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Around five years ago,
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it struck me that I was losing the ability
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to engage with people
who aren't like-minded.
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The idea of discussing hot-button issues
with my fellow Americans
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was starting to give me more heartburn
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than the times that I engaged
with suspected extremists overseas.
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It was starting to leave me feeling
more embittered and frustrated.
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And so just like that,
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I shifted my entire focus
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from global national security threats
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to trying to understand
what was causing this push
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towards extreme polarization at home.
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As a former CIA officer and diplomat
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who spent years working
on counterextremism issues,
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I started to fear that this was becoming
a far greater threat to our democracy
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than any foreign adversary.
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And so I started digging in,
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and I started speaking out,
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which eventually led me
to being hired at Facebook
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and ultimately brought me here today
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to continue warning you
about how these platforms
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are manipulating
and radicalizing so many of us
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and to talk about
how to reclaim our public square.
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I was a foreign service officer in Kenya
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just a few years after
the September 11 attacks,
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and I led what some call
"hearts and minds" campaigns
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along the Somalia border.
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A big part of my job
was to build trust with communities
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deemed the most susceptible
to extremist messaging.
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I spent hours drinking tea
with outspoken anti-Western clerics
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and even dialogued
with some suspected terrorists,
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and while many of these engagements
began with mutual suspicion,
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I don't recall any of them
resulting in shouting or insults,
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and in some case we even worked together
on areas of mutual interest.
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The most powerful tools we had
were to simply listen, learn
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and build empathy.
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This is the essence
of hearts and minds work,
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because what I found again and again
is that what most people wanted
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was to feel heard,
validated and respected.
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And I believe that's what most of us want.
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So what I see happening online today
is especially heartbreaking
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and a much harder problem to tackle.
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We are being manipulated
by the current information ecosystem
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entrenching so many of us
so far into absolutism
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that compromise has become a dirty word.
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Because right now,
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social media companies like Facebook
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profit off of segmenting us
and feeding us personalized content
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that both validates
and exploits our biases.
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Their bottom line depends
on provoking a strong emotion
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to keep us engaged,
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often incentivizing the most
inflammatory and polarizing voices,
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to the point where finding common ground
no longer feels possible.
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And despite a growing chorus of people
crying out for the platforms to change,
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it's clear they will not
do enough on their own.
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So governments must define
the responsibility
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for the real-world harms being caused
by these business models
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and impose real costs
on the damaging effects
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they're having to our public health,
our public square and our democracy.
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But unfortunately, this won't happen
in time for the US presidential election,
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so I am continuing to raise this alarm,
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because even if one day
we do have strong rules in place,
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it will take all of us to fix this.
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When I started shifting my focus
from threats abroad
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to the breakdown
in civil discourse at home,
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I wondered if we could repurpose
some of these hearts and minds campaigns
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to help heal our divides.
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Our more than 200-year
experiment with democracy works
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in large part because we are able
to openly and passionately
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debate our ideas for the best solutions.
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But while I still deeply believe
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in the power of face-to-face
civil discourse,
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it just cannot compete
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with the polarizing effects
and scale of social media right now.
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The people who are sucked
down these rabbit holes
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of social media outrage
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often feel far harder to break
of their ideological mindsets
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than those vulnerable communities
I worked with ever were.
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So when Facebook called me in 2018
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and offered me this role
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heading its elections integrity operations
for political advertising,
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I felt I had to say yes.
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I had no illusions
that I would fix it all,
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but when offered the opportunity
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to help steer the ship
in a better direction,
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I had to at least try.
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I didn't work directly on polarization,
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but I did look at which issues
were the most divisive in our society
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and therefore the most exploitable
in elections interference efforts,
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which was Russia's tactic ahead of 2016.
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So I started by asking questions.
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I wanted to understand
the underlying systemic issues
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that were allowing all of this to happen,
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in order to figure out how to fix it.
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Now I still do believe
in the power of the internet
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to bring more voices to the table,
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but despite their stated goal
of building community,
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the largest social media companies
as currently constructed
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are antithetical to the concept
of reasoned discourse.
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There's no way to reward listening,
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to encourage civil debate
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and to protect people
who sincerely want to ask questions
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in a business where optimizing
engagement and user growth
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are the two most important
metrics for success.
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There's no incentive
to help people slow down,
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to build in enough friction
that people have to stop,
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recognize their emotional
reaction to something,
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and question their own
assumptions before engaging.
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The unfortunate reality is:
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lies are more engaging online than truth,
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and salaciousness beats out
wonky, fact-based reasoning
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in a world optimized
for frictionless virality.
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As long as algorithms' goals
are to keep us engaged,
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they will continue to feed us the poison
that plays to our worst instincts
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and human weaknesses.
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And yes, anger, mistrust,
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the culture of fear, hatred:
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none of this is new in America.
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But in recent years,
social media has harnessed all of that
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and, as I see it,
dramatically tipped the scales.
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And Facebook knows it.
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A recent "Wall Street Journal" article
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exposed an internal
Facebook presentation from 2018
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that specifically points
to the companies' own algorithms
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for growing extremist groups'
presence on their platform
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and for polarizing their users.
