Gosh. OK...
I'm glad this isn't live. (CHUCKLES)
I'm, like, so not on today.
INTERVIEWER: Can you just say your name and pronounce it
so nobody messes it up? Sure, It's Mark Zuckerberg.
How would you like to be identified? Your title?
Founder and CEO?
I was a sophomore at Harvard and we needed to- I guess...
I've never really been asked how the company was started before.
(LAUGHTER)
How does how did Facebook start?
Um, now I'm all embarrassed.
I was there, right from the beginning,
and Mark always carried himself in a way that showed confidence.
You launched Facebook - in your dorm room? - Yeah.
Have a 10 million dollar cheque in your pocket
probably does that to you.
Facebook is like the world's largest media company in history.
And one person, Mark Zuckerberg, is its dictator.
When I first joined, the founders is on the cover of Time magazine,
movies were being made, and now you are being told
you destroyed democracy.
And then his worst nightmare, the threat of regulation.
Congress says they are going to call for his head,
they summon him, then he appears.
REPORTER: Today could be the biggest day
of Mark Zuckerberg's entire career.
The Facebook CEO is set to testify before Congress this afternoon
for the very first time.
REPORTER: The lines out of the door, Julia, I mean, it's insane.
Its definitely very crowded, it's our understanding
that he arrived through the garage, then an elevator upstairs
and he avoided all of the cameras that where trying to stake him out.
REPORTER: The stakes couldn't be any higher for Zuckerberg
after revelations that the personal data
of as many as 87 million users was improperly obtained.
REPORTER: Facebook really is facing a crisis of trust.
Mark, why hasn't anyone been fired over this scandal?
Mr Zuckerberg, is there any regulation?
Are you putting privacy over profits now?
SENATOR: Mr Zuckerberg... are you too powerful?
Do you think you're too powerful?
Today's hearing is extraordinary,
but then Facebook is pretty extraordinary.
We're here because of what you, Mr Zuckerberg,
have described as a breach of trust.
As you said, "This is not likely to be an isolated incident.
We are listening, America is listening,
and quite possibly, the world is listening too.
My top priority has always been our social mission
of connecting people, building community
and bringing the world closer together.
We have faced a number of important issues around privacy,
safety and democracy,
before I talk about the steps we are taking to address them,
I want to talk about how we got here.
Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,
for most of our existence... (SPEECH FADES, STOPS)
You know, I was a tech journalist for Fortune magazine.
A PR person called me and said,
"You know, Mark Zuckerberg is coming to New York.
Would you like to meet him?
My first instinct was, "Oh, this is ridiculous. I'm wasting my time.
This is a baby." He was so young.
I never had interviewed someone that young before.
But as soon as he started talking, I settled down fast
because he spoke with some of the most visionary language
that I had experienced talking to anyone ever.
I was sitting there talking to him and said, "You know, I was thinking,
maybe I should write a book about your company."
And he says, "Go for it."
And I was like, "Holy shit, he actually wants to cooperate."
And that was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
He was one of four children.
The only boy and his mother called him the Prince.
He was anointed even within the family, in other words,
and that shaped his worldview tremendously.
He went to one of the most elite prep schools and thrived
and triumphed there. And then, of course, he got into Harvard.
You know, Harvard is an anointment.
You're feeling you have unlimited possibilities.
He really wanted to be noticed.
He wanted to be the smartest kid on campus. But Harvard is full of kids
who were always the smartest kids in their school.
And so Mark Zuckerberg had to find a way to get noticed.
And he did that.
Chair recognises the gentleman from Missouri, Mr Long for 4 minutes.
Thank you, Mr Chairman. One question I would like to ask is,
what was Facemash? And is it still up and running?
No congressman, Facesmash was a prank website that I launched
in college, in my dorm room.
It's on page one, November 4 2003.
"Hot or Not? Website briefly judges looks."
Which is a good headline.
"Zuckerberg wrote a journal published on the site itself,
he wrote 'I need something to occupy my mind, I just need an idea.'"
It sort of spread across campus that there were these rankings
of the hottest students on campus on Facemash.
And everyone wanted to see the top five hottest guys
and the top five hottest girls. And it was a unifying campus event.
Everyone heard about it very quickly all at once.
And it was all we were talking about.
KIRKPATRICK: It was something he just did for the fun, and then
it got a little out of hand because people liked it so much.
It was sexist, it was juvenile.
It did get him in trouble.
I don't think he would have probably been expelled,
but he was called before the disciplinary authorities at the school.
And that made him a celebrated figure on campus.
By the time he launched Facebook, he was already like a famous innovator.
So people wanted to know what he was gonna do next.
So, one night in February of 2004, I'm sitting in my dorm room,
and my roommate comes in, and she shows me on the screen,
this very rudimentary template where your uploading a photo of yourself
and sort of answering a few basic biographical details
and it's called The Facebook.
REPORTER: What is The Facebook exactly?
You sign on, you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions,
entering some information phone numbers, interests,
what books you like, movies, and most importantly, who your friends are.
Then you can browse around
and just find some interesting information about people.
It was definitely romantically-charged.
If you decided you like someone
and you wanted to learn more about them at the time,
you had very few options.
Relationship status, women would put
that they were married to their best friends.
'It's complicated', I think was also one that was popular.
I do remember some of the questions that were on the Facebook template
included political views, everyone put 'very liberal'.
Favourite quote, people would put earnest quotes.
It was earnest. It wasn't ironic at the time.
I just threw it together one week in January.
This was in your dorm room? Yeah.
You launched Facebook - in your dorm room? - Yeah.
I was the 60th user. It must have been only a couple of hours
after he made it go live, but then very shortly after that,
everyone on campus was on it.
In one email exchange, he was kind of joking.
"Wow, all these people are submitting their stuff,
all these photos, they're so dumb, they just give me their data.
They don't understand how precious data is."
"Ha-ha, dumb fucks."
Mark understands when he's very young,
that private data on people can be used.
He doesn't know how, when he's in his early twenties,
he has a certain voyeuristic approach to the data.
"I want to collect data for data sake,"
but initially it's just it feels like power.
Data feels like power to him.
SENATOR: Thank you, Mr Chairman, I want to follow up on the questions
around the terms of service.
Your terms of service are about 3,200 words with 30 links.
One of the links is to your data policy,
which is about 2,700 words with 22 links.
And I think the point has been well made that
people really have no earthly idea what they're signing up for
but I'm wondering if you can explain to the billions of users,
in plain language, what are they signing up for?
Silicon Valley was the mecca of software
and innovation and technology.
Amazon-dot-com, this is Lance.
Money was being poured into software companies
and internet companies and it was seen as, sort of,
the promised land of capitalism.
This is definitely very cool. I like it a lot.
Just three years ago I was sleeping on the office floor
and now, obviously, I've got a million dollar car
and quite a few creature comforts.
And Zuckerberg was very impressed by that, that's for sure.
We had this feeling like, OK, all these great companies
come from Silicon Valley. Wouldn't it be cool to spend a summer out there?
Get that experience, but we expected to go back to Harvard in the fall.
The thing that made it so that we didn't
was that Harvard has this great policy
that lets you take as much time off as you want.
So in the summer of 2004, he rented a house
and took a bunch of his Harvard chums out there,
and they started programming Facebook from Palo Alto.
CHAFKIN: You know, the Internet, kind of by definition,
is sort of a lawless place, particularly back then.
