this industrious and clear minded in my lifetime. >> that's correct. that's absolutely correct. it's almost as if every part of your brain started working together in a different way, in a different fashion. that's the mindset. it's as if i've never ever drank before. that is remarkable to me. it's an absolute gift. >> you've changed? >> absolutely i've changed. >> recently checked back in with jason, who tells us he still hasn't had a drink since he attended the retreat in jamaica two months ago. he credits the mushrooms for helping him heal. thanks for watching. thanks for watching. i'll see you next sunday. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com frs

[wael] without facebook, twitter, google, youtube, this revolution would have never happened. do you guys end up spending 45 minutes or an hour scrolling through your phone instead of just going to sleep? [girls] yeah. managing my followers, my brand placements, it's a full-time job. your being observed constantly and algorithms are taking that information and changing what you see next until they've changed your behavior. we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. where are you getting your news from? before i get out of bed every morning, i'm always on twitter. fake news can have real-world consequences. the pandemic wasn't real and we're here to take the country back. [music]

the web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfillment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation, but metamorphosize into a device for communication. [stephen] the promise of the internet from the 90s and the 2000s is that we were all going to share a big, digital community. you know, be part of the global network. and with the rise of social media, there were very few barriers to access and one could belong. anyone could have their voice heard. they see someone they might recognize and click on them. and then you see that they're friends with someone else.

and you share all these common interests. and then you check the time and it's four hours later and you have no idea how you got there. the early 2010s were this incredibly frothy, bubbly moment for social media. the site got 2,200 hits within two hours? 22,000. [sheera] people were touting it as this amazing thing that was going to change everyone's lives. and here in silicon valley, it was seen as this heroic mission to be part of a company that was going to change the world for the better. facebook, twitter, youtube have all developed into mainstream platforms and for presidential candidates left, right and center, having a robust social media strategy is the only way to go now. this is the era when, you know, obama's being called the first social media president. he was the first president to tweet from a potus account. i am going to make history here as the first president to live tweet. [elizabeth] he used social media in a way that was clever and got him attention. it's out there, baby. follow the tweets. thank you so much, facebook for hosting this, first of all.

[sheera] with the obama administration, we really saw this love affair kind of blossom between washington, d.c. and silicon valley. my name is barack obama and i'm the guy who got mark to wear a jacket and tie. [renee] social media was originally seen as a way for people to come together to debate the issues of the day. and the internet had opened up so much information to people across the world. and people could now see their leaders for what they were potentially and move away from authoritarianism. and the arab spring, of course, was some of the most visible examples of this. the arab spring takes place in 2011, and it's a moment when in many countries in the middle east, average people start to rise up and rebel against authoritarian governments where the idea of revolution was not accepted before because it was lethal. the only barrier to people uprising and revolution is the

psychological barrier of fear. if you managed to break the psychological barrier, you're gonna definitely be able to do the revolution. there was this google executive, wael ghonim, who was egyptian and an activist. and he set up one of the first facebook pages that was the hub of the arab spring movement. [man] ghonim's facebook page first sparked the protests titled, "we are all khaled said." it memorialized an egyptian businessman who'd been beaten to death by police after threatening to expose corruption. the page called for protests on january 25th. [elizabeth] the protesters in tahrir square, they organized around this facebook page, so people were calling it at the time, a facebook revolution. [wael] without facebook, without twitter, without google, without youtube, this would have never happened. this is what a civilian resistance looks like. the young people on the internet, they started this revolution.

[sheera] that was really different because of social media in real time the world could see these young egyptians rising up against their rulers. it gave them a sort of international backing that they hadn't had before. the crowds are shouting and screaming, making what is for them, a joyful noise 18 days into their protest because hosni mubarak has given up the powers of office. after the fall of the egyptian government, wael ghonim was interviewed by wolf blitzer on cnn. [wolf] wael, you're giving facebook a lot of credit -for this. -[wael] yeah. for sure. i want to meet mark zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually. you know, i always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet. [cecilia] he was giving credit to facebook as a powerful example of how social media stretched beyond just friends connecting, but could be used to foster these big social movements. [crowd chanting] we are the 99%!

