>> welcome every one to our most recent book we are pleased to have you here on this rainy evening. we are selling books tonight please support him as an author to buy the book afterwords please do that. also thank you to c-span booktv you will be in the movie. [applause] you may know from his work at the university with dir. of center of media and citizenship at university of virginia and author most recently of antisocial media. then a very short introduction

and why we should worry how the clash between freedom control as crashing the system the rise of intellectual property. also called editing with re- wiring the nation we are so glad he could come here tonight with his book launch thank you for providing this beautiful space for the reading and then they opened the house tonight stick around we obviously cannot set you all up in the shop so without further a do. [applause]

>> i will placed age crew and give myself some height. on this rainy night rainy week in a rainy month it has been very strange here in seattle. [laughter] i am thrilled about this event more so than any other book event for this book with a home-field advantage. so it is really cool. giving a chance to reflect on the whole process why this book exist and why there seems to be significant interest that is more about facebook than it is about me that i will take it.

facebook is had a rough couple of years. you may not have noticed but it has been involved in or responsible for or contributing to a number of very bad things in the world everything making our personal data with us unsavory political consulting firm out of london to the perpetuation and all sorts of problems with horribleness. but there was a reason that we joined a spoke 2.2 billion people are regular users. the reason is my dog who appears regularly and she is

super cute and gets a tremendous response. for the puppies and the babies and updates from a friend from high school that had a baby or of puppy and that's the good stuff. we would be pretty thrilled with our experience. and with those relationships to be secondary and tertiary relationships. a bundle of interests and passions. and to be fascinated by our ability to share and connect other is the addictive nature to using facebook and that is

how they get you. so many years ago sitting at her house staring at my phone rudely she started to complain about this thing called facebook it was taking so much attention away from real life and she had a facebook account she wasn't happy with her spirit will -- experience she thought it was inflaming relationships and i was the son-in-law but it is too early to tell to figure out how to behave and things will get better than of course i should always listen to my brother-in-law and the first thing i did was call her and tell her how sorry i was for having that attitude so i

decided to write this book at a very tender and difficult moment. you probably have had this moment mid-november 2016. [laughter] trying to figure out what good i was to the world or to anything? my country took a turn i could not have predicted or was not willing to accept and for the first time i did not understand my own country even with a phd in american studies i did not understand america. clearly a waste of time. i have a friend in new york who was feeling the same thing a magazine editor for years and he quit his job and tried to figure out what he would do to make a bigger difference.

he didn't want to do magazine profiles anymore. he was driving up and down the east coast trying to have this conversation what just happened and he went to dinner with a few friends and we were talking through some stuff and came back to my house and my friend was in the room and my wife was in the room and we started going back twice happened in the election and said i just understand how trump could have snuck up and one wisconsin and michigan and florida without running tvs. he wasn't spending money he wasn't really campaigning so what the hack happened?

is that of course put all of his money into facebook that doesn't take much money facebook is so efficient and precise and it allows you to car carefully target segment of any group conservatives or voters or nonvoters and then to experiment with particular messages and try out on a hundred voters in dubois county in florida you may be animated but historically votes for democrats you can try out an ad to see to get the reaction that you want out of them which either is not to vote or vote for trump's you could do that surgical play you can do that with any other advertising medium otherwise

every journalist has a chance to see the address on facebook is so effective and narrow the tailored different color backgrounds which they found makes a difference how people respond so you can make sure you talk to everybody in st. petersburg florida or fort lauderdale florida to eliminate all jewish people from that ad. and imagine what you can get away with. and they probably did but we will never know they hit their target they hit the response than they are gone with no oversight. my friend said you need to write that book and what it does to our democracy i have been collecting work and

research the scholars were putting together on how facebook has messed with politics around the world and is a for some tremendous dissension and hatred in places like iser by jean and how to use facebook to mess with estonia of all places and how russia had in concert with her actual invasion of crimea to flood crimea with propaganda through facebook so all of these data points i had been accumulating and putting them in electronic folders there was a lot of material what it does with our data and then i was thinking i could string this together i sent it

