Valentine's Day's coming up. I wish all of you
a happy, happy Valentine's.
May it be blissful, may it be peaceful,
and may it be filled with whatever you need.
That's what we say back home.
Valentine's is a very important day
in South Africa. We celebrate it in church.
Has nothing to do with, like, like, sex and romance.
You go to church,
and then you pray about sex and romance.
(laughs)
You know, what's crazy about Valentine's Day
is that it's based on Saint Valentine.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's, like, the saint of Valentine's Day.
And do you ever think about, like, how shitty it is
for certain saints? Like, what they have to look after?
Do you know what I mean?
'Cause, like, some saints have cool things.
Saint Christopher, the saint of travel.
Saint... (kisses) Look after me
as I take on this treacherous journey.
Please, Saint Christopher. (kisses) Look after me.
Saint Sebastian, the saint of martyrdom.
You're going to die. You're gonna give up your life.
Saint Sebastian. (kisses)
Look after my soul
as I give my life up for a great cause.
Saint Valentine. (kisses)
Saint Valentine. Yo, man, can you help me
find chocolate at CVS? (kisses)
Please, man. Let me figure out the aisle,
'cause I'm trying to smash tonight, yo.
(kisses) And the cheap chocolates,
not those, like, super expensive Belgian ones.
(kisses) Just good enough that she thinks I thought about her
ahead of time. (kisses)
All right, Saint Valentine. Thanks, my dude. (kisses)
ANNOUNCER: Coming to you from the heart of Times Square
in New York City, the only city in America,
it's The Daily Show.
Tonight, roads are racist,
reading up for Valentine's Day,
and Frances Haugen.
This is The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Hey! What's going on, everybody?
Welcome to The Daily Show. I'm Trevor Noah.
Let's just straight into today's headlines.
♪ ♪
We kick things off with Bitcoin,
the only money that doesn't have slaveholders on it.
One of the advantages of cryptocurrency
was supposed to be how it was secure from theft.
And I would explain why, but instead,
just ask that one dude at the next party you go to.
He'll be very happy to go into great detail.
But despite the super security of crypto,
there have, unfortunately,
been some major crypto heists over the years.
And the same technology that makes it hard to steal
also makes the perpetrators extremely hard to catch.
Hard but not impossible.
NEWSWOMAN: This morning, the Justice Department
announcing the largest single seizure of funds
in the department's history.
Investigators say hackers broke into an online currency exchange
back in 2016, stealing 120,000 Bitcoin,
which, at the time, was worth $71 million.
But today, it's worth a staggering $4.5 billion.
Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan,
are charged with laundering Bitcoin
tied to the hack using thousands of small transitions
and accounts set up with fake IDs.
Holy shit. Four and a half billion dollars
in stolen Bitcoin.
This is huge.
You realize... You realize there's 330 million people
in the United States,
and that's $4.5 billion.
So that means you could give each person in the U.S.
te-ten...
♪ ♪
If you... Five...
You could give everyone some money.
And by the way, you might think
that everyone who uses Bitcoin would be happy
that the police were able to track down the stolen crypto,
but it turns out no.
Turns out a lot of the crypto community
actually took this as bad news
because cryptocurrency is supposed to be anonymous.
And if the FBI can trace Bitcoin
to someone who might have stolen it,
what's to stop them from tracking innocent people
who are just using Bitcoin
to buy heroin and automatic weapons?
This is scary stuff.
But where some people see a problem,
I like to see opportunities.
Which is why, my friends,
I've created a new form of currency
that is totally anonymous and completely untraceable.
And it comes
with just a little bit of cocaine on it.
(sniffs) So, if you're interested,
I'm gonna be selling these on my website for $50 each.
Think it's a steal.
Now, you're probably wondering
who are the criminal geniuses who are part
of one of the biggest financial crimes in history?
Well, you know when they say you should never meet your heroes?
Yeah. This is why.
NEWSWOMAN: Lichtenstein, a U.S. and Russian citizen
is described in a profile online as a tech entrepreneur.
And according to Morgan's social media profiles,
she's a serial entrepreneur and a part-time rapper.
