This is before the court in the future for the good of the court it's not healthy to get a new justice in or only would do a part and just Nina Totenberg n.p.r. News Washington upwards of 3000 protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court today to make their feelings known to lawmakers ahead of tomorrow's expected procedural vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh an f.b.i. Report clearing the last remaining hurdle for a Senate vote on the nomination among the demonstrators was a large contingent from Maine calling on Susan Collins a key Republican to vote against the nomination Collins is not yet said how she will vote but did say that it appears the f.b.i. Conducted a very thorough investigation of the sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh 300 protesters were arrested at a Senate office building today the top administration on build a new historic plan for combat terrorism today N.P.R.'s Scott Horsley reports it's the 1st major rewrite of the plan in 7 years the plan calls for beefed up border security a culture of preparedness and international cooperation to fight with the White House says is an increasingly complex and defeat terrorist threat national security advisor John Bolton who oversaw the planning process says one big change from the previous blueprint is the focus on what he calls a radical Islamist ideology it's long been the president's view that without recognizing that we're in an ideological struggle that we can't properly address the terrorist threat the plan also addresses homegrown terrorism and the process by which people already living in the u.s. Can become dangerously radicalized Scott Horsley n.p.r. News the White House the u.s. Has not been invited to a summit in Canada aimed at saving the World Trade Organization Dan Carp and Chuck reports the u.s. Has been left off the gas lifts of with the trumpet ministrations distain for the world body Canada's international trade diversification minister says the hope is that the 13 like minded countries who will attend the 2 day summit will come up with ways to reform the w t o and ultimately persuade Washington of its continued value. But he says the best way forward for now is without the u.s. President Trump has long derided the w t o and even blocked appointments of new judges to its dispute settlement body reporter Dan Carp and shock on Wall Street the Dow was down 200 points this is n.p.r. The death toll from an earthquake and tsunami that struck a central island in Indonesia has now risen to at least 1500 Indonesia's disaster agency further boosting the death toll nearly a week after the disaster a French rescue worker says his team using a high tech scanners as detected a person believed to be still alive beneath the rubble of a hotel a magnitude 7.5 earthquake caused massive devastation after hitting last Friday countless people are still looking for loved ones with the death toll expected to rise further in Los Angeles former rap mogul Marion should Knight was sentenced this morning to a 28 year prison term stemming from a voluntary manslaughter case David Wagner from member station k.p.c. See was in the courtroom today the former c.e.o. Of Death Row Records ran down 55 year old Terry Carter with his truck in 2015 night originally said it was out of self-defense but now he's pleaded no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter the victim's relatives wept in the courtroom as they described how the incident has affected them after the sentencing daughter Nick a a Carter said she's relieved nights case is finally over he showed no remorse made a fact he made himself the victim over and over again night sentence as part of a plea deal to drop 2 other cases one involving robbery and another in which Knight allegedly threatened f. Gary Gray the director of the 2015 film straight out of Compton for n.p.r. News I'm David Wagner in Los Angeles crude oil futures prices took their biggest plunge in roughly 7 weeks or oil dropping 2.7 percent today to end the session at $7433.00 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange I'm Jack Speer n.p.r. News in Washington. Support for n.p.r. Comes from Americans for the Arts committed to transforming America's communities through the arts and arts education supporting the nonprofit arts industry which employs $4600000.00 people nationwide learn more at Americans for the Arts dot org Support for Casey you comes from fish why celebrating 15 years with a family friendly open house live music food and ocean themed art 5 to 8 pm Friday October 5th at 500 Seabright Avenue Santa Cruz details at Facebook dot com slash fish wise and from Lincoln Street Studios a woman helmed film production studio in Santa Cruz helping companies craft their story through branded content served in the Bay area and beyond Lincoln Street Studios dot com. This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross last week Facebook announced the most serious security breach in the company's history in which an unknown hacker was able to log on to the accounts of at least 50000000 Facebook users but that's just one element of the crisis facing the world's largest social media platform Facebook was the conduit for Russian backed descent from ation campaign in the 26000 election that reach tens of millions of its users and the political consulting firm Cambridge analytic got access to the personal information of 87000000 Facebook users which they used to target messages for the Trump campaign Facebook is now under investigation by the f.b.i. The Securities and Exchange Commission the Federal Trade Commission and authorities in Europe and Australia our guest New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos explores Facebook's history and profiles its 34 year old founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a recent issue of the magazine he says Zuckerberg relentless drive to expand Facebook's reach has jeopardized the privacy of its users and made vulnerable to political manipulation his story is titled ghost in the machine can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy he spoke with Fresh Air's Dave Davies Well Evan Osnos Welcome back to Fresh Air You know we all know Facebook is a very big deal give us a sense of its size and reach. There's really nothing quite like it in the history of American business it is now 2200000000 monthly active users meaning it's larger than any country in the world it's really got no. No natural precedent when you look at the history of enterprise It's really closer in terms of scale and reach to a political ideology or religious faith I mean it just in literal terms it now has as many adherents as Christianity and that is all been built in the last 14 years since it was founded in 2004. For this piece you visited Mark Zuckerberg at his home at his office you had numerous meetings a lot of access from a guy who was pretty careful about you know journalists getting connected to him How did you convince him to share so much time with you. Well he did I should say reluctantly. This was a long process that started a year ago when I 1st approached them about the idea of this kind of story