YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheera Frenkel

lines on the record: 32
first: 2021-07-20
most recent: 2021-07-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's an expression I first heard it in Arabic. I don't know where it originated, but it goes, you know, those in power begets a thirst for more power. It's probably the best translation. I've certainly seen it in powerful people that I've encountered in my life that once they have some power, they tend to have a thirst for much more. So I imagine if Mark follows that pattern, he will continue to want to be increasingly powerful. I don't know where you go from here, conjecture power, but I imagine much like Bill Gates when he left Microsoft, you know, he became the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I can see Mark doing something like that and becoming powerful in a different way.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a reporter who covers misinformation, I'm always kicking myself and not doing more YouTube stories. They are more difficult to do because YouTube is constantly removing videos and then not explaining why or making it impossible to even find out when they've removed the video or why. But I absolutely think that's going to be something a lot more reporters start to look at and try to sort of unlock is this idea of how misinformation and how hateful speech is being spread on YouTube.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, over the years, there's been a lot of chatter about Cheryl Sandberg leaving Facebook as we write at one point in our book. She was looking at a job in the Clinton administration. Had Hillary Clinton won, we would have likely seen her in the Treasury Department. You know, I think Cheryl Sandberg isn't tied to Facebook the way that Mark Zuckerberg is. She has had a persona and a career outside of it with her book Lean In and Option B, and I imagine that she wants something else because at Facebook she'll always be a number two position. But, you know, we also know that she's someone that isn't going to leave on a low note. She wants to kind of, you know, recap some of her reputation. She wants to, you know, to not be blamed for all the failings and faults of Facebook. And so I'm not sure. I think it's a question of when she leaves and not if she leaves. And in terms of what she's doing now, you know, she's taken on this interesting portfolio of doing sort of outreach to small businesses. We've seen her really.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was once the kid. He was once the heart, you know, the hot product on the market was his. And I'm sure that's difficult if that's no longer the case.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plan to get newsletters started on their platform. I think it was a few months ago now that they launched reels, which was meant to be sort of a competitor to TikTok. Neither one of those appears to be very successful. They're still innovating. They're still trying to get ahead of competition or imitate popular features of their competition. But I do think that at least look at TikTok right now. It's really its growth is immense. It's tremendous. It's really threatening to encroach on some of Facebook's core user base. I think Mark Zuckerberg is very, very worried that all of the public backlash against Facebook as a company and this idea among young people that it's just not cool anymore to be on Facebook is going to ultimately hurt them.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook would love to continue to buy the competition. I think many founders in Silicon Valley are no longer interested in selling to Facebook, largely because of the experience of companies like Instagram and WhatsApp that were promised certain things by Mark Zuckerberg, including autonomy. And they were promised Facebook was going to maintain some of their values around privacy and security. And they didn't see those things happen. And now you speak to founders who say, well, I wouldn't sell to Facebook because I don't trust them to honor some of their agreements. But now Facebook is much more in the business of really trying to copy or mimic popular platforms out there. We saw them recently announce.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's always more that they can do. And really, there's more governments can do as well in terms of helping Facebook figure out what should be the role here. I mean, should governments have a role in saying to Facebook, right, we're drawing our line is here. If you have speech on your platform that disenfranchises people from voting, that's not something we're going to allow. content on your platform, which in the middle of a pandemic causes people to behave in a way that threatens public health. We're not going to allow that. Do government start to play that role rather than waiting for Facebook to always be responsive?”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no switch. It's not ever that easy. Could they do more, yes? There's always more they can do. There are a trillion dollar company, I think especially, again, I hate to go back to this, but in the parts of the world where Facebook is still being used in massive numbers, if Facebook were to ever issue a per capita breakdown of how many moderators they had working on the, you know, in Portuguese, working in Burmese, working in all these other places, I'm sure that the number would be really frightening compared to what they have in terms of English language content moderation.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because those are the same company. It's led by the same people. I mean, misinformation is growing on WhatsApp and nobody really knows what to do about it. There are also countries all over the world where government institutions are issuing their ruling largely through Facebook. If you want to know what your local department of education is doing, you have to go to Facebook to find out. So Facebook's here, it's a stay. It's so intermeshed in really a really incredibly global way. I think the question is really just how can we be more responsible in our usage of it.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a ubiquitous tool that's being used for communications beyond the phonomy. It's just, I don't, I think it's influence, it's sort of unmistakable and it can't really change. Does that sound really dark? Yeah. I mean, I would add that, you know, it's not just Facebook. I talk to plenty of people who say, well, I'm not on Facebook. And then my immediate next question is, well, are you on Instagram or are you on WhatsApp?”