>> 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 >> the advertising system on facebook is so efficient and precise it allows you to carefully target segments of any group of consumers, voters, nonvoters and target them and experiment with particular messages. you can try out 100 voters in duvall county, florida, who

might be really animated by gun rights but have historically voted for democrats, four or five different dads to see if you can get the reaction you want out of them which would be either not to vote or vote for trump. you can do the surgical play with facebook. you can't do that with any other advertising media. you buy television ads, everybody sees it. facebook ads are so effective, so narrowly tailored, so testable, different color backgrounds which they found makes a difference in how people respond to ads. you can make sure you talk to everybody in st. petersburg, florida or fort lauderdale and eliminate all jewish people from that if you want and imagine what you could get away

with but we will never know because the that don't exist anymore, they were ephemeral, hit their target, got the response and are gone and there is no oversight. my friend said you need to write that book, talk about what facebook does to our democracy. i hadn't thought about doing that. i had been collecting research that some amazing scholars had been putting together, work on how facebook missed with politics around the world, how facebook is a source of tremendous dissension and hatred and other problems, how russia used facebook to mess with estonia of all places, very stable democracy. how russia had, in concert with their actual invasion of

crimea, flooded ukraine with propaganda through facebook. i had all these data points i had been accumulating and putting them in electronic folders, privacy and surveillance on what they do with our data and thinking i could string this together. i sat down with that weekend and sent it out and got a swell response because everybody else was coming around to the idea that facebook played a crucial role not just in american politics but how politics work around the world. what have we seen since then? we have seen very clear evidence that the very nature of facebook contributes to distribution of the worst kinds of hate speech, actual call to genocide in places like sri

lanka and myanmar, has contributed to the election, was a major driver for the election in the philippines, that it is a phenomenon that locks governments into power in places like cambodia. it played a huge role in the elections in kenya last year, played a huge role in the brexit referendum before our elections -- tracing the effect in india and the ways it used facebook and what's apps to distribute propaganda, cut down critics and spread malicious rumors and lies about critics, to harass critics, instigate widespread and repeated death threats and kidnapping threats

against academics, leaders of human rights organizations, journalists and party leaders. that has been going on in india for three years and is a frightening situation. i have to conclude the us got off pretty easily. not americans have gotten off easily about all people who ended up in this country got off easily. let's be clear about that. nonetheless things are worse in other places and they are worse in places where facebook matters more. those places are the very places where facebook instigated a philanthropic effort to spread high-speed data connections to the poorest people in the world, created a system called internet.org and through that created a set of

applications, if you're in one of these countries and get into a contract with a telecommunication provider that agreed to carry free basics, it does not count against your data and you don't get charged. in countries where data is expensive and people pay month to month it makes sense and you use the suite of applications. it happens to use facebook and what's apps improved by facebook. that means in places like cambodia and the philippines and me and our, facebook is the internet. in a place like myanmar which just got phones and only recently got any sort of internet connectivity facebook is essentially the entire media ecosystem. not coincidentally it is the site of horrendous genocide against the muslim minority population. we have seen this sort of thing time and again around the

world, most brutally in myanmar. one thing to remember, 2.2 billion. i mentioned it before, the most important thing to remember about facebook in february 2013, facebook had 2.2 billion users around the world. nothing comes close. the bbc doesn't have that many listeners around the world, cnn international doesn't have that many viewers around the world, that is a stunning number. that also means at that scale there is almost nothing facebook can do to alleviate the problems i described. almost impossible to filter out all of the garbage out of a system that has 2.2 billion humans regularly contributing garbage and some puppies to it. it is a really unmanageable

system at that scale so two other aspects of facebook are important to remember, the advertising system i told you about that so accurately and inexpensively targets any sort of contact to just the audience and nobody else beyond it. that laser pointing of advertisements has tremendous possibilities in the world of propaganda. it is great for selling shoes, terrible for democracy. the third aspect is the core out the rhythm of the newsfeed. things that pop up in your newsfeed most often and things that pop up the highest are things facebook has judged or predicted to generate engagement. you have told facebook the sort of things you like and people you must interact with. it reflects what you told

facebook you care about and in addition, certain subjects generate tremendous amounts of attention and facebook knows it and when they do they rock around facebook, those are the posts that generate the strongest emotion and therefore the largest level of engagement which is the magic word. what is engagement? the combination of clicks and likes and comments and shares and those little:-)things, those are levels of engagement. those comments matter the most. if you post something that generates 100 comments chances are almost every one of your friends and many people beyond your friends will see that post. and a lot of thingsthings that generate strong emotions do like pictures of my dog, butter, which rock around the internet largely because people like butter and say i like butter and i saber like you