REPORTER: Today the US Court of Appeals ruled that Napster
is infringing on copyrighted music,
in essence, letting its users steal songs.
It's kind of, probably, no coincidence
that this sort of wild forum would start in California,
in the original Wild West.
At the time, Silicon Valley companies
were pushing the regulatory envelope.
They were doing things that in various ways
seemed unacceptable and doing it with almost no consequences.
Silicon Valley and the ethos of Silicon Valley
couldn't have been more perfectly suited for Mark Zuckerberg
if he had drawn it up himself.
Because here you have this idea that there are disruptors of society
who are smarter than everyone else,
and they should be given money.
They should be given power because they can create a technology
that will disrupt the whole world.
BALOUN: The life of my profile pictures.
That's my mom. We're in Lake Cuomo.
I'm just amazed at how many photos I have on Facebook
and how they're all... relentlessly optimistic.
I think it's just a celebration of my life actually.
This wouldn't be bad on my gravestone. (CHUCKLES)
Because this is actually what I'd like to be remembered as.
I'm Karel Baloun,
I was Mark Zuckerberg's first senior engineer at Facebook.
I have a master's in Social Psych,
so just the idea of connecting people was really tremendous.
I had been an engineer in Silicon Valley for seven or eight years,
and all of that was in corporations.
So I was ready for a start up.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Alright, what's the safety word?
It was the office above the Chinese restaurant
with the graffiti on the wall.
ALL: One, two, three, four, five, six...
The office was very Spartan.
There were IKEA tables.
We assembled our own chairs the first day.
ALL: ..eleven, twelve, thirteen. Wow! (LAUGHTER)
The amount of energy and confidence in that room was astounding.
You could see Mark coding in the corner on the floor sometimes.
He would just- Instead of sitting at the table,
he would just lie down on the floor with his laptop, flip flops up.
And Mark Zuckerberg's handle is 'Zuck'.
It was a term of endearment.
We were all that close.
The way that I can be unique is by revelling
and being young and just being a little crazy.
So, for example, there's this feature called 'poking'
where you just go to someone's profile and you can poke the person
and like, what does that do? Nothing. It sends them a message.
It's like, "You've been poked", you know? Like, who cares?
It's like, I thought about it when I was drunk or something, you know?
And like people really like poking each other for some reason.
I don't think anyone can really explain.
Mark has a consistent vision that is very clearly articulated
for everyone to understand. He wants to connect people.
That was the supreme novel idea.
Was that we are engaging on things together
and it's bringing people together.
I've been covering tech since 2015.
Somewhere within, almost every story
in Silicon Valley that I've come across...
...Peter Thiel has been pretty much inside, behind, around.
He's one of the key power brokers.
He's started a company called PayPal with Elon Musk
and from there, built this empire.
The government is so- is so fundamentally evil,
that to deny the evil nature of the government
is equal to denying the existence of the devil.
Kind of what makes Thiel interesting and special
is that he's not just a money guy, he's sort of an influence guy.
Technology is this incredible alternative to politics
and the task in this world where politics has become so broken
and so dysfunctional is to find a way to escape from it.
Most of his beliefs boil down to an idea that billionaires,
in particular tech billionaires,
should be afforded maximum freedom to run the world.
The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology
to overturn the monetary system of the world.
It's really easy to see why he liked Mark Zuckerberg.
He had been sort of, you know, a bad boy of campus.
He was kind of like pushing the bounds of what was acceptable
and what was normal.
And that is the kind of thing that Peter Thiel absolutely loves.
And you can kind of see why.
Because those kind of rule-breakers are the ones who are likely
to, you know, find opportunities.
KIRKPATRICK: Peter Thiel was the first really serious businessperson
to recognise the scale of what this could become.
Which is why he said, "OK, I'll invest half a million
for 10% of the company."
And the parting words that Thiel left them with,
as they walked out of his office, was, "Just don't fuck it up."
Today, The Facebook has nearly 5 million users across 1,500 campuses.
Joining me to talk about the fast-growing company
is the founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.
You received venture capital funding
and received about $13 million.
What was the pitch to VCs?
Oh, we didn't do any pitch. No?
He looked very young...
but he carried himself in a way that showed confidence.
You know, having a 10 million dollar cheque in your pocket
probably does that to you.
THOMPSON: What I can say about the early investors
is they're all hardcore capitalists.
They're all big time Valley people.
They'd much rather have a one in a hundred chance
of becoming a trillion-dollar company
than a guaranteed $10 billion company.
So, they're going to want you to take risks
and they want you to be extreme in what you do.
Mark thought of himself as a renegade leader of opposition
to the established order,
so he would sign his pages of the service.
Sometimes you'd find the phrase,
'Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State.
SENATOR: Thank you, Mr Zuckerberg, for being here.
I note up, until 2014, the mantra or motto of Facebook
was "move fast and break things".
Is that correct?
I don't know when we changed it, but the mantra is currently
"move fast with stable infrastructure",
which is a much less sexy mantra.
Sounds much more boring. But my question is,
during the time it was Facebook's mantra,
do you think some of the... misjudgements
were as a result of that culture or that attitude?
CHAFKIN: Where Thiel influenced Zuckerberg
was in this idea of 'move fast and break things'.
Growing like as big as you can, as fast as you can,
that is the Peter Thiel approach.
Push the gas as hard as you can,
spend as much money as possible on anything you can do to grow,
to ensure that you have absolute network dominance.
Every day we would code and push that immediately to the site.
Then it would hit the site and we would see whether it worked or not.
And if there was a bug, we might roll back what was on the site.
Or we might just push a patch right over it.
And there was very little safety or control.
FRENKEL: There's a video of Mark Zuckerberg
where he goes back to Harvard and he essentially tells students
that they should buck the system the way he did.
I think it's more useful to, like, make things happen
and then apologise later
than it is to make sure that you dot all your I's now
and then, like just not get stepped on.
He loved playing strategy games from a young age
and winning in everything he did
has always been a high priority for him. Dominating, succeeding.
He used to end every meeting at the company by shouting,
"Domination!" That was like his, sort of, catch phrase
that he ended meetings with. And you know,
that reflects a lot about his personality, his goals.
He wanted to dominate, and he wanted to win.
FRENKEL: Mark Zuckerberg needs to distinguish his company
from other social media companies at the time.
Because even though he's incredibly popular among college students,
he still has competition.
There's MySpace, there's Friendster.
And he very quickly understands that...
by making decisions as a company about what people see,
he can create a revolutionary product.
What Mark did was really use the first algorithmic device
that would rank what you saw.
It made decisions for you.
KIRKPATRICK: People competed with each other
to have the most Facebook friends.
"You have 100 friends? I have 200 friends."
Or 2,000, or whatever.
All of a sudden, they could see everything about you
and you could see everything about them in a newly automated fashion.
And many people didn't like that.
They viewed that as an invasion of privacy and it was a crisis.
CHAFKIN: Over and over again in the history of Facebook,
the company would kind of go to a place that was, like, a little edgy.
They just sort of violated everyone's privacy without asking.
Facebook's approach for most of its history was to, you know,
shoot first and ask questions later.
BAROUN: He apologized publicly for how he rolled it out
or for poorly communicating about this new feature.
But the feature was going to be there because it had real utility.
FRENKEL: He wanted you to spend hours scrolling your news feed,
getting this constant sort of stream of data about people you knew
and people you were interested in.
