YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Stamos

lines on the record: 60
first: 2019-05-24
most recent: 2019-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The reality TV version of the internet will exist for a long time, just as the reality TV version. I think Facebook and Twitter distribution systems for content more than they are content themselves and social media is a whole nother thing, but I'm talking about publishing and even when people are talking about where they get their news and information, most things people read are on other sites that are commercially published and driven by advertising.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason it sucks is because of advertising. Full stop. That is the game that we've been playing for 20 years, and it wasn't so bad at first. And now attention wins, period. The cheapest way you can generate attention, which is the same reason that reality TV dominated. Change the business model, you change the content. To me, people talk about saving publishing or saving news. How about we create something way better? And I think we can do that in the same way other industries do by changing the incentive structure.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you imagine that there will be great media brands not, like, you know, you have Game of Thrones, for example, which just finished, which we're not sure we're going to do after that. But you still are positive that media can morph into this in this noisy angry.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very optimistic. I think it's interesting that the written word and publishing, which we're currently focused on, though not limited to, is kind of the last to be, you know, there's a time when it was going to be the death of the music industry. And there's a time it was never, as I recall, the death of the TV industry, but there's a time when reality TV dominated. And that's what we kind of thought the future was. And both those are tremendously better, both as businesses and as consumer products. And I think the same thing for the same reason can happen with the information we read in non-fiction educational content as well.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not Twitter, but we just serve a very different purpose. So the modern media company, if you're building a publisher today given the internet, I think it'd be crazy to limit yourself to the people in the building or the people who you know. And so we have the good fortune of getting tens of thousands of people every single day saying, here's my story, here's my idea, here's my perspective, and we curate that. And sometimes we edit it and we put it in front of more people. And then we also get the benefit of working with people who are well established. And so a modern media company, I think, taps the world's brains and really builds the best. And a big part of what we do in our philosophy is blending humans and machines. So we've seen the pure open platform, what that gives us in terms of content. And we've seen”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think that's, I think a modern media company, we think the idea of being open to some degree is important, and this is where we're really trying to capture the best of what you get from the internet and from social media in many ways, which is giving a lot of people the chance to be heard, but it's not guaranteed. It's not just let the machines and algorithms and people fight it out for attention. It's really blending openness.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love So, what do you imagine, finishing up, what the modern media company looks like? What's been the thing that you've done and you've thought, ah, that's not the way it should go? What do you think a modern media company looks like? Because you could go and buy old media companies and try to...”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, there was a rumor about that. I love New York magazine. I think they do a great job. And look, I think it is something I've thought about because I think there's a lot of those organizations that do great work and they need a new model, frankly. And a lot of them are, I think, will be fine, but a lot of them are going through more difficult times. The difference between myself and most of the people you mentioned is if we were to do that, it would plug into the business I'm building.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think yourself of buying big media companies, all the others, a lot of Lorraine Powell Jobs, Mark Benioff, obviously Jeff Bezos and others with some money have been purchasing things? There was a rumor you were looking at New York magazine. Is that true?”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could call it a network, and medium's always been a network. It's really a platform, and the subscription part is a bundle. It's a bundle of thousands of writers, of dozens of publications for one price. Some of that is licensed, by the way, from third-party publishers. So we include New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, a lot of these part of just a few stories from them are in there. And so really our goal is to build the best content subscription product that there is.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Launch something with a couple weeks ago. And so all of that is working. It's really the combination of things that are working because it's very clear to me that advertising isn't working. Pure advertising for publishing, for quality information, people still want good things to read and to inform their view of the world. And so every publisher that, as you know, is putting up paywalls and subscriptions, and it seems very clear that people aren't going to subscribe to dozens of sites, just like they don't subscribe to every TV show they watch or every musician. They're going to look for a lot of value under one subscription that's personalized, that's high quality, that I think ad frees tremendously.