In one of her songs, Morgan calls herself
"the infamous crocodile of Wall Street."
♪ I'm many things ♪
♪ A rapper, an economist ♪
♪ A journalist, a writer, a CEO. ♪
I know what you're thinking.
The Bitcoin crimes are nothing
compared to calling this shit rap.
What was that? ♪ A rapper ♪
♪ An economist, a jour... ♪
Yo, rap is not just, like, saying wo... (sighs)
What is that?
And, also, even if you are a rapper,
you know it's never a good sign for your rap career
when you're listing all your other jobs in a song.
You're just a rapper. This person's running around, like,
♪ Yo, yo, yo, this definitely doesn't pay the bills ♪
♪ I have to do a bunch of other things ♪
♪ 'Cause, as you can tell, no one would pay for this. ♪
And this wasn't a once-off crime, by the way.
The rap video, not-not the money.
This woman, it turns out, has been spitting wet fire
everywhere that she's been given a chance.
Please, Jesus, I beg you, no mo.
Like, what... What is she...
Which rap is she listening to
that she thought that that was a reference for rap?
That's what I want to know.
Like, where was she listening to rap and she's like,
"I could do that.
I'm gonna go and do the exact same thing."
♪ No, no, yo-yo! ♪
Imagine if you were sitting next to her in a room,
what are you thinking is-- "Are you okay in there?!"
(chuckling)
Here's a tip-- kids, if you want to look cool
while doing your rap,
don't read your lyrics off to the side.
Practice and learn the thing.
'Cause, otherwise, it sort of eliminates your swag.
The whole time, she's, like, doing this
to catch the next... rhyme
that's ditto.
You can't do that. No rapper would have succeed--
Can you imagine if Tupac was reading his rhymes off
on the side? ♪ You claim to be a player ♪
♪ But I f... just... screw ♪ S-Sorry, guys.
♪ Screwed your wife, we bust on the Bad... ♪
Can we get a-- can we get a different font?
If you have four-- five-- $4.5 billion,
why are you on TikTok? What are you doing on TikTok?
Huh? The whole point of being on TikTok is to get followers
so that you can get paid so you can be rich enough
so you don't have to be on TikTok anymore.
No one wants to be on TikTok.
You think Shaq is dancing for fun?
That man has danced-- Look at the pain in his eyes!
They're coming for his family.
I'll never understand how people are smart enough
to commit the biggest crimes but then dumb enough
to never get away with it. I mean...
like... (sighs)
there's a better way to do this crime.
And I'm not trying to give anyone advice
on how to do crime.
Please, I'm not giving advice.
But here's the thing.
If you steal crypto, don't just keep it all in one place, yo.
What you got to do is break it up into multiple wallets.
You keep those wallets offline in separate drives, right?
Then you make sure that your keys are not in the cloud
or written down anywhere.
Then you move to a country that doesn't have
any extradition laws to the U.S.
Then you launder the money slowly
using other crypto or NFTs.
And, again, I'm not giving advice on doing crime.
♪ This has been Trevor's Advice on Doing Crime. ♪
All right, let's move on to our top story.
One of President Biden's biggest accomplishments so far,
I mean, aside from allowing students to keep their debt,
has been the infrastructure package.
It's a $1.2 trillion law
that's gonna help rebuild roads,
expand access to clean drinking water,
and finally get around to adding all the other colors
to stoplights.
And while most of the infrastructure package
was pretty uncontroversial,
there was one thing that was buried deep in the package
that has actually got a lot of people riled up.
NEWSMAN: Democrats, led by President Biden,
say now is the time to build back better.
But leaders don't just want to build and update roads.
In some cases, they want highways torn down.
Democrats would like to provide funding to tear down highways
that had a damaging effect on urban minority communities.
There is racism physically built into some of our highways.
And that's why the jobs plan has dollars specifically committed
to reconnect some of the communities that were divided.
NEWSMAN 2: Critics though slamming the secretary
after he said Biden's infrastructure bill
would address racism in highways.
I guess now, according to Democrats,
roads are now racist
and you need to apologize for it.