there were a number of movements that really harnessed social media. occupy wall street. [chanting] [yael] the black lives matter movement. [chanting] even something like the ice bucket challenge. it's fun. it's silly, but it raised millions of dollars for als research. and it's a really good example of the way a movement using this chaos and fun on social media can really cause some great things to happen. but these platforms that are allowing something like an ice bucket challenge or the arab spring can also be used by authoritarian dictators. [woman] egypt's supreme military council now has its own facebook page, the very platform used by activists to organize the revolution. [sheera] the mubarak regime largely ignored social media. post mubarak, you have the muslim brotherhood and then the egyptian military really used the internet as a way to control the population. they use it to crack down on lgbt groups.

they use it to go after any kind of political dissidents. and so you have them all of a sudden realizing that this is an incredibly powerful force in their country and one that they want to control. coming apart at the seams, it sure looks like it. two years into the arab spring, the winds of hope and change have turned into a tempest of fear. starting a new chapter can be the most thrilling thing in the world. there's an abundance of reasons to get started. how far we take an idea

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today's closing bell marked the end of facebook's first day of trading. here's mark zuckerberg ringing the opening bell, of course, virtually in california. and no, you can't buy shares on facebook's website. [farhad] before facebook went public, it really grew from essentially nothing to, you know, hundreds of millions of users very quickly because they added a lot of features. they invented a lot of things. it was one of the most innovative companies in silicon valley. we've invested so much in building up infrastructure and tools. and also the culture that tells people to take risks and try things out. [max] the one idea that grew these platforms from b-list companies of the internet revolution to some of the largest corporations in human history was the newsfeed. facebook's 20-something ceo decided it would be cool if students could keep track of all the latest news of their facebook friends. the newsfeed is a deceptively simple idea, which is that what if we take all of the updates from everyone in your network and we put them all on one page for you?

all of a sudden, because of the newsfeed engagement shot up by like 6 or 700%, which is what companies like facebook want because it means you're spending more time on the platform, so it means they can sell more ads. and that is now basically the defining principle of how all the platforms work. twitter announcing a move away from its chronological timeline to show tweets that each user's most likely to care about based on followers and interactions. [renee] over time, facebook's news feed and the timeline on twitter began to use algorithms for curation. and the platforms also began to create tools by which you could convey an appreciation for the content. gradually, you had the ability to like it, to share it on facebook, to retweet it on twitter. but you're also, of course, communicating something back to the algorithm that has just curated that content for you. [yael] so the core part of the business model becomes gathering up as much data as it can about every user,

whether that be while you are on facebook or whether that be following you around the internet so that it can build a profile about you to then sell this idea to advertisers that they can persuade individuals based on those profiles. people signed up for facebook just to stay in touch with their friends. and now some of them feel that there's some snooping going on. around 2010, facebook was under scrutiny by the federal trade commission about privacy violations. so people started asking some tough questions about the company's privacy practices. so do you feel like it's a backlash or that you feel like you're violating people's privacy? there's just been a lot of-- a lot of space between that early stuff and where we are now. if i could--if i knew what i knew now then, then i hope i wouldn't have made those mistakes. and under pressure, we saw mark zuckerberg just profusely sweat. he was just dripping sweat down his face. you wanna take off the hoodie? no, i never take off the hoodie.

i know you don't. what's with that? whoa. all right. that's okay. i think for the viewer, you felt compassion for him because he was so uncomfortable. but we were also quite glad that he was being asked the tough questions. it was the introduction of the issue of data privacy and privacy violations by facebook. we are focused on privacy. we care the most about privacy. our business model is by far the most privacy friendly to consumers. mark zuckerberg is still wearing his hoodies and t-shirts. and sheryl sandberg, she comes in and she provides that polish that you need when you're doing something like this huge ipo, trying to get people to pay for shares. it's my job to make this company as valuable as i possibly can. [woman] while mark zuckerberg is the creative force behind facebook, it's sheryl sandberg's job to figure out how to tap its vast advertising potential. there comes a time in every tech company's life when it