I said look I we do in the New Yorker these very long detailed profiles and I think initially Facebook's view was we don't need to do this or a big powerful company. And I continue to work on it basically started interviewing a lot of other people around Facebook people who worked there in the past people who work there in the present and as that accumulated I continued to say look this is fundamentally should be about how Mark Zuckerberg sees the world and over time they came to I think sort of grudgingly and I but I'm I'm grateful for it except the idea that to an extraordinary degree Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook I mean that is the reality he's the chairman he's the c.e.o. He owns controls 60 percent of the voting shares so if you're going to understand Facebook in any meaningful way the conversation really has to start with him and with him and for that I think they ultimately recognized he had to be a part of this project the company has come up against a growing and really serious decline of public trust both among politicians and among the general public and. I think they recognize that at the core of that and I think he recognizes that there is this profound question mark around what does Mark Zuckerberg believe and what does he stand for what does he care about how does he see his role in the country what does he see for the for the role of technology and this project was my attempt to try to answer some of those questions for myself and for readers. Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was at Harvard it takes off and it grows and it grows because they're determined you know to to get more users to connect more people as October he likes to say and you're right that in about 2007 it plateaued at about 50000000 users which a lot of other kind of similar platforms had done what did the company do to break through that ceiling when they 1st panicked really there was a a sense internally that they wondered whether they'd to hit the wall and whether this thing that had grown so fast was now over and and what they did was they discovered something important. Which is that in order to punch through that wall they have to come up with a whole range of new ways of accessing new populations people who wouldn't otherwise have been on Facebook the 1st thing they did was they discovered they simply had to translate the site into other languages make it available to other countries around the world and allow people to be able to post in Spanish and so on and by doing that they crossed this barrier this moat which had prevented other social media sites from growing but it did something even more important which was that it established. The sacred importance really sacred is the word of growth internally they created a team called the growth team which became as its former Facebook executive said to me it was really the cool crowd this was the team everyone wanted to be on was growth was about really sanctifying the idea of growth as an end in itself that if Ace books stopped growing then its whole reason for being would cease to exist and that idea ended up becoming the dominant fact of the next decade from 2007 until today when Facebook became extraordinarily focused on whatever it could do to continue growing year after year and one of the things they did was that they made it a platform for outside developers so that maybe you want explain what this means so that other software developers could reach into Facebook and use it. They made a big choice which was that instead of saying we're just going to be our own site we're actually going to try to become a platform like almost like an operating system the way that Windows used to be the you know the way that everybody went on to their personal computer and then you would build applications on top of that and that decision to open themselves up as a platform meant that they were then sharing data to a much larger group of of developers of programmers than they otherwise would and this turned out to be a. Full decision because if you fast forward many years later to you know what we all now know is the Cambridge analytical scandal that was it was directly a result of this decision to open themselves up as a platform because what they'd done was they'd allowed an academic researcher to use some of the data on the platform to build a personality quiz but then he sold that data to the political consultancy known as Cambridge analytic and that sort of back door the way in which that data went out the door has created much of the crisis that now engulfs the company today and you write that the executive within Facebook Sandy para kill us was put in charge of looking into what these outside you know app developers were doing with that the data that they got from the Facebook users who you know plugged into their games what did you find. What he found unnerved them sending para Kilis had joined Facebook in 2011 and was one of the people responsible for going out and figuring out whether the data that they were giving to developers was being misused in any way or you know were people violating privacy were they taking more data than they were supposed to and what he found was that they were in some cases programmers for instance were siphoning off people's pictures and their private messages in other cases he found a developer that was building centrally shadow profiles profiles for people who'd never given their consent. Including for children and it was you know this was a case in which there was just this feeling of it being the wild west this data was out there and nobody was paying attention and he raised alarms internally as he tells the story what he did was he said look we need to do a major audit to go out and figure out where is our data who has it and how are they using it and as he says he was told that's not going to happen because if you do it you may not want to know what you're going to find meaning. They may have already lost control of so much of that data that they didn't really want to discover the full reach and send us left but in many ways his warnings turned out to be prophetic because exactly the kind of undisciplined use of data which he had warned about and and tried to raise greater alarms about internally turned out to be the origins of the Cambridge analytical scandal which became so so consuming for the company this year so a lot of resources within the company devoted to pushing growth not so much and to doing it responsibly Yes exactly as he said that now I needed people I needed engineers to help me try to police where this data was going but all of their resources were going to growth he said at some point he told me that the growth team had engineers coming out of their ears they had everything they wanted everything was devoted to growing and it was not devoted to making sure that what they were doing at the time was safe what are some of the other things the company did to keep growing that kind of pushed the boundaries of privacy. Well they began to build in lots of ingenious details into the design of the site things like auto play video this is something as simple as changing the