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything's growing. The bulk of medium is still self-published authors. And that's what, and we have our partner program where we pay them through. Most people write a medium. We don't opt in to get paid. They're looking to find audience. We also have very growing editorial team that is publishing the latest thing we've been doing is starting these little publications or mini magazines around a variety of topics. We've been doing that both in-house and through partners like Mark Bittman and Roxanne Gay.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We haven't changed that many things about medium. Medium's been around for about seven years. The entire time it's been an open publishing platform that has grown that entire time, so more people write, more people read. Two years ago we started building a subscription business on top of that. That's been going very well. And so over the last two years, the main thing we've done is built this premium consumer subscription business on top of the open publishing platform. So it's really a mesh of those two things that allows anyone to publish, have a voice, potentially get paid. We pay thousands of writers from all over the world.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think obviously AI is infiltrating everything we do, and there's some very interesting things. Actually, there's an overlap of AI and material and molecule discovery. Which I'd probably butcher this if I try to explain it. One of our companies is Zymergin, which is based on, which is just doing mind-blowing things and inventing new, discovering new materials and new chemicals through AI. And so that's a field that I barely understand. And I think every time I learn more about it, it's doing incredible things. There's a number of companies like that.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is dramatically. I mean, in my 20 years of building companies in Silicon Valley, the intensity of focus on diversity and inclusion in the last five years is dramatically higher. It's an order of magnitude higher. And it's changing how definitely how we invest, how we run companies, how we hire, it's changed all those things in my experience. And we have a long way to go.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I agree. I don't see any excuse for doing it. We try very hard to invest. I don't have the data off the top of my head about our portfolio. I know it is something that comes up in every partner meeting and every conversation I'm in about how we both hire in the firm both women and people from underrepresented backgrounds and how we get that into our portfolio. And we work on it daily. And my partners are very focused on them. I don't have an excuse.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's habit. It's definitely not the lack of viable investments that are outside the geography or demographics of that traditional set. aren't internationally focused. And one thing is that so much of the money is in Silicon Valley and the firms are there because they come out of it's historic. And it is hard to invest in other places where there's just a time in the day problem. We have a couple investments in Europe, but not a lot, and we have some in New York and throughout the country. But part of that, I certainly celebrate expanding the ethos and the formula of Silicon Valley to other places, but it's pretty massive and there's this perpetuating cycle. People come out of companies and they go back in and they invest in their friends. I get that.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we do a lot of stuff in sustainability from solar and solar software. We're investors in Protera, the electric bus company. There's some other, another exit we just had was Ollie, which was a supplement company. And so we tend to do things that are outside of the traditional Silicon Valley world that I know, which of course Silicon Valley is expanding greatly in terms of what they invest in, but it's not a lot of software or media.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we kind of play a different game, I think, than most Silicon Valley investors. And first of all, it's our lens of filtering out a lot of things that could be great investments, but if we don't think they really are going to address some need for society, we'll say, that's okay. There's lots of others we'll focus on. Which eliminates most of enterprise software And then also the message that entrepreneurs really appreciate is that we are mission aligned and we will support an entrepreneur who is mission focused, which people come to us because they really like hearing that because as an entrepreneur, you can be, and I've been in this position where you're aligned with your investors in terms of wanting to build something really big, but you can get misaligned in terms of really the purpose of that thing.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would assume any meat company, I mean, the response to the Beyond Me IPO, which has been so gratifying, is that people are paying attention to this plant protein company that most people wouldn't have predicted would make such a big blip. And I think it's a lot of people seeing the potential.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal with it, and the company's been around for a few years, and the goal with it was always to penetrate the meat market. And I mean that in the actual grocery store sense. And to really massive trillion dollar market that we thought there was a better alternative to, so we didn't have the plan for that. Ethan and his team had the plan.