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's so true, right, that many people feel like they have to use these apps. I think anybody who's part of a group, a sports group or a club, a parent association will oftentimes have to subscribe to some sort of Facebook group because that's where people communicate. It has become absolutely utility for many people, especially around the world and outside the US. I don't know if people are trapped. I think some people feel trapped. I think a lot of people feel very ambivalent about their experience. They know that they're uncomfortable with all the news that they've heard over the last several years and they have a sense of some of the consequences and the collateral damage that comes from the company and its decisions. But they also feel like, well, this is actually the only place where the majority of my friends and family are, where my school actually issues announcements for my children. I mean, it's at this point become such a”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think when Cheryl Sinberg first joined Facebook, there were certainly some changes made at the very, very beginning of her start at the company we've heard from women who say, well, you know, finally there was a woman you could come speak to. Finally there was a woman at the top that you could at least voice your issues with. But it's interesting. Some of those same women who were so thankful to have her join said that upon reflection a year or two later they were incredibly disappointed in how little sort of fundamental change happened at the top. I mean, this is a company where all the executives are still overwhelmingly male. I think it was what point two years ago they had more executives named Chris than they had women serving as executives. You know, it's part of it as engineering culture. Part of it is that, you know, when they look at who they hire, they claim that it's harder to hire women than it is to hire men. But fundamentally, Facebook still has an issue with women.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't expect things to really veer into a different course. It may look different. Facebook, the app, it may have different functions, but the core things about the technology and the business I don't think will change from what we're with those sort of things in place still.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Mark Zuckerberg wants every human on earth who has an internet connection to be a Facebook user, and I really mean that. I think he really believes that his ability to be a historic figure is to connect the whole world. We've heard that mantra so many times. Connect the world, connect the world. What he doesn't do is say, what happens next when the world is connected? And that's really one of the reasons why we wrote the book is we've seen all the consequences of that. I think the future of Facebook is the trajectory doesn't look like it's going to change at all, especially with the leadership in structured as the way it is. There's no oversight of Mark Zuckerberg by the board of directors. There is internally he has more power and more decision making sort of authority than any time, really.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's sort of this premise and belief and underlying bedrock for all of Mark Zuckerberg's decision is that free expression works somehow and he believes that the site, though he's tweaked that and he's evolved a little bit, I think he's really loath to ban any political figures.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Facebook's going to watch and see what he does over the next two years. Maybe it'll depend on how likely he is to become president again. I think he's likely to run for re-election and win Facebook might be wary of antagonizing a future president of the United States. I do think they're watching to see what he does in the interim right now and how he uses his platform on other. He still has a platform on other more fringe social media sites. And so I'm sure they're watching that closely and a lot can change in the next two years.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that were categorically untrue about the vote and about the election. And that as that anger ferments, people unite on Facebook and they ultimately decide to come down to Washington and on the eve of January 6th, reporters were sending Facebook examples from groups where people were posting assault rifles and saying, I'm bringing this gun to Washington, who's with me. Facebook removed those groups, but the fact that reporters had to, like myself had to point them out and say to them, are you going to take this down before they could take them down? I think it just shows how much work the company sell us to do. It's still a whack-a-mole approach where they've got this hammer and they're swiping in every direction that, you know, ultimately how long can that be Facebook's approach?”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think January 6th was an excellent example of highlighting exactly what Facebook has not yet addressed. Facebook rightfully says that they have helped stop disinformation on their platform. They've helped create a model for how other companies can stop disinformation by forming the security team that is now very active in rooting out Russian, Iranian, Chinese, et cetera, disinformation campaigns. And so what happened in 2016 is now much, much harder to begin to accomplish. I mean, the Russian campaigns are now found almost monthly on Facebook and removed. What they haven't figured out is misinformation. It's people spreading bad information to one another, people spreading conspiracies to one another. That's what happened on January 6th for months this narrative spread on Facebook that the election had been stolen, that vote of fraud had happened, and these groups gained traction, and they got people angry. And Donald Trump himself was allowed to share.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's going to be a boy genius to create the next technology. And Mark appeared to be that person. So at that point, Google was a little bit more mature.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it was a merger, and we don't know that it was a discussion of a merger, but there were discussions about what kind of partnership could emerge.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder if this all was happening 10 years ago, if the role he's playing now wouldn't have been played by Cheryl Sandberg. And we have seen and documented in our book how he's done media appearances and he's gotten out in front of controversial moments at times where certainly that would have been Cheryl Sandberg a few years ago. I think it's going to be interesting to see how successful he is in Europe and with the challenges that lie ahead there. And is it all talk or can he actually make a difference in terms of how Facebook is perceived by many European leaders?”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, you know, in a way, he's become Facebook's chief diplomat. Facebook is currently facing some very challenging battles in Europe and in the rest of the world. And Nick Clegg's experience in Europe is certainly, I think, going to be a great asset to them. And that's one of the reasons they brought him on board. He also seems to really earn the trust of some key executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They kept that feature going until it was literally flagged for them in a report they could no longer ignore. Their new head of security said, this is a huge issue. Your own employees are over and over again abusing their access to user data because you have not created ways and systems to catch them and stop them. You have made it so that it's a matter of time before this happens again. And he insisted that it be changed. And it was only then that Mark Zuckerberg sort of said, oh, right, well, let's change this. It highlighted for us a problem and a pattern that was going to repeat over and over again in every chapter, which is not acting proactively, not seeing around the next corner. And honestly, not seeing the potential for things being misused and things being misused by bad actors.