nature of Facebook so that when you scroll down your page that the videos would begin to play without you having to click on them what that was was essentially taking advantage of some of our own psychological wiring that means that just a limiting that small obstacle makes you much more likely to stay on the site to watch that ad and ultimately to consume whatever advertising is around it and they did other things they for instance you know you remember in the very beginning Facebook used to have pages single pages you have to click on to the next page they got rid of that so it's just a continuous scroll and all of these little tiny details. Were in a way making Facebook into a new generation of behavioral experts they figured out how do you tweak people's vanities and their passions and their susceptibilities and their desires in order to keep them on the site the most important thing Facebook could do and this is how they measured it was make sure that people war were signing on and staying on whenever you joined the company in your orientation you were taught about something very important a metric known as El 6 of 7 which means the number of people who logged in 6 of the last 7 days and whatever you could do to try to raise that l 6 of 7 that was the priority. But as somebody put it to me the problem with that is that eventually you exhaust the positive ways of boosting that engagement and eventually you start to look at what this person described as the dark patterns the ways that you can use anxiety or vanity to try to get people to sign on one of the things they discovered for instance was if you send somebody an email that says that a Facebook friend has uploaded a picture of them to Facebook that people are almost incapable of resisting the temptation to look and that sort of tweak that just minor behavioral nudge turned out to be. Really hugely important to the growth of Facebook Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker we'll talk some more after a short break this is Fresh Air support for k.c. You come from City of Santa Cruz street smarts campaign reminding bicyclists to ride defensively and visibly in the same direction as cars obey traffic signals and signs and use a helmet and hand signals and from shipped with ship to members place an order in the mobile lab and a personal shopper hand picks and delivers the things they need from fresh groceries to household essential more at. Dot com. This is Fresh Air and we're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos he has a piece in the magazine called Ghost In The Machine about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and its current controversies it's in a recent issue. Now Facebook is in a lot of trouble these days because of data breaches it role in elections but you're right that some former Facebook executives are voicing doubts about the company's role for other things exacerbating isolation outrage addictive behaviors you know give us an example this is a big change for Facebook traditionally its former executives have been silent they leave the company and very often don't say much about it starting last year Sean Parker who was Facebook's 1st president he's a sort of well known Silicon Valley figure gave an interview in which he said that as he put it he's become a conscientious objector to social media he said God knows what it's doing to our children's brains and then a few days later there was another very prominent former Facebook executive named who had been the head of growth a vice president of user growth which was an absolutely central position at the company for a number of years and he came out and said you know in the back of our minds we all had a sense that something might be going wrong that our product with thing that we were building I'm paraphrasing here was as he put it contributing to the breakdown of social discourse the breakdown of society and he said he would never let his children use this kind of product I think because the public face of the company has been so on message about how they contribute in their minds to doing good in the world to have some very senior former executives come out and talk about what the public has come to believe which is that there are these very serious side effects to the company's growth was a real wake up call externally and I think somewhat internally yes side effects in terms of increasing you know social tensions and in some cases violent political activity what about isolation addictive behaviors. There has been a growing body of research that shows and it's been published in sort of the major scientific and academic journals that there is a correlation in some cases between heavy Facebook use and decreased sense of Well Being a sense of connection people feel lonely there is a lot that they're trying to figure out about this but it's gotten to the point where the data is unimpeachable and the company has begun to acknowledge it you heard for the 1st time early this year that Facebook said look we recognize that there are different ways that you can use this and if you're just using it passively if you're just sitting there scrolling with glazed eyes hour after hour of we recognize this is not good for you and so what they did is they said we're going to try to change it a bit so that people are more actively engaged so that they're you know talking to friends actively communicating with their family members and stuff like that but that was a key difference from how they used to talk about it which was that if you didn't agree with the fundamental premise that Facebook was basically good then it was a kind of heresy and they wouldn't want to have the conversation they are now slowly acclimating to the idea that people just don't buy that anymore you know you talk to Zucker Berg a fair amount about this you know pushing of boundaries of privacy to grow how does he regard this kind of experimentation where he absorbed a central belief early on in his career and I think it's become just key to understanding why he's made choices that he has and some of the mistakes that he has which is that he decided early on that he was very often going to be criticized he said look this is just a fact of what we do is he said look we're not selling dog food here we're doing something in head intensely inherently controversial it's at the intersection of psychology and technology and. So when people criticize Facebook for being. Too casual about their privacy for allowing data to be took to get out into the world. Very often what he came to believe was that they would criticize him at the time but over time eventually they would accept it they would get used to it and they would keep signing on they would keep growing and that idea about criticism. Really hardened and became a central governing principle at Facebook this sense that they were leaders they were pioneers they were forging ahead they had to push the public beyond its comfort zone when it came to being less private because if they didn't do it then people wouldn't wouldn't go there but they were convinced that even in the cases of controversy when you had civil libertarians or regulators