REPORTER: Students looking at Facebook average 18 minutes a day,
and that fact has rocketed the company's value
into the hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe more.
KIRKPATRICK: The company was just growing like crazy at that time.
I got a phone call from an executive at Facebook
that I barely knew, and he said,
"My boss is facing a crisis
and he needs advice
from somebody who really understands Silicon Valley.
Would you take a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg?"
And so Mark Zuckerberg came to my office
and he looked just like Mark Zuckerberg. I mean,
the grey hoodie, the jeans.
And he goes, "Yahoo! has offered a billion dollars to buy Facebook.
And everybody I know, including my parents,
has told me to take the money."
So I looked at Mark and I said,
"Well, there's only one that question matters.
What do you want? Do you want to sell the company?"
BAROUN: He refused, famously, to sell Facebook to Yahoo!
for a billion dollars and everybody was against him.
It's a lot of money for all of us, right?
None of us were independently wealthy.
He was saying, this is a valuable idea
and I can execute it better than Yahoo!
That type of confidence and fearlessness...
...when even technical obstacles are daunting.
Well, it's courage.
If they'd sold to Yahoo! at a billion,
they would all be quite rich, but they were going to be really rich.
More and more press attention from people even like myself,
was, you know, flattering them
and making them feel the centre of the universe.
And they were like, "Yeah, we are really the cool ones."
INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about business. There are reports
that this company is still not breaking even.
And what shocked me when I read that was with 175 million customers,
how can any business not make money?
What's the explanation for that?
Zuckerberg was still living on a mattress on the floor,
you know, hardly ever even going home
because he was just working around the clock.
He cared very little about anything else
other than user growth and user engagement.
Well after Facebook had been going for...
three years or so,
the investors were increasingly determined that
somebody had to figure out how to make a lot of money out of this
tremendous cultural and community success.
Oh, wow. That's awesome. How are you?
REPORTER: Sheryl Sandberg is an unlikely revolutionary.
At 43, she is one of the few women at the top of corporate America.
Sheryl changed everything.
She was a practice business leader
who had, in many ways, built the advertising business at Google.
Panama hats.
Let's say I was looking for Panama hats today. Here I go.
Panama Hats Direct, a very specific search,
looking for a very specific product.
And the advertiser is able to find me
and I'm looking for that product.
There is a crucial, crucial moment in the evolution of Facebook.
Sheryl Sandberg comes on board and is given the mandate,
'figure out how this thing can make money.'
We just literally had dinner at my house
and Mark would say, sometimes, you know,
"I'm so sorry, I can't invite you over for dinner."
But at the time, he only had like a one room apartment.
He never had any furniture, make it a futon.
He thought that would be awkward, which it would have been.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Thank you all.
There are lots of choices that she and they could have made.
And they made a choice to sell targeted advertising
based on individual's data.
The thing about Facebook that was so unique
was it had a whole lot of data that you had voluntarily provided,
where you lived, how old you were,
whether you were in a relationship, what your interests are.
These are invaluable pieces of information
for people trying to sell ads.
BAROUN: People were uploading photos,
people were posting status updates to their feed.
But it was really about what's going on in my mind right now.
The prompt is still the same. What's on your mind?
But people are really using it in real time
to say what was on their mind.
Sheryl Sandberg realised that a system with that many users
was going to be a huge opportunity for advertising.
And from the time she arrived,
they started making more money.
INTERVIEWER: Are you Facebook friends with Mark?
Yes. Yeah, I have been since the beginning.
He just posted he's going to have another baby.
And so I liked the fact that he's having another baby,
wished him a Happy New Year at the beginning of this year.
And he liked back in my comment, wishing him a happy New Year.
I found myself in the mid-2000's
working at a company called Cisco
and Facebook came knocking on my door.
(PHONE RINGING) Good afternoon, Facebook how may I help you?
When I arrived. Wow. It was chaotic.
I just found these really smart,
really high energy people bouncing around.
In those, sort of, early 20-tens,
if you worked for Facebook, everyone was fascinated by it.
You did feel like, in a sense, an ambassador
for this amazing force that was potentially gonna change the world.
Um... I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous.
We have the President of the United States here.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
My name is Barack Obama
and I'm the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
Thank you.
And, in fact, if you'd like, Mark, we can take our jackets off.
That's good.
Part of what... makes for a healthy democracy
is when you've got citizens who are informed, who are engaged.
And what Facebook allows us to do
is make sure this isn't just a one-way conversation.
Well, it was widely said at the time of Obama's election
that one of the ways he won
was by so effectively campaigning on Facebook.
Who is Barack Obama?
The answer is right there on my Facebook page.
That was a deeply impressive to Zuckerberg
and made him feel pretty puffed up. I'd say, yeah.
"Hey, we helped get the president elected." That was very heady.
Hi, this is Lady Gaga.
And I'm saying hello to all of my little monsters on Facebook.
I love you guys so much.
CHAFKIN: You know, this clip, Lady Gaga shows back then,
Facebook was unambiguously cool.
REPORTER: Here is what Time magazine said in 2010
when it named Zuckerberg 'Person of the Year',
quote, "In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together
a 12th of humanity into a single network,
thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large
as the United States, worth more than $80 billion.
It has turned into something that has changed the way human beings
relate to one another on a species-wide scale.
Anybody. Literally anybody with no technical skills
had the power of the mainstream media outlet and in their hands.
REPORTER: Mark Zuckerberg says
Facebook's almost guaranteed to reach the 1 billion user mark.
We were empowering people,
people who previously have been disempowered
and that was a noble mission, and we were all signed up for that.
And that's what got you out of bed in the morning,
was putting the power of a major communication platform
into the hands of an ordinary person,
wherever they were in the world, at no cost.
Back in 2010, we had some Arabic speakers already in the team
who were looking at content and they flagged the fact
they were seeing interesting stuff.
(INDISTINCT ARABIC SHOUTS)
In particular, there was an Egyptian page
calling for a massive demonstration.
Did you plan a revolution?
Yeah, we did.
Here were all these people in countries like Tunisia,
Syria and Egypt
who could create their own alternative media
in opposition to a state that control the media
to within an inch of its life and allowed them no space.
They created the revolution, not us.
We weren't there on the barricades,
but we had given them a media tool.
First Tunisia, now Egypt. What's next?
At Facebook.
Facebook? You're giving Facebook a lot of credit for this.
Yeah, for sure.
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually.
(ALL SINGING IN ARABIC)
An Arab Spring was the point at which, I think,
a lot of the world woke up to the fact
this wasn't a platform for kids.
It was actually influential and potentially world-changing.
And Mark was feted.
I would go and see government ministers in Europe
who previously had not been particularly interested
who was suddenly going, "Oh, you know, this Facebook thing,
actually I want to know about it. It is interesting.
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg." Because now politicians
see the platform as politically powerful.
And there was a glow for a period of time after that.
REPORTER: Today, an astronomical benchmark
as Facebook officially announces it now has 1 billion users,
one seventh of the world's population.
I joined a month after the Arab Spring.
I knew that they had made me the offer on Valentine's Day of 2011.
And so I posted, "I'm excited that I'll be joining
the Facebook DC team very soon."
In all honesty, I'm having a lot of feelings kind of flood back
of what that felt like on that first day,
walking through the doors, having no idea
what the next ten years were going to have in store for me.
In 2011-ish, 2012,
Facebook moved to the old Sun Microsystems campus.
