Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about a book that's both distressing and inspiring,

The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth, and Why I Ble I blew the whistle on Facebook. It comes out today.

My guest, Francis Hogan, the author, described herself as an American data scientist,

algorithmic product manager, and whistleblower.

Interesting to me, in that order.

And now she is also an advocate for transparency and accountability in social media.

She will be known to many of you as the woman who

worked at Facebook in 2019 in its civic integrity department, ultimately disclosing tens of

thousands of pages of internal documents to the SEC and the Wall Street Journal, documents that

reveal Facebook's awareness of the role it was playing in radicalization and political violence.

Frances, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for inviting me.

Happy to be here.

We met at a dinner in Vancouver recently where you told the story of the shift in Facebook's

algorithm in a way that had the most refreshing clarity.

Can I ask you to summarize that as if you were speaking to someone thinking about going

on Facebook for the first time? One of the reasons I wrote my book was I wanted people to

understand how different the algorithms that drive TikTok, the drive Facebook are from the kinds

of algorithms that drove, let's call it Web 1.0, so things like

Google search and bulletin boards, you know, that kind of thing. When it comes to something like

Google, you can have, because everyone in the world sees the same thing, you can have things

...