or politicians or ordinary member of the public complaining about Facebook that that was simply a sign that they were being bold and that idea continued really until until the present day is it true that in 2010 he said privacy is no longer a social norm he did and it caused a big uproar at the time he said look this is a generational difference we don't feel the same way about privacy that our parents and grandparents did and people said that's that's wild that's not right privacy is built into the very nature of the United States it's in it's really in bedded in the Bill of Rights and. His belief was that it was as well as it was often described an antique and that we needed to push people further there was in the early days of Facebook there was a. Of fema a phrase that was bandied about called radical transparency the idea that you had to be aggressively transparent in order. To be modern The sense was as one person had put it. You know that in the future because of Facebook and other things like it they were exploding the boundaries of privacy that extramarital affairs would become impossible people couldn't hide things like that they could no longer hide their lives outside of work from their lives and work and they believe that to be a virtue this sense that there would be this fusion this union of our private selves and our public selves but that put them at odds with the public and the key fact I think was that over and over again Mark Zuckerberg believed that being at odds with the public was not a sign you were doing something wrong it was a sign that you were doing something innovative and there there montra their motto of course became move fast and break things and that motto really captured the way that they see the world now almost like redefining what it is to be human. Yeah they believe that this that this tool Facebook had that kind of power and and they came to being at a time in Silicon Valley where you were you had this almost messianic sense of ambition this belief that you weren't just building computer applications you were actually building tools that were fundamentally reshaping society and they embrace that wholeheartedly. There was a recent data breach at Facebook where 50000000 users information was taken by somebody how serious a problem is this this is a serious one this is the largest security breach in Facebook's history and what was unusual about this and what sets it apart from other cases like Cambridge analytical was that this was outright theft this was a case of hackers or hacker we still don't know who it was. Finding centrally under protected door and walking through it and taking control of at least 50000000 Facebook user accounts Facebook also. To be safe took another 40000000 users and kicked them off and forced them to log back in so it may be as many as 90000000 or more that were affected by this and in this case the hackers were able to get total control of the accounts so they were able to get control of your privacy settings they could go in your messages they could post things on your behalf that at this point Facebook says they haven't found any evidence of these hackers doing that so that only heightens the mystery they don't know why they did it they don't know if this was a foreign government or if this were individuals if this was a criminal act but what's interesting about this particular case and why it really leaps out to people who study the history of Facebook is that a few years ago Facebook might not have gone public with this is fast as they did they would have they would have probably investigated it more internally but under the new rules that haven't been imposed by the European Union they were required to announce this very fast and as a result they had to talk about this breach really before they know very much about it so it's raised as many questions as it's answered at this point we're listening to the interview Fresh Air's Dave Davies recorded with Evan Osnos a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as his article about Facebook is titled ghost in the machine can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy we'll hear more of the interview after a break I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air. 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And from the Westside farmers market featuring heirloom apples specialty peppers and local pears the west side farmer's market is open 9 am to 1 pm Saturdays at Mission Street extension at Western drive. By This is Steve Inskeep from n.p.r. News I'm thinking of that New Yorker cartoon where one person at a party turns to another person at the party and says and that's not just my opinion it's the opinion of somebody on n.p.r. Next time you're at a cocktail party you can be ready for some scintillating conversation if you keep up with the news by listening in the mornings to Morning Edition from n.p.r. News to start your Friday with Morning Edition till 9 am here on 90.3 k.z. You. This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross let's get back to the interview Fresh Air's Dave Davies recorded with Evan Osnos about his recent New Yorker article ghosts in the machine can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy Osnos profile Zuckerberg and writes about how Zuckerberg relentless drive to expand Facebook's reach has jeopardized the privacy of its users and made vulnerable to political manipulation . Of discussion about Facebook being used to exacerbate social and political tensions in the United States there are also serious questions about it being a catalyst for political violence in other parts of the world for example. Once Facebook in effect saturated the Western world it began to move more aggressively into developing countries and as it did as it moved into places like India and Sri Lanka and me and Maher. Really became a powerful new ingredient and a dangerous new ingredient in some cases into these longstanding ethnic and religious rivalries in me and Mar For instance when Facebook arrived it really became in effect the Internet there was only about one percent of the population that was online before Facebook was there and then over the course of the next few years it grew rapidly and. People who were interested in fomenting this kind of ethnic hatred between Buddhists and Muslims figured out how to use Facebook to great effect and they would spread hoaxes or rumors and in there were cases where a rumor or hoax that was spread on Facebook directly contributed to the outbreak of a riot and what you heard over that period was that people in Myanmar began to talk to the company warned the company that this was a problem as early as 2013 people began visiting Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park giving presentations talking about the problem of ethnic violence being trafficked on Facebook and the company would listen in some cases they would give a hearing to that view and it would over the years they continue to visit activists and technology entrepreneurs for me and more but they didn't see any fundamental change and and they were start every time they went they would they would hear very often