's other concerns that facebook may have, i think when it comes to the facebook files or facebook papers one of the employees said in the document said they don't believe that history is going to look back kindly on facebook. i do believe that history it's going to happen now. history is happening now, but i think it is still going to be a little while before we see the long—term impact of the reaction to these papers. we willjust have to sit back and see how the plot unfolds, but whilst that is the facebook problems in the real world, they are also making bid moves into an alternative world. the metaverse. this is a concept that it keeps cropping up, big tech keep telling us about the future — facebook have announced 10,000 newjobs working just on this. but lauren, what is the metaverse? people listening at home will be going, meta what? what is the metaverse? it believe it depends on who you ask. if you think about the word universe meaning like a single universe, the metaverse is supposed to somehow transcend that. the most consistent description i've heard from different people is that's a kind of successor to the mobile internet. the way that 20 something years ago we were experiencing the internet primarily through the web, now we all have mobile phones, smartphones in our hands and metaverse will be some next level or next layer of that. where there is this kind of pervasive connectivity in our lives. which may sound thrilling to some people that may be alarming to others. where we feel a sense of presence with the people around us. right now as we are doing this radio and video presentation, we are on zoom, looking at each other on 2d flat screens and in some kind of metaverse world perhaps we would feel a little bit more present with each other as we interact and move from space to space. nicola, this does sound alljust a bit dystopian, doesn't it? it is true that the metaverse did come from dystopian science fiction, i'm a max of science fiction geek as well as a social scientist. i'm interested in how technology and people interact but snow crash is the origin of the meta—verse and i described it as the 3d internet. it's notjust the digital bit, i think there is the intersection with the real world that we need to think about as well. typically people do think of the metaverse as a snow crash, ready player one, the ultimate dystopian vision would be the matrix as well. this is the problem, it's all the science geeks pushing us toward the new future? it's trying to move from that 2d static, i guess spectator sports that we have been doing a lot of at the moment because we have been staring at 2d screens for a very long time during the pandemic. moving into a 3d space. the exciting bit is that it could be the new internet, it's enabled by technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality and mixed reality. those are three slightly different technologies as well. some of which involve wearing glasses. i think that's one from a more social science user perspective. i think that glasses bit can be one of the steps that they have got to get over run people adjusting to virtual reality. i tend to go queasy on the top of the bus. if you put that headset on me i do tend to vomit. that will get better and there's a big fashion brand recently that just launched a pair of glasses which are augmented reality. rather than being completely concealed in a headset, you can actually start to merge reality and the digital world as well. there's lots of applications that we have been looking at, things like health care using that kind of application. we can start to see some quite exciting examples of things that we can do with that technology. and then mixed reality is where it is more the star trek vision. the hollow deck type of thing where you bring them together and there's this word that describes the physical world and digital world start to interact. if i pick up a pencil, will the physical world respond? what of challenges creating this metaverse as well as connecting probably multiple metaverse ends together. and enabling us as users to navigate through those multiple worlds in a very consistent way. you have given us some enticing glimpses, but let's try and pin down exactly what the metaverse will be. lauren, some of our listeners may know, they may even remember the sims, that was a video game in which you had a little digital characters and you can decide what they wear, what they ate, what kind of house they lived in, whether they even had a shower. i remember playing that. is the metaverse similar to that? i think you're touching on something that is important. which is that the metaverse can be expressed through a virtual world such as simcity or the sims, and some people also say second life is something that would be considered part of the metaverse. but is doesn't necessarily have to be something that is in that space. as nicola also said, it could be something that kind of exists partly in your physical world around you and partly in the digital world. i also think that what you're describing or asking are these silos, right? we hear technologists prognosticate right now about the meta—verse and say it's going to be its vast expanse of virtual experiences were people will connect, there will be interoperability, it will be open. but what we are actually seeing is now a lot of these companies try to elbow their way into the meta—verse and stake their claim in it. facebook of course is one, you mentioned that off the top. i wouldn't be surprised if we saw google make a more serious play in the metaverse. apple might not call it that because apple tries not to call things super nerdy terms but it's working on ar solutions. there's microsoft, pok mon go, fortnite, and what we are seeing are these companies that exist in our lives, so present in our lives through their technology services. many of them are not interoperable. many of them have containers or walled gardens where we are supposed to live and do our work. and do our connecting with other people. and so i think the promise right now theoretically is that it's been very open and that people just kind of live in this next layer of the internet. but in reality these companies want to make money off of this. want to build applications on top of this and they are going to do, i think, what they can to make you use their services over others. if i'm right you have some doubts about this, right, the