A complaint you here a lot these days is that social media is full of garbage and blatant lies.

Russian fake news and Trump tweets, tabloid gossip and cancelling strangers, conspiracies

about Sandy Hook shooting and Pizza Gate and a million other things.

These unsavory hallmarks of our internet age have real

significant lasting consequences in the real world. Pizzagate inspired one man

to barge into a pizza store with an assault rifle

thinking he'd be freeing children from a sex trafficking ring

run by Democrats in Washington. Russian disinformation has played no small role in dividing Western societies,

fueling the extreme political movements plaguing America and Europe to this day.

The problem got so bad that in 2018 the Senate called Mark Zuckerberg to testify.

Could the man most influential in defining today's social media defend the monster it become?

In his opening statement referring to Facebook as a quote unquote tool for good and bad,

he admitted to the company's many failings.

It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

That goes for fake news for foreign interference in

elections and hate speech as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't

take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake, and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry."

It didn't have to be this way. It wasn't so long ago that we created the internet after all,

and back then at the time nearly everyone listening to this was alive,

the government was faced with a choice.

Make sure the internet is as clean and safe for everybody as possible or just let everyone

run wild. In hindsight, of course, you know which of those paths we chose. Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

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