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Episode Description:

The lures and the wiles of social media are all too familiar to us by now.

Less familiar is how well the companies behind those lures understood what they were doing.

When Facebook tested prioritizing content people actually chose – misinformation went down, violence went down, and hate speech went down. So did engagement. The incentive structure is upside down, and on some level, the company understood that too.

In 2023, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen came on the podcast for an illuminating conversation about the role Facebook and algorithmically driven social media platforms generally have played in degrading mental health and accelerating social divisiveness. That episode resonated with a lot of people, nearing a million views on YouTube alone.

Now her story is the subject of The Social Reckoning, a just-released major motion picture written and directed by Aaron Sorkin – a workmanlike version of what went down at Facebook between 2019 and 2021, and of the role Frances and Jeff Horwitz at The Wall Street Journal played in bringing these facts to light.

With the film returning these questions to the center of the frame, this episode revisits that 2023 exchange with Frances (ep. 779), the former lead product manager on Facebook’s Civic Misinformation team who copied tens of thousands of pages of internal documents showing the company knew it had accidentally changed its algorithm to reward extremism, all while refusing to fix it.

Following her are excerpts from conversations with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation (ep. 827); journalist Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine (ep. 703); and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy (ep. 884).

And yet, revisited now, these conversations feel more urgent, because the ills of our algorithmically driven information interfaces have only grown worse.

Inside this episode:

• Why Frances Joined Facebook & What Happens When Facebook Is the Internet
• The Dissolution of Civic Integrity & the Run-up to January 6
• Zuckerberg’s Voting Control & Life in an Echo Chamber
• Transparency, the Right to Reset Your Algorithm, and Reclaiming Our Boredom
• Jonathan Haidt on the Great Rewiring of Childhood & Four Norms for Parents
• Max Fisher on Outrage, Engagement, and Why Social Media Acts Like a Drug
• Dr. Vivek Murthy on Warning Labels, Phone-Free Schools, and an Unfair Fight