Mr. Harris Zooms to Washington

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back in January 2020, Tristan Harris went to Washington, D.C. to testify before the U.S. Congress on the harms of social media. A few weeks ago, he returned — virtually — for another hearing, Algorithms and Amplification: How Social Media Platforms’ Design Choices Shape Our Discourse and Our Minds. He testified alongside Dr. Joan Donovan, Research Director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy and the heads of policy from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The senators’ animated questioning demonstrated a deeper understanding of how these companies’ fundamental business models and design properties fuel hate and misinformation, and many of the lawmakers expressed a desire and willingness to take regulatory action. But, there’s still room for a more focused conversation. “It’s not about whether they filter out bad content,” says Tristan, “but really whether the entire business model of capturing human performance is a good way to organize society.” In this episode, a follow-up to last year’s “Mr. Harris Goes to Washington,” Tristan and Aza Raskin debrief about what was different this time, and what work lies ahead to pave the way for effective policy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's almost like listening to a hostage in a hostage video.
0:03.6	Nothing they're saying makes much sense until you realize there's a gun off stage holding
0:08.0	that their business model held to their head and is causing them to say the things that
0:11.2	they're saying.
0:12.2	Again, these are really good people.
0:14.0	We can't talk about the actual underlying issue because the business model is based on
0:17.6	this manipulation.
0:18.9	So this episode is Mr. Harris zooms to Washington just a little over a year ago, Tristan headed
0:26.4	to Congress to testify.
0:28.8	And April 27th of 2021, he was back and a lot has changed.
0:34.6	We've been through a pandemic, January 6th, a lot has happened.
0:38.6	And so Tristan was testifying to the subcommittee on privacy, technology, and the law on algorithms
0:46.3	and amplification, how social media platforms design choices shape our discourses and our minds.
0:52.6	So Tristan, what was different this time?
0:56.3	Yeah, great question.
0:57.6	So this time it was actually with a similar cast of characters, Joan Donovan, who is at the Harvard
1:03.3	Shore and Seen's dinner, focusing on studying on disinformation was there.
1:07.5	What I've learned over the last decade of studying the internet is that everything open
1:11.4	will be exploited.
1:13.5	Moreover, misinformation at scale is a feature of social media, not a bug.
1:19.2	Along with head of policy at Facebook, Monica Bickert.
1:22.8	This time though, we had the head of policy at YouTube and also at Twitter alongside.
	...

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