Designing a Better Facebook
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, April Glaser is joined by guest co-host Max Read, an editor at New York magazine who covers technology and the internet.
First, April and Max talk about Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ apostasy. Last week, Hughes wrote a long op-ed in the New York Times about why he thinks the company that made him so wealthy should be broken up.
Then Katherine Lo joins the hosts to discuss how Facebook’s redesign will change how we communicate on the platform. These days she leads the content moderation team at a nonprofit called Meedan, which works with journalists on disinformation. While we talk a lot about how large social networks are governed—and misgoverned—it’s less frequent that we talk about how these platforms are designed, and how that can lead to toxic behavior.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 14. |
| 0:15.3 | First of all, I'd like to welcome my co-host for this week, Max Reed. Max is a writer and editor at New York Magazine where he writes |
| 0:22.0 | Life in Pixels, a column about the internet, and as he puts it, other signs of the Apocalypse. He's also the former editor-in-chief of Gawker. Max, thanks so much for co-hosting. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. So on today's show, we're going to talk about Chris uses apostasy. I always have a hard time pronouncing that word. |
| 0:39.7 | I think I said it right. |
| 0:41.0 | I think you got it right. |
| 0:41.9 | Okay. |
| 0:42.3 | He was a founder at Facebook and had a very long, I think like 6,000 word or so article in the New York Times at the end of last week. |
| 0:52.6 | I think it was Thursday about why Facebook should be |
| 0:55.8 | broken up into smaller pieces. And then we're going to talk to Catherine Lowe, a researcher |
| 1:00.3 | and a consultant specializing in online harassment. And she's going to talk to us about how |
| 1:04.4 | social media platforms should or could be designed differently in order to prevent the spread |
| 1:08.6 | of misinformation and harassment. And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best things we saw on the |
| 1:14.4 | web this week. |
| 1:15.1 | That's all coming up on if then. |
| 1:17.2 | So for news this week, we are going to talk about Chris Hughes. |
| 1:21.3 | In a 6,000-word op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, |
| 1:25.9 | posited that the company, which has made him super fucking rich, should now be broken up. |
| 1:31.7 | He said, the vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete, to come up with better products, has virtually disappeared. |
| 1:40.4 | This means there's less chance of startups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. |
| 1:46.0 | It also means less accountability on issues like privacy. |
| 1:49.1 | The solution of this, you says, is to increase competition, and the best way to do that is to break up the company he helped build. |
| 1:55.9 | He says this should be accompanied by creating a new federal regulatory agency that has expertise in tech companies |
... |
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