the same message which was we're going to hire dozens of Burma's language speakers to be able to police this kind of thing more effectively but still fundamentally it didn't change and. And eventually it became so pronounced the role of Facebook as a catalyst in this violence became so serious that earlier this year the u.n. Investigator in charge of probing the persecution of the writing of Muslim minority in Myanmar described the role of Facebook as in her words a beast she said it has become something that it was never intended it is actively contributing to this what the u.n. Now considers a genocide did you talk to Mark Zuckerberg about this I did and I asked him about it and at 1st he was he was. Frankly a little glib about it he said look this is a problem that is similar in a lot of places and it's one that we're that we're dealing with I'm paraphrasing there and I pushed him on and I said I talked to people in Myanmar just yesterday in fact. And they're baffled about why a company as big and as as rich and as innovative as Facebook has been unable to deal with this problem and what he said was we take this seriously we really do understand this is a problem but it's not something in which you can just snap your fingers and solve it overnight it takes a process you have to build out these systems in order to allow artificial intelligence to detect hate speech and then hire the kinds of people who can who can solve the problem he said that they're going to have over 100 people Bernie speakers who are going to be policing the Facebook in me in mind but I think it speaks to a broader broader for dynamic at work here which is that for a long time as one of Mark Zuckerberg friends said to me when there were complaints about the company he either thought that these were just let these were people who were slow to embrace technology or in other cases they were exaggerating or overstating the role that Facebook was playing he looked at a place like me and Martin said well they were probably going to be fighting Anyway I'm putting words in his mouth there those are not words he said to me. But I think over time he has come to this realisation and by his own description a belated realisation that Facebook is not just a tool on the table it is not just a new implement it is in fact a fundamental and very wrists by its own nature it has to be responsible for the forces that it unleashes but then building the systems to try to get control of this is is hard and they have moved much more slowly than they should have in some cases by their own admission Let's talk about the 26000 elections did Facebook when the election was approaching see this as a big revenue opportunity. They did they saw this as a important moment they Sheryl Sandberg in a call with investors and analysts compared it to the World Cup or the Super Bowl with a chief operating officer you know she is yeah she's sort of arguably the 2nd most powerful person at Facebook and and what she said was this was going to be a major opportunity for them to sell ads political ads that were projections at the time were that as candidates and political organizations became more aware of the importance of the Internet that they were going to shift a lot of their spending from television into the Internet and that that you were going to see a 9 or 10 fold increase in how much spending was going to be available and Facebook wanted to be a big recipient of that right and it had gotten a special exemption to print ads which didn't disclose who paid for them right so the so that was kind of a wide open opportunity yet Facebook had used its lobbying power it had. It had argued to the Federal Election Commission that it should be exempted from rules that require television advertising to be identified by the source of the funding you know that point at the end where they I say who who paid for the ad they said we shouldn't have to follow those rules because we're a new technology and in their filings they said you don't want to stifle the growth of new innovation but as a result that meant that it was in a sense of very dark terrain that things that were being posted on Facebook that were ads around politics were in many cases of mysterious origin it was very hard to know who was posting them and why and Facebook offered to embed a Facebook employee with both the Clinton and Trump campaigns to help the campaigns use the platform effectively how did they respond to the Clinton campaign rejected the offer. They thought they had more or less enough of their own technical capability to do it but the Trump campaign embraced it eagerly they were a much smaller almost sort of shoestring operation they had very little of the season political expertise that was rallying around other presidential candidates and so fake. Book moved employees into the Trump campaign headquarters and they helped them craft their messages they helped him figure out how to reach the largest possible audience how to test different messages many many messages a day to figure out just what small differences changing the background color or changing the text or the font how that would impact the did number of people that would click on it and ultimately might give money and support the candidate so later in the end when after Donald Trump won the election the senior campaign strategists were very clear as one of them Terry song said to an interviewer without Facebook we would not have won they played an absolutely essential role in the process how did the Trump campaign itself use the platform to affect things like turnout. Well one of the things they did was the Trump campaign bought an ad campaign on Facebook that was designed to suppress turnout among constituencies that they expected to be important to the Democrats including African-Americans and young liberals and white women and by by targeting that population using these incredibly powerful tools of persuasion that Facebook has which I really have been engineered to to optimize to get people to respond. In the view of the Trump campaign that was an important piece of their success and they've talked about it ever since Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker we'll talk some more after a short break this is Fresh Air support for k.c. You comes from chamber music moderate Bay percent ing the fan Creek quartet performing works by Schubert legatee and rebel 730 Saturday Oct 6th at the sunset center in Carmel details that chamber music moderate dot org k.z. You is a proud media sponsor of the Santa Cruz surf Elm festival a tribute to wave writing and filmmaking October 5th and 6th at the Rio theater in Santa Cruz more ad. Org slash sponsored events. On top of breaking news it's practically a full time job actually it's my full time job and I'm here to help you keep on Jonathan Capehart host of America on the line a national news in Holland show about the midterm elections from w n y c radio every Monday through Thursday we have all the latest developments analysis and updates on the races America on the national conversation about. America on the line tonight at 9.3 k.z. You. Support for n.p.r. Comes from this station I'm from