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But keeping us engaged
is how they make their money.
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The modern information environment
is crystallized around profiling us
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and then segmenting us
into more and more narrow categories
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to perfect this personalization process.
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We're then bombarded
with information confirming our views,
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reinforcing our biases,
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and making us feel
like we belong to something.
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These are the same tactics
we would see terrorist recruiters
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using on vulnerable youth,
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albeit in smaller, more localized ways
before social media,
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with the ultimate goal
of persuading their behavior.
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Unfortunately, I was never empowered
by Facebook to have an actual impact.
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In fact, on my second day,
my title and job description were changed
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and I was cut out
of decision-making meetings.
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My biggest efforts,
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trying to build plans
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to combat disinformation
and voter suppression in political ads,
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were rejected.
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And so I lasted just shy of six months.
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But here is my biggest takeaway
from my time there.
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There are thousands of people at Facebook
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who are passionately working on a product
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that they truly believe
makes the world a better place,
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but as long as the company continues
to merely tinker around the margins
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of content policy and moderation,
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as opposed to considering
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how the entire machine
is designed and monetized,
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they will never truly address
how the platform is contributing
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to hatred, division and radicalization.
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And that's the one conversation
I never heard happen during my time there,
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because that would require
fundamentally accepting
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that the thing you built
might not be the best thing for society
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and agreeing to alter
the entire product and profit model.
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So what can we do about this?
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I'm not saying that social media
bears the sole responsibility
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for the state that we're in today.
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Clearly, we have deep-seated
societal issues that we need to solve.
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But Facebook's response,
that it is just a mirror to society,
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is a convenient attempt
to deflect any responsibility
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from the way their platform
is amplifying harmful content
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and pushing some users
towards extreme views.
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And Facebook could, if they wanted to,
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fix some of this.
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They could stop amplifying
and recommending the conspiracy theorists,
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the hate groups,
the purveyors of disinformation
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and, yes, in some cases
even our president.
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They could stop using
the same personalization techniques
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to deliver political rhetoric
that they use to sell us sneakers.
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They could retrain their algorithms
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to focus on a metric
other than engagement,
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and they could build in guardrails
to stop certain content from going viral
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before being reviewed.
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And they could do all of this
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without becoming what they call
the arbiters of truth.
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But they've made it clear
that they will not go far enough
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to do the right thing
without being forced to,
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and, to be frank, why should they?
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The markets keep rewarding them,
and they're not breaking the law.
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Because as it stands,
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there are no US laws compelling Facebook,
or any social media company,
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to protect our public square,
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our democracy
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and even our elections.
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We have ceded the decision-making
on what rules to write and what to enforce
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to the CEOs of for-profit
internet companies.
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Is this what we want?
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A post-truth world
where toxicity and tribalism
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trump bridge-building
and consensus-seeking?
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I do remain optimistic that we still
have more in common with each other
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than the current media
and online environment portray,
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and I do believe that having
more perspective surface
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makes for a more robust
and inclusive democracy.
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But not the way it's happening right now.
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And it bears emphasizing,
I do not want to kill off these companies.
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I just want them held
to a certain level of accountability,
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just like the rest of society.
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It is time for our governments
to step up and do their jobs
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of protecting our citizenry.
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And while there isn't
one magical piece of legislation
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that will fix this all,
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I do believe that governments
can and must find the balance
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between protecting free speech
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and holding these platforms accountable
for their effects on society.
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And they could do so in part
by insisting on actual transparency
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around how these recommendation
engines are working,
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around how the curation, amplification
and targeting are happening.
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You see, I want these companies
held accountable
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not for if an individual
posts misinformation
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or extreme rhetoric,
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but for how their
recommendation engines spread it,
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how their algorithms
are steering people towards it,
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and how their tools are used
to target people with it.
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I tried to make change
from within Facebook and failed,
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and so I've been using my voice again
for the past few years
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to continue sounding this alarm
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and hopefully inspire more people
to demand this accountability.
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My message to you is simple:
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pressure your government representatives
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to step up and stop ceding
our public square to for-profit interests.
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Help educate your friends and family
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about how they're being
manipulated online.
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Push yourselves to engage
with people who aren't like-minded.
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Make this issue a priority.
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We need a whole-society
approach to fix this.
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And my message to the leaders
of my former employer Facebook is this:
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right now, people are using your tools
exactly as they were designed
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to sow hatred, division and distrust,
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and you're not just allowing it,
you are enabling it.
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And yes, there are lots of great stories
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of positive things happening
on your platform around the globe,
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but that doesn't make any of this OK.
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And it's only getting worse
as we're heading into our election,
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and even more concerning,
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face our biggest potential crisis yet,
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if the results aren't trusted,
and if violence breaks out.
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So when in 2021 you once again say,
"We know we have to do better,"
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I want you to remember this moment,
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because it's no longer
just a few outlier voices.
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Civil rights leaders, academics,
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journalists, advertisers,
your own employees,
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are shouting from the rooftops
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that your policies
and your business practices
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are harming people and democracy.
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You own your decisions,
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but you can no longer say
that you couldn't have seen it coming.
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Thank you.