Roads can't be racist.
You can't build racism into a road.
Roads are made of sand and gravel and asphalt.
Ask any road builder.
Roads cannot be racist any more than toasters
or sectional couches can be racist.
They are inanimate objects. They're not alive.
Okay, first of all, toasters can totally be racist.
Yeah. I can't even count how many times
I've put a piece of white bread into a toaster,
and it came out wearing blackface.
That shit wasn't cool.
But yes, look, the idea
that highways can be racist has completely blown the minds
over at Fox News, and I get why. I get why.
I mean, I get why Tucker is so puzzled by this.
If highways were racist,
then, surely they would have been a guest on his show by now.
It must be very confusing for him.
But there is actually a real explanation
for why Pete Buttigieg is so mad about America's roads.
And it's not just because
he keeps failing his driver's ed test.
No, there's another reason.
So let's find out why in another installment of
"If You Don't Know, Now You Know."
♪ ♪
Highways. They are the vital arteries
that crisscross America,
helping the country's truckers transport goods,
its workers commute to and from the office,
and its O.J.s flee the LAPD.
But what you may not know is
that when America first started building its highway system
back in the 1950s, people were often forced
to leave their homes to make room
for all these fancy new roads.
And guess which people were moved the most. Guess.
NEWSWOMAN: The Federal Aid Highway Act
of 1956 was one the largest public works projects
in American history.
It added 41,000 miles to our interstate system.
NEWSMAN: Pretty much every major city in the country-- New York,
D.C., San Francisco, Philadelphia, you have
major highways cutting through neighborhoods,
requiring the demolition of lots
of housing and other sorts of buildings.
That as they're thinking about
where they're gonna drop highways
and destroy neighborhoods, they invariably single out
what they see as the worst neighborhoods
in their communities.
NEWSMAN 3: It became a pattern in cities
across the country. Poorer and minority residents
were displaced to make way for highways,
and white residents used those highways to commute
into the city for jobs and commute back home at night.
NEWSMAN 4: Planners had an uncanny ability
to pick out the Black neighborhoods.
The route for I-94 in St. Paul displaced one in seven
of the city's Black residents.
"Very few Blacks were living in Minnesota,"
one critic noted, "but the road builders found them."
Yeah, that's right.
Highway I-94 could have been anywhere in Minnesota,
but it just happened to displace the very few Black people
living in Minnesota.
More commonly known as the Minnesota Timberwolves.
And look, don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong.
These highways had to go somewhere, right?
I'm not saying "no highways," but more often than not,
that somewhere was right through a Black neighborhood.
Because you see, rich white neighborhoods--
they didn't allow this to happen to them.
But brown and Black families didn't have any political power
to stop it.
I mean what were they going to do? Take to the streets?
It was impossible. They hadn't been built yet.
And look, Black people are used to being displaced
by gentrification, even today.
But at least when that happens,
they get to enjoy Shake Shack for a few months first.
These highways, on the other hand--
they didn't provide any improvement to the neighborhood.
They slashed a hole through it.
And whatever was left
of that neighborhood just withered and died.
NEWSMAN: From the beginning, the Rondo neighborhood
was a haven for people of color.
At its peak, from the '30s to the '50s,
it had Black-owned grocery stores, credit unions
and social clubs.
During construction from 1956 to 1968,
Rondo lost 700 houses, 300 businesses,
and the population declined by 61%.
NEWSWOMAN: In Florida, Overtown was the center of Black Miami.
The I-95 tore through the neighborhood,
wiping out countless homes
as well as its thriving business district.
Kansas City, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, New York City,
Montgomery, Los Angeles. The list goes on and on.
Man, it's actually pretty heartbreaking to see
how devastating these highways were
for the Black communities that they ran through.
Streets that were once filled with Black people
are still empty to this day.
And of course, of course these communities crumbled
once a highway ran through it.
I mean, highways, think of all the things they bring.
Highways bring noise, they bring pollution,
and if you're really unlucky, spontaneous musical numbers.
I'm trying to get to work!
I mean, have you ever looked on the side of a highway
and thought to yourself:
Yeah, that looks like a nice place to live.
