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Ya where some ribs and getting ready for the president ial debate tonight. Nights debate will be formed by conversations happening on facebook. 39 el decisionmaking material from facebook getting over a billion Political Campaign po i love thcommentsthat are coming in. Smoking these meats and, um, and ju hanging out wit people who me in my backyard. Make no mistake, everything you care about, everything i care about and ive worked forake. I will beat Hillary Clintony, i will beat hso badly. I hope that all of you get out and vote. This is going to be an important one. Tonights broadcast will also become a Gathering Place for political conversation. cheers and applause thank you. Thank you. Facebook is really e new town hal better conversations happen on facebook. Poke for a vote. Poke for a vote. U. S. A. u. S. A. Hillary Hillary facebook is the ultimate growth stock. Facebook is utterly dominating this new, mobile, digital economy. Have political conversationn facebook, things like the most likes, interactions, shares. As evaded justice. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to, in my view clarify. 2016 is the social election. Facebook getting over a billion Political Campaign posts. Narrator 2016 began as banner year for Mark Zuckerberg. Come one of in the wor emergihat, as it was connecting billions, it was inflaming Division People really forming these tribal ideities on facebook, where you will s getting into big fig narrator wve been investigating warning signs that existed as facebook grew, and interviewing those inside the company who were there at the time. Umbers growing like crazy, as did the rest of the media and the news world in particular. And so, as a product designer, when you see your products being used more, youre happy. Its where were seeing conversation happening about the election, the candidates, the issu sed the platform more successfully than Donald TrumpsDigital Media director, brad parsca i asked facebook, i want to spend 100 million on your fo they say, we dont have a manual. I say, well, send me a human manual, then. Ames jacoby and what does the manual provide . You have a manual for your car. T have that fors you woulse in your car, right . I spent 100 million on a platform, the most in history, it made sense for them to be there to help us make sure how we spent it right and did it right. With custom audiences, you can get your ads to people you already know who a fabook. Narrator what facebooks representatives showed them was how to harness its powerful advertising tools to target new and receptive audiences. Friends of people who like my page. What i recognized was the simple process of marketing. I needed to find the right people and the right places to microtargeting allows you to do is say, well, these are the people that are most likely to show up to vote, and these are the righences we need to show up. The numbers were showing in the consumer side that people were spending more anmore hours of their day consuming facebook best place to show your ntent, it would be there. It was a place where their eyes were. Where they were reading their local newspaper and doing things. And so we could get our message injected inside that stream. And that was a stream which was controlling the eyeballs of most places that we needed to win. t justas also dominating the news business. 62 of americans say they get their news from social media sites like facebook. More than a dozen developers have goal of aad more news. Narrator facebooks massive audience enticed media organizations to publish straight int news feed making it one of the most important distributors ofd. Im personally really excitedabout this. I think that it has the potential to not only rethink but to rethink a lot of the ways industry works. Narrator but unlike traditional media companies,book didelf as responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the news and information on its site. The responsibilities thatey should have taken on are what used to be called editing. And editors had certain÷g respsibilities for what was page versus the last page, the relative importance of things that dont relate purely tod dont relate purely to popularity. So they took over the role of editing without ever taking on the responsibilities of editing. Narrator instead, facebooks editor was its algorithm designsers whatevers most engaging to theook, they didnt see jacoby was there a realization inside facebook as to what the responsibilities would be on distributor of news . I dont think there was a lot of thinking about th, that idea. I dont think there was any, any thought that news content in particular had, had more value or had more need for protection than any of the other pieces of content on facebook. Narrator andrew anker was in charge of facebooks new products team, and is one of eight former facebook insiderso agreed to talk on camera about their experiences. I was surprised by a lot things when i joined facebook. Anrew up in the a there to be more of a sense of how people interact with media and how Important Media can be to certarmation diet. applause we have a video from davida from napoli. No. A technology company. Were not a media company. The fact that so many big wellknown news brands really pushed into facebook pretty aggressively legas a place to get, kind of, information. And i think that also strangely created the opportunity for people who werent legitimate, because if the legitimate players are there, and youre not legitimate, all you need to do is set up a website and thenr stufook is going to look similar enough that youve just gotten a huge leg up. Hillary clinton is the moston. Narrator but as the 2016 campaign heated up. And ill tell you, some of,y what i heard coming from my opponent. Narrator . Reporter Craig Silverman was sounding alarms that facebooks news feed was spreading q sinformation what he called fake news. Fake news just seemed like and i was trying to get people to Pay Attention. I was tryingo get journalists to pay atteno also get facebook and other com like twitter to Pay Attention to narrator silverman traced misinformation back to some unusual places. W this small cluster of websites being run, the va majority, from one town in macedonia. How popular is it . Maybe. 