back but the same applies to conspiracy theories. if i were to tonight post an article from the economist about how the current meltdown of the italian political system is going to shake monetary policy and the european union, some of you are ready to read that article. if i posted it the handful of you who read that article might go to my facebook page and click like, thumbs-up, thank you for sharing this article from the economist, well reported, well thought out, sober minded economist tone article but it wouldn't generate vitriol unless you are an active member of the italian political party but you are not. i don't have friends like that. but that article would sink like a rock on facebook. it is too reasonable. if i were to go home and post something about how vaccinations cause autism that

would generate tremendous response. 99% of my friends would say what are you doing? you are out of your mind. why would you spread such lies? darlings to the centers for disease control showing how wrong you are at your articles from major newspapers showing how wrong you are and peer-reviewed scientific journal articles saying how wrong you are and there would be hundreds of comments. every one of them would show how wrong i am and ensure that my conspiracy. rocketed around facebook and got more people to see it and if it reaches 100 people, one goes really? i might not vaccinate my kids. every example of craziness, wackiness, hate speech, conspiracy theories, generate reaction and they are the things the travel farthest on facebook. this is why you can't argue against the crazy on facebook. if you argue against the crazy you amplify the crazy. it is the opposite of what we teach ourselves about how we debate issues in the world, how

we are supposed to disagree with people, often agreeably, sometimes disagreeable he and arrive at consensus or at least triumph in the public sphere. that doesn't happen on facebook. the opposite happens. the more reasonable your posts the less visible you are on facebook a little wacky your posts are, the more watched you are on facebook. it is a terrible system. a terrible system for a democratic republican. it is not bad for hobbyists or making sure you follow niche interests. pretty good if you like puppies that really bad if you're going to perform your politics on facebook and as aristotle tells us we are political animals, we can't help ourselves. we conduct our politics on facebook. what can we do about this? very little. what can facebook do about this? almost nothing. 2.2 billion people, advertising system so surgically addresses

the right people for the right product for the right candidate or the right idea and an algorithm that amplifies things to generate strong emotion. the combination of those things is facebook. the only way to clean up facebook is to address those three things and that would mean not having facebook and facebook can't not have facebook and facebook can't address those things because that is what makes it work, that is how it makes money, that is how it exists as an important thing in the world. another -- trying their best to cosmetically address these problems, country by country so they put extra effort into filtering out hate speech before the german election, they put extra effort featuring out fake accounts before the referendum in ireland over abortion rights and trying their best to make sure the congressional elections in fall of 2018 are not overrun by

russian propaganda the way the presidential election was in 2016 but this is a harder problem because we are talking about 435 house districts, at least half the state legislators, a good number of governors, so many elections facebook is monitored is an impossible job in a country like this. facebook can't fix itself and there is little we can do. there are some policy interventions i would like to see, stronger scrutiny of facebook. wouldn't mind seeing instagram and what's apps severed from facebook or oculus, virtual-reality system severed from facebook, it has too much power and data about all of us and it would be nice if those other systems competed with facebook, especially instagram. those mergers never should have been allowed and i would like to see strong data protection in the united states much like in europe which would at least give us some transparency,

ability to see what facebook does with our data and right now we can't. we give facebook a blanket license to do whatever facebook might think of in the future to do with our data. that wouldn't happen under the european general data protection regulations. i wish in the united states we had similar laws. unlikely to happen for many years. certainly not before 2021 and might not ever happen. i would like to see happen in canada and brazil and australia and other places but these are longshots and they only really address some of the problem. the rest seem pretty unsolvable to me. i want to be wrong about that. i want smart -- smarter people than myself to fix the problem and show me i am wrong. whether they work for facebook or work in washington dc or

brussels or canberra, i want them to fix the problem in five years ago to be able to say that book i wrote, don't bother with it. i was so out of line. it was so wrong. if that happens i will be superhappy. i will be happier if it happens after everybody bought the book, right? please do buy the book. i want to thank, and house for allowing us to have this space in this event tonight. i think c-span booktv for taking the time to get my message out to an audience beyond my dear friends here but i especially thank julia who has not only done a great service for charlottesville by reviving and energizing the new dominion bookshop but has for many years been a central node in cultural life in charlottesville. anyone who participates in

artistic communities, she has done a fantastic job for many years, charlottesville would not be charlottesville without her and shopping new dominion, the best bookstore in town and it will remain so with your loyalty so thank you very much and i will be happy to talk more about this if you have questions. [applause] what did i get wrong? >> on your second point about the way it works on facebook, is this not a place facebook can actually if they choose to change the algorithm, this is something they control, right? i understand there might be resistance because your revenue stream and whatnot but what have you seen in your review?