Sun Microsystems was a very prominent company in Silicon Valley
and ended up going under.
Mark was very worried about being out-innovated.
You don't want to become Friendster. You don't want to become MySpace.
You had to keep moving. You had to keep doing stuff,
because if you didn't, someone was going to run faster than you.
Every day when you left, seeing that Sun Microsystems logo
was meant to be a reminder.
You could be this big behemoth one day
and tomorrow you could be having a rummage sale to sell your desks.
KIRKPATRICK: He did not want competition
in the social media industry.
No business leader likes competition.
He always saw Facebook as an industry in itself.
FRENKEL: Mark has always been a deeply competitive person.
He didn't just want to be famous. He wanted to be historic.
CHAFKIN: Facebook is like the largest media company in history,
and one person, Mark Zuckerberg, is its dictator.
And that was set up early on by Peter Thiel.
Thiel was instrumental in creating a situation where Zuckerberg
had this kind of like, controlling share in the company.
He set Facebook up
so that Zuckerberg could do whatever he wants.
Peter Thiel really backed the idea of the 'founder-genius'.
You founded this company.
You came up with the idea of a social network.
You are the genius and you need to be in control of this.
You need to be calling all the shots.
To the degree that we will structure your company
so nobody can hold you accountable.
That gave Zuckerberg essentially complete control over this company,
which continues to this day.
Basically, Zuckerberg could do whatever he wants.
Facebook is buying Instagram.
That's a popular photo sharing service
for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Zuckerberg reportedly negotiated the deal to acquire Instagram
for a billion dollars without alerting the board
or consulting with the board.
Instagram was tiny, but it was growing very, very rapidly.
It was obvious that it was cool
and the cool people were already using it,
even though it only had 30 million users.
It had every major, you know,
smart person in Silicon Valley using it.
He already knew that he was a little behind the curve
on adapting to the smartphone era
because Facebook had been built for the PC era,
and Instagram was designed for the mobile age.
He was very concerned that if he didn't buy Instagram,
it would be a major competitive problem for him.
Everyone was convinced that Zuckerberg
spending a billion dollars for Instagram was a sign that,
you know, the world had gone crazy because, like, how could a company
with few dozen employees possibly be worth a billion dollars?
- What is that? - I know! (OVERLAPPING CHATTER)
It's got 30 million users. Just like a social media platform for photos?
It's retro. Retro- Can it make me look younger?
ANNOUNCER: Give a hand to the Instagram founders!
The idea is to sell your company to a company
that's gonna be a rocket ship. And I remember Mike and I talking
about, like, do we believe that by being part of this larger company,
Instagram can reach an even higher potential even more quickly?
And that was the bet that we made.
Facebook makes money by collecting data on its users and selling ads.
Instagram was important because you were that much more likely
to share photos which showed things in them
of what you might be interested in.
And if you're trying to sell somebody a product, be it a car
or T-shirt, it could show where you were in terms of income bracket.
And so a lot of these things would have been really lucrative
for Mark Zuckerberg.
REPORTER: There's a clue to the potential financial attraction
the moment you download Instagram.
30 million worldwide now have the app.
Every one of them has handed over their personal details,
creating a bulging database,
now the property of Facebook.
CHAFKIN: The same with WhatsApp, you know, paying billions of dollars
for this messaging platform that had almost no revenue.
SENATOR: Mr Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us
the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Um. (AWKWARD CHUCKLE)
Uh, no.
If you messaged anybody this week,
would you share with us the names of the people you messaged?
Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.
I think that may be what this is all about.
Your right to privacy.
The limits of your right to privacy
and how much you give away in modern America,
in the name of, quote, "connecting people around the world."
Question, basically of...
what information Facebook is collecting,
who they're sending it to, and whether they ever asked me,
in advance, my permission to do that.
Is that a fair thing for a user of Facebook to expect?
The Zuckerberg Files came out of... a project where I was thinking
about how does Zuckerberg talk about privacy?
So I started collecting blog posts and speeches or interviews
that he gave around privacy
and decided to build a digital archive.
And so we've created the Zuckerberg Files
and have been collecting every single thing that he says in public.
One of the earliest clips that we have is a family video
of when Mark Zuckerberg received
his acceptance letter into Harvard University.
One of his other first interviews he gave to some filmmakers
is him sitting on a couch in shorts with a red cup,
probably with beer in it, and a T-shirt just hanging out
and giving an interview.
I mean, whether we have something that will last for a long time
or is this just, like, kind of a cool toy
for people to play with now? We'll see.
And that's one of the fun things about the archive.
We can see how he's kind of evolved and how his image changes.
And one of the moments when that happened was an interview he gave
where there were really hot lights, some controversies going on,
some really hard questions. He was sweating onstage.
INTERVIEWER: You want to take off - the hoodie? - Woah.
Alright. That's OK.
You could tell he was uncomfortable. He took off his sweatshirt
and inside of his sweatshirt is like this kind of weird company logo.
We print our mission on the inside. What?
What is it? "Making the..."
Making the world more open and connected.
Oh, my God. It's like a secret cult.
(LAUGHTER)
And really, from that point on, I think then they brought in
the corporate communication heavyweights,
gave him some speech training.
That's when we start seeing the jokes about Zuckerberg as a robot.
And, you know, and that there's this kind of coldness to how he engages.
More recently, he's been posting more about his family...
...including now occasionally pictures of his children.
But interestingly, we rarely see his children's faces.
So, I'm assuming he wants to make sure his kids faces
don't get put online for privacy reasons
or any kind of face recognition or for their own safety.
But of course, his platform has built tools
to scan our pictures and our faces.
So, he's taking these steps to protect his family, you know,
in ways that maybe many users don't understand how they should be
doing similar things to protect their own privacy on his platform.
Facebook, as I said, Josh, hitting another new all time high today,
above 70 bucks. It just seems unstoppable.
They like every move he makes, now.
I don't know how much longer this lasts, but for right now,
it seems he can do no wrong, and the stock price reflects that.
(CROWD CHEERING) (CAMERAS CLICKING)
Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running...
...for President of the United States.
HARBATH: When Trump first came down that escalator...
to announce that he was running for president, myself,
like a lot of others, was like,
"This is probably not going to last very long."
I got an email one night from Trump's PR that said...
"Trump's thinking about running for president. You want to help?"
I was like, "Yeah, sure."
I walk into this big room.
So, I listened for an hour
to a pitch of all this stuff they're gonna do.
And they asked what I think, and I just said, "No."
I just said, "We're going to do something completely different."
I said, "We're going to win this thing on Facebook."
I went home, and I focused all day, every day,
creating most of the content, doing everything myself,
my laptop at home, just me.
We need to talk directly to every single person individually
so that they can have the proper understanding
of who Donald Trump is and what he wants to do.
Voters have busy lives, they're doing things,
but they're on Facebook during lunch. Facebook in the evenings.
They're on Facebook in the restroom.
So, you have these moments of time where you can get into their brain.
Facebook said, "We'll give you a team.
They can sit in your office all day and ask them whatever you want.
Anything breaks, they'll fix it, if you spend this much money."
I said, I'm going spend $100 million."
They're like, "Well, that's plenty."
THOMPSON: Zuckerberg's ideology is to 'bring the world together'.
Donald Trump, whether you like him or not,
that is certainly not his ideology.
I think he probably thought it was going be the best possible outcome.