out because everybody came to that moment that facebook played a crucial role of how politics work around the world we have seen very clear evidence that it contributes to the distribution of the worst kind of hate in places like sri lanka and me and that has been contributed to the election that it is a phenomenon and placed my

cambodia and the backside referendum and the other thing i have been tracing is the party in india to distribute propaganda and cut down the critics to harass the critic to instigate the widespread death threat leaders of the nongovernmental organization and the opposition party leaders that has been going on for about three years so putting all that together have to conclude that all americans of god not so let's be clear about that but nonetheless

things are worse than other places where facebook matters more and they happen to be where facebook instigated a philanthropic effort to have those high-speed connection create a system and a set of application and if you are in one of these countries and you get into a contract with the telecommunication doesn't count against your data. so where the data is super expensive and people pay month to month it makes a use that suite of applications that just so happens to include facebook so that means in

places like cambodia or the philippines facebook is the internet in a place like myanmar as recently as 2014 recently got any sort of connectivity it is to the entire media ecosystem it is the site of horrendous genocide. we have seen this most acutely and myanmar. how does this happen? i mentioned 2.2 billion february to have 2.2 billion users nothing comes close the bbc doesn't even have that

many listeners that is a stunning number. that also means there is nothing that facebook can do to alleviate those problems it is almost impossible to filter out all of the garbage of a system with 2.2 billion humans regularly contributing garbage so it is an unmanageable system so those two other aspects facebook advertising system that so accurately targets to just the right audience and nobody else beyond that that laser pointing of advertisement in the world of propaganda it's

terrible for democracy now the third aspect of the things pop up in your newsfeed most often or the highest is what facebook has judged or predicted to generate engagement because you have told facebook the things that you like or the people that you most interact with so it structures your newsfeed experience that you already told facebook that you care about and in addition certain subjects generate attention and would they do that and then to generate the strongest emotion there is a magic word what is engagement the combination of clicks and

likes and comments and shares those are all levels of engagement so if you post something that generates 100 common many of your friends and beyond that will see the post. also like pictures of my dog better. because most people like butter and say i like butter. and it works out very well but the same applies to a conspiracy theory can i host an article from the economist how the current meltdown of the entire political system will shape monetary policy in the european union right now you're reading that article go to my facebook eighth month --

my facebook page and they thank you for sharing this sober minded but unless you were the active member of a particular party as i don't have friends like that but that would sink like a rock it is too reasonable if i were to go home and post something how vaccination cause autism that would generate tremendous response my friends would say what are you doing? you are out of your mind here are some links to the cdc showing how wrong you are in here are articles showing how long you -- wrong you are with hundreds of comments everyone would show me how wrong i am and they would ensure of my

conspiracy around facebook reaches 100 people than they would say really? now i may not vaccinate my kids and that is exactly what happened every example of craziness and wackiness spirit sees harry's generate reaction this is why you cannot argue against the crazy on facebook because then you amplify the crazy it is the exact opposite how we debate issues or disagree with people and arrive at a consensus or triumph in the public sphere. the opposite happened the less visible you are on facebook the more wacky your posts are it is a terrible system for democratic republic.

it's not bad for a hobbyist or to follow a niche interest but it's really bad if you perform politics on facebook and as a political animals we cannot help ourselves we conduct politics on facebook so what can we do about this? very little what can facebook do? almost nothing. 2.2billion people those that address the right people and the right candidate and the right idea with that algorithm the combination of those three things the only way to clean it up his address those things that means not having facebook because that is what makes it

work and that is how it exists. now they tried their best to cosmetically address these problems so they put extra effort into filtering out the hate speech before the german election before the referendum of abortion rights and to make sure those congressional elections in the fall of 2018 are not overrun by russian propaganda like 2016 possesses a much harder problem for a hundred 35 house districts, half the state legislatures and a good number of governors it is almost impossible job in a country like this. there is very little we can do

to see stronger antitrust to me and with instagram i wouldn't mind seeing a separate realities system facebook as too much power with those other systems if they competed those mergers never should have been allowed. under that would give us some transparency and right now we can't to have a way get licens license -- a blanket i sends that wouldn't happen under the protection regulations i wish we have similar laws over many years.