No. You probably thought:
I wonder if I could use the bathroom in that gas station
without being murdered.
And the fact that they destroyed Black neighborhoods
wasn't the only racist thing
about how highways were designed.
You see, around the time the highways were being built,
segregation laws were being struck down in America.
But, lucky for the racists,
they didn't need the laws to enforce segregation,
because now the highways did it for them.
NARRATOR: Infrastructure didn't just break up Black communities,
it reinforced segregation.
The 1938 Federal Housing Administration
Underwriting Manual said an artificial barrier,
like a highway, could protect a neighborhood
from "adverse influences,"
like "inharmonious racial groups."
They laid the interstate down right on the black-white line.
Bam! And what that meant was, that it would be much harder
to have school integration.
I mean, you couldn't have kids walking across the interstate,
for heaven's sakes.
NARRATOR: A report from the Georgia Historical Society says
that while deciding the route of I-20,
the Atlanta Bureau of Planning said it would be
the boundary between white and African American communities.
Because the highways in Atlanta were laid down
primarily with a regard to keeping the racists apart,
rather than keeping traffic moving efficiently,
it laid them down in a way that, today,
traffic in Atlanta is incredibly snarled.
I-20 zigzags from east to west in a route that makes no sense
unless you know it was laid down with the desire to segregate.
Man, racism is a hell of a drug.
I mean, think about it, instead of designing
the most efficient highway, they instead made it zigzag
around the city like some kind of racist Mario Kart.
Well, if you... if you're real about it,
Mario Kart is pretty racist.
'Cause in real life, when Italians get in a car accident,
they don't yell: Mamma mia! I love-a the spaghetti!
Do you have any insurance on you?
And, guys, I don't know about you,
but there is nobody that I hate more than I hate traffic.
Like, I will literally shake hands with my worst enemy
if it means I can get where I'm going 30 minutes faster.
I'm still not friends with you, Winter,
but at least we're both gonna get home at 5:00.
And I'll make the sun set at 5:00.
-Ooh, I hate you so much! -(laughing)
Oh, can you turn on the AC, please?
So yes, highways might not be following Black people
around department stores or turning them down for loans,
but the way that highways were built in America
was inarguably racist.
In ways that still affect American society to this day.
And I know, like, that people like Tucker and Sean Hannity,
they love to make it seem like talking
about the racist history of highways
means that you're somehow calling people racist today
because they still drive on those freeways.
Waah, you're a racist, you're a racist!
No, no, that's not the case.
Nobody's telling you to walk to your next family vacation.
What we're saying is, if we can try to understand the history
of how a thing came to be, then maybe we can figure out
how to make it better when we build new roads in the future.
And if you don't know, now you know.
All right, when we come back,
Dulcé Sloan is gonna get us in the mood
for Valentine's Day. Oh, yeah.
Welcome back to The Daily Show.
This Monday is Valentine's Day,
the day that will be the reason couples break up
six months from now.
But for all the people out there who are already single,
we turn to Dulcé Sloan
for a Valentine's Day episode of Dul-sayin'.
♪ ♪
Hello, friends. I want to wish all the couples
a happy Valentine's Day.
I hope you all have a romantic evening
and your carriage ride around the park
is filled with horse farts.
I've been single for too long
because, you know, dating apps are digital dumpster diving.
The only thing that's got me through it
are romance novels.
Mmm! (kisses)
But not just any romance novel.
I'm talking about the unsung heroines
of the erotic: all the Black women
writing the best ones.
For example, the queen of Black historical romance,
Beverly Jenkins.
Just check out the passage from her novel Indigo,
which I imagine is read to me by Jesse Williams.
"She moved her hands over the strength of his back,
"kissing him,
"flicking her tongue against the edges of his lips,
"experimenting with the boldness
"his passion had planted within her
"while his hands beneath her gown toured lustily.
No man had ever touched her this way."
(exhales) Damn.
I remember the first time I read this,
I fell right out of my chair.
No, I slid out.
I love how she was flicking her tongue
against the edges of his lips.