Donald Trump driving lots of engagement,
Donald Trump buying lots of ads and then Donald Trump losing.
I think they thought they'd take the money
and Trump would be a joke and they'd benefit from it.
I don't think they saw what was coming at all. I did.
And yes, we will build a wall.
MCNAMEE: The way you work with Facebook as you say,
the people I want to reach look like this.
Find all the people in Facebook...
who look like the people I want.
And when you have one in seven voters in your custom audience,
the precision with which you can target
is completely unprecedented.
THOMPSON: So he says, "I'm going to sell a ton of hats
that say, 'Make America Great'."
Somebody buys one of those hats, and then he says to Facebook,
OK, now put a Trump 2016 ad
in front of everybody who has characteristics
similar to the person who bought the hat.
Facebook knows everything about everybody.
So it finds all of these people who are similar, in whatever way
the Facebook algorithm can determine,
to the person who just bought the hat.
HARBATH: Anything we were offering to the Trump team.
We're also offering to the Clinton team.
Hillary's folks were like, "Thanks, we've got it.
Don't call us. We'll call you if we need help.
Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown
of Muslims entering the United States
until our country's representatives
can figure out what the hell is going on.
(CROWD CHEERING)
THOMPSON: Facebook was a perfect medium for Donald Trump.
He appeals to the emotions that work on Facebook,
our lizard brain emotions, and not our thoughtful brain emotions.
Hate him, love him. You have immediate reactions to Donald Trump.
That's how the Facebook algorithm was tuned, particularly in 2016.
I went to go check my phone and I see Trump's post
and immediately I'm like,
"Oh, no, this is not good."
And I ping some folks on my team and I'm like,
"Make sure nobody takes down this post
without escalating it up to leadership."
ALLAN: They are crossing a line and we've not had that before.
We want to protect political speech.
And the assumption was that political candidates
will not say completely unreasonable things that break our rules.
You got to see this guy. Oh, I don't know what I said.
Aagh! I don't remember.
He's starting to put things on Facebook that are challenging us
that we never thought we'd have to grapple with.
So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato,
knock the crap out of it, would you? Seriously?
Are we seriously now in a spot where we're have to think about...
taking down content from a potential President of the United States?
Normally we'd have that discussion with Sheryl.
If it's sufficiently momentous,
then Sheryl will then take it to Mark,
and then he'll either go with it or he won't.
When Mexico sends its people... they're bringing drugs.
They're bringing crime. They're rapists.
Mark did understand the scope for abuse,
and he felt that the way you avoid that
is you say we, the platform, are neutral.
We don't decide what's in your news feed.
You, the user, decide what's in your news feed.
HARBATH: Mark does an interesting interview
where he is in a room full of people,
and you can see he really held on to this idea that all speech is good
and that people would see the misinformation for what it was.
This is tricky, right? Because lies...
What the line is between something which is factually untrue
and what is a disagreement of opinion
is not always a black and white line.
we don't want to block people from sharing something on Facebook,
even if it's untrue.
Forget the press. Read the Internet.
Study other things. Don't go for the mainstream media.
I saw how Facebook was polluting the news ecosystem,
and I saw that it was making media worse.
I noticed that stories with no information,
salacious headlines, all kinds of problematic features
were doing much better than other stories.
That's when I started to really say,
"Oh, wait, what's going on here?"
And then, of course, we have Crooked Hillary. Crooked Hillary!
(INDISTINCT CROWD CHANTS)
What should we be thinking about fact checking?
Should we be thinking about this?
Is there anybody more crooked than this woman?
We're in the middle of an election.
We don't want to look like we're putting our thumbs on the scale.
I was like, "He might win? No, he's not going to win."
I kind of had this...
two sides in my brain fighting against one another.
And I think a lot of others at the company did, too.
ANNOUNCER: Please welcome the co-founder of PayPal
and first investor in Facebook, entrepreneur, Peter Thiel.
Good evening. I'm Peter Theil.
I build companies and I support people who are building new things,
from social networks to rocket ships.
I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump.
He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
REPORTER: He's a self-described libertarian,
but he's a delegate for Donald Trump.
He's an immigrant from Germany, pro tech, obviously.
And is openly gay.
Tonight, I urge all of my fellow Americans
to stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
CHAFKIN: Peter Thiel is very interested in business,
but has spent two decades as a right-wing political activist.
I think Thiel...
has had an influence on Zuckerberg's politics.
And insofar as Zuckerberg is kind of a libertarian who thinks that,
you know, the world be better off if tech companies could just
do whatever they want and the government should get out of his way
and that he's kind of more OK with Donald Trump than a lot of people.
Those are things that Thiel, I think, had an influence on him.
But I don't think Zuckerberg has deep political views at all.
I think his politics are Facebook
and his politics are Mark Zuckerberg.
PARSCALE: I'm upstairs with Trump in his residence,
and I get a phone call from my data staff that's pulling out the numbers
and they're like, "Brad you did it.
The numbers are there. Trump's won. I can't believe it."
I walked out and I told Donald Trump, I shook his hand
and I said, "Congratulations, Mr President."
He said, "Really?" And I said, "It's done.
They'll recount it two or three times before they announce it.
But you won.
REPORTER: And confirmed that Donald Trump
will be the 45th President of the United States.
THOMPSON: People are just shocked.
How did this happen? What's going on? What does it mean?
And one of the quick and early hypotheses is,
"Oh, wait, it's because of Facebook. Because the fake news on Facebook.
It's because the way the Facebook algorithm worked.
Stories start to come out about Russian influence.
And the stories are overcooked,
and they give too much credit to the Russians.
But suddenly it looks like Facebook missed something.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
I ran a company which put-on high-end tech conferences,
and for years I had been trying to get Zuckerberg to come and speak.
And finally, you know, I hit it.
Hey! Hey. Good to see you.
I wasn't even associating his speaking at the conference
with the fact that it was two days after the election.
And I do remember thinking...
before he was on stage with me that he seemed very preoccupied.
But thank you so much - for being here. - Glad to.
Post election you've been getting a lot of pushback
from people who feel that you didn't filter out enough
fake stories during the course of the campaign.
You know, personally... I think the idea that...
...you know, fake news on Facebook
of which, you know, it's a very small amount
of- of the content,
influenced the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea, right?
I was still fundamentally sympathetic to him
up to that point.
But it was clear that, no, it wasn't a crazy idea at all.
That, in fact, whether they swung the election or not
is still a subject of debate,
but fake news on Facebook had had an impact.
I was deeply disappointed in him.
I was forced to think very hard.
What do I really think about him?
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, guys.
I was really alarmed by what was increasingly obvious
to be the consequences of his failures of governance.
Overnight, we went from everything we touched to turn to gold.
To everything we touched turned to dust.
And now we're grappling with...
...the downsides of this thing that we built.
When I first joined, movies were being made.
The founder is on the cover of Time magazine.
You're overthrowing dictators.
And now seven years later, you're being told you destroyed democracy.
KIRKPATRICK It wasn't until Donald Trump was elected
that it began to be apparent
just how dangerous a system like this could be.
And don't forget, it was also Brexit.
The sun has risen on an independent United Kingdom.
Erdogan in Turkey.
Duterte in the Philippines.
Orban in Hungary.
All elected using Facebook, in every single case.
Everything changes from, sort of, 2016 onwards
after that Trump election.
People in the company went from feeling the sense of loyalty
to feeling they had a wider loyalty to something outside.