it may not ever happen to raid and that power of facebook but they only really addressed some. the rest seem unsolvable to me but i want to be wrong. i want more people to myself to fix the problem and show me i'm wrong. i want them to fix the problem and five years from now to say that book i wrote i was so out of line. i was so wrong. if that happens i will be super happy and even happier if that happens after everybody buys the book. [laughter] so once again i really want to

think this event for having us tonight also c-span booktv for taking the time to help me get my message out beyond my friends here but also especially julia who is not only done a great service by reviving and energizing but is a central node and anyone who participates in those artistic communities has done a fantastic job for many years. and again the best store in tow town. thank you very much i'm happy to talk more if you have questions. [applause]

>> what did i say wrong? >> is this not place and to change the algorithm? because of those revenue streams or whatnot? something to address that advertising system before the election? they are requiring anybody who posts and add that has any indication of a political conscience to have political keywords from abortion to the economy if you post an ad with any of those words you will be flagged by facebook and asked

to submit proof you live in united states. once that is screened they will run your ad and they want to take a copy of that ad to put it in an archive so people can examine what that are -- that ad was about if you are working for the internet research agency in st. petersburg and want to distribute those ads without any problem in 2016 there are plenty of people in the united states that only takes a handful and you can get those people to sponsor these ads with the same effect with the

internet search ads so facebook is doing this and showing to be taken seriously but the problem is there is no way to get around getting around the barrier. because it is so big and so global so i don't anticipate it has that much of a difference but trying to run those facebook ads but happens to cover politics but it has political terms. . . . .

india is probably their hardest problem. we have more than a dozen languages and you need to hire staff and create an intelligence system in each of these languages and be able to flag all of the different derogatory speech in the languages and keep up with the slaying. 22 million americans use facebook each month. 250 million people in india.

220 million in the u.s. that is only 69% of the u.s. but this tops out. the only difference each of us in the united states is worth more in terms of revenue than anybody in india but that might not be the case in 20 or 50 years or at least the top 100 million the buying power depending on currency and whatnot. so what facebook is trying to do is country by country tried to plug up their problems and that is a walkable process.

[inaudible] what is the pressure? >> it's coming out and they are really scared. the pressure is they want to head off the regulation so every industry wants to write the legislation and brussels or london or the u.s. maintains a high level of animosity that the regulations could be a hindrance to how facebook updates in the future and they want to get ahead of that said to be able to negotiate in good faith and write the bill which is what

every industry wants to do, they have to take the temperature down. they have to make a good-faith effort and thing is they are making a good-faith effort. the people at facebook get this. they didn't get this on so last year which is maddening. if they had read the social media scholarship like i do, like my friend does, we knew this stuff was possible but nobody was listening. so cambridge analytic.com hold of the information on 150 million american voters. that's a lot of voters. almost all of the actual voters and that was a massive scandal. a researcher at the university got the data and handed it over

because they have no control over who took the data out and it seemed a way the story ran that this was a massive meltdown and a big one off but it wasn't. it was a reflection of the policy between 2010 and 2015. they encourage them to take the data about all of us out of facebook and use it to target ads and spread the buz love arod the web for instance. it's thoroughly encouraged other websites and applications to connect itself to the ecosystem. it was policy everybody that followed closely nune closely nt will us raise questions and got no response. in 2012, the obama campaign had an application that you could use if you were a volunteer.