Ooh, you know a writer is good if they make kissing sound sexy
even when it's wrong.
Like, don't be licking his lips,
Get that poor man some Chapstick.
Now, if you want to go a bit more old-school in your romance,
you can try Rubie Saunders.
She was best known for a series following Nurse Marilyn Morgan
and her steamy affairs with doctors.
The series was coming at you with some hot lines.
Hank was standing behind her now
and, somehow, his arms were around her waist.
Hank pressed close to her.
She could feel his breath on the back of her neck.
"I won't hurt you, honey,"
he murmured as his arms tightened around her.
They sank into the cushions,
together.
Shit!
Listen, everyone knows
that sinking into the cushion means good sex.
Or your couch is too old.
Either way, you're gonna be sore in the morning.
By the way, we would never have known many of these authors
if it wasn't for book publishers like Vivian Stephens.
She was groundbreaking,
not just because she sought out writers of color
who wrote about women with real depth
but also because she wasn't afraid
to publish explicit sex scenes.
She changed the game with her publishing company
Candlelight Ecstasy,
which is one of those terms that only belongs in a romance novel.
If you combine candlelight and ecstasy in real life,
you're gonna lose your eyebrows.
Stephens helped publish great authors like Sandra Kitt,
who wrote love stories featuring both Black and white characters.
So she referred to herself as a "switch hitter,"
which I feel like means something different now?
Is that when a dick is ambidextrous?
Like it can hold a pen with his left and his right testicle?
Anyway, one of Sandra Kitt's greatest contributions
was the novel Adam and Eva.
This novel is about Eva Duncan
escaping the death of her husband.
She takes a vacation to the Virgin Islands,
and basically by the time she leaves,
ha, they're just called "The Islands." (laughs)
What I like about Sandra's writing is how she evokes
the physical sensation of sex, and also the butts.
Just check out this passage.
"...when Maxwell's other hand made a sensuous journey
"up the back of one thigh,
"causing a quaking through the center of her body
"as he pressed her buttocks to bring her
"against his distinct, hard masculine form.
"She finally came... to her senses,
"pulling her mouth away with a gasp
and turning completely within the circle of his arms."
♪ ♪
Dulcé, I'm... finished.
Well, I wasn't.
Well, I guess that about raps it up for book club.
So when your single ass is curled up with a book
about people curling up with each other,
make sure not to forget the Black women that paved the way
for you to hear lines in your head like this.
"They could resist each other no longer.
"She in her robe, skin aglow, lips pursed.
"He hovered above her, lustful, yet firm,
whispering her name, 'Dulcé.'"
Ooh.
All right, Dulcé, really? Did you write this?
Dawg, great character. Didn't you go to acting school?
No.
Ah, self-taught.
Okay. I see you.
♪ ♪
Thank you so much for that Dulcé.
All right, when we come back, I'll be talking to the woman
who exposed Facebook's biggest secret.
You don't want to miss it.
Welcome back to The Daily Show.
My guest tonight is former Facebook product manager
turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.
She's here to talk about how Facebook
prioritizes profits over public safety
and teen mental health.
Frances Haugen, welcome to The Daily Show.
Thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here.
Um, your name
isn't as big as the story
that you really, I mean, leaked to the world.
You know? A lot of people, you say, "Frances Haugen,"
they'll be like, "Who is that?"
But then if you say to people,
"Hey, remember how we all learned
"that Facebook and what social media is doing
"is essentially destroying teenagers' brains
and it's harming all of us?"
Yeah, that report happened because of you.
So, let's start with the question of "why?"
-Mm-hmm. -You've worked for, um, Google.
-You've worked for Pinterest. You've worked for Yelp. -Mm-hmm.
And yet you blew the whistle on Facebook.
-Mm-hmm. -Why did you feel like, "Oh, this...
This is something I can't sit on"?
So, when I joined, uh, Facebook, I thought I was gonna work
on misinformation in the United States.
And I was surprised, and I-I actually was charged
with working on information outsi...
-only outside the United States. -Okay.
And, um, like many people and many technologists,
I had never really focused
on Facebook's impact internationally.