switches from the underdog, the scrappy innovator, to the one trying to protect the realm that it's created to stop its competitors. twitter is just six years old, and with its growing number of active users around the world, the company is now estimated to be worth a whopping $8 billion. [sheera] twitter comes at a time where mark is also scrambling to catch up with mobile use among people. facebook was really created for people who were using it on a desktop. and in that time that it takes facebook to create a mobile-friendly version of their product, the number of other apps are already up and running that are very pleasing to look at on your phone. and so they start to really threaten facebook's market dominance as a social media platform. with instagram, you can snap photos on the go, filter those photos. and it's a really fun way to share kind of your day and what's going on. and since we launched, about three months later, we had over a million registered users. so when instagram comes on the scene

and people start downloading it in record numbers, mark is scared that this company is going to surpass his. and so he starts to scramble and figure out if this is a company that he can buy. instagram is off the market in an instant. facebook likes the photo sharing app so much it's paying $1 billion for it. [farhad] after facebook bought instagram and went public, their big concern was what public companies care about, which is making money. they grew a lot. they kind of grew their business. they, you know, ran a lot of ads, but they stopped kind of making new things that were changing the world anymore.

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to comcast business internet customers. so boost your bottom line by switching today. comcast business. powering possibilities™. [music] [woman] the advent of the front-facing camera in 2010 suddenly put the power and creativity of self snaps directly in our hands. posting them on social media sites like twitter, facebook and instagram has become part of our digital identities. younger viewers won't believe me, but in the 1990s and even the early 2000s, it was kind of assumed that everyone on the internet was some kind of like, sweaty dweeb who couldn't show their face in public. and not only that, that you were never, ever supposed to reveal anything about your identity online. with the rise of instagram and the rise of these high tech smartphone cameras that allowed you to capture all

of these images very quickly, the internet became very image conscious. it became very status conscious. and that was a complete inversion of what it had been before. [farhad] instagram had a big effect on how we see ourselves. ordinary people started to talk about things like having a brand as if they were, you know, corporations. so regular people were trying to become kind of influencers. managing my followers, managing my brand placement, my partnerships, all of those different things, it's a full time job. influencer is someone who has a close and intimate relationship with those who follow them, and that can mean giving advice. make your to-do list the night before. or selling a product. and there are a lot of products coming out and a lot of stuff that i like to use a lot. and i'm gonna post on here and let you guys know about all of it. [woman] what do you do? i basically am just your friend next door, but i have this access that you want.

we are kind of like our own marketers. i think you're marketing yourself every day with the content you create. ladies and gents, this is where all the magic happens. [natalie] and it is a business, so you are, you know, working with brands to promote their products. our handbag business has taken off through our engagement with the influencer community. our production has doubled. -doubled? -doubled. [tobias] so in 2010s, the way that people use social media shifted from this passive place for being with friends online to this much more performative place where now you are getting paid in likes or money for the types of things that you do in front of other people. you're getting a true representation of what people are really living and doing on instagram? no, because people have their instagram account and their fake instagram account. social media, whether you're a user or creator, it absolutely can affect your mental health because you are watching everyone's highlight reels.

you are seeing the most interesting parts of their day. and i think you compare yourself and it's hard not to. i've even heard the term like addiction, right? this obsessive desire to get as many likes as possible. as much as i want to say i don't care about the likes and you know, it doesn't matter. it does matter. and i think it relates to how well your videos are doing and how well your content's doing. i think it was a form of validation. i've bought likes. i still do. so like, i buy likes to like show where it's like, "hey, i'm a cool person." the like button was a mark of genius. the internet is supposed to be interactive. the internet is supposed to be a growing community. and so the like button is an easy, quick way of joining the conversation, but the like button also becomes this powerful force in keeping people's attention. i always waited and waited and waited for someone to reply. it was like i couldn't put it down. your behaviors, you don't realize it, but you are being programmed.