metaverse? i do have some concerns i would say. primarily i think there's a real barrier tojust people why the adopting it. so long as there is a proponent of it that relies on heads up displays was that the vr headset or ar glasses, ijust think it's going to take a lot and is going to have to be, going to have to be advancements in that technology for people to adopt it widely. go to be applications where people can join from their 2d screens and enter the metaverse, but what technologists are pressing right now is the totally virtual immersive experiences. it feels like vr and ar in their teenage phase. as much as we are figuring ourselves out and considering changing our names, the metaverse is a new name change for what technologists have been pushing already for decades at this point. my other concern is just about inclusivity in the metaverse. a lot of the conversations we have heard so far, some of the most prominent voices around the metaverse, this panel not included, happened to be people who identify as men whether science fiction writers or analysts, or people like mark zuckerberg or the founder of second life. and i think it's when you have this sort of homogenous body of people who are creating this next layer of the internet you are setting yourself up for having an experience that does not necessarily apply to everyone or consider everyone. and i think right now the answer to that is, well, don't worry we are designing avatars that reflect what real people look like. and that's great but does not necessarily consider the harms or potential harms or social dynamics that would exist for people who come from underrepresented or marginalised groups who deserve to have the same safe experience and the internet as the people who are creating it. madhumita murgia european tech correspondent from the financial times, what do you think of the metaverse? i'm in the office for the first time in a while and corralling - opinions from my desk. i was talking to my two editors about this. - we were saying, you know, - we throw this term out as if it's this futuristic thing, but we are already. on the path to this. i know the metaverse is supposed to be three—dimensional- and augmented but what it is really is, as lauren said, it's— interconnected in a kind of world where we do all things online. i over the last year and a half we are doing all things online already. - living together virtually. we, notjust for entertainment, but for work as well. _ and we are already at that stage where behaviourallyj we understand what it would mean. so i think the jump is a bit smaller for me than it would have - looked like two years ago. and really the next step is making it all interoperable. _ even if that's not in 3d, - can i take all of my social graph data from facebook and take it with me somewhere else? - rather than having all of these separate kind of units? - can ijust live one life online? i think that will be the first step of this metaverse and then - we will kind of go on to the issues around glasses and _ headsets and things. i think we are closer than we think. thank you very much, we could talk about this all day but that's all the time we have for now. thank you so much on my guests, the media show will be back at the same time next week. thanks for watching and goodbye. this weekend will be dominated by two areas of low pressure. this one has mostly cleared away eastwards, that will be followed by sunshine and showers. tomorrow we have a deeper area of low pressure to bring wet and windy weather, and that will also be followed by sunshine and blustery showers into the afternoon. this is this morning's rain band pushing into the north sea, a bump of high pressure bringing all the sunshine, then this new area of low pressure which will arrive on sunday and bring very windy weather and further heavy rainfall. a chilly afternoon, cooler than the last few days, but still pleasant in the sunshine. this evening will be chilly under clear skies, most of the showers fade away, then this new area of low pressure will be hurtling into the south and west turning wet and windy here, with temperatures rising to 12 degrees. further north, could be really quite chilly, low single digits in some spots. don't forget tonight the clocks go back one hour so you get the extra hour in bed, which will be pretty good news for sunday morning, as it looks pretty atrocious with this deep area of low pressure sweeping northwards and eastwards, taking its band of heavy rain northwards and eastwards during the morning. some of the rain will be really quite heavy with warnings in force, and the risk of flooding. the ground is saturated from so much rain recently. it will clear northwards, become confined to the north of scotland, then in the afternoon it will be very windy around southern and western areas particularly but there will be sunshine around too with blustery showers across southern and western areas, with the temperatures just about making the mid—teens in the south and cooler than that further north. halloween evening will be a blustery one with lots of showers. northern and western areas have a greater chance of staying dry towards eastern england. this is sunday's low, it pushes northwards during the course of monday but it will bring a run of north, north—westerly winds, again quite strong feeding in plenty of showers to north—western areas, some merging together to produce longer spells of rain. there will be some sunshine around, where we could see highs around 13 degrees. otherwise it's a chilly day, nine to 11 further north. then things look like they settle down as we move deeper into the week, with a ridge of high pressure moving in, it should be sunnier. this is bbc news. the headlines at five... borisjohnson warns the eu that french threats over post—brexit fishing licences are "completely unjustified". but he says the dispute mustn't overshadow attempts to agree action on climate change we are going to get on and do the things that matter to both of us, and make sure we work together on tackling the big issues that face the world. there's some turbulence in the relationship. as world leaders meet in rome before the crucial cop26 climate summit, france says the row over fishing raises questions about britain's reliability. lawyers for prince andrew claim the woman who's accused him of sexual assault is out for �*another payday�* as they ask a new york court to dismiss the case.