And very rapidly, um,
I realized kind of the horrifying magnitude
of the danger that we were facing.
That Facebook's algorithms give the most reach
-to the most extreme and divisive ideas. -Mm-hmm.
Um, and that-that process is destabilizing
some of the most fragile places in the world,
like Ethiopia or what happened in Myanmar.
It... You see, when-when you say that,
there are some people who will accept it immediately,
and then there are some people who will be like,
"That's-that's not true at all."
But I'm sure there are a lot of people
who will say, "But, I mean,
"aren't they always going to be extreme people in the world?
You know, there's always somebody saying something."
You know, Facebook themselves say...
They go like, "Hey, we're not... We're not part of the problem.
"We're merely a platform that people put their views on.
We are not part of the problem." And you disagree with that.
So, let's imagine you had a relative
who had particularly extreme ideas.
You know, I've... We often say, like, the crazy uncle.
-Right, right, right. -'Cause, mm, some of us have those.
Uh, that person, if they're...
If we're talking to them one-on-one
or we're talking to them at a family gathering,
that scale allows for resolution of ideas.
-Okay. -What's happening on Facebook right now
is ideas that are the most able to elicit a reaction--
and the shortest path to a click is anger--
those get the most reach,
and ideas that are more moderate
or that try to bring us into synthesis
or to-to help us find a middle path,
those aren't as likely to elicit a comment from you
-or elicit a like. -Right.
And so Facebook doesn't give it as much distribution.
So, Facebook is essentially propelling
certain ideas out there.
So, they may say, "We're the platform,"
but, really, what they're also doing
is they're advocating for certain viewpoints
because they push those out because those get people engaged
-and spinning in the cycle. -So, I think it's a thing
where it's not they sit down and go,
"How can we get more extreme ideas?"
I don't think that's what they're trying to do.
But they do know that there are lots of solutions
that are not about censorship.
It's not about picking good or bad ideas
-or good or bad people. -Mm-hmm.
It's about how do we change the dynamics of these systems
so that you could have
good speech counter-counter bad speech.
How do we give those more of an equal say at the table?
You know, it's-it's interesting that you lay it out like this.
Because I remember talking to my friends about this,
-saying, "Have we become angrier in the world? -Mm.
Have we become less able to have misunderstandings?"
'Cause I-- 'cause I'll sit with my friends and I go, like,
I don't agree on so many things with my friends.
But I don't remember a time when that meant
-that I couldn't be friends with them. -Yeah.
In the world of social media right now,
-it feels like if I disagree with you on this... -Mm.
...I disagree with you on everything.
It seems like, Facebook world, if you disagree on this,
-we're gonna make or we're gonna find more ways... -Oh, yeah.
...to-to, you know-- to find where you disagree
-or-or how to make you disagree. -Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so some people have said this idea of, like, uh,
Facebook's always looking for fault lines.
Right? So-so, a "high quality" piece of content
is one that gets lots of engagement.
And it turns out an angry comment thread
where, you know, it causes us to yell at each other,
that is viewed as a higher quality piece of content.
And so, uh, you know, during, um, COVID,
I've had friends who wrote very long, thoughtful pieces.
They went and digested lots of information.
-Ah. -That's gonna cause less knee-jerk reaction
than something that really offends you.
So, "masks don't work."
-People are clicking on that. -Yeah. Yeah. Psh-shh-shh.
"Here's the thing about masks we have to consider
-in our society." Boo. -Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
-Facebook's not pushing that. -Or...
So, what's interesting, you know,
-in-in everything that you've done is... -Mm.
...even though you're a whistleblower,
even though you came out with this information,
you've never said, "I'm anti-Facebook."
-You've never said, "Shut Facebook down." -Mm-hmm.
-You've never said this thing needs to go away. -Yeah.
What you're arguing for is
we change our relationship with not just Facebook
-but social media companies as a whole. -Mm.
-E-Explain what that means. -Mm-hmm.
So, often, when people talk about this idea
of we need to change our relationship with social media,
it's more about, like, should we use our phones so much?
But I-I'm encouraging us to have a conversation
about what's our relationship with companies.
