Hello and welcome to the Longform podcast. I'm Aaron Lammer, your co-host. We've got a special

episode for you today with Ryan Mack and Craig Silverman. They both write for Buzzfeed news

and over the course of the year leading up to the elections. They wrote about how Facebook

was handling misinformation and the consequences of some of those decisions which culminated in the

Capitol riots in January. The series won the 2020 George Polk Award for Business Reporting.

So here it is, my interview with Ryan Mack and Craig Silverman.

Welcome, Ryan Mack and Craig Silverman. Congratulations on your Polk.

Thank you. Thank you. How did you both originally come to be reporting on Facebook Together?

It's been weird because Craig and I are really not dedicated Facebook beat reporters. I kind of cover

corporate accountability for tech companies for our tech desk at Buzzfeed. Craig, what do you do

exactly? What do I do? My title is Media Editor but that was the title that I was given because it's

the most close approximation that we could think of years ago. I mean I have been in a lot of ways

kind of been a media reporter but really reporting on our information ecosystem and how it is

manipulated and abused and I don't think you can dig into that and dig into disinformation

without of course bumping up against Facebook and so I think we've been coming at it from

different angles and it just happened that last summer we happened to converge on it and kind of

team up for a bunch of stories that started really with stuff that Ryan had been gathering a lot

from inside the company and putting a lot of that together with what's happening on the platform

and outside the company. For those I don't know, Craig is the guy that coined the term fake news.

Like literally, God found the Macedonian teens, coined the term and then it went from there and

thanks Craig for the last four years or whatever. You're welcome everybody. Donald Trump has kind of

taken that term. It's kind of his now. I gift it to him and don't want anything to do with it

...