>> people doing something to address the advertising system in the united states before the election and that is they are requiring anybody who posts an ad that has any indication of political content like having a set of political keywords, from abortion to faith to the economy. if you post an ad and have any other word right now you won't be flagged by facebook, you will be asked to submit proof that you live in the united states. once that is screened they will run your ad and also wants to take a copy of that and keep it in the archive so in the future people can examine what that was about. if you are working for the internet research agency in st. petersburg and wants to distribute the same kind of ads

you did in 2016, what you are going to do is find a few people who live in the united states. there are plenty of people who are willing to mess with the united states. only takes a handful. maybe it only takes ten. you could get those people to sponsor these ads and have the same effect the ruble purchased in 2016. facebook is doing this and making a big deal to show it is taking the problem seriously. there is no way to get around the fact that people get around the barrier. it is so big and global and so easy to get around these restrictions. what made a difference, they

tried to promote an event but the miller center covers politics. the ad was flagged and denied by political terms in it. i tried to buy a facebook ad for this event and it was flagged and denied to because they are being so careful about anything that might seem political. it was a book maybe, who knows? my book title as the word democracy in it, that was enough to flag it. those are they hire staff and create a machine learning or that alone

india, 250 million, 220 million americans use facebook every month, 250 million people in india use facebook, 220 million in the us, 60% of the us. each of us in the united states in terms of revenue. for some strata for the top hundred million in india, the buying power will

>> i saw hereditary yesterday, wondering if you could help me understand, facebook is trying all these things to shore up and stop, what does the pressure do that is causing them to try all these things? what do you see as the global or national political pressure? >> this book from oxford university press, they are really scared. the pressure is they want to head off regulations they can't write themselves so every industry and every major player wants to write the legislation. if anger remains high and

legislators in brussels or london or canberra or in the us maintain a high level of animosity toward facebook, the regulations could be a real hindrance to how facebook operates in the future and they want to get ahead of that. getting in the room to negotiate in good faith and write the bill which is what every industry wants to do they have to take the temperature down, to take the temperature down they have to make it seem like they are making a good-faith effort and they are making a good-faith effort. people at facebook get this. they didn't get this until last year which is maddening. had they read social media scholarship like i do, like my friend meredith does, we live in this stuff and we knew it was not only possible but was

actually happening but nobody was listening to us. cambridge analytica got deep data on 150 million american voters. that is a lot of voters, almost all of the actual voters and that was a massive scandal. this researcher at university of cambridge got the data and handed it to facebook because facebook had no control over who took the data out and it seems the way the story ran out, this was a massive meltdown. it really wasn't. this was a reflection of facebook policy from 2010-2015. facebook encouraged application developers to take all the data about all of us out of facebook and use it to target ads and use facebook and more creative way. it thoroughly encouraged other

websites and applications to connect itself to the facebook ecosystem and be dependent on facebook. it was policy from 2010-2015, everyone who follows social media new this. a lot of us raise questions and got no response. in 2012, the obama campaign had an application on people's phones that you could use if you were a volunteer and you login with facebook credentials and not only would your facebook data be shared with the obama campaign but all your friends what and the obama campaign without even knowing they were getting it had all the data on all the americans. amazing how much data they had in 2012 lose the trump campaign could not do that in 2016. i will get to that in a second. in 2012 a lot of us raise their hands and said this is not good. of head of state has intimate data on the citizens of that country and that data is in the

political wing of that person's operation. forget whether i like that candidate or president or not, this is an unhealthy situation in a democracy. nobody cared. we couldn't get anybody to write that story. nobody writing an op-ed about it. it wasn't interesting because the story was barack obama is digitally savvy. of course that was. that happened to cambridge analytica written by a bond villain that became a major international story and because it was working for ted cruz no one in texas likes, that helped and donald trump, 60%, 70% of the country didn't like and was working for the campaign in brexit, it was easy to say cambridge analytica is a bad actor, stealing data. when facebook made it seem they

stole the data instead of facebook gave the data away and didn't care who will got it which was the case that is a long way of saying facebook now has to deal with a series of crises that strike at the core of its business and facebook would like you to believe and most importantly like senator mark warner to believe it is a series of fixable surface level glitches. warner is smart enough to know that is not the case. we are going to see over the next couple years a couple of good attempts to try to rain facebook in but probably not going to go anywhere for some time. >> speaking to that directly, having read the book, it seems there is this techno-determinism in terms of

