a, it s not just facebook, i just want to say that up front. when you hear president biden say facebook is killing people let s play the clip and hear your reaction since you worked there 11 years. they re killing people. the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. and they re killing people. how did you feel when you heard that? you know, brian, that was a truly stunning thing to hear. obviously it feels terrible to hear the president say something like that. now, i think your point is super important up front that there is a whole ecosystem of misinformation out there. it s important to understand what happens and the impacts of that ecosystem. you know, there s this debate back and forth of what impact is misinformation on facebook around a whole broad array of topics. but today this misinformation on vaccines that we could understand the impact. and that s the important point. there s this saying at facebook which is data wins arguments.
do they look at it enough? are they investing in the teams as fully as they should and getting other partners to look at that data the way they should? i don t think so. the new york times reported this week on internal clashes. what they called data wars involving this tool called crowd tangle. what is going on with this tool, and why does it matter? crowd tangle is a really great tool that takes public content and it s important that people know these are public posts and public content and makes a set of the data available to researchers and journalists to understand what things get interacted with on facebook. what are people clicking on, what are they commenting on and sharing. that helps them to research and understand the distribution or, sorry, the engagement with information on facebook. it s a critical tool that i ve heard from researchers that gives them an incredible ability to start to see some things but it s not complete. there s a whole array of information ar
so, brian, what else do viewers need to know? is there something we re leaving out here or something else that viewers need to know about what you said is a very hard problem and lack of transparency makes it harder? yeah. look, i think people need to understand that these are incredibly complex issues. when you re the person who s inventing the ship, you re not dreaming of the shipwreck. part of the problem is that there are optimists are building these things that don t dream of the bad outcomes. and we have great entities in the world that are really good at researching things and understanding the bad outcomes. the things that facebook can t dream of that are going to go wrong on the platform. this global community could really play a role in shaping things. it s not just the u.s., think about every country that facebook is in and every language and every context. that s incredibly hard. and if we don t have the companies being transparent, then we need to look at ways to create
i started to see after spending 11 years building things that i was proud of, i was concerned about the information that could be shared on the platform and it can impact communities large and small in ways that we don t understand. there wasn t being enough effort being put to really understand that. let s understand what it does. is facebook a radicalization engine? is it radicalizing millions of americans? i don t know. i d love to know. a great way for us to understand that is to have more access to the data that will give researchers and journalists and teams the ability to do that hard work. here s what facebook said when we booked you. they said we simply disagree with brian. we offer more transparency built around our quarterly transparency report, our realtime dashboard and our programs that grant researchers open access to privacy-protected data. are they basically saying you re not doing what we want but we are doing these other things so we are more transparent than t
and you could understand whether this is a massive problem or a smaller problem if everyone was looking at the same data. that s part of the problem is i feel like the president is left without the data that he needs to really understand what role facebook is playing in the issue. so the white house doesn t have the data, news outlets don t have the data. does facebook internally have the information? and do they look at it? do they want to know? yeah, so i think there s a couple of layers here. one, facebook absolutely has the data. you know, these are the misinformation that you talked about up front, these kinds of sources, whether it s tucker carlson or alex jones or others or a broad array of people who create the misinformation, because remember, there s not people at facebook making the misinformation. there are other people who create it and then it gets distributed on facebook and it goes viral. so facebook absolutely has that data. and they look at it. but do they look