tire rock offering a tire decision guide to help customers find tires that fit their car and driving conditions with a network of more than 7000 independent installers tire dot com helping drivers find deliver install. And from Cancer Treatment Centers of America offering immunotherapy and other personalized treatment options to address patients individual needs more about precision cancer treatment at Cancer Center dot com We're speaking with Evan Osnos he is a staff writer for The New Yorker his piece about Martin Zucker Berg and face book Ghost In The Machine is in a recent issue of the magazine so when word began to emerge about the spread of false information on Facebook some of it by by Russian actors we now know about the internet research agency in Russia how did sucker bird respond to this. Initially he rejected it he said it just seems as he put it pretty crazy that the presence of fake news might have affected the outcome of the 2016 election he said that just a few days after the results were in. Since then. Initially Facebook was really reluctant to embrace this idea that they played a meaningful role in the election with Mark Warner and Senator from Virginia who's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee contacted Facebook shortly after the election and said he really wanted to talk about the role of of Russian interference on Facebook and as he put it to me they were completely dismissive they they just didn't believe that they had a serious role to play here over time they have come to understand that that's simply not the case they initially they'd estimated that about fewer than 10000000 Facebook users might have been might have been affected by Russian just information and they later had to revise that in preparation for testimony in Congress and they said actually as many as maybe 150000000 Facebook users were affected by Russian descent from ation And what's remarkable about that is is how efficient it was actually as a as a conduit for just information because the Russian Internet research agency which was reporting to the Kremlin had fewer than 100 members of its staff on this project and yet they were able to reach a size 150000000 Facebook users that is extraordinary and it was I think to this day Facebook is struggling with that fundamental paradox which is that on the one hand their business and their success depends on their ability to tout their powers of persuasion they are telling advertisers we can encourage users to listen to you to believe in you and to act on what you're telling them and yet at the same time they're trying to say that they have not had this dispositive effect on our politics and that is a contradiction. Right and then there was the Cambridge analytical scandal in which you know it emerged that a firm working for the Trump campaign had acquired the personal data of what 87000000 Facebook users that's right so the company was in big trouble Zuckerberg went before Congress carefully prepped of course how to do. Well there is a lot riding on that appearance you know it in many ways a kind of felt like a trial here here he was on behalf of the company going in front of Congress and there was growing calls for regulation and. He in some ways vastly exceeded expectations and that was because largely because Congress showed itself to be. Really extraordinarily unprepared to deal with the complexity of Facebook they just simply didn't ask the kinds of questions that would have really gotten to the heart of Facebook's operations and how it makes choices so much so that it one point Orrin Hatch Senator from Utah said to Mark Zuckerberg if you don't charge customers then how do you make any money and Zuckerberg kind of gave a little smile and said Senator we run ads it was such an obvious fact to anybody who's paid attention to technology that it really I think underscored the mismatch between the scale investment and sophistication of these companies and Congress's inability to come up with the laws and the rules that can respond to them in real time maybe you could just explain that a bit I mean Facebook makes a fortune by digital heads how does it work you know in some ways Facebook is actually a little bit like a newspaper in the sense that the way that it pays for itself is by running ads alongside the content that people post and look for on there so on any given moment when you go on Facebook you will find these highly targeted ads these are things that are chosen just for you based on your browsing behavior around the Internet based on the posts that you clicked on the things that you look for. They choose ads that you are much more likely to click on then you would if they were just sending the same ad to everybody else and that formula that ability to micro target as it's known ads to specific users has been this extraordinary geyser of business success they. They just stumbled on something that was. Able to generate returns for companies that kept them coming back over and over again and advertising on Facebook. And the company is taking steps certainly says it's taking steps to monitor the the content that political players are using the platform for and that you know is arguably critical as we approach the midterms it's also pretty tricky right I mean how do you distinguish spin from fakery or you know dangerous content from distasteful How is the company doing this. It's become this consuming effort you know Facebook over the last year as they've as the controversy has grown they've undertaken one initiative after another so when it comes to political election advertising for instance what they said was Ok even though for years we argued that we shouldn't have to disclose the funding sources for political ads now we are going to not only do that but we're going to go farther than t.v. Does we're going to let users be able to click on an ad and then know not only who paid for it but what other ads to those people pay for and who are they targeting. They're also saying we're going to do more to defend against the kind of dissin from Asian campaigns what they call coordinated inauthentic behavior essentially misinformation that's distributed to try to shape elections not only the United States but in other countries and they've had to in many ways Dave it's almost like they've begun to take on some of the qualities of a government you know they've had to hire people who actually worked in the u.s. Government on things like misinformation. In order to try to ferret out efforts by Russian officials or in one case there was an Iranian campaign to try to spread misinformation but what we don't know and really won't know until after the midterm elections in the u.s. And the elections that come to follow are whether or not that's that's working and I think what's interesting is that Facebook on has become much more public these days in terms of talking about when it finds examples of this information it will announce it will say we took down a group of Russian imposters who are seeking to affect American voting behavior for instance. But that's either a sign that they're winning the battle or it's a sign that the battle has grown so much