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because for Mark Zuckerberg, when he launched the company, when he hired his first employees, the priority was growing as quickly as possible. It was moving fast and scaling things. We have a profanity in the book, which I'm not going to include on the show today. But engineers were encouraged to ship products as quickly as they made them. And in order to do that, he gave them free access to user data. It was a way of getting them to work very, very quickly. You don't have to theoretically see if something works. You can test it on a real person in that moment and see, do they like this feature that I've created or not? Even though they were firing people year after year and those 52 people you mentioned, that was just in one, I think, two-year time frame that was studied. We don't know how many people were fired before then, and we don't know how many people were not caught. We just know that in one two-year time frame, they caught 52 people.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We thought it showed something about what their priorities were. So, in order to understand the importance of that anecdote, you have to understand why these engineers were able to stock women essentially and find that kind of data on users.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can you possibly hope to understand what's happening in MAMR? How can you possibly hope to avert the spread of hate speech there when you don't even have people that are speaking the languages to moderate the content that is coming from there?”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that mentioned Myanmar for me, that was really honestly one of the most powerful chapters in the book to write because it's a story that people think they know, think people understand that Facebook played a role in spreading hate speech there. But I don't think people understand how many warnings Facebook got. I mean, we document in detail in this book how people were raising flag after flag after flag and saying this is bad. You know, it's not just one post. It's not just a dozen posts. It is radicalizing people in anti-Muslim hatred across Myanmar. And to see Facebook ignore that even when someone comes to their company headquarters and says a genocide can happen, it's possible if you don't do something. And as we write in the book to have one Burmese speaking moderator in a country where over 100 languages are spoken to me, that was such a damning detail.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it making the company better? It was enforcing their executives really to be transparent about what happened there and perhaps start change. And so, yes, I mean, we're incredibly thankful to the people that spoke to us for this book because it made it possible to not have to deal with, you know, as you know, 10 hour-long PR phone calls. And speak to people who weren't reading off a script.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Josh, you mentioned that I spent a decade in the Middle East. Much of that writing for the Times of London. I'm very practiced at dealing with dictatorships With authoritarian regimes that don't want stories told. I think that's probably what attracted me to writing about a lot of these really big tech companies that have so controlled their message. I mean, many of us become journalists because we want to get accurate and truthful and objective information out there. We don't want the varnished company PR line. That's not what service democracy is. It's not what serves the public. And I can't say how if Facebook is scared of us, I can say that we are not afraid of Facebook. We found in the journey of reporting this book that employees wanted to talk to someone Facebook has sometimes taken the line that we only spoke to employees that were disgruntled and I would say that's absolutely not the case of the 400 some people we spoke to for the book the vast majority still work at the company they spoke to us because they they care about Facebook they saw things going off the rails they saw their leadership making mistake after mistake and not accounting for it and their motivation was”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of decisions they're making. And I will not pretend that we came up with this plan from the very beginning. It was quite a journey, Josh. As you said, like you don't know how people write this book. I'm not necessarily one to recommend writing a book. It was hard, but it's been very rewarding at this point. And that's what we tried to cover in the book. It's sort of those three aspects, the leadership, the business, and the technology.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Cecilia and her expertise in Washington and myself out in San Francisco. I would only add that this actually started with one question that our editor at the New York Times asked us back in 2017, I think, which was when some of the first scandals were coming to light about foreign election interference and privacy problems. She asked her name is Plewingtam. She asked, what really is going on at Facebook? And that was an important animating question because so much had been written about Facebook and Facebook is so incredibly concerned about controlling its image. It has hundreds of public relations people to make sure to protect their image. We thought it was actually just for us journalistically we were incredibly curious to try to really dig into that question and to go beyond the talking points, beyond the varnished image that Facebook presents to understand really a few things, how the company works as a technology, how the company works as a business model, who the leaders are and what”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it really started out of a natural partnership between Cecilia and myself. We had written so many articles together in which we found ourselves repeating things over and over. Facebook apologizes, Facebook admits mistakes were made. Facebook says it's going to change. you know, there's a pattern there. And as a reporter, you always have so much left over in your notebook, so much sort of juicy, colorful behind the scenes details of how these conversations happened, who was involved that add nuance and perspective to incredibly consequential moments, both here in the United States and really globally. And so being able to take all that and put it in a book and not just say, well, Facebook made a mistake with Cambridge Analytica or Facebook made a mistake when it came to Russian election interference, but to take you into the rooms where those mistakes happened and where decisions were made about how Facebook was going to handle it, it just, it felt worthy of a book and it felt like a story that we could really tell well together.”
2021-07-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, with Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source