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Beyond me was one of the first investments we did. We actually rolled it into obvious ventures. Biz and I, you know, my longtime partner Biz was a vegan for a long time, some Kleiner Perkins did the Series A and Beyond Meat. I think because they knew he was a vegan and they're like, hey, are you interested in this company? And so he brought it to us and we were very excited about it. We love the products. been vegan in pescatarian for a long time and”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is done phenomenal, and it's not an impact investment, it's phenomenally lucrative, profitable investment that addresses this massive need of lowering our carbon footprint when it comes to the meat wheat.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Impact investing can be great, but impact investing historically is a view that we will take a lesser financial return in order to have some sort of other impact. Which there's investments that make sense for that. Our view is that the biggest companies that scale the most are not going to have, they're going to have big returns. And so rather than say we're going to compromise in returns, we feel like that can be a failure mode and say, like, actually it's not that healthy of a company or it doesn't have great product market fit. We're saying, no, it has to be, it has to be great. So an example one of our companies is beyond meat, which is...”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's just our term before things. We have a lens. We're not an impact investor. We're a for-profit investor because that doesn't compromise on financial returns, but we're very genuinely focused on things that we think are big ideas and big solutions.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that we wouldn't, but at obvious ventures we focus on what we call world positive investing, which is things that we think address big systemic problems we face as a society. We haven't seen something come along and we don't do actually very many internet or media things. We do a little bit, but we do things more in health and wellness and sustainability.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm confident it will remain around, but I think also people's relationship and sort of the novelty and some of the excitement that brought us to is wearing off. Sugar high, and now we're like, oh, do we need this in our life in the same way?”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where do I think it is? It's in the bleakness of figuring out where it needs to go. I think I don't have any answers as to how we get out of the current situation, but I think there's a tendency to say, oh, social media is terrible and forget all the great things about it, which I still believe are true. And I believe the terrible things are true because social media is humanity. And it amplifies, unfortunately, amplifies a lot of bad aspects of humanity. It's very powerful at that and very powerful at connecting people with terrible ideas and amplifying those and making them seem like they're good ideas. On the other hand, it does the opposite. And I think there is a better version of social media to be invented. And I don't know if that will happen incrementally because there's lots of smart people trying to evolve these systems at these massive companies or if it will happen with just completely new paradigms and new ideas that come along.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, being on the board is not being at the company. And so while it's called Life.for Twitter, I kind of laugh because it's kind of been life after Twitter for me for a long time. And I'll always be associated with the company, always be rooting for it. Still a shareholder of the company. certain part of my year is no longer spent in Twitter board meetings but I've been focusing my time on other things for a long time.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ted Cruz, right? Exactly because what's happened is they've vacillated back and forth. And so it's to use a recent metaphor, there's a little bit of a James Harden action going on here of working the refs, right? Of they have indicated as the refs that they can be worked that they will give you the call if you flop. And so everybody's flopping now. And that's not good for democracy for these decisions to be made in a secret conference room based upon external pressure. It needs to be made with a public discussion.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, I mean, the other big thing is I think they just need to be honest about what they can and can't do. One of the big problems to the company is they make these content decisions based upon external pressure and trying to react to immediate issues, and they don't base it upon kind of a constitution of why does Facebook do certain things. And the truth is there should be limits to the company's power. And I think it would be better for the company to say there are certain things we are not going to do, even if we get yelled at a lot by the New York Times and explain to the media.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it exists in the societal impact is still bad. And I think that is a very seductive future for the company, and the company has to resist that, and they have to work on, well, I think I believe in encryption and privacy, but we have to balance the privacy responsibility with the safety responsibility. And there is lots of good technical work we can do to do better on both of those. I would like to see them spend the next year doing that.