[max] think of a slot machine. when you pull the lever on a slot machine, you are engaging in a process called intermittent variable reinforcement, which is by far the most effective way to train someone to repeat a behavior. and the form of that that you experience on social media is likes. if you post something, you do not know if you are going to get approval for it, and you don't know what the scale or consistency of that approval is going to be. and it's what keeps you coming back to it over and over again. that thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? that's a social validation feedback loop. i mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in-- in human psychology. i call social media attention alcohol because it's really fun.

it helps people find each other. it helps people have a good time. and also it has its dark side. what if whiskey was invented, and wine and beer were invented in 2004? what would we be doing right now? i think we'd be very curious about what effect it's having on our brains, on our relations to each other. it's the same thing with social media. what's it doing to us? ♪ welcome friends, to the middle of everything! friends that bike together. hike together! -with goats. -with goats! come on in... it's the middle things that count. you just can't beat this view, or this crew. ♪ can't wait to see what tomorrow brings, here in the middle of everything!

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[music] [renee] if facebook is the club where you hang out with your friends, twitter is the arena where you go to fight. we all are so obsessed with your twitter feud with debra messing. you've had a great twitter feud with eminem. [man] there's nothing like a war of tweets to put the twit in twitter. twitter was much smaller than facebook, but it had a lot of influence, kind of disproportionate influence because of the fact that it attracted a lot of reporters and politicians, you know, people who made and could kind of influence the news. where are you getting your news from? twitter. before i got out of bed every morning, i'm always on twitter. [renee] it became really a place where news would break. and you also see this phenomenon of what's called the main character of twitter. sometimes somebody makes an inadvertent comment. sometimes it's deliberately provocative. and then the entire platform kind of descends upon it. and that person has a very bad day, usually.

[woman] social media is calling it the tweet heard around the world. "going to africa. hope i don't get aids. just kidding. i'm white!" pr exec justine sacco sending out that tweet right before her 12-hour flight to south africa. the most famous cancelled person in the 2010s is justine sacco. we all remember, has justine landed yet? [woman] her twitter page immediately filled with hateful comments. the hashtag, has justine landed yet? trending worldwide. she's out of a job and apologizing. [sidney] was the response to justine sacco disproportionate? yes. were people taking it too far? absolutely. it became a game about when will this woman find out that her life is ruined? gamergate. you might have heard that term. it's the story that has produced threats of mass shootings, forced a woman to move from her home recently after rape threats that made front page headlines around the country. gamergate was basically young male video gamers captivated by this conspiracy theory that the feminists and the woke

liberals were supposedly coming for their video games to suppress men generally, and white men, especially. so gamergate really starts in the deep, dark bowels of internet culture on a platform called 4chan. and gamergate was the first of these online movements that gained so much momentum and so much size to reach out into the real world. get on the ground! [sidney] a lot of these upset gamers would swat these women, which is where you would call in a fake death threat to the fbi, so that they send officers to your home. they would call in bomb threats. so as gamergate was happening, there was also this online far right online white nationalist movement who are watching all of this. folks like steve bannon, who was running breitbart and a lot of others and saying, "these are our people."

so they started to make a real effort to try to link up the white nationalist message with gamergate. at breitbart, we'll never close our comment section. we'll stick up for 4chaners when they want to stay anonymous. redditors against overbearing moderators. we'll stick up for gamers against anyone stupid enough to take them on. [sheera] steve bannon looks across the political spectrum in the united states and thinks to himself that he can harness all this sort of extremist ideology online and channel it behind candidates that he wants to see run for office. we caught on with this kind of working class, middle class audience. we got people engaged. said, "hey, we'll build a community here." and i had an entire team that did nothing but deconstruct the algorithms of facebook. without facebook, breitbart could have never gotten to the size it got. [renee] around the 2016 election, facebook had created the possibility for anyone to kind of set themselves up like a media outlet. and that really begins to appeal to spammers and manipulators,

because producing hyperpartisan content is actually a great way to monetize with this ad-based business model. so any individual page looked no different than cnn's page. and so if you could give it a vague title, the news journal of omaha, right? you know, i've just made the news journal of omaha exist. you could make yourself look like what i call sometimes, like a media of one. the pope endorsed donald trump. no, he didn't. hillary clinton sold weapons to isis. no, not true. these are just some of the fake news stories filling your facebook feed. [renee] the reason this works is because the main goal of the algorithms is to make people spend more time on the platform. and the way that they achieve that is to measure how much people are engaging with content and then spread the posts with the most engagement. so the algorithm decides that thing is popular. and it spreads the post far and wide and it becomes more popular, whether it's true or not. as long as it's on facebook and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it. [sheera] because these fake news stories are doing so well on facebook, groups all over the world get in the