not only with your data be shared all of your friends and pretty soon without even knowing they were getting if they had all of the data on all of the american. amazing how much they had in 2012. the trump campaign couldn't do that and i will get back to that in the second. but a lot of us raised our hand and said this isn't good. the head of state has intimate data on the citizens of the country and it's in the political wing of the person's operation. forget whether i like that candidate or not it is an unhealthy situation but nobody cared. we couldn't get anybody to write that story. it just wasn't interesting. so then it becomes a major

international story and because they were working for ted cruz no one in texas even like something for donald trump which 60 or 70% plus working for the lead campaign. it was a bad actor stealing data and billy facebook made it seem as they store the data instead of they gave the data only and then didn't care who else got it such was the case is abou so tha way of saying they have to deal with a series of crises that strike at the core of the business and would like you to believe it is a series of

glitches. mark warner is smart enough to know that isn't the case and we are going to see a couple of good attempts but they are probably not going to go anywhere for quite some time a and. >> having read the book it seems there's this determinism around once you implement a everything just keeps getting better. can you talk about not? >> determinism, which one of my

mentors wrote this important book and then another follow-up look is very much a technological determinist. the idea was if you introduce the technology, you change everything. you introduced the light bulb and human beings are suddenly different animals. they run their day differently. if you're going to make an argument the liberals ar that le pretty good that the case study. the problem is it doesn't map out to the human experience beyond a simple technology that has had a profound effect like the lightbulb. if you take something less simplistic and more complicated like the turntable, you will see that you don't necessarily

change it in on one particular y or production because of coursee it is supposed to rotate this day that some people decide to move it this way occasionally and create rhythm out of it and the fact that human beings interact and create a way that impose different agendas that is an indication of looking at technology and the social shaping of technology. and i find that a more compelling way of looking at technology. facebook is a set of algorithms and interfaces that offer certain forms of behavior but they do not determine what we do. we change facebook as much as facebook changes us. facebook was invented for the graduation photos and college kids to keep up with each other

over their lives. that is how it was designed. the social shaping part came when the nazis showed up and used it for different purposes. when misogynist misogynists user different purposes. a by thby the way there were about a thousand groups on facebook trying to convince everybody the earth is flat. flat. that i doesn't was designed for for those interventions. it shaped by s. and mark doesn't know us and didn't even get curious about us before he created a system he quickly connected millions of people to. he made a profound mistake by assuming we were all sort of people who hang out with mark.

if we were dot kind of people that would be useful, but that is iisn't the world. it is messier than that and angry and mean and that is what we have seen a. >> for years and years they have had production cases with the controls and interfaces are a. so you also feel like they are making a good-faith effort.

i've been in the room with a few people who are really shaken up by what's been happening. that doesn't mean everybody is. one of my former graduate student at the university of wisconsin spent a couple of years assembling an archive he called zuckerburg files of everything he's spoken, every speech he is made, and i went through hours and hours and hours and the end o days of mark zuckerberg talking in various contexts mostly with media context mostly with media training and careful structure but with i can't say that i know

him that i know him as well as anybody else that has not met him and why he sends is that he's overwhelmingly naïve and he just never compounded the inhumanity. so he's caught by surprise and he does care deeply about only can look at the problem through his ideology which is solidified by getting so rich on the back of it and that is an ideology that insists the more we are connected to each other the better we will treat each other. the closer we are to each other the better we will be. thousands of years of history notwithstanding.

the constant interaction is going to somehow flour into a mutual understanding is incredibly naïve and yet time and time again that is how he's describing the mission and he is very committed to that. he has also said pretty early in his career he doesn't believe that we should have any control over our data and control our reputation, that we should be completely open in all cases to everybody because that's what he calls authenticity. he thinks we are inauthentic when we hold back information about ourselves and aspects of our lives. so, if you are not willing to tell your friends that you are gay, that is inauthentic to mark