They went from being proud to go out and say I work for Facebook
to being ashamed of it.
You start to think, maybe we are the bad guys.
In terms of Mark's persona, his big positive persona
becomes a big negative persona from that point onwards.
Alright. Hey, everyone.
I'm here with my friend
and Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg,
for our typical one-on-one. (LAUGHTER)
Welcome to our one-on-one. Here we are. (CHUCKLES)
FRENKEL: Sheryl Sandberg and Mark, do these twice a week, one-on-ones.
But it's put on for show to make people feel that
Facebook is a place largely for good, rather than with conspiracies,
hate speech and misinformation that was really flooding the platform.
It's been a really important year for sharing
because a lot has happened and not all of it positive.
This has been a year of a lot of angst,
a lot of people having issues, really serious issues,
violence, war, terrorism all around the world.
But you also see these other moments.
You see, you know, the number one live video of the year
was the Chewbacca mom. Hey.
I'm really excited to share with you something I got.
Here we go.
I got to take of my glasses for it. (LAUGHS)
Naturally. OK, here we go.
So, yes.
Now, watch when my mouth actually moves.
(CHEWBACCA ROAR)
(LAUGHS, CHEWBACCA ROAR)
Oh, my gosh. I'm in tears.
REPORTER: We see the Jewellers and other Muslim-owned businesses
being ransacked by Buddhist residents and monks.
In my mind, Myanmar is the starkest example
of what can go wrong with Facebook.
It comes at a moment where Facebook is desperate
to expand to the rest of the world.
They are committed to bringing on the next 1 billion users.
There is virtually no research done into Myanmar as a country
or understanding that this is a place in the world
where there is no free press, there are no, you know,
independent government institutions.
They were buying their own PR,
that the most important thing was to bring people online.
And if you brought people online, inherent good would come from that.
And they didn't want to listen to the many people
who were telling them that in some cases,
bringing people online when there wasn't media literacy
or a Free Press or any other institution
to hold it in account could lead to hate speech.
REPORTER: From a hilltop, we see a young man, presumably Muslim,
attacked by men wielding sticks.
He staggers, attempting to flee...
...but he is forced to the earth.
I was a reporter in Myanmar, and I wrote an article...
...and part of that article documented the rise in hate speech.
I interviewed people in Myanmar who said,
"I didn't know the Rohingya were raping and killing our women.
But now that I'm on Facebook, I know the Rohingya are actually
these horrible creatures, you know."
And I took that to Facebook, as a reporter and I said,
"Can you please look at these posts that I'm sending you?
Because I can tell that this is actually footage
that's been manipulated to make it look as if
the Rohingya are carrying out atrocities.
And Facebook told me to take a hike.
Later, I found out even more activists
begin to send Facebook warnings
and saying hate speech has just gone off the rails.
Report after report after report
and Facebook does nothing.
They even bring in an activist to speak to them in their headquarters
who says, "If you do nothing, a genocide could happen."
People that walk out of that room with him and go,
"I think he's exaggerating.
I don't think he knows what he's talking about.
That's not gonna happen. That's not gonna be our fault.
SENATOR: You know, six months ago, I asked your general counsel
about Facebook's role as a breeding ground for hate speech.
This is a type of content I was referring to,
it calls for the death of a Muslim journalist.
That threat went straight through your detection systems,
it spread very quickly.
And then it took attempt after attempt after attempt
to get you to remove it.
Senator, what's happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy
and we need to do more-We all - agree with that. - OK.But...
...UN investigators have blamed you,
blamed Facebook for playing a role
in citing possible genocide in Myanmar.
He sees himself as having built a platform for all humanity.
And in his mind, that's a good thing.
There will be tremendous benefits
from making the world more open and connected, et cetera, et cetera.
But humanity includes some bad actors.
There's a lot of nasty people. That's not his problem.
Yeah, there's going to be some nasty shit that happens.
People are going to do things that are illegal, immoral, cruel,
hateful, murderous, even.
"But don't blame me. That's human nature."
REPORTER: It is reported that both the Justice Department and the FBI
are investigating the now-defunct political data firm,
Cambridge Analytica.
REPORTER: The data firm hired by Donald Trump's presidential election
campaign used secretly-obtained information
from tens of millions of unsuspecting Facebook users.
Misuse of Facebook data is at the centre of this scandal
involving both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook now says 87 million users
may have had their information shared with Cambridge Analytica.
We, as the public were impacted by it,
notably have not heard from the brand name of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg or COO, Sheryl Sandberg.
Neither one of them wanted to be the face of this.
And Zuckerberg was probably like,
"Well, it's your thing, it's your department."
And she was probably like, "You're the CEO."
And neither one of them could decide who would go out and take the heat.
And eventually, five days later, it's clear that someone has to come out.
I want to start with just a basic question, Mark.
What happened? What went wrong?
So, this was a major breach of trust.
And I'm really sorry that this happened.
SENATOR: You know, you have a long list of apologies.
In 2003, it started at Harvard.
"I apologise for any harm done as a result of my neglect."
2006, "We really messed this one up."
2007, "We simply did a bad job, I apologise for."
2010, "Sometimes we move too fast."
2011, "I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes."
2017, "I ask for forgiveness. I will work to do better."
So it seems to me...
that self-regulation simply does not work.
Mark Zuckerberg's experience as an individual
is that he does things which upset people.
He apologises and everybody moves on.
But there comes a moment in- after Cambridge Analytica in 2018
where it's not working anymore.
REPORTER: Senator, do you think that you really can trust a company
to police itself when it comes to our privacy
and when it comes to things like not censoring our freedom of speech?
As of right now, no.
Lawmakers in Washington were getting impatient because
the controversies were stacking.
Sentiment was turning against the technology industry.
They had wanted Mark Zuckerberg to testify for more than a year
and Facebook declined, they refused.
And then they threatened to subpoena Mark Zuckerberg
if he didn't appear in hearings in Washington.
And so finally, they agreed that
Mark Zuckerberg would come to testify.
There's a reason all these incredibly important
and effective disruptors of social media communications,
shopping, started in America because we had light touch regulation.
Now they've gotten big. So we have a job to step in.
If they don't perform according to the rules of the road.
Facebook has not been regulated at all at that point,
and any sort of regulation that could pop up
would be catastrophic for the company.
Any regulation and privacy, and data collection
would impede Facebook's business model,
which is to collect as much data as possible
and to sell that data to advertisers.
That is the heart of Facebook's business model.
ALLAN: Mark knows that it's high stakes.
You know that the chances of getting something wrong are quite high.
So I think he's absolutely laser-focused.
Facebook hired one of the biggest law firms,
and for two weeks this law firm went to Menlo Park
and spent time with Mark Zuckerberg holed up in conference room,
grilling him in, sort of, mock hearings,
grilling him on the names of members of Congress,
on what questions they'd ask. It was almost a mock debate preparation.
I think what he wants is, to get in there.
Don't screw up. Get out.
REPORTER: It's a monumental moment for Facebook.
This is a company that's become ubiquitous.
It's now under fire for not being transparent with its users
about its use of our data.
Now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will have his moment on Capitol Hill
testifying before Congress.
The stakes are very, very high.
Mark Zuckerberg walked into the hearing rooms
in the navy, blue suit
and surrounded by an entourage of lobbyists.
He came in with almost, like, a slight smile on his face,
trying to look cordial, trying to look cool and calm and collected.