200 people . Yes. Most of them didnt reall care about who won the election. They werent in this for politics. If you put ads on these wefic from facebook, that was a good way to make money. There are some people made, like, 200k or Something Like that. 200,000 euros . Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was 15 want to read about trump, so imiting trump stuff. Trump earned them money. We saw macedonias publishgy clinton being indicted the pope endorsing trump Hillary Clinton selling weapons to isis, getting close to or above a million shares, likes,÷o comments. Thats an insane amount of engagement. Its more, for example, thanthe New York Times had a scoop about Donald Trumps tax returns. How is it that a kid in macedonia can thatent than a scoop from on facebook . Ring the campaign was pope endorses trump, which was not true, but it went viral on facebook. Was it known within facebook that that had gone viral . Um, im sure it was. I didnt necessarily know how viral it had gotten, and icertainly didnt believe that anybody believed it. Jacoby but would that have been a red flag inside the company, that something thats patently false was being propagated to millions of people on the platform . I think if you asked the question that way, it would have but i think wh the next question, which is the harder and the more important question, was, which is, so what do you do about it . , you then very quickly get into issues of not only free speech but to what degree is it anybodys responsibility, as a Technology Platform ors a distributor, to start to decide when youve gone over the linesomething that iclearly false from something that may or may not be perceived by everybody to be clearly f anpontially can do damage . Jacoby over the course of there was a lot of news about sinformation. I mean, there was, famously, the pope endorses trump. Do you remember that . Absolutely. Issues at the time, but, but absolutely i, i do remember it. Narrator tessa lyons was chief of staff to facebooks number two, sheryl sandberg, and is now in charge of fighting misinformation. She is one of five current officials facebook put forward to answer questions. As there any kind sense of, l polluted with misinformation someone should do something about this . There certainly was, ando were thinking about it think there was a real awareness of, internally or externally, was the scope of the problem and the, the right course of action. Jacoby how cou it berprising t becoming the worlds information source, that there may be a prob there was certainly a th]x related to news or quality of news. And i think we all recognizedll of the considering, we focused a lot on threats that werent misinformation and underinvested in this one. Narrator but there was another problem that was going unattended on facebook beyond misinformation. One of the big factors thatd in the election was what started to be called Hyperpartisan Facebook pages. These were facebook pages that ki ginning up that partisanship were right, theyre wrong. But not even just that, it wastheyre terrible people and were the best. Pages were getting tremendous engagement. A million migrants are coming over thifwall, andlike, rape your children, you know . That stuff is doing well and the stuff that was true would get far less shares. The development of these hyperpartisan turned the informational commons into this trash fire. And theres some kind of parable in that for the br effects of facebook. That the very thin divide us most cause the most engagement. barking, which means they go to thep of the news feed, which means the most people see them. Narrator this worried an early facebook investor who was once close to zuckerberg. I am an analyst by traini and profession. S to watch and at this point, i have a series of different examples thats something wrong, systemically, with the facebook algorithms and business model. In effect, polarization was the key to the model. This idea of appealing to peoples lowerlevel emotions, things like fear and anger, to create greater engagement, and in the context of facebook, time on site, more sharing, and, more advertisg i found that incredibly disturbing. Narrator ten days before the election, mcnamee wrote zuckerberg and sandberg about his concerns. I mean, what i was ally trng to do was to help mark and sheryl get this thing right. And their responses were more or less what i expected, which is to say that wheen were isolated p had addrsed each and every one of them. I thought facebook could stand up and say, were going to reassess our priorities. Were going to reassess the metrics on which we run the company to try to take intoe fact that our im is so much greater now than it usedo be. And that as facebook, as abillions of users, we have influence on how the whole works that no ones had before. Ive just received a call from secretary clinton. Clinton he the election. The clinton c really a somber mood here. The crowd here at Trump Campaign hea narrator trumps targeted ads on facebook paid o. Ebook help one of the nastiest elections ever . Narrator . Leading to complaints that facebook helped