Inside the Facebook Files

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. We’ll be talking about “The Facebook Files”—a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal about Facebook’s failures to mitigate harms on its platform. There’s a lot of critical reporting about Facebook out there, but what makes the Journal’s series different is that it’s based on documents from within the company itself—memos from Facebook researchers, identifying problems based on hard data, proposing solutions that Facebook leadership then fails or refuses to implement and contradicts in public statements. One memo literally says, “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly.”

To discuss the Journal’s reporting, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Horwitz, a technology reporter at the paper who obtained the leaked documents and led the team reporting the Facebook Files. What was it like working on the series? What's his response to Facebook's pushback? And why is there so much discontent within the company?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair
0:07.2	podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair.
0:14.7	That's patreon.com slash LawFair.
0:18.2	Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair
0:25.6	no bull and the aftermath.
0:30.6	People internally note that basically the tactics being used by the anti-vax people are
0:39.4	the same ones being used by the stop the steel movement, are the same ones being used
0:44.1	by the anti-vax people regarding measles.
0:47.4	And so like it's pretty clear there is a pattern here and there are some sort of areas
0:53.0	of open weakness and I guess I think that's the part that I think is sort of was frustrating
0:58.9	to a lot of people is that this was the fourth, fifth, sixth time in a row in the US context
1:05.0	alone that Facebook had seen this sort of behavior producing harm but they haven't really
1:11.4	figured out a way that they're comfortable with to ring it in.
1:16.9	I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast September 23rd 2021.
1:24.2	Today we're bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth or series on the online
1:28.7	information ecosystem.
1:30.0	We'll be talking about the Facebook files, a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal
1:36.1	about Facebook's failures to mitigate harms on its platform.
1:40.3	There's a lot of critical reporting about Facebook out there but what makes the journal
1:44.3	series different is that it's based on documents from within the company itself.
1:49.6	Memos from researchers within Facebook, identifying problems based on hard data, proposing solutions
1:56.7	that Facebook leadership then fails or refuses to implement and contradicts in public statements.
	...

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