They're unfazed. They don't want to show that
they're deeply inside very, very nervous.
CHAFKIN: I think there was a sense among lawmakers
that this was an opportunity to arrest this...
incredibly fast-growing, dominant social cultural business phenomenon.
Mark, are you putting privacy over profits now?
KANG: His lobbyists had negotiated with staff to make sure that
the air conditioning was jacked up
so that Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't sweat on camera.
Not only is the public, competitors
and lawmakers all watching this hearing,
but so is the stock market.
Investors were watching the hearings
to see if Mark Zuckerberg might trip up
and say something that could hurt the future of the business
and therefore hurt the stock.
(BANGING GAVEL)
Committee on the Judiciary and the Commerce,
Science and Transportation will come to order.
The beginning of the hearings with Mark Zuckerberg are tense.
You could tell the Facebook flock in the room are tense.
You could tell Mark is tense, the way he's sitting.
He's kind of very squared off.
I was captivated. What are the questions they're going to ask?
What are they going to uncover? What are they going to learn?
SENATOR: Mr Zuckerberg, what is Facebook doing
to prevent foreign actors from interfering in US elections?
How will you protect user's data?
Do you collect user data through cross-device tracking?
Are you willing to expand my right
to know who you're sharing my data with?
Do you believe European regulations should be applied in the US?
Are you willing to change your business model
in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Congresswoman, I'm not sure what that means.
It would seem like that would be the start
of what would be a really intense grilling.
But I was really surprised to hear how many times
Mark Zuckerberg was able to say... I can have my team follow up with you.
I'll have my team get back to you.
I'm happy to have my team follow up with you if that would be helpful?
...without answering the question at that moment.
And there was no follow up.
Some of the questions were very basic and very simple.
And I was watching this and I was communicating with other people
who follow the industry well and they were saying the same thing.
Why is there no follow up?
Mark Zuckerberg was probably thinking the same thing,
that some of these questions were not so hard
and that the hearings themselves would not be the grilling,
the, sort of, slaying that he had feared.
You're supposed to answer 'yes' to this question.
OK, come on. I'm trying to help you, right.
I mean, give me a break. The answer is 'yes'.
OK, so thank you. (LAUGHTER)
FRENKEL: The hearings could have been a turning point,
but some of the members of Congress asked these incredibly fumbling questions.
'What is this Facebook machine?' You know,.
they just they sound like your dad is asking a question about Facebook.
How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?
Senator, we run ads.
I see.
It became so clear that these members of Congress
didn't know the very basic technology that Facebook ran on
and that they were so out of their league in understanding
the fundamentals of Facebook as a company.
How could they possibly hold them to account?
You want to break now? Or you want to keep going. (CHUCKLES)
Sure. I mean, that was that was pretty good. So, alright.
In the room at that moment you understood,
like, he's got this.
He's got these members of Congress wrapped around his little finger.
I remember talking to a Facebook executive
who was fairly sceptical of Zuckerberg, talking about
everybody in a cafeteria celebrating as he knocks the senators back.
And just that was a moment where a company,
which had lost a bit of faith in their leader,
decided they loved him again.
The hearing is adjourned.
He came out of it pretty well.
Much better than I would have expected.
ALLAN: I mean, at the end, I think we feel we've done a good job.
We prepared our CEO, we've negotiated the terms of the hearing.
And if he gets away, you know, at the end of it
and nothing has gone terribly wrong...
...that is- You feel professionally...
Tick. You know, you've done your job.
The upshot was that any hopes for regulation
to curtail the power of Facebook
would never really happen any time soon
because lawmakers were incapable of doing so.
REPORTER: Do you feel that any senator here
has really laid a glove on Mark Zuckerberg?
If you think being slapped with wet noodles is hard,
I guess that's hard.
The real proof that the hearings were not so terrible
for Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg
was that Facebook stock rose.
Mark Zuckerberg became, personally, billions of dollars richer.
He left that day back to Menlo Park,
and his lobbyist went to a wine bar in Georgetown to celebrate.
The hearings were a success from their point of view.
REPORTER: You might think this is a map of the world, but it's not.
It's a blank screen.
And for every person who's using Facebook, we put a dot.
And when you do that, it effectively draws the world.
HAUGEN: When I joined Facebook in 2019,
I think it was actually in kind of a momentary calm.
The year before they had Cambridge Analytica,
which had blown up catastrophically.
So I think if you had asked a random employee,
they would have said things are looking up. Right.
We've survived Cambridge Analytica. We've weathered it.
Our stock is on the upswing.
You know, I worked on civic misinformation.
So that's, you know, things like ethnic violence.
And just a few months before,
they had realised that they didn't have a policy
against politicians calling for violence.
There were now political parties in the world
that were explicitly doing things like demonizing minorities
by calling them, you know, 'rodents', that kind of thing.
And a working group was formed to start figuring out
what should the policy be when situations like that happen.
It took a working group of maybe 30 or 40 people,
months to write the political speech policy
for Facebook, and they present it to Mark.
And Mark takes a look at he goes, "I don't like this.
I can do better." And he goes home that weekend
and he writes the political speech policy for the company.
So think for a moment about the arrogance of this. Right.
So Mark takes the work of like 30, 40 people.
Many of these people have PhDs in ethnic violence and he says,
"Oh, no. I can write a better political policy over the weekend.
I don't think that we want private companies
censoring politicians in the news.
I generally believe that as a principle,
people should decide what is credible
and what they want to believe and who they want to vote for.
I don't think that that should be something that we want tech companies
or any kind of other company doing.
2020 was a make it or break in moment for Facebook.
You had a sitting US President, Donald Trump, who was,
daily, pushing the limits of what should be said on their platform.
He was using it every single day in ways that were challenging
for Facebook to defend or make decisions on.
And there was this real sense inside Facebook of almost daily panic
of what's he going to say next?
What kind of PR storm is this going to create for us?
What kind of negative headline is going to get written today
about our company?
I remember the day after the US election speaking to someone
at Facebook who was on their election team who said,
"God, what a relief, it's over. Trump has lost."
Good evening.
I'd like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts
to protect the integrity of a very important 2020 election.
If you count the legal votes,
I easily win.
People knew prior to the 2020 election that
Trump was gonna try to delegitimize the election if he failed,
and we know this because he had been threatening it for a long time.
The lead up to January 6th was not random.
Take me inside Mark Zuckerberg's head to like the moment that
you decided you needed to change Facebook's core mission.
I feel like we have a responsibility to do more in the world.
So, what is the new mission of Facebook?
So, our new mission is to bring the world closer together.
What we need to do is empower people
all around the world to build communities.
Things like church groups and sports teams
and neighbourhood groups... (FADES)
MCNAMEE: Facebook was created initially for people
who shared an interest to get together
and which evolved into this gigantic system
that included both chess clubs
but also white supremacists and terrorists.
Facebook groups wound up becoming the home
to politically engaged extremism.
That we had not seen before.
There had been a study, internal Facebook study
what they discovered was that 64% of the time
that people join an extremist Facebook group...
...the trigger for joining was a recommendation made by Facebook.
FRENKEL: A group called Stop the Steal started to post on Facebook
and it is committed to spreading the false idea that the election
was stolen from Donald Trump,
and they managed to get hundreds of thousands to join their group.
Internally in Facebook, there's this kind of moment of panic
when they realise this is one of the fastest growing groups
in Facebook's history and it is committed to spreading
the false idea that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTS)
And then January rolls around and you have these rallies of people
all over the United States that are coming together under the banner of
the election was stolen and they're organizing themselves on Facebook.
