A politically conservative mom from north carolina, from wilmington, north carolina, she expressed in her facebook profile an interest in politics, and parenting and christianity and followed just a few other facebook accounts, including fox news, and president trump: and that s it. just sort of a bare bones profile, and this fake account, this carol smith account never expressed any interest in conspiracy theories of any kind. but nevertheless it only took two days that facebook recommended that that person, carol smith should join groups dedicated to qanon, that democrats are a secret cabal of satan worshipping pedophiles and will be executed in a mass public execution at guantanamo, really, carol, so soon, and even though the researcher running the fake account did not engage with those groups, with those
Want to buy an ad on facebook, you know who you go to, you go to facebook. you go to the dealers. every part of this is controlled by facebook. the pricing, the buyers, the sellers, every part of it. but the other part is that they understand the political risks that a company like this threatens. also, we now have someone in the justice department who had shown that he has the courage to stand up to monopolists like facebook, so i m really encouraged. we have good laws. i d like to strengthen them, but we have good laws on the books, and we have people who i believe are going to be willing to pick up those laws and start using them. it will be a tough fight, but my money s on them. in terms of getting to the kind of goal that you re talking about, whether or not the breakup of facebook ultimately
Campaign, facebook announced that any ad paid for by a political candidate would be exempt from facebook s fact checking protocols. the practical implication of that is exactly what you think, politicians were formally allowed on facebook to spread any lie they wanted about their opponents with total impunity. that, for example, is how donald trump was allowed to run facebook ads falsely accusing joe biden of corruption. with her deliberately transparently false ads, senator warren set out not only to test the system but also to demonstrate how dangerous facebook could be with only stupid rules in place, without proper safeguards in place to make sure they weren t just spreading known base lies. that was just in response to the policies of facebook that we knew about publicly. as we now start to learn more about how facebook operated behind the scenes, how the company s own recommendations and internal incentives steer everyday people to violence and conspiracies and hate all over
Test feed s news feed is a constant barrage of misinformation, violence, and gore. again, just by following facebook s recommendations. now, in response to these test cases, facebook has pointed to changes it says it knead to make the platform safer. it also has made progress in working to stop abuse in countries where there s a heightened risk of conflict and violence. it s clear that the problems that tech giants like facebook are both facing and creating are complex, but are also really really not getting better over time. and if we are looking to these companies to show bravery and backbone, so far the evidence that they are capable of that or inclined in that way is getting worse over time. worse over time, and seemingly acutely worse recently. how do we solve for that. and who is in charge of solving for that. senator elizabeth warren joins us about that and more next. r es
Up those laws and start using them. it will be a tough fight, but my money s on them. in terms of getting to the kind of goal that you re talking about, whether or not the break up of facebook ultimately happens, and i hear you when you describe why it s more likely than it previously was. is there room for the congress essentially to establish regulation in this field around human rights and around the protections for pluralistic democracies. i mean, if facebook had been compelled by u.s. law to not respond to a dictator, to not respond to the putin regime in russia, and take actions to disadvantage opposition political candidates, if they were constrained by u.s. law in terms of how they were able to answer demands like that, would that make a difference? sure. we could have written much better laws over the last decade to be able to constrain. now, it s tough, you know, we ve got lots of free speech issues, and the regulation would be