once you implement technology and determine certain outcomes and techno-optimism, the idea that this keeps getting better, once we make these little fixes here and there. talk about the idea that you talked about in the book. >> psychological determined is some, one of my mentors years ago wrote this important book and another follow-up book called technology. he is a technological determinist. his mentor was marshall mcluhan and the idea was and is if you introduce a technology you change everything, introduce the lightbulb and human beings are completely different animals, they think different way, act different, run their day differently. it is a powerful technology. if you're going to make a technologically deterministic argument, a pretty good case study.

technological determine is him doesn't actually map human experience beyond a simple technology that has had profound effect like the lightbulb. if you take something less simplistic, much more complicated, used in more creative ways, like the turntable, you will see by introducing a turntable to a room you don't necessarily change it in one way, in one direction because it is supposed to rotate this way, 33.5 rpm but some people decide to move it this way, occasionally, and create rhythm out of it and the fact that human beings interact with their technology in creative ways and impose as individuals and groups different agendas on those technologies that is an indication of a different way of looking at technology, the social shaping of technology

and i find that a more compelling way of looking at technology. how does that relate to facebook? facebook has a set of algorithms and interfaces that offer us and structure and encourage certain forms of behavior but don't determine what we do. we change facebook as much as facebook changes us. facebook was invented for the puppies and the babies and 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 for different purposes and misogynists decided to use it for different purposes, when conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccination campaigns and flat earth groups, there are thousands of flat earth groups on facebook trying to convince people the earth is flat. when those people show up that is not what facebook was designed for but facebook becomes shaped by those interventions.

facebook is shaped by us as much as we are shaped by facebook. mark zuckerberg didn't get us, didn't even get curious about us. before he created a system he connected billions of people too. he made a mistake by assuming we were all sort of people who hang out with mark zuckerberg, we all went to harvard and silicon valley. if we were that kind of people, even just the harvard people facebook would be fairly usable except for kissinger, we went to kick him out. but it is messier than that, angrier than that, meaner than that and that is what we have seen. >> you mentioned facebook being motivated to bring the temperature down to a fairly intractable problem.

for years and years the reputation of purposely being deceitful with their controls and interfaces. i am curious with those data points so you feel like facebook is making a good-faith effort, my intuition -- >> people are shaken up by what is happening. that doesn't mean everybody is shaken up by what is happening or that mark zuckerberg is sick and up by what is happening. i get the sense he is. one of my former graduate students at the university of wisconsin, milwaukee, spent a couple years assembling an archive he calls the zuckerberg files where he has catalogued,

everything mark zuckerberg faced, every speech he made and every interview he appeared in. i withdrew hours and hours and hours and weeks and days, mostly media training, and i can't say that i know mark zuckerberg. and my sense is he is overwhelmingly naïve, fundamentally uneducated. never confronted the inhumanity of human beings, the potential cruelty of human beings. in those areas is caught by surprise. he can only look at the problem through his ideology, by

getting so rich on the back of it and that is an ideology that insists that 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 to each other. thousands of years of human history notwithstanding. there are plenty of cases when people living next door to each other are not good to each other, people living in the same house are not good to each other. to think the constant interaction between human beings will somehow flour into mutual understanding is incredibly naïve and time and time again that is how he is describing the mission of facebook and its social mission, he is committed to that, that gets him up in the morning. in terms of what he does with our data he has been duplicitous because he also said especially early in his career that he does not believe

that we should have any control over our data and control over our own sense of our reputation. we should be completely open in all cases to everybody because that is what he calls authenticity. he thinks we are inauthentic when we hold back information about ourselves and holdback aspects of our lives. if you are not willing to tell all your friends that you are gay that is inauthentic to mark zuckerberg even if you're not willing to tell your friends your gay because you might be afraid of some terrible consequence or you are not ready, that doesn't matter. if we got to the point many people in silicon valley believe this, if we get to the point where everyone will just be exposed for who they are, we won't be able to hate everybody because we will realize how many people like that are around us. terribly simplistic, terribly naïve, ignoring all sorts of other frictions in human relations. but that is his core belief.

he is still holding onto it, he is unshakable and when he says he gives us control of our data he means only in the most cosmetic way. when i share a post i can choose whether everyone in facebook has the potential to see it, just my friends have potential to see it, whether a subset of my friends has potential to see it, whether everybody has potential to see it except my mother which i have done at times. you have to care about that level of control. i have stuff i might not want to show my mom so i will go into this and tweak it a little bit. not many people do that. they just post. it is open to everybody. that doesn't matter. who you share stuff with on facebook is an issue but not as crucial as the fact you share everything with facebook and apparently cambridge analytica as well. hundreds of developers, like

people who created mafia wars and words with friends, though there when developers have your data too. they know about are your breakups and everything, everything you read, everybody wanted to win an election, they know that stuff and we don't know with whom they share that data or sold the data. >> you talk about mark zuckerberg personally but what about the culture of facebook? >> corporate culture of facebook, a lot of people work there are upset about all this. many major people have quit in the last year. leaders of project. the guy who ran what's apps just quit. because they were devoted to privacy. a lot of other people have serious misgivings about what is going on. i happen to know a lot of people are taking the sort of

attitude that jim mattis's tapes, if not me then whom, it could get worse if i'm not one of the good guys trying to work on this problem. that is a tough position to be in, not an enviable position to be in and plenty of people at facebook are true believers. i have former students working at facebook. most are true believers because they just got there and have not been indoctrinated but the ones who are fully vested, a lot of them are, that is because they are in that bubble. that is their bubble, their ideology, that gets them up in the morning to go to work. people at facebook truly and deeply still believe connecting everybody to everybody is the answer to all our problems. one more question. >> does facebook have any competitors? >> here is the thing. the top we 7 social media platforms, two operate in china

and very little outside of china. the one that is most important is reach out. i will get to that in a second. 5 of them operate outside china and two operate in china, you are down to five. order of number of users, youtube at 2.6 billion people but youtube is not really a social network in the same way. a lot of things facebook doesn't do it doesn't do a lot of things facebook does do but keep it on the list anyway. youtube is owned by google. facebook messenger, instagram and what's apps owned by facebook. what's apps has 800 million users around the world. twitter only has 300 million users around the world, it is way down on the list.

it is not that important. don't tell the president but it is not that important in terms of how it affects people's lives. within certain communities in certain places in the world it is more important in western europe than the rest of the world, even more important on celebrities and other groups in the united states to use it for certain purposes but in terms of its effect globally, it is not anywhere near the top 7, four of the twee 7 owned by facebook. what about reach out? reach out has 850 million users which is a lot and it is an amazing service, it does everything for you. you can take up library books, make doctors appointments, charge sodas in your machine, live through it, the operating

system of your life. the government watching everything you do or mining everything you do, everything facebook does, everything instagram does everything youtube does. if we had a version of we chat in english operational in the united states we wouldn't use anything else and this is what scares facebook. facebook sees it as a model. they are not directly competing. a lot of people use facebook and we chat but a lot of people in the chinese diaspora can't use facebook in china. these are two separate worlds. facebook wants to be more like we chat. the operating system of our lives. mostly what you are seeing on facebook messenger. if you open facebook messenger the apps on your phone, you see a bunch of many apps, bank of america apps, starbucks apps pizza hut apps, attempts to get

more transactions filtered through the facebook ecosystem in the hopes that you won't have anything but facebook messenger. and facebook -- what facebook is trying to do is to become more like we chat and comes outside of china. at the same time mark zuckerberg is flying to china, learned mandarin, trying to get into china to compete there. and 20 years down the line. and what happens in thermostats, cars, refrigerators, clothes and glasses, chips in our brain. some company, whatever company, manage that data.

and outsourcing decisions to that country. and that might be google and microsoft. or facebook. that is the long game and into artificial intelligence and self driving cars like google is, wearable, facebook is taking a different route, amazon and google want to have those obelisks in your home to manage everything you think about and listen to everything you are doing. that is part of the process to become the operating system of our life and it has to be one company because there needs to be standardization for the data to work, everything to work together. that is the long game we have to watch out for as citizens. we should be very aggressive forcing our leaders to try to

assess potential consequences of stress -- such a system. and making healthy decisions as those sorts of opportunities arrive in our lives and not rushing to the shiny new thing because it is the shiny new thing. please hang around, get more to drink and let's thank julia again. [applause] >> siva vaidhyanathan will be signing a book in the back. have drinks, have dinner upstairs. [applause]

>> tonight on booktv look at recent books on economics and finance. andy pudzner talks about capitalism coming back. >> that all started 8:00 eastern on >> caller:. >> we don't have the same location, we don't have the same outlook but where we are all the same as people of color, women of color, the way we t