business of creating fake news. and in macedonia specifically, you have this entire town really who decide that their business is going to be the fake news business. -how popular is it? -about 200 people, maybe. -200 people? -yeah. -are making fake news websites? -yes. [woman] and you also have russia. [man] it was during the russian-backed rebellion in ukraine in 2014 that evidence first emerged of pro-kremlin troll factories filled with bloggers paid to spread false information online. [sheera] russia fine tunes these tactics of how to interfere in elections in countries like ukraine as early as 2013. and by 2016, they are primed to do this in the united states. we have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence our election.

one thing the russian hackers did was try to create competing protests using social media. literally trying to create moments of violence among americans. so if they were going to create a protest in front of a mosque in favor of a muslim community there, they would then organize a second protest that was against muslims in the community in the same exact location. [woman] anti-muslim protesters gathered outside an islamic center in houston, texas. a much larger counter-rally forms across the street. [sheera] in a way, it was pretty similar to the donald trump campaign in that they were both trying to stir up deeply emotive issues among americans. the epidemic of malicious, fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year. it's now clear that so-called fake news can have real world consequences. [elizabeth] in the aftermath of the 2016 election,

there was this conversation about fake news on twitter and facebook that, that was driving a lot of what people thought about the election. and mark zuckerberg was asked about it a few days after the election. he famously denied it. the idea that, you know, fake news on facebook influenced the election in any way, i think is a pretty crazy idea. but there were researchers that started to look and say, "how many people were actually influenced by russian content?" and the answer is tens and tens of millions. polarization on election hacking is a horrible, horrible problem for our country. if you don't have everybody accepting that this happened, how can you move on and fix the fundamental problems? you know, two years after pearl harbor, the united states had quadruple the size of our navy. two years on from the election, and people are still arguing whether we were even attacked.

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starting a new chapter can be the most thrilling thing in the world. there's an abundance of reasons to get started. how far we take an idea is a question of willpower. because progress... is a matter of character. ♪ grillin', chillin', spillin', dillin'. ♪ ♪ bec-ing. never brie-ing. ♪ ♪ smokin', yolkin', flippin', dippin'. ♪ ♪ if you're not oozing, then you're losing. ♪

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it's not too late for another treatment option. to learn more visit treatted.com. that's treatt-e-d.com. [music] [yael] all of these social media companies were rising during the 2010s, but people don't always realize just how big facebook was. that company scaled majorly to dominate the globe. i'm standing outside the main school in the village of muyungang in rural myanmar.

if all goes to plan, this community that has no paved road, piped water or grid electricity will be at the center of a mobile phone revolution. in myanmar, people are given access to mobile phones for the first time. their phones in many cases come pre-loaded with facebook. so they don't say, "i'm gonna go online." they say, "i'm gonna go to facebook." and so myanmar becomes this case study of what can go wrong when facebook enters a country. authorities in myanmar are being accused of destroying the sites of crimes against rohingya muslims. new satellite images show bulldozed villages previously burned down. many of the rohingya have been forced to flee. [sheera] you have these government-backed buddhist monks who start to spread anti-muslim ideology online, saying that there are muslims in myanmar that are raping and looting and pillaging. and people believe it.

[sheera] facebook's algorithms spread it because it gets a ton of engagement. and suddenly, all these people in myanmar are flooded with anti-muslim rhetoric. and public sentiment strongly turns against muslims in that country. it's really not until a genocide takes place that facebook understands there's a major problem here. the new bombshell investigation exposes facebook's growing struggle to tackle hate speech in myanmar. facebook has now turned into a beast than what it was originally intended to be used. with the arab spring, few really contemplated that the government could make the same use of these platforms, but they did. and that's also what you saw in myanmar. the same mechanics that allowed a post about some state atrocity to go viral let the government suppress those same voices. talk louder than anybody else.