-Or what's the companies' relationships with us? -Okay.
Facebook knows that they have a level of-of, um,
unaccountability that's very different
than either Google or Apple or other big platforms.
Because, in the case of Google,
we can scrape, we can download their results and analyze them
and see if there are biases.
-Okay. -In the case of Apple, we can take apart the phones
and put up YouTube videos saying
-Apple phones do or don't work the way they claim. -Huh.
But in the case of Facebook,
researchers and activists have been telling Facebook,
"Hey, we have found all these examples.
"We think there's a pattern here.
"We think there's too much human trafficking.
-We think kids are suffering." -Right.
And Facebook keeps coming back because they know
no one can call them on it
and saying, "That's just anecdotal. That's not real."
But when you released the information,
we realized it wasn't anecdotal, it was real, because Facebook
-had done the research. -And Facebook knew about it.
-Right. You see, now, this is interesting. -Yeah. Yeah.
-'Cause this reminds me of the tobacco companies. -Yes.
-Yeah. Yeah. -It reminds us of the, you know...
-the fossil fuel companies. -Yeah.
They do the research,
they find out something really bad,
and then, I mean, obviously, they go, like,
"We're not gonna put this out there, but-but we know."
One of the biggest things that's really gotten people worried
-is how social media affects younger brains. -Mm-hmm.
I mean, it affects my brain. I'm--
I don't consider myself younger anymore, but
young people are-are like...
-it seems like the highest... at the highest risk. -Mm-hmm.
Yeah, Facebook's internal research says
that the highest rates of problematic use peak at age 14.
So you're not allowed to be on the platform until you're 13.
-Uh-huh. -So I guess it takes a little bit of time
to form that habit. But the largest fraction
of any of those age cohorts they sampled...
And they've done studies that have 100,000 people in them.
-Okay. -These are not tiny studies.
Um, they find that the largest fractions say,
"I can't control my usage, and I know it's impacting my health,
-"my employment or my school" is at age 14. -Wow.
And so, there's a real thing where young people have both...
-You know, they're struggling with issues in their life. -Yes.
And they don't have the self-control yet.
And they say this. They say this to researchers.
They say, "I know this is making me feel bad,
"and I can't stop.
-I fear I'll be ostracized if I leave." -Mm-hmm.
And those factors mean it's not easy for kids just to walk away.
It's also not easy for people to understand how to, um...
how to fix it. You have lawmakers now...
-Mm. -...who are trying to figure this thing out.
-Silicon Valley is way ahead of them. -Yup.
Like, way ahead of them. Lawmakers.
You see these hearings. They'd be like,
"What if... what if my Facebook is an insta flap?"
They don't understand what's happening.
So how do we begin creating a world
-where we're not destroying the companies... -Mm.
...but we're-we're regulating them the way they should be?
So the main thing I'm advocating for is around transparency.
Because one of the problems today is because
-Facebook is the only one that holds the cards... -Mm-hmm.
...like, they can see... they can see whether or not
they're holding, you know, a royal flush or not.
-Right. -What they claim.
Um, we need to move to a world
where we have more access to data.
And that can be aggregate data.
It can be privacy-sensitive data.
It doesn't have to, you know, expose people. It's not...
-It's a false choice of privacy versus transparency. -Right.
And once we have the ability to have conversations,
we can stop talking about boogie man social media...
-I see. -...and we start having conversations
on how do we solve these problems.
I think what we need to do,
and this is what I'm gonna spend 2022 doing,
is we need to start organizing people.
Like, I want to plant a youth-directed movement
where we can begin putting pressure on Facebook
-to release this information. -Mm-hmm.
Because I don't think Facebook is just gonna do it
automatically out of the goodness of its heart.
-Right. Right. -We have to force them to.
And I think there's lots and lots of opportunities
where we can begin putting pressure on them,
either socially or financially.
-Yeah. -As a user of social media,
as a person who speaks to all my friends on social media,
and I have my enemies on social media,
I appreciate this conversation 'cause I think, um,
-Yeah. -...if we're not careful, we end up in a world
where we're all fighting really just because
an algorithm is trying to make us fight half of those fights.
