Jeff Horwitz on Broken Code and Reporting on Facebook
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2023
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “Broken Code”—which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as Meta.
On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Jeff along with Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill—and also someone with close knowledge of Meta from his own time working at the company. They discussed Jeff’s reporting and debated what his findings tell us about how Meta functions as a company and how best to understand its responsibilities for harms traced back to its products.
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| 1:00.7 | Search Crisis Christmas appeal. This just was a kind of almost a hostile |
| 1:13.4 | was a kind of almost a hostile environment to anything that was a departure from the straight growth platform and in fact I think some of the people in newsfeed ranking even used the |
| 1:18.0 | words user value was synonymous with usage time. |
| 1:23.0 | In other words, we increased user value |
| 1:24.6 | means that people spent more time in the platform. |
| 1:27.8 | And that was viewed as being an inherent good, |
| 1:29.9 | which, again, I'm not saying there might not be a correlation but that seems |
| 1:35.0 | shall we say like you're you're deliberately setting yourself up to miss things. |
| 1:39.8 | I'm Quinta Jressic a senior editor editor at Law Fair, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, December 20, |
| 1:47.0 | 2023. |
| 1:49.2 | Today we're bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem. |
| 1:55.5 | In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop, a series of articles about Facebook's |
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