that they're going to continue to face this and what I'm struck by is how much the integrity in the credibility of elections now rests on the shoulders of individual employees inside a private company in California that's a very unusual situation for our democracy to be in because they can actually make distinctions about what what the public sees and what it doesn't yes yeah I mean they have to make very subtle choices take for example the you know misinformation What is the definition of misinformation when is somebody being wronged by accident and when is somebody being wrong on purpose when are they trying to deceive large numbers of public those kinds of very subtle things which are usually the province of the Supreme Court or of lawmakers are now being handled in conference rooms at Facebook and it's very complicated Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker His piece The Ghost In The Machine about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook appeared in a recent issue we'll talk some more after a short break this is Fresh Air I'm Marco Werman You know the women who clean hotel rooms and turn down the beds they feel vulnerable to sexual assault by hotel guests you don't come with the price of the room this housekeepers fed up I'm there to work to make a living to be assaulted she is joining other housekeepers in the u.s. And worldwide to demand protection on the job hotel workers say me too on the world . Join us for the world Friday evening at 6 on 90.3 k. a Z u. An armed African-American teenager was shot and killed in the next Radiolab how many people do we see killed by the police each year are police shooting more black people white people we don't know there's no national statistics on no one keeps accurate statistics on police shooting I've met 100 other mothers whose lost their children I could not believe that my profession in some cases is that out of control that's on the Next Radio Radiolab Thursday night at 8.3 k.z. You. This is Fresh Air and we're speaking with Evan Osnos who's a staff writer for The New Yorker his story Ghost In The Machine about Martin Zucker Berg and Facebook appears in a recent issue of the magazine they recently took down a post from Alex Jones of Info Wars you want to tell us that tell us about yeah this was a really important case study in how Facebook is going to deal with its most complicated problem in some sense which is content what do you simply do with the fact that people are posting a 1000000000 items of content to Facebook every day that's the actual number and. What they've tried to do is to say Ok we're we're going to punish hate speech we're going to prevent hate speech from being on here but for things that are less than hate speech if it's just misinformation or things that appear to be wrong by accident well then we're not going to ban that person from Facebook we're going to try to use other tools we may make their posts less visible we might share them last but the case of Info Wars which as we all know is a conspiracy Web site led by Alex Jones and. For years it has promoted in particular the falshood it's a false conspiracy theory that that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged it was a hoax and it was designed to try to advance an anti gun agenda that's the theory and for years people have complained to Facebook about it they said this really has risen to the level of harassment of the parents who are who are the whose children were killed Sandy Hook and. This summer people started to criticize the company more publicly and said look you need to remove in 4 wars this is no longer normal content they disqualify themselves from being a part of civil discourse here by by by directing all of this harassment at the parents and then there was the parents of one of the children at Sandy Hook wrote an open letter quite candid and very tough directed at Mark Zuckerberg and said that they've been driven into hiding because a. They're as they put it in explicable battle with Facebook to try to get this kind of material taken down so that they don't have to deal with trolls and people who are you know discovering their address and then and then threatening them online and finally this summer Apple took down in full wars is pod cast and then very soon thereafter Facebook and other companies followed suit and I talked to Mark Zuckerberg about it I said why did you wait this year why did you wait so long why did you wait so long to take down this thing that people had so clearly complained about and he said Well. We don't want to punish people who are just wrong we don't want to ban them from Facebook what we're trying to do is figure out how to shape this thing and he acknowledged in effect that because Apple had moved on this that he said you know at that point we realized we had to make a decision we had to get we had to get rid of this and so we did it but from my perspective what was interesting about this was that this is the very beginning of an issue for Facebook this is not the end I mean this is just the front edge of an unbelievably complex problem which is what are the bounds of free speech what do we actually want to be able to have and what do we consider to be out of bounds what is in effect shouting fire in a crowded theater and what is legitimate provocative unsavory speech and these are some of the hardest problems that we face and they're now in the hands of let's face it they're in the hands of the engineers the people who created this incredibly powerful application you know there's lots of 1st Amendment law that says the government can't you know distinguish types of speech and prohibit it. Is it clear that a private company like Facebook can when it's this big Well that actually of Facebook as a private company can do whatever it wants on speech if they decided tomorrow that you couldn't talk about golden retrievers on Facebook they could put that rule in place and I think for some reason that you know we find ourselves really torn you even if you're not a fan of info. Wars and God knows I'm not it has to make a person uneasy to know that there is now a company which is capable of deciding not only what kind of information it's going to suppress but also which kind of information it's going to promote and on any given day there are people who are going to be offended by those choices. But the tools that by which Facebook is held accountable are not the tools that we use in politics it's not like you vote the bums out it's not like people are appointed to Facebook's board as if they were Supreme Court justices this is a case in which a private company is making profound choices about the contours and the boundaries of political expression and we don't have obvious tools with which to regulate them you know when you look at the arc of the story I mean this company founded by Mark Zuckerberg has this astonishing growth is deeply committed to growth and in doing so you know compromises privacy and ends up. You know sharing data it shouldn't about its users and gets into some trouble and a question arises about whether the company has the ability. Has the capacity for self reflection whether