A Reckoning at Facebook

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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. Plus, The New Yorker’s Director of Photography, Joanna Milter, on her true passion: the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a real trade to bond.
0:03.0	The One World Observatory,
0:06.0	the straight of the block for West Boulevard and makes that right.
0:09.0	They're trying to answer questions about upward mobility in America.
0:14.0	The military strategist, it was profiled brilliantly hesitant.
0:17.0	I think if you could be defined this not culture of people. It was a kind of form of life on this planet that we haven't really seen before.
0:26.5	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC
0:32.7	Studios and The New Yorker.
0:35.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:38.7	A few months back, senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared in front
0:43.2	of the House Intelligence Committee, and they had been summoned to answer questions
0:47.3	about Russia's influence on the 2016 election.
0:51.4	You had a foreign government apparently buying thousands of dollars worth of advertising
0:56.0	to create discontent and discord in the 2016 election. So the bottom line is these platforms
1:04.5	are being used by people who wish us harm and wish to undercut our way of life.
1:10.3	Although like most congressional hearings, it wasn't really about information as such.
1:15.2	By then, everybody except maybe the president understood that Russian operatives had manipulated
1:20.2	social media on a wide scale. The hearings were about how much these companies would
1:26.5	acknowledge their culpability.
1:28.7	Nicholas Thompson follows technology and how it affects us more closely than just about anybody I know.
1:34.0	He was formerly my colleague at The New Yorker and is now the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine.
1:39.6	Thompson's cover article written by him and his colleague, Fred Vogelelstein is in the new issue of Wired,
	...

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