the question is very simple. do you believe that genocide happened here or not? i'd say genocide didn't happen. [derek] looking back now, we understand that facebook has discovered that the way to increase engagement on the newsfeed was to accentuate high arousal, negative emotions, not just sadness, not happiness, outrage. so the best way to drive engagement is to put someone in an agitated, emotional state where they're commenting and yelling and fighting with other people online. and there was undeniably a massive attempt to do that, both at facebook and twitter, because it drove advertising revenue of all things.

but it had a corrosive effect on political discourse in the social sphere. thousands of anti-globalization protesters are demanding world leaders in hamburg get out of town. in 2016, 2017, in place after place around the world, you would see, just like myanmar, these sudden explosions of communal violence. for example, that unite the right rally in charlottesville. just that all of these different far right groups that had never really successfully cooperated suddenly pulled together into this real movement. so there is a white nationalist rally and police are expecting thousands of protesters and counter-protesters. the name of today's rally is unite the right. it's about time! [max] the fact that donald trump is now president was what people initially thought was driving it, but some digital researchers figured out after the fact, that the platforms had played a really significant role

in bringing all these disparate groups together through reddit and especially through the facebook groups recommendation feature, which is by far one of the most powerful forces on the internet. last night at the torch walk, there were hundreds and hundreds of us. we are stepping off the internet in a big way because we have been spreading our memes, organizing on the internet, and you ain't seen nothing yet. the conspiracy correlation matrix was the term i started using to describe facebook's recommendation engine. it said, "you like this conspiracy, you should try these as well." and it was just pushing people, you know, further down this rabbit hole. facebook ended up becoming the biggest, but it wasn't the only one that was contributing to these issues, right? i mean, look at youtube. [woman] so this is a news video. [guillaume] but then it recommends like, ten reasons people believe the earth is flat. [elizabeth] youtube actually flies under the radar. it's interesting. facebook publishes a quarterly content report and consistently links from youtube on all topics

are the most circulated single links on facebook. so you can think of youtube as the source material for a lot of the radicalized content and hateful content, as well as the misinformation that we see in society. these are scientifically proven to do jack sprat! when youtube and to the same extent facebook starts to stitch users through these sequences of conspiracies in this particular order, it creates a world view that did not exist absent those platforms. one of the first big manifestations of it is what we now know as qanon. [woman] at president trump's rally in tampa, the image was hard to miss. the letter q on signs and t-shirts. it represents qanon, a fast growing online community that pushes false conspiracy theories, including that a child sex ring is being run by hollywood celebrities and democratic politicians. [yael] so for anyone who ends up going down

this radicalized path, these companies favorite retort was that they're just a mirror to society. facebook is a mirror to the real world. and that means that you also have bad actors in this space. and it's extremely challenging to police that. [yael] so on the one hand, facebook is selling the notion to advertisers that not only are its users persuadable, but they know how to help you persuade them. but then when you say that facebook is also helping radicalize people, that's when they say, "oh, no, no, we're just a mirror to society." "we're not persuading people." that completely ignores the fact that youtube and facebook's algorithms are bringing people towards content and showing them things they were not searching for to begin with. jfk was murdered by cia. 9/11 was an inside job. people in our government who are working towards a deep state who are trying to keep us controlled. is there a conspiracy theory that you don't believe in?

that's a great question.

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[music] tiktok is the latest app to capture the attention of teens and young adults across the world. the app came as the number one downloaded app of 2018. [natalie] in the late 2010s, social media starts to morph

to this entertainment viewing, view for pleasure kind of thing. camping, that's awesome. i love just like sleeping on the ground and doing that. that's so cool. i don't go on tiktok to make friends or have genuine connections. i go on tiktok to see a video of a puppy that i think is cute and smile. i think what's really interesting about tiktok is it's not a social network. you don't connect with your friends on it. you're kind of putting things out there for the world, for anyone to see. and tiktok kind of mediates that with its own algorithm. it shows you what it thinks you would like. tiktok is gen z's app. millennials are using it. all of us are using it. but at the end of the 2010s, tiktok is the juggernaut. it is what everyone is downloading. that tiktok craze. the app, as you know, probably has exploded in popularity. every one of these apps goes through a honeymoon phase where it's like, this is funny, this isn't toxic and political.

