we're eight days away roger from judgment day but there's a chance it won't be just one day uh that the results could take some time are these platforms ready obviously not you know i think that what we've learned emily is that the root cause of disinformation the root cause of hate speech and conspiracy theories you know those things have always existed but on the internet platform specifically on facebook on youtube instagram and twitter the business model and the algorithms that make these companies so successful amplify hate speech disinformation conspiracy theories as really the lubricant for
the business model and it has been an enormously successful strategy that has undermined democracy pretty fundamentally and this election is really where all of it is coming to a head it's really obvious now to voters that disinformation is so widespread and policymakers are in the same place and so in many ways i think that voters are far far better prepared than 2016 for the kind of disinformation we saw that what we don't know yet is what kinds of disinformation we will see after election day and whether people are as ready for dealing with that whether
the news media is as ready to deal with disinformation in the days after the election ends as uh as they have been in dealing with russian disinformation lately paint that picture for me what happens after the election we've heard from sources at facebook that mark zuckerberg is preparing for civil unrest and working on things that facebook can do in in this scenario what does that look like so i'm actually mostly worried about disinformation targeting journalists because the the economic incentives of journalism today are driven by the same things that drive facebook and youtube which is
to say they need attention they need to grab that attention and hold it as long as they can so everyone will be looking for that moment when they can start to either declare a winner or just as importantly declare some important piece of news along the way and i do expect that there will be lots of players attempting to exploit that i'm really relieved how effective the inoculation of journalists has been in the last couple weeks with all the hunter biden nonsense and the proud boys email uh scam that came up but it'll be a
different phenomenon after the election because again that's a different kind of environment for facebook for youtube for instagram for twitter the issue is that their ability to enforce their own rules has not been good and the rules themselves have carveouts that will allow a significant amount of shenanigans the thing that scares me most is the stuff happening inside facebook groups the private facebook groups the kind of places where q anon people and the uh the most aggressive far-right people hang out that those are places that facebook does not patrol and where things can be shared
without showing up in the facebook systems and if in terms of organizing the recent shutdown by facebook by youtube by twitter of many q anon pages and groups that was super helpful that that undermined their short-term ability to organize but it didn't wipe them out and they have been working very hard to reconstruct networks and so i'm nervous about all of those things i'm praying that we're going to come through this smoothly but i think it would be naive to assume that people will not try to exploit the uncertainty to insert disinformation into our politics
interesting now on that note i want to talk about some of the things that facebook has done leading up to this moment encouraging voter registration ongoing efforts to combat misinformation and inauthentic behavior they've modified their political ad policies they've banned supposedly they say q anon holocaust deniers uh the post-election notifications that they'll have in place facebook says uh and quoting guy rosen that the head of integrity that they've learned a lot since 2016 and they've made a lot of progress they've got more than 35 000 people across the company working on safety and security issues
why is that not enough for facebook to be ready well i think we can just look at the evidence this year so let's think about covid denial and how profound an issue that has been for the country obviously it didn't start with so uh social platforms like facebook but they amplified president trump they amplified other voices in the kova denial sphere and really undermined our country's response to the pandemic and i don't know what percentage of those who are dead you would attribute to president trump versus internet platforms but the internet platforms clearly played a
role in this and it was not helpful at all i think we've also seen relative to q anon specifically that just using facebook's own numbers facebook's research said 64 of the time when someone joins an extremist facebook group they do so because facebook recommended it and that means of the three million that were in just the largest q a on facebook groups and pages facebook almost certainly recommended two million of those people to join so what facebook did in shutting down the largest pages and groups for q m is demonstrably helpful but their their enforcement
of that and the ability of these things to morph into something else to use camouflage like save the children the hashtag that they've been using to try to mask what they're doing that's still there when we think about holocaust denial we're still trying to find out if facebook has banned holocaust denial in any language other than english what are they doing about other uh genocides the answer is nothing so there's nothing about the armenian genocide nothing about myanmar so what i would say here is i'm glad they're doing stuff i hope they enforce it well
but even that won't be enough 35 000 moderators has not put a dent into this problem because it's the wrong approach when the problem comes from the business model when it's built into the operations of the company at its most basic level no amount of human capital put in at the end is going to fix it you need to change the business model so mark zuckerberg jack dorsey sundar pachai all testifying before congress this week the issue in particular is section 230 and the liability these platforms face for content posted on those platforms in terms
of regulation what do you think needs to happen to get these issues under control and do you is there any hint of optimism um in your mind that that can actually happen um you know satisfactorily so this is i think the silver linings are everywhere on the regulatory front three weeks ago the house antitrust subcommittee published a bipartisan report in which it labeled facebook google and amazon as monopolists this is incredibly constructive in america monopoly is always been the bad guy and an antitrust case is like playing a video game and reaching the very end
being declared the winner right if if if you've been so successful you've gotten an antitrust case that is the grand prize and historically in technology every major wave starting in 1956 with the creation of the computer industry every wave has been driven by an antitrust case and so investors in particular should be welcoming this process i think there are two other areas in which regulation is likely i think in any trust it's almost a certainty the two places where it's likely are privacy where the state of california has a referendum on the ballot this year
proposition 24 that would put real teeth into the existing california privacy law and bring it pretty close to the standard of europe's gdpr the third area the one where we have the most work to be done is related to safety so think of this as all the things related to hate speech disinformation and conspiracy theories everything related to section 230 of the communications decency act everything related to the culture and business model of silicon valley where unique among all engineering disciplines engineers in the tech industry are not held responsible for harms that they cause and
where there is i think now a bipartisan sentiment that that's just not appropriate that the products that these guys create are so important to our economy that like the chemicals industry in the 60s like pharmaceuticals at the turn of the 20th century like the building trades in 19th century we have to find a way to regulate them so that they can do all the good without doing the harm and i think if that package happens if we get safety privacy and antitrust that will unlock an entrepreneurial wave that will be the biggest wave of tech
that we've ever seen in this country it'll be more diverse in terms of geography and i think it'll be more diverse in terms of the categories it touches and i think the opportunity to return to technology as being something that empowers the people who use it instead of victimizing them i think that is something that three months ago seemed like was very far off today we are closer to it regulatory processes take time but we're making progress roger i have about a minute left we you saw the the volatility in the markets today do you
see more volatility for the big tech names we've got you know big companies reporting later this week we've got the certainty that the pandemic will continue no matter who is in office we saw sap uh present a pretty dismal forecast for the first half of next year what's your outlook well i i don't want to pretend like i have a crystal ball emily but i do believe that that the market has enjoyed a period of prosperity because of some of the actions the trump administration has changed taken both at the federal reserve level and in
terms of the response to the pandemic and the absence of a follow-on intervention in the economy relative to the pandemic is causing justifiable concern if we don't do that soon people are not going to have disposable income and that's just going to be bad for earnings and therefore bad for the market i also think that the breakdown in u.s trade relationships around the world it's going to have a cost and it's going to show up in in the earnings numbers over the next few quarters and so i look at all this and it feels to
me as though the market is heavy that it it it's due to to if you will uh give back some of the gains simply because of the uncertainty we face now but i as i say i am long-term super optimistic emily because i do think we're going to restore democracy and i think we're going to restore capitalism and those two things are going to be great for investors