TRUMP: We will never give up. We will never concede it doesn't happen.
You don't concede with this theft.
And then you have Trump himself issuing calls on Facebook saying,
"Come to Washington on January 6th, come rally in my name.
The election was stolen from me."
And it is that moment that Facebook understands
this is a four alarm fire.
And will this finally be the moment where they have to
take down Donald Trump's account?
And Mark kind of sits there and you think, should I call Trump?
Should I try to use backchannels to him to say,
"Hey, we're thinking of taking down your account?
And people close to him say, "I don't think it's a good idea.
Like, you could be seen as colluding with this."
People are sharing on Facebook live videos and photos
of themselves marching through the halls of Congress
looking for Nancy Pelosi, looking for Vice President Pence.
If you're Mark Zuckerberg and you've created technology
whose sole purpose is to connect people, that's your worldview,
that connecting people is inherently good
and introducing that technology to the world
has made you one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men.
It is very, very hard, I imagine, to then sit there and think,
is my underlying premise wrong? Is connecting the world bad?
And it really is only when it gets to the point where
people sitting next to me are saying, "This is gonna go to trial,
there are going to be congressional hearings about this."
And Donald Trump can continue to use this Facebook page
to agitate for violence.
And we're going to get held responsible
that Mark Zuckerberg sits there and goes, "It's gone too far.
We need to take down his account."
REPORTER: Good afternoon and we start with some breaking news,
President Trump has been banned, indefinitely, from Facebook,
according to Mark Zuckerberg. In a statement, he said,
"The current context is now fundamentally different,
involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection
against a democratically elected government.
FRENKEL: When I started reporting on Facebook, I realised very quickly
that you needed to have sources at all levels of the company.
People who work at Facebook are not used to speaking to the press
because they've been instilled with such a fear of what
talking to the press can do for their careers.
There is a very serious top-down threat of if you speak to the press,
you will not just be fired.
You will never work in tech again. Your name will be blacklisted.
It's compounded by these very fierce NDAs,
which stands for non-disclosure agreements,
that the people who work there have to sign.
I used to work in the Middle East, and I used to speak to people
who were dissenters in governments with dictatorships and monarchies
where speaking to the press meant being imprisoned.
And I had an easier time getting people in those countries
to speak to me sometimes than I did
getting employees at Facebook to speak to me.
Facebook for most of its history,
has had an entire department dedicated to finding leakers.
People who speak to journalists are rooted out
and fired in very public ways within the company.
They're constantly talked about.
At one point, it was fairly common to talk about them as rats.
In the aftermath of January six, I realised the only way Facebook
could save itself is if they got help from the outside
and so I was ready to blow the whistle.
Imagine you come in and you think it's a crisis,
and then you actually sit there and start accumulating the case
to prove the crisis.
You know, you think you know how bad it is.
And now you're like, you're looking at the whole stack of evidence.
You're like, "Oh, this is far worse than I thought it was.
It took me a long time to figure out how could I document what the public
needed to know in a way that would be effective?
And I took a bunch of screenshots.
Every time there'd be something that was sufficiently embarrassing,
they would put up a wall around information.
And so my fear was that, you know, this was like the last chance,
like I had to do a good job because the public might never know.
Blowing the whistle is very complicated,
and at some point my screen shot stopped working.
And so I was like, "Oh, so I know I'm being spied on."
I totally align myself with all the possible consequences
of what Facebook might do to me if they caught me,
because I assumed as soon as that journalism happened,
they would know it was me because they can go and triangulate
these are the documents. She's the only way to access them.
In the run up to when the Wall Street Journal began publishing,
my lawyers basically told me that I was delusional,
they thought my identity could stay a secret
because Facebook at any point could out me
and a lot whistleblowers are discredited.
And so I got basically gotten presented with the choice, like,
do you want to tell your own story
or do you want them to tell your story?
REPORTER: Scathing accusations from a former Facebook executive
about how the company handles hate content and misinformation.
REPORTER: She is the former employee
who is now accusing the social media giant of knowing how harmful
their algorithm is for our entire democracy.
KANG: When Frances Haugen comes out from the shadows
as the whistleblower.
It was an astonishing moment.
A lot of what she had been saying was what we had been hearing.
We had many Frances Haugen's, but she had documents
and she was willing to put her face and her name behind that.
She was willing to testify.
Facebook's products stoke division and weaken our democracy.
Almost no one outside of Facebook
knows what happens inside of Facebook.
The company intentionally hides vital information from the public.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing
and surprising revelations from Frances Haugen
was that there were internal studies
on how Facebook's recommendation engines
can lead teenagers into these rabbit holes.
REPORTER: A troubling new report today spells out
what all that time on social media is doing to our teenagers.
For example, a teenager looking at some influencer of fitness
would then get served to them, recommendations to diets,
and then that would then lead to
recommendations for eating disorders,
things like bulimia, how to become anorexic,
really destructive behaviour.
Content that elicits an extreme reaction from you
is more likely to get a click, a comment or reshare.
These are the kinds of rabbit holes that were leading to suicide.
Thoughts of suicide ideation.
And Facebook understood this.
It was, in fact, studying this.
The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook
and Instagram safer but won't make the necessary changes
because they have put their astronomical profits before people.
It is time for us to adopt a new company brand
to encompass everything that we do,
to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.
I am proud to announce that starting today,
our company is now Meta.
I gotta pause that.
Look. L- Look!
Let's remember, all this pride
and this cocky stuff was at the exact moment
when all of Frances Haugen's whistleblowing revelations
were cascading across the news media.
When they were getting new articles every day
based on Frances Haugen's documentation that, basically,
proved their culpability, at the height of that period.
They had a big press conference to change their name
and make their new strategy, the Metaverse!
And you know what? It worked.
Now...
You know, I really just cared about building something that
my girls are going to grow up and be proud of me for.
And I mean, that's what is kind of my guiding philosophy at this point is,
and I- you know, come and work on a lot of hard things during the day.
And I go home and just ask, "Will my girls be proud of what I did today?"
FRENKEL: There's no doubt history is going to remember Mark Zuckerberg
for creating the first really global social media company.
I don't see how we as a society go back in time to a point where
we're not all instantaneously connected to everyone
we want to be connected to all over the world.
It really has created a new reality.
I think the people closest to Mark that have now left the company
and reflect on their time there say that
the biggest problems at Facebook come
because of the absolute power that was handed to one individual.
It's the President of the United States!
And that no matter how smart you were as a 19 or 20-year-old
in creating a very specific type of technology,
there is just no situation in which it is appropriate
for one person to have unbridled power
and decision-making over such a large group of people.
And that by having really no cheques and balances
on Mark Zuckerberg's power or his decision making,
Facebook ultimately made a number of mistakes
that affected millions of people all over the world.
When someone becomes worth $100 billion
and is the richest person in human history of that age,
it makes them feel magical... unchallengeable
and, I feel, self-justifying to a tremendously harmful degree.
KANG: The main question of Facebook going forward is,
who keeps Mark Zuckerberg in check?
There are very few people that hold him accountable.
Who's the one who tells him, "Mark,
that decision may not be good for the company?
It may not be good for the business model."
And very importantly, who is asking him,
"Mark Zuckerberg, is that decision you're making good for the world?"
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