A Reckoning at Facebook

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Barack, Washington, Wickenden, News, Obama, Politics, Wnyc, Lizza, President

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2018

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We now know that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social media to sow division and undermine the election of 2016, and special counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted Russian nationals and Russian entities for this activity. During that period, however, Facebook executives kept their heads down, and the C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, denied and underplayed the extent of the damage. Now Zuckerberg is in a process of soul-searching, attempting to right Facebook’s missteps—even if it means less traffic to the site. Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired (formerly the editor of NewYorker.com), interviewed fifty-one current and former employees of Facebook for a Wired cover story, co-written with Fred Vogelstein, called “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World.” He tells David Remnick that the effort is not just lip service: for a business like Facebook, reputation really is everything.

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1:11.7	I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, David Remneck talks to Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine.
1:21.1	In a recent piece in Wired, Thompson wrote about Facebook's role in the 2016 presidential race and how the company is dealt with
1:28.8	the fallout from the election of Donald Trump.
1:34.5	A few months back, senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared in front
1:39.4	of the House Intelligence Committee and they had been summoned to answer questions about
1:43.9	Russia's influence on the 2016 election.
1:47.6	You had a foreign government apparently buying thousands of dollars worth of advertising to create discontent and discord in the 2016 election.
1:57.2	So the bottom line is these platforms are being used by people who wish us harm and wish to undercut our way of life.
2:06.6	Although like most congressional hearings, it wasn't really about information as such.
2:11.4	By then everybody except maybe the president understood that Russian operatives had manipulated social media on a wide scale. The hearings were about how much these companies would acknowledge their culpability.
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