tilt the election. Facebook elected donald thats basically. Narrator . Which the Trump Campaign d as anger over the results. There has been mounting criticism of. No one ever complained about facebook for a single day until donald trump was pre the only reason anyones upsetabout this is that donald trump is president and used a system all built by liberals. When id everybody after my interview of what we did at facebook, it exploded. The funny thing is, the obamacampaign used it, then went on tv and newspapers, and they put it on the front of magazine, and the left and the media called them geniuses for doing that. Accusations that phony news stories helped donald trump win the presidency. R trumps victory put facebook on the spot. Facebook even promoted fake news into its trending. Narrator and two days afterfornia, zuck publicly about it for the first time. El ogs postelection, youve been getting a lot of push from people who feel that you stories, right . You know, ive seen some of the stories that youre talking about, around this election. Tain profound that the only could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. You know, personally, i think the, thedea that, you knowhc fake news on facebook, of whh, you know, its, its amall amount of, of, of the content, influenced the election in any way, i think, is a pretty crazy idea, right . If i had been sitting there in an interview, i would have said, youre lying. When he said, we had no impact on the election, that. Remember reading t being furious. I was, like, are you kidding me . Like, stop it. Like, you cannot say that and not be lying. Of course they had an impaus. Theye most important on, news distribution. There are so many statistics about that. Like, i dont know how you could possibly make that claim in attitude. That infuriated me. Ed everybody there saying, youre kidding me. Jacy is he n the importance of his platform in our democracy at that point in time . Es, i think he didnt understand what he had built, oror wasnt paying doesnt. They really do want to pretend, etting on their private planes, as theyre gett their beauti6hl homes, as theyre collecting billion dollars, they never want to ackn have. They dont. Foreing here. Thank you, guys. I thinkt all of us sitting in menlo park to not necessarily understand how valuable facebook had become. I dont think any of us, mted how much of an effect we might have had. Years later, or almost two years later, that we really understand how much of a true effect we but i think more importantly, we all didnt have the information to be sayingke that at the time. My guess is, is that mar realizes that there was a lot more to the story than, than he or any of us could have imagined at that point. Narrato barely two months later, in washington, an even more serious situation was developing. Intelligen investigating russian rference in the electionether soci disinformation, fake news. Does that continue . Yes. In my view, we only scratched i say we, those that assembled the Intelligence Community assessment that we published on the 6th of january 2017, meaning nsa, c. I. A. , fbi, and my office. But i will tell you, frankly that i didnt appreciate the full magde of it until well after. Narrator amid growing scrutiny. Ht. Narrator . Zuckerberg set out on a crosscountry trip facebook. Different states for my personal challenge for the year to see how different communitieare working ountry. Narrator but while he was on the road, the news was getting worse. The u. S. Intelligence Community Officially is blamingesident. Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the president ial election. Narrator zuckerbergs chief ofbeen asked to see what he could find on facebooks servers. We kicked off a big look into the fake news phenomenon specifically what component of that might have a russian part in its origin. Narrator they traced disinformation to what appeared to be russian governmentlinked sources. Jacoby so, what was it like bringing that n others in the company, and up to mark and sheryl, for itance . You know, we had a big responsibility in the Security Team to the right peoplewhat had happened without being kind of overly dramatic. Its kind of hard as a security person to balance that, right . Like, everything seems like an emergency to you. S case it really was right . This really was a situation in of this iceberg, and we knew there was some kind of iceberg beneath it. Narrator stamos expanded his investigation to look at hown operation may have also used facebooks targeted advertising so what we did is, we then decided were going to look at all advertising and see if we can find any strange patterns that might link them to russian activity. So we enlisted huge parts of the company. Ind of dragooned everybody inteam. So you have people in a war room working 70, 80hour weeks billions of dollars of ads of pieces of content, and by kind of a painstaking process of going through thousands and thousands of false positives, eventually found this large cluster that we were able to link to the4j Internet Research agency of st. Petersburg. Narrator it was one of theroups that had been using facebook to spread disinformation in ukraine three years earlier. This time, uake accounts russian operatives had paid around 100,000 to run ads that promoted political messages and facebook g what the Internet Research agency wants to do is, they wantate the appear of legitimate social movements. So they would create, for example, a proimmigration group and an antiimmigration group. And both of those groups would be almost caricatures of what those two sides think of each othe and their goal of running ads were to find populations o people who are open to thosends of messages,