and by the end of the decade, tiktok is right there. and that has bad implications for facebook. facebook's attendance by young people is crashing. young people consider facebook old and untrustworthy, and boring. and in the 2010s, they'd much rather go look at the entertaining video on tiktok that doesn't have that dark side glowering in the background. a whistleblower is sounding the alarm on a data analytics firm that harvested information from millions of americans without their permission. -cambridge analytica. -cambridge analytica. cambridge analytica. [man] the data firm with ties to the trump campaign is accused of misusing the personal information from millions of facebook users. in 2014, hundreds of thousands of people on facebook were invited to take a little psychological profile quiz. it seemed like fun, the fine print said, by the way, you're giving us your facebook data

if you do this. whoever reads those things? so a lot of people took it. it turned out that not only were they surrendering their own data, they were surrendering the data of all their friends, totaling 87 million people on facebook. the strings were being puppeteered by this company, cambridge analytica. by having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of americans undertake this survey, we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the united states of america. we could build a psychological profile of each voter in all of the united states. and then whatever we think this target profile will be receptive to, we will create content on the internet for you to find in order to change how you-- how you think about something. suddenly, it's not just about manipulating people to buy stuff. it's about manipulating the future democracy. so all these anxieties that were right below the surface

just boil over. [glass breaking] and this creates the reckoning against the tech industry. [man] mark zuckerberg will testify before congress. [woman] facebook's sheryl sandberg and twitter's jack dorsey will appear before the senate intelligence committee to testify in september. [man] you solemnly swear to give the full truth and nothing but the truth? [cecilia] in 2018, the heads of twitter and facebook came to washington to testify before congress. we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. and it was my mistake. and i'm sorry. you know, we wish we had taken more firm steps. -i think-- -you had those media reports. why didn't you? they legally certified they had deleted the data. following cambridge analytica in the lead up to 2020, facebook knows they have to do things differently and they need to clean up misinformation on the platform. well, first, of course, facebook needs to do more. and we are we are confident that we are gonna be considerably better prepared, for instance, for the 2020 us elections than we were for 2016.

and of course, we need to do more on a whole range of other fronts. so immediately before the election is held in november, they introduced something, which they call internally the nicer newsfeed. [cecilia] twitter and facebook decided to try to slow the spread of disinformation by tweaking the algorithm behind the newsfeed. and they prioritize authoritative news sources. [sheera] places like the new york times, the wall street journal, washington post. suddenly, are surfaced more highly than news outlets that have been flagged for publishing hate speech or misinformation. and what they find is that while engagement goes down, so do complaints that people are seeing misinformation and fake news. cbs news projects that joe biden has been elected the 46th president of the united states. very quickly after the election, facebook decides it wants to go back to the old version of facebook because the old version of facebook gets more people using their product for more hours of the day.

and they did this in spite of, you know, a number of groups in the united states saying that there were problems on the horizon, that there were these organizations called stop the steal that were convincing americans that the election had been stolen. [man] stop the steal swept across inboxes, facebook pages and twitter like an out-of-control virus. [max] when twitter and facebook turn back on these engagement maximizing features, the platform systems, just as they've done with qanon, just as they've done with charlottesville, just as they've done with gamergate, they start to link all of these groups together and start pushing election misinformation that says the democrats and shadowy forces have stolen the election from us and we have to go take our country back. we will never give up. we will never concede. we will stop the steal. [crowd cheering] [yael] social media really started as this fun experiment. how do we connect the world? but something really shifted in the 2010s

because once scale power and money became more important than the user experience and societal effects, i would argue social media completely lost its way. [wael] i once said, if you want to liberate a society, all you need is the internet. i was wrong. the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart. there're lots of people who are afraid of, what happens when ai takes over the world? what would that be like to live in? go on facebook. go on twitter. go on youtube. they staged sandy hook. the evidence is just overwhelming. you're electing to live in a world governed by an algorithm. and so i think in a weird way, social media is like a signal from the future saying be careful how much you give up to machines, because when you take humans out of the system,

when you take ethics out of the system, this is what you're left with. i think that the web is gonna be profound in what it does to our society. it is the ultimate direct to customer distribution channel. the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company in the world on the web. so i think the web, as we look back years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for computing. it's gonna be huge. yeah. [music] welcome to "the wh