I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, October 27th.

Facebook in the crisis of its life over its role in the crisis of other people's lives. The crisis at Facebook is being

caused by internal documents that are being called the Facebook Papers and have been shared with a

consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Francis Hogan. Here are a few of the headlines

the Facebook papers have generated in the last few days. From the New York Times,

internal alarm, public shrugs. Facebook's employees dissect its election role. From HuffPost,

Facebook froze as anti-vax comments, swarm users. From Vox, Wall Street doesn't care about the Facebook leaks. Mark Zuckerberg does.

USA Today from just this morning. Instagram's dangers to children unite liberal and conservative lawmakers who agree on little else.

And a few more from the times. In India, Facebook grapples with amplified version of its problems,

and Instagram struggles with fear of losing its pipeline, young users.

With me now as the writer of all those New York Times articles, Shira Frankel, Times technology reporter,

and co-author of the book, An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook's Battle

for Domination.

Shira, thanks for coming on today.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I want to walk you through some of the stories that you tell in these articles.

I think the listeners will find it really interesting to go point by point through a couple of them.

So let's begin with your article, internal alarm, public shrugs, Facebook's employees dissect its election role.

It begins with a Facebook employee who opened an experimental account in 2019, and she quickly discovered something alarming. Want to start with that story?

Sure. So this Facebook employee is a long-term researcher who likes to run these kinds of

experiments. She joins Facebook in a new user and then see where Facebook's algorithms take her.

...