-Mm-hmm. -I've noticed even with the show,
-if I say a thing on the show... -Mm-hmm. Mm.
This'd be, like, the most interesting thing for me, is,
depending on what I say,
-Facebook sends that to different people. -Ooh.
-One time we had on the show where... -That's a real thing.
One... Yeah. One time we had on the show
where, um, literally I'd laid out both arguments.
-I said, "Here's one way to see it." -Yeah.
"Here's another way to see it."
-But then, on Facebook, only one way went to each group. -Yeah.
-Yeah. Mm-hmm. -And I was fascinated by that.
'Cause then people are like, "Why didn't you say it
the other way?" I was like, "But that's exactly what I said."
They're like, "Oh, well, I didn't see that."
-And then you realize... You know? -Yeah.
So, one of the things that happens is, um,
so let's say you take a video clip.
So let's say you have, out of any given one of your shows,
people go and put on YouTube lots of different little chunks.
People can re-seed those onto Facebook over and over again,
-and they do. -Right, right.
And each time that enters into Facebook--
you know, someone posts it to a group, someone does this--
it enters into the network in a different way.
And the algorithm begins picking up data on that,
and it says: Oh, interesting,
like, these kinds of people engage, these ones don't.
And so, and because it's entering
from so many different points, it actually gets a chance
to learn what kinds of people or communities
it engages the most with.
And so that echo chamber is real.
-Like, the algorithm pulls us towards homogeneity. -Yes.
It's almost like Facebook knows
that you react most to your neighbor
when they play loud music.
-(laughs) -There's no reaction from you
when your neighbor's doing other things,
but when your neighbor plays loud music,
that's when you react-- so then Facebook goes,
-"I'm just gonna..." -It's even worse than that, actually.
-How can it be worse? -Imagine there's music that you like,
-and there's music you don't like. -Oh, wow.
It actually knows you really don't like,
-I don't know, reggaeton or something. -Oh, wow.
-And one of the things that's, like, really sad is, um, -Okay.
one of the things that was in the documents
is that people talk about, um,
especially people from marginalized communities,
that they will go and correct people who are spreading, um,
you know, racist, sexist, homophobic comments,
and guess what, now Facebook knows you engage
-with these keywords... -So they send you more of that.
-And so they send more of it. -Yeah. Yeah.
I didn't know they were doing that...
They don't do it on purpose. It's a side effect.
-It's a side effect of the way the algorithm works. -Yep. Yep.
So the algorithm is designed to get
as much engagement as possible,
and then engagement, unfortunately,
means you're more likely-- there's a car accident,
-I'm going to engage. -Yeah. Yeah.
Or more of, um, if they had an option of showing you a stream
of different things, they know you gawk at car accidents,
so they show you more.
Man. This is hard, because on the one hand, I go like,
well, I need to stop looking at car accidents,
-but the brain is the brain. -It's the brain.
You know, if all the-- AI is not intelligent.
-Right? We like to say Artificial Intelligence. -Yes.
But the people who actually study it
call it "machine learning," because it's not intelligent.
It's just a hill climber. Optimizing.
And, you know, think of all the different pieces of content
-you've been exposed to. -Mm-hmm.
Uh, it's not trying to show you the most extreme content.
It happens to be, to fulfill its goal function,
-it mindlessly pushes you towards them. -I understand.
And so this is about Facebook making choices to not fix it.
Facebook has lots and lots of options that...
They're letting the machine run wild.
-Money. -Money.
That's what it is.
Thank you so much for being here.
This has really been enlightening.
-Good luck on the rest of your journey. -Thank you so much.
If you want to learn more about Frances's advocacy work,
then you can go to franceshaugen.com.
We're gonna take a quick break,
but we'll be right back after this.
Well, that's our show for tonight, but before we go--
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Now, here it is, Your Moment of Zen.
Not only do we have the DC jail, which is the DC gulag,
but now we have Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho police
spying on members of Congress,
spying on the legislative work that we do,
spying on our staff and spying on American citizens
that want to come talk to their representatives.