it can take you know adverse information and reexamine its assumptions and practices that in many respects this really comes down to Zuckerberg What did you find about that. I found that he is insulated to I think an unhealthy degree from this kind of criticism and if he was sitting with me right now I would say this directly the reality is he's built the company in his own image he's had the luxury of sculpting an organization to his like I mean quite literally the blue color that Facebook has as its signature blue is chosen because he is red green color blind and he prefers to look at the color blue he can see a very distinctly so in every way both physical and spiritual this company reflects his sensibilities but in order to be able to continue to grow and evolve and respond to the problems that it's encountered he need. People sitting in the room with him who will tell him Mark I think you're not seeing this the right way you're not seeing this clearly you're wrong and I was struck that in our interviews I got the sense from him that he knows that on some level he's tried over the years to make these choices to get outside what he described as as as as the bubble he's got 5 people who report directly to him and they are all people who he has in effect chosen and installed in those positions and there is very few there are very few people at Facebook who are willing to stick their neck out and say I fundamentally disagree we need to do things differently. You know at the end of this piece you write that some people think of Mark Zuckerberg as an Atomic Tom with little regard for the human dimensions of his work and you say not exactly the truth is something else what's the truth. The truth is that he is at peace with what he has done with the choices that he has made I I came to really understand that Mark Zuckerberg in his own conception of his place in history believes that no change happens painlessly and that change is difficult and in many ways it's like his inspiration Augustus Caesar he he believes that he's made tradeoffs that he has in order to grow he had to give up perfection if he wanted to be vastly influential than he couldn't always be quite as safe as people wanted him to be and in his mind and in the mind of the people around him they are vindicated by their sheer scale and success and for that reason it's very hard for them to accept that the public is how ling in many cases for real change because they believe if we had given in to the critics at every step along the way and made changes then we wouldn't be as big as we are today Evan Osnos thanks so much for speaking with us thanks very much for having me Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker His article about face book is titled ghosts in the machine can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy. If you'd like to catch up. Like our interview with Washington Post national security correspondent Greg Miller author of the new book The Apprentice Russia and the Subversion of American democracy check out our podcast. Including my recent interview with pianist composer. Who leads the house late night with Stephen and was at the piano. New episodes of Murphy Brown. And. K.z. U. Is proud to be a sponsor of bookshop Santa Cruz announcing cookbook author chef and restaurant tour yodel model lengthy in conversation with some ino strut Sunday October 28th that peace United Church tickets at bookshop Santa Cruz dot com partly to mostly cloudy skies are in your forecast for Thursday night lows will be in the upper forty's to lower fifty's then sunny skies for Friday with a high are around 70 degrees in Santa Cruz 64 in Monterey tomorrow from California State University Monterey Bay This is listener supported 90.30 Pacific Grove Monterey Salinas Santa Cruz n.p.r. For the Monterey Bay area it's 8 o'clock before we start today's episode we much to know this broadcast contains tape that describes violent events some there is some profane language we beep it there's descriptions that may not be suitable for young children or sensitive listeners so please be forewarned. You know with. Your listening to Radio Lab radio from do you need me w n y c. Robert Krulwich Radio Lab And today. We're going to start this show with a with a fellow named been months Comrie a reporter for The Tampa Bay Times he's a guy we've had on the show before Ben say something. Then. Ok I think a good where we just want to know from you like what are you guys doing how are you doing it what are you thinking I'll start at the beginning yes started to gain you know what you're doing so after the Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson there was growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed when that became a national story there was a lot of bellyaching in the press how many people do we see killed in the United States about by the police each year how no one keeps accurate statistics there's currently no national statistics on police shootings law enforcement officer involved shootings and it struck me at the time that like what we react to is all anecdotal you know once in a while one of these things will catch fire to me or right Jason Harrison fandom. Will become sort of a national story and I personally was having trouble at processing that like number one is there. Is a trending one way or the other are police shooting more black people and white people just very simply you know the problem is we don't know we have no idea because nobody tracks these f.b.i. Doesn't state agencies don't for the most part that data doesn't exist somewhere when the police for in itself in the police department it does on the local level however it doesn't exist in any accurate way by a broader agency and I could tell you how many person actions there were. In Florida in 2011 using the f.b.i. Numbers or the number submitted for Department of Law Enforcement but I can't tell you how many times police shot somebody Now there have been a couple of organizations that have tried to keep track nationally but everything that's done so far is incomplete you know because most of those you know like the Guardian has an online database most of them rely on media reports so they're only really keeping track of the ones that sort of hits the public consciousness that's right so Ben and his editors thought let's do something that's more complete let's do something that's unprecedented. So the 1st study had Florida it's a 3rd biggest state demographics are pretty similar to the rest of the country and Florida has wonderful public records Lawson legally it's easier to get information in Florida than in a lot of other places and so. Set down in certain emailing every single police precinct in the entire state of Florida I think has sent 388 e-mails asking for 5 years worth of paper any paper generated when an officer fired a firearm and someone was injured or killed as a result of that shooting Now this involves a year of work County police departments getting lawyers involved this is a massive thing that involves probably no less than $100.00 people but eventually. Put together the most comprehensive police shooting database that we know of.