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I agree with some of the directional stuff of moving the company towards smaller groups, moving it towards ephemerality, moving it towards encryption. Encryption end-to-end encryption gives you ability to mathematically guarantee people's privacy that allows you to put data out of your reach and out of the reach of your advertising team and anybody who wants to use it. The thing that has to happen with that is they have to do some fundamental rethinking of how they do safety in this situation, which the problem is there's a future in which Facebook encrypts everything. Everything moves to small groups. A lot of these problems go away from the press because the press doesn't see it anymore.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I do think Mark is serious that he really cares about what people remember him for and what this company does. I think one of the fundamental issues is that the metrics the company has been measuring to manage tens of thousands of people that make decisions have been the wrong ones. And that is a hard thing to change. And that's why I'm saying changing out leadership on the product side might be necessary to help also signal that the things we used to measure around engagement, around time use, time spent, all that kind of stuff, that's not what we care about anymore.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because what kind of mixed message is it to say we're pivoting the company to care about long-term issues? Yet most of your compensation is based upon what happens right after the quarterly numbers are released. I mean, Facebook stock is way back up”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Congratulations you got a raise because our stock went up, right? Allowing using RSUs as the main form of compensation for executives takes away any kind of discretion from the CEO to motivate people with money. And I think that's a fundamental issue in Silicon Valley. It's for startups, stock makes sense because people are taking a risk. If you work for a huge profitable company, they already have to fully expense it. There's no tax benefit. You're paying full marginal tax rates on stock compensation. You should be bonusing people. You can pay them as much, but the bonuses should be based upon a basket of metrics that measure whether you're doing good long-term things for the world, not based upon whether Wall Street liked your recent numbers. Because Wall Street doesn't give a crap of whether textbooks.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, yeah, so Yahoo was dying for 10 years. I mean, there's a lot of problems with Yahoo, but I actually think the companies are too beholden to Wall Street. And so the second big thing I would change is they need to get rid of stock compensation at big public companies. So 80-something percent of my compensation at Facebook was set by Wall Street. And so this is a crazy world if the CEO comes to you and says, you've done a really poor job of making our products good for the world, I am very upset with you.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he controls the company. Right, because there is a legitimate argument that he has too much power. He needs to give up some of that power. And if I was him, I would go higher a new CEO for the company. He's already acting as the chief product officer with Chris Coxgon. That's where his passion is. He should hire a CEO that can help signal both internally and externally that the culture has to change. And I mean, my recommendation, I'm not a recruiter, but if I can get 20% of this guy's salary in the first year, that would be fantastic. My recommendation would be Brad Smith from Microsoft. But some adult who has gone through this before at another company. And then the second, I think, big thing I would do”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg called me, which he doesn't, and asked my advice on this, I would say a couple things. I think Facebook needs to have an internal revolution on the culture of how products are built. And there's actually a model for this, which was Microsoft 2002, in which Microsoft was facing kind of the same level of pushback on core information security issues, and they completely changed how the product works. So he directionally has some ideas on that, but I think it's hard without making significant leadership changes to do that. And so if I was Mark, my suggestion would be, especially because there's all this, the antitrust stuff is a lot very personalized on him, he should hire himself.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Antitrust. So I think there are legitimate antitrust arguments for breaking up Facebook and breaking YouTube up from Google. Those arguments, legitimate arguments are the ones on competition policy, right? If you want to argue that these companies have reduced competition through their incredible ability to predict the future, to use their cash reserves, to buy companies and to take out competition, I think that's a legitimate argument. Breaking up the companies does not solve the fundamental issues. You can't solve climate change by breaking up ExxonMobil and making 10 ExxonMobil's, right? You have to address the underlying issues. And so I think there's a lot of excitement for antitrust because it kind of feels good to be like, oh, I hate this company, so let's break it up. Having three companies that have the same fundamental problems doesn't make anything better.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting problems we have in the US is we don't have a competent privacy regulator that translates rules into, so one, we don't really have privacy laws, right? So the FTC kind of comes up with, they move the goalposts and they say you have to follow these goalposts, and then there's not a lot of interpretation of what that actually means technically. And this is a problem you see a lot in Europe because European GDPR is being interpreted by 28 different data protection authorities. So you have 28 goalposts you're trying to shoot through. I think in the US we can do a better job on if we had an organization that could fine without going to court, right? And that's what some of these other countries do have, like the Irish, is they have organizations that can”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and creating the idea that you're a suppressed minority, right? Right. Even if you control two branches of government and a huge media ecosystem. And so there's no way they're going to sign up for Christchurch or anything else that could possibly undercut the argument that Trump supporters are the suppressed. That there's any kind of moderation that means anything.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. That's a problem. And so I think that's a different issue than online ads. I think on the content moderation extremism, the United States is out of the game. Partially because of the First Amendment, partially because of the Trump administration is never going to do anything that undercuts their, you know, it's pretty clear that one of their 2020 strategies is to build a huge amount of kind of cultural dislocation among their supporters based upon saying that internet companies are suppressing them, right? Like conservatives control Fox News. They have a huge online ecosystem.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I mean, I think what would happen if the US came up with a broader definition of political ads and then came up with requirements around who you have to be to run them, what kind of transparency is provided, and how much microtargeting can happen, I do think that would encourage a number of other countries to adopt the same standards if only because it is much more likely they will be enforced.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and well, and actually, I mean, the real game in town seems to be other countries. It seems to be post after the Christchurch shooting the most interesting regulatory moves have all been in the non-US Anglophone countries, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, here in Canada there's lots of discussion about regulation. And because of the lack of a First Amendment, parliamentary systems where you have kind of an implied constitution but no constitutional right to free speech, these countries can move much more quickly than the United States can. My proposal would be I think the US should lead on this and so we should have a US the US should lead on regulating ads we should have a US federal privacy law our reluctance to play in this space has opened the door for other countries to regulate in a way that is in some cases not helpful and in this case maybe we could set a standard that becomes international standard”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like your use of the term amplification because I think one of the things we start to forget is that these companies are actually many products at once. If you take just the Facebook product, the big blue app, you can decompose it into 10 or 12 different applications that have different levels of amplification. And at the top of, I use on a chart an inverted pyramid for this, the top of that inverted pyramid is advertising and recommendation engines. And so I think that's where you start because that's where the most risk is. And there's also, I think, the least amount of free expression concern when you block somebody's access to advertising. And so if we're going to start from a regulatory, both self-regulatory and federal regulatory perspective, you start at the top there of regulating political ads. We have a bunch of detailed recommendations in this report that's coming out, but we're going to talk about how we would expand the Honest Ads Act, the kind of transparency requirements. There's been a bunch of transparency changes, but they're totally voluntary.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“India is the election's over. The counting is happening right now. India is a fascinating issue because most of the disinformation is driven by domestic actors. And they're doing it on WhatsApp. It's actually interesting. WhatsApp is the exception that proves that some of the kind of dumb criticism about Facebook and algorithms is poorly built because WhatsApp has no algorithmic ranking. It has a huge amount of privacy for people and yet there's a disinformation problem because the problem is people. And in this case in India, you have the ability to enlist hundreds of thousands of people to push propaganda on behalf of your political party.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of citizens United. So, what would be the solution? So you have the billionaires, the attack of the billionaires on the election. You have influenced by the Russians who will continue to do it because it works, presumably. Other countries.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, an American. Like if you had an American, you know, the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson or George Soros or pick your billionaire, Reed Hoffman got kind of caught paying for a company to do some of this stuff on the Democratic side.”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we are entering a very, very scary period, right? For a couple reasons. One, the Russian playbook for 2016 is out there. It is not that technically difficult to hack the email of a couple of grandfathers and release the contents. Nor is it that difficult to build a team of people that basically are edgelords pushing memes all day and then doing a little bit of targeted advertising. So, what I expect is that the Russian playbook is going to be executed inside the United States by domestic groups, in which case some of it other than the hacking is not illegal. All the Russian internet agency stuff, if done by a group hired by an American billionaire and they're careful around existing...”
2019-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Facebook’s former security boss Alex Stamos and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT