YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Angwin

lines on the record: 70
first: 2019-04-26
most recent: 2019-04-26
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

“To break my heart over here God, there's so much. But you know, one of the things I'm really upset about is the use of algorithms to score people in ways that actually aren't really seen as tech. Your resume is sent through an algorithm, right? People work for algorithms fired by algorithms. People who work everywhere. And so this idea that, and I do, I just think it's worth pointing out, the people who are scored and sifted by algorithms, strangely, are often people of color and poor people. And so we're getting into a world where actually some people get human judgment and some people judgment by machines. And that's a very upsetting thing.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And solidify the results. This happened with our work on criminal risk scores. We put out the data set. Because it's been replicated and written about so much. And it's really moved the field in terms of the field of computer science fairness and algorithms.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. I say scientific journalism, and what I mean by that is it's better than the normal journalism, which is three anecdotes and you're out, right? So when we've had our meeting with Craig, he was like, okay, let me use to see I understand this. Basically, all you're talking about is increasing the sample size. I was like, yes, that's basically it. That's not entirely true, right? Like, so we have a data ethics policy, or we had at the markup, which actually said we will not do p hacking and also that we aim for replicable results and we will publish our data and our code as often as possible, which is what I've done all my career. And so I do think journalism can aspire to the standards of science, but we are journalists, right? And so I think of us as the first people over out of the trenches, right? We're doing the first draft. And then actually science usually comes in and does a lot of follow-up work to validate.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm interested in the notion of scientific journalism in an era in which there's a lot of examining of science itself. There's between peacking and replication problems. Academic science has started examining how the apparent rigor isn't actually as real as we thought.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to chat, and I'm like, no, I didn't call me Friday, and then Friday I'll not pick up the phone. So it's a much softer approach. I just, I don't, I can't explain it, but it's just as effective. And they certainly will, I think Mark's piece about his wanting legislation was fascinating. You should read between the lines of that particular thing, I think. Okay, quickly here and here.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's no question they're doing heavy duty lobbying on lots and lots of issues that affect them. I think the question is who can they try to find people they can work with on their side. Like you have someone like Senator Warner, who's very tough on them on some issues or Senator Klobachar is tougher on them. Senator Bennett is moving into that direction. Senator Wyden is very interested in voting machines. That's more of his area. So they tend to try to co-op them. When I wrote a column this week about Sri Lanka, the first call was a Facebook person saying, hey, girl.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've hired a lot of lobbyists. You might look at that. There's a lot of data on that. Like in terms of they didn't have lobbyists before and now they have a ton of lobbyists, first of all, I think their approach is a little different than, say, a big oil or big banking or stuff like that. They're very, they'll show up, they'll apologize, they'll have meetings, they'll have dinners, they'll have thought time. Mark is having a lot of dinners with smart people. Like he's getting his Harvard education now, which is kind of fascinating. He's having these and everyone will go. Like, you know, if you're, I don't know, the guy who wrote The Hamilton book, Ron Cherna, you'd go to dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, right? Why not? And so they're doing it that way. I think they're allowing the discussions to go on and then secretly behind the scenes sort of trashing people. Like, correct? I mean, I don't know. I think they seem to be, it's a different way approach.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My question is if there's a politician that starts getting rhetorically and legislatively very tough on tech, do you believe that the tech companies will kind of resort and hunker down like the hydrocarbon”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sugar all the time, and sugar, you can have sugar, sugar, you can keep your room messy, you can do this. What do you imagine is going to result? And this is why we have what we, I, this is my belief, but other people have different beliefs. So it's going to be a big question. But as to younger people, I do think they get inundated. It's like sludge. You can't be protected from it. The government really should be protecting people from this or lawyers suing, you know. And the US, we usually choose lawyers. Lawyers, yeah. So question right here.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over issues of Fosta and Yeah, but there's only one shipping. Yeah. So the question is do you remove it for the large companies? Does the world's richest people deserve immunity from behavior? Because what's resulted is it's sort of like giving kids.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you'd like to know, I'm going to write about it in the New York Times next week, and they're very nervous. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives internet companies broad immunity from anything that flows over. It's sort of treating them like a phone company, essentially. And it was done at the time, and I was there and I wrote about it for the Washington Post, actually, in order to allow these companies to grow. They were small startups and they didn't want to be sued out of existence from the very get-go. And AOL was a big part of pushing for that and other sites at the time. And so what they did is got this broad, broad immunity. And I just interviewed Nancy Pelosi about it, and she said it was a gift that they're abusing. And it certainly was a gift. And so the question is, do we want to allow people who are the richest people on earth now from using this gift to abuse it further? And I think it's been chipped away.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being completely spammed with lies all the time. Like, is it actually your responsibility? Like, I feel like one thing that we kind of haven't paid attention to enough is the literature around persuasion. And the fact that all of us are very persuadable. And we used to have information gatekeepers who had certain standards and they didn't publish things that were untrue. And the reason was they were at risk for a lawsuit, right? The Wall Street Journal where Kara and I worked together for years, every story in there we could be sued for. We could be sued for the letters to the editor. Those were fact-checked, right? The advertisements we were actually responsible for. The internet company's got a special exemption in the 1996 telecom act so that they're not liable for anything that anyone writes on their platforms.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm not sure that hypothesis is true. I'd like to see the data for that. But I do think that media literacy in general is a challenge. And I actually just feel like that's a classic case of pushing the burden onto the user, right? Like the fact is that if you're”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will push back on you. I have a son who literally is like, I call him Wikipedia, walking Wikipedia because he has so many, well, not those facts, but he's so factually oriented that he will not talk about anything else. So it's an interesting change. But how do you?”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also see analysis there is plenty like I actually feel like we're not lacking right now for opinions about tech online in my feeling right and so I felt like that space was fully owned and was good it was great everyone's doing it we could bring just a different piece to the table”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the big issues, and also we would have been fine with no finding, right? Like, I mean, if there's nothing to find, then there's nothing to find, right?”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boom, we were like, oh my gosh, they give themselves a huge advantage when they're the seller or when it's their favorite sellers. What are they called? I forgotten the name, but the ones who pay them fees to be in their warehouse is fulfilled by Amazon. And so then we were like, oh, we had a huge finding. And that's, and that's where you just let the facts lead you to where you want to go.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were like, oh, there's nothing here. And I thought that was really disappointing, but happened. And then I went to drinks with Barry Lynn, the guy from Open Markets Institute, and I was like Yeah, we looked into Amazon. We couldn't find anything. He said, Oh, well, have you tested the real question with Amazon is how did they treat themselves as a seller on their own platform that they control? So we tweaked our hypothesis. We said, okay, let's ask that question. We already had all this stuff running.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for example, which probably is true. Yeah, no, and many times our stories have taken many surprising turns, right? So we were looking at Amazon. I had been told that there was a if you shopped on your mobile phone versus desktop, you would get different prices. So we put all this testing software up in the Amazon Cloud, of course, and ran tests on Amazon from Amazon Cloud. And we found no results.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because at the end, Facebook sucks as your end point, for example, which probably is true. It's probably accurate. But you don't want to start with that. You want to give them the benefit of doubt when you start something. And you could go down another road, for example.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm actually not sure about that, but I do feel like I could imagine that people donate to their favorite causes and I can understand why you might want to position your journalism as a cause. What I feel though about that is that from my experience doing this type of work that it undermines your findings. When you go in with an agenda, you have to be willing to follow where the data leads you. And so I think it's a dangerous road. I can see it's tempting, but I think it's dangerous for the pursuit of truth.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually just want to do the thing. I was doing it. I mean, it would be awesome if I could just do that. Like, we had some great investigations. I feel like we were going to launch. I had some great people who were going to come, the people who were there are great. If I could do this somehow, somewhere, that's what I would do. I want to build this field. This is too important an issue for there not to be a team like this doing this type of work. It doesn't have to be at the markup. It can be somewhere, but I'm going to try to figure out a way to make it happen.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She fired you. So, what happens now? Now, just Jeff has written a very problematic memo, very defensive memo, which I said on the internet yesterday about what's going on and begging the people to come back, which was odd at the same time.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's what it seemed like. And I don't actually know what they're going to do because there's two journalists left in the newsroom, and I don't know what that publication is at this moment. But that's where it looked like was heading, and I didn't feel like I could stay there and not be the person in charge of editorial. And so I wrote that letter and then. And then she fired”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but they didn't offer, like, honestly, they didn't even offer me a job. It was just like you might be suited as a columnist, but there's no job description of like what that would look like and what your roles be or anything. So I wrote them a letter with my lawyer saying, look, it seems like you're reneging on your agreement to give me my employment contract. It's been sitting with you. My lawyer has given it to you. But I'm not going to step down as editor-in-chief because I have promised our donors and employees that it will pursue a particular vision. And I don't have faith that you're going to carry that out.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And once again, there was no plan of how I could improve it, it was just a declaration, and then said, you know, you probably better suit it as a columnist. And I was like, oh, I mean, I'm not really a columnist. I mean, I was like every once in a while I've written an op-ed here or there about an investigation I did. So it wasn't, it didn't, I just said it.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, we know things are going that well, right? Right, right. And then we continue to have conflicts about the mission and the advocacy. And then in the end of March, she and Jeff took me to dinner again and said that was failing as editor-in-chief and bringing down the markup.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think she ran some of the Canadian broadcasting corporation internet site. So she's been in journalism, radio and TV. So that was disturbing. That's when I sort of realized that”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a couple Ennogram or something. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what these things are. And so there were a whole bunch of reasons like that that I wasn't suited to leadership. But it wasn't a performance improvement plan. Like here's the ways you can grow as a leader or anything like that. It was just a negative. And this is someone who.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did go to all of them. I went to all the meetings, but I just didn't like them. Another reason was I wouldn't agree to take a personality test. I don't believe they're based on evidence and she was really insistent that she needed me to personality.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish we had been hiring faster, but we had a pretty aggressive hiring schedule. So I felt like we were definitely on track to launch in July. We had some investigative stories that were coming down the closing finish line. I felt like excited about it. But she took me aside in January with Jeff, the two of them, and they said you're not suited to be editor-in-chief. And the reasons were things like you don't like meetings. That's true, but”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I don't know why I was fired, right? She would never give me a reason that's been out there as the management issues, leadership. That's what she said publicly. You did hire fast.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea of could we bring more scientific approach because I feel right now, despite all the craziness in the world, I do feel data changes the narrative. When you bring data to the table, people are willing to take it on board and it does lead to change and impact and policy changes. And so I feel like that was our calling as a journalist was to bring that data to the table so that we could make change.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reality is the fair representation is that 99% of the science suggests that climate change is happening and 1% of people who don't have credentials say it's not. So I wanted to move a little bit more towards what I call the scientific method approach, which was you have a hypothesis. Hypothesis. Facebook allows drop-down menu for racism that allows advertisers to break the law, test that hypothesis. Okay, how much data do we need to collect? In that particular case, buy one ad, you've basically proven it. Some hypotheses need thousands of data points, right, for criminal risk scores we collected 18,000 scores of defendants. And then you basically say, here's our finding. Our finding is X, and here's our limitations. So the limitations of our finding is we couldn't test every ad on Facebook, right? And so I felt like that was our approach. And that is different than Mother Jones and the nation, but it's also different than normal journalism. It's just, it was just a nice.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because I actually had this other idea, right? So I really felt like journalism is always put on the pedestal objectivity, which is this weird neutral tone and point of view, and it really has led basically to false equivalency, right, on the one hand, climate change is happening. On the other hand, some random person says it's not. And the truth is that's not a fair representation of what”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll talk about that. The difference between skepticism and being negative. Yeah. Because I get accused of being super negative all the time, like constantly. And I think it's fair. It's a fair point of view. I think I've been with them long enough to be warning people about what's happening. Talk about that idea because you want to, there are advocacy publications. I guess you might put Mother Jones in there. You might put some others, but you didn't think of yourself as that.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think we weren't aligned on the vision as much as I thought, right? Because once we started getting into it, it just became clear that she was taking a much more anti-tech position than I. And I'm obviously known for being very skeptical about tech, but”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought, oh my God, we're going to lose this money. How do I go back to him and say, like, we're starting again with a different team? And so I said, okay, well, I'll agree to that because honestly, I didn't want to do the business side stuff. So I thought most of that job is actually stuff I don't want to do, but I need an employment guarantee. I need a contract so that I can't be fired at will. And she said, sure, let's totally do that, but it's going to take a couple months. Let's just close this stuff and we'll get to it. We'll get to it. And we never got to it. And so that's why I was fired by email on Monday. Right.