zuckerberg i'm even if it's because you might be afraid of a terrible consequence or you are not ready, that doesn't matter if the idea is if we got to the planes coming and i'm serious about this, many people believe this if we can get to the point where everyone will just be exposed for who they are because all of a sudden they realize how many people like that are around us. terribly simplistic and naïve but that is his core belief. he's still pulling onto it and when he gives control over the data is in the most cosmetic w way. whether just my friends have the potential to see it, whether everybody with my mother has the potential that i'm sorry i've done that a few times. [laughter]

first of all you have to care about their level of control. not many people do that. but that really doesn't matter. it's an issue that it's not as s crucial as the fact as you share everything with facebook and cambridge analytics as well. hundreds of developers, the people who created mafia wars and words with friends, they have all of your data. they know about all of your breakups, everything and we don't know with whom they've sold that data.

there are a lot of people that work there that are upset about all that has gone on. many people have quit in the last year. leaders of projects because they were divided on the system and there's other people that have a serious misgivings about what's going on and i happen to know that there are a lot of people who are taking this sort of attitude that you have to make dramatic take us which if it isn't even whom and if i am one of these guys trying to work on the problem that is a tough mission to be on and it's not an enviable position to be on and there are plenty of people that are still true believers. i have former students working there that those that have fully

vested or true believers and that is because the they are in their bubble and believe connecting everybody to everybody is the answer to all of our problems. >> does facebook have a real consensus? >> the top seven social media platforms, two of them operate in china and very little outside. the one that's most important is that i will get to in a second. if you take the top seven and remove it you are down to five. number two is due to that

1.6 billion but it isn't really a social network system in the same way. it does a lot of things but let's keep it on the list anyway. what about the three after that. the lowest is 800 million around the world. twitter is about 300 million around the world. twitter is down on the list. it's actually not that important. don't tell the president it's not that important. [laughter] it is important within certain communities and places in the world, so it's more important than in the rest of the world. it's even more important among celebrities and other groups in the united states that use it for certain purposes but its effect globally and on politics isn't anywhere near the top 74

of the seven ;-). what about we chat that has about 850 million users which is a lot. it is an amazing service that does everything for you. you can take out library books, make doctors appointments, you can live through it. it's the operating system of your life it just happens that government is watching everything you do and keeping a record so you don't misbehave. miss behave. we chat does everything twitter and instagram. if we had obligation to the united states we wouldn't use anything else and that is what scares facebook.

they see this as a model though they are currently not competing there's a lot of people in the portaworld that use both facebod we chat but you can't use facebook in china so they are two separate worlds. facebook wants to be more like we chat which is why they keep inventing new services to become the operating system of our lives. if you open facebook messenger you will see a bank of america, attempts to give more transactions filtered through the ecosystem in the hopes that one day he won't use anything but the messenger and facebook and they might be integrated and then facebook will do everything we can do when you think about what they are trying to do is trying to become more like we chat and at the same time he's

learning mandarin and trying to get into china to compete. outside of china, zero competition but if they are directly competing for our attention and it's serious. years down the line that idea isn't just about what happened on our phone if it happens in our thermostats, our clothes and our glasses. at that point where everything has data flowing through it, some company will manage and monetize and we will be outsourcing decisions to that company. it might be google or microsoft or amazon. it might be facebook. that is why they are getting more into virtual reality and artificial intelligence and self driving cars.

amazon and google want those in your home to manage everything you think about and listen to everything you're doing. that is all part of the process and it has to be one company because there has to be some sort of a standardization. so that's what we have to watch out for. as citizens we should be aggressive in forcing the leaders to try to assess the consequences of such a system that there might be positive consequences as well and i'm sure there are is going to be about helping decisions as they arrive in our lives and not just rushing off to the shiny new thing because it is a shiny new thing. please hang around, gave more to

drink, thank them for lettin his hang out here and let thank julia again. [applause] i do need to mention steve will be signing his book in the back. so everybody stick around. [applause]

good evening. i am the co-owner of a bookstore along with my life, thank you everyone for coming.