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So I did a kind of founder's mistake, which was when I recruited Sue to be the business partner. And I didn't really, we didn't talk about what our roles would be until we were a couple weeks away from closing the gift from Craig. And then she said, she gave me an ultimatum that she would quit if I didn't make her CEO and my boss. And I was scared.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did worry about it, but I actually felt like the nonprofit model that we were pursuing had a little bit more hope. I feel like the for-profit model has led to, it's just been really hard because it trends towards clickbait. And you have to really push against that because the ad model is really this incredibly transactional model and it's not based on the quality of your audience at all. I was hopeful that we could sort of build a nonprofit model by getting our readers to understand that like we weren't going to have any tracking on the website. It was going to be very privacy protecting. It was going to feel like a service, you know, because a lot of places that charge subscriptions, but then they still track you and still advertise you. And it's like, come on, guys. You know, so we felt like, okay, maybe people would donate the amount that they would have subscribed somewhere because they understood that we were on their side. We weren't selling their data, collecting it at all.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my colleague Jeff Larson, who he and I had been doing these investigations together for years. And then he and I recruited this woman, Sue Gardner, who'd run Wikimedia Foundation to be our business partner because we knew that. We had heard that journalists were not good at running businesses. And so we thought we needed someone to help us with that.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His mouth, I shall because he said them. So $23 million to form a team to look at just instead of just what had been done, which is piecemeal or else someone like me, which I just stand outside of tech companies and yell at them. Which, by the way, is very...”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much fanboy, right? And so the field is evolving, but I wanted to build that investigative wing and really make a model for the field of how this could be done using technology to investigate technology.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to do was I had a little team at ProFublica, two programmers and a researcher, and we were doing our investigations. And, you know, one year we did Facebook, one year we did software that was used to assess criminals and predict their future criminality, which we showed was biased against black defendants. Big surprise. And one year we did car insurance how breadlining worked. But each year we had to pick. And I felt like everything is happening all at once. And like I want four teams like this because the technology is not just impacting the companies that we think of as tech, Facebook and Google, but every bit of our lives is being algorithmically decided. And some of these decisions like the criminal risk scores have enormous consequences. Incarceration or not. And so my idea was I wanted to scale up this work and sort of build a field around tech accountability journalism, you know, tech journalism had its origins were really very”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that happens, and Germany's doing a pretty good job of keeping the Nazis off Facebook, so it's like weird, and Twitter. So you can go there and have a Nazi free experience on the internet. And so you realize there is a world where you could have a Nazi free experience.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that great at solutions. I'm super good at problems, but I do feel like there has to be something structural has to change. And I don't know what it looks like, but I do feel like it has to be governments have to have some control over how speech happens in their countries.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, like they're bigger than any nation, and they regulate speech around the world, like their decisions about what people can say to each other is the decision in any country. And every country is struggling with how can I, this is something bigger than me that I can't control. It's a force that I don't think we even know how to deal with in the world.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at Google, they paid almost $6 billion fine to the EU last year, and it literally didn't move the stock, make a blip in their earnings, didn't change any behavior. So we've seen that these companies can weather these kinds of fines. I try to be optimistic. Like, I do think that public, when they're embarrassed, they try to eventually sort of fix things, but it doesn't feel like systemically there's a fix that anyone is pursuing. And I don't know how that works because these are companies that are almost ungovernable, right? Like they're.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what do you imagine is going to happen today to Facebook and companies like this? Because I think a lot of people feel that people have outrage over privacy, but I don't think people do. I think they're going to get fined and they're going to move on and find ever more nefarious ways to spy on you.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It evolved over time, like the very initial response was I don't think you understand ad targeting. And then it became, oh, this was a mistake. We're going to fix it, you know.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT