♪ call one eight hundred, eight million announcer: filling a better bay area -- this is abc 7 news. >> you are watching getting answers live on abc seven and wherever you stream. we ask experts your questions every day at 3:00 to get answers for you in real time. we are going to talk about a few things, including the fact facebook had been down most of the day. it came back online just moments ago and is running very slowly. the outage started early this morning with millions of users in the u.s. as a whistleblower just went public with accusations the company lied to the public about their progress fighting hate, violence and misinformation. facebook disputes that. we will get into this with

someone who's an early investor in facebook coming up. first, joining us to discuss the latest is the ucf chair of the department of medicine. happy monday and get to have you here. >> good to see you. kristen: a couple of headlines -- seeking fda approval, johnson & johnson for its used are, possibly pfizer for five to 11-year-olds and merck for its antiviral pill. three things full sublets talk about those. >> there are 4 -- the moderna booster as well. kristen: talk about what this all means. >> the pfizer boosters are out there. i got mine about 10 days ago. it is still not clear what people who got moderna or j&j should do. the fda is going to try to figure that out. i'm not sure what they are going to try to do. i imagine recommend a second shot stop but dharna has been

holding up better than pfizer. if there is a moderna booster, they will look at half the dose. they are also looking at mixing and matching, whether it's ok to take the other one, if you got pfizer, whether you should take the moderna. everyone is waiting for approval for five to 11-year-olds. the data look good and we will have to see. then you have the merck pill which could be a game changer. if you feel a little crummy and get a rapid test and test positive for covid, you can immediately get a prescription to take a pill a couple of times a day for four or five days and that decreases your chance of getting super sick. a lot of stuff on the docket. kristen: i saw a new study about the heart inflammation -- seems like odds increase after the second shot of an mrna vaccine.

can you talk about how much is your risk and who gets it? >> i haven't seen that study. there was one study that looked at the risk that mostly happens in young adolescents come mostly in boys that just got retracted because the methods were flawed. that whole area is up in the air. we know not a single person has died of myocarditis by report and the risk is worse if you get covid dan if you get the vaccine. it is something to way as you try to vaccinate kids but most experts who have looked at the literature, it is clear the benefits in terms of preventing covid and the spread of covid far outweigh the small risks of getting inflammation of the heart. if you get it, it last for a little while but then goes away.

kristen: let's just emphasize the actual numbers are minuscule. five point eight cases out of a million for the second shot compared to .8 after the first. that is minuscule. let's talk about the fact that this is not insignificant. we hit 700,000 deaths in the u.s. from covid. i want to ask if you feel like that went by without too much of a blip. not so much for you guys, but the public. i saw a lot more outrage about dr. fauci's comment about not sure about christmas than the fact that we had 700,000 deaths. >> i think everybody has gotten a little numb to this. if you said 18 months ago we were going to have 100,000 deaths, everybody would say that's impossible. the number, the way i give it some sense and meaning and proportion is that it's now larger than the size of washington dc.

if everyone in washington dc passed away, that would be fewer people died than who have died of covid. her member in each one of those is a person with a family, friends and loved ones, it is important to do that. the last 200,000, the vast majority of them did not have to die if we had widespread vaccination. that makes it a little worse. it's one thing to have died before we knew what hit us last year, but now that we have the tools to prevent virtually all deaths from covid, most of the deaths are for those who have chosen not to be vaccinated. kristen: it's like you read my mind. i was going to ask, you think we could have prevented. andrea on twitter has a question -- she wanted to ask about new cdc guidelines, dr. fauci's guideline saying don't have holiday gatherings.

she said my whole extended family is vaccinated. she thinks that's a negative message that vaccines don't work. what do you say to that? >> i it's hard to know what we will be sate -- what will be safe and not be safe around the holidays in part because it is going to vary a lot depending on where you are. if you are in the bay area, where we have hit 75% of all people in san francisco, including kids under 12 who can't be vaccinated, 75% of the people in san francisco have been fully vaccinated, that is amazing. it will be a different environment than if you are in a place where 30% or 40% of people have been vaccinated. if you are going to have a family gathering where everyone has been vaccinated in a region where the prevalence is low, you could probably do that safely. if the prevalence is high, the risk of infection is reasonably high and you will want to pay attention to that. kristen: you put out a tweet today, which we hope to show --

you make it clear looking at the picture here that you are choosing to dine inside in restaurants again. here is -- you show a graph related to that. explain this to us. >> this is the case rate in san francisco. youyouyouyouyou look at where we were in the beginning of june, about 10 cases a day in a city of 900,000 people. we peaked at about 300 cases a day and are back down to the mid-70's now. we are at a level where the new cases every day is fewer than 10 for 100,000 people in the city. the chances you are going to encounter someone who is infected is low. when you combine it with the

fact that i'm fully vaccinated and took my pfizer booster, you can combine that with the test positivity rate which is down around 1%. the rate of positive tests and people who don't have it, that's running about 4% now. combine all of that and eating indoors is not zero risk, but it is incredibly low. i enjoy eating at a good restaurant and i think the benefits outweigh the risks. i can see some wealth looking at the same data and say not quite or i have elderly relatives at home or kids at home who haven't gotten their shots, may be i'm going to hold off for a while. in my judgment, the risk has gotten to a level where i would be comfortable to be inside in san francisco.

if i'm inside, i'm going to wear my mask but i have to take it off to eat. kristen: how about walking around in a downtown street outdoors? i noticed everyone else's wearing their mask. i feel like you might tell me it's ok to where it just walking around outside. what you tell me? >> totally ok. outdoors is a little riskier than what we talked about last year. because of delta, delta is so much more transmissible than the original virus that you can't say outdoors is 100% safe. but the kind of transmission i worry about is if i'm face to face with someone on a windless day and the person is yelling at me, casual, going by someone on the street is perfectly ok. when i walk the dog, i don't wear a mask.

kristen: have we met the metrics to drop indoor mask mandates? >> the number i like is five cases per day per 100,000 people. we are not quite there yet. there have been curves that have gone up and down a little bit of this, so i would want to see we are continuing our downward trend. but if we go in the direction we are going in now, it will probably be safe to do that and i think health leaders are thinking that. kristen: some countries are starting to abandon the covid zero strategy, trying to squash out every case, making that statement. i wonder what your thoughts are. i know china is sticking with that. do you think more and more around the world that we are moving past that? >> it is so difficult to get to

zero and the only way to get to zero as if you are like new zealand, and you can basically keep the virus off the island. i think they announced they are going to abandon it because it is too brutal. it's such a hard thing for society to bear. it's hard to argue with new zealand's success, but at this point, we are going to have to live with this virus for the next several years, maybe forever. we have enough people vaccinated that we can talk about what is a reasonable strategy to go back to living our lives. it just gets better and better if more people get vaccinated. if the pills turn out to be successful and approved by the fda so if there's a case and someone is at risk, they can take pills and that decreases their chance. it's leading to a scenario where

we learn to tolerate it and the toll is small enough to get back to a semblance of our former lives. i think that's a better strategy than saying we're going to try to get to zero cases. the only way to do that is to create so much hardship that it's not worth it stop -- t

kristen: welcome back. facebook, instagram and whatsapp all owned by facebook all just came back up after being down for about six hours. three billion people around the world use the social media platforms thought this happened when they after a former facebook engineer came out and said the company put profits above all else, bearing evidence its products and policies were

hurting people and our country. joining us to talk about this is an early facebook investor and author of the book -- waking up to the facebook catastrophe. thank you for coming on. last time we had you on, i think it was 2019 when your book came out. >> i was talking then about the exact same issues. the difference now is the whistleblower has given us hard evidence that the management team at facebook not only knew about the problems, but was very comfortable allowing them to persist. kristen: we want to dive deeply into those documents and what specifics she brought up, but quickly give us a summary of what happened here. we wake up and see on our phone apps that it's not loading and then we type in facebook.com and nothing happens, can't get to it and it seems like facebook this appeared until 20 minutes ago. what happened on the technology

end? do we know? >> we know in general terms what happened stopped away they are architected, they are so large that they handle all these issues internally. the domain naming service, the key infrastructure for finding things and moving around the web is something very old. it was never designed for the scale of today's internet. companies like facebook are really sophisticated and are generally able to keep things up even though the infrastructure is fragile. the most likely explain his facebook was doing something internal, a product upgrade and somebody inadvertently deleted the file will use to find their websites. that would be bad enough. other potential excavations -- i think that's the most likely 1 -- and it is bad enough because it's a reminder this company is a monopolist and not one but three categories and as a consequence, when they have a

small internal failure, it shuts the whole thing down. that shows the level of concentrated economic power they have. kristen: the timing though -- a lot of conspiracy theories. people are like is this an inside job? pointing out things that make it seem like it possible. and this is happening because of the discussion about whether facebook has done so much bad and what it needs to do. so the gravelle institute, a progressive think tank tweeted if facebook simply did not come back, that would be a very good think for humanity you agree? >> absolutely. i've been in silicon valley for a long time and investing in technology company since 1982. the thing people forget is engineers are really smart and the ability to create a new safer version of facebook or instagram or any other tech product is unlimited.

what stops them is monopolies are really good at blocking access to the market for any kind of start up that might compete with them. that has been the problem for a decade and if they disappeared, in a matter of weeks, you would see all kinds of incredible alternatives. we should not be afraid of that. we should embrace it because it would be easy to have things that were an not just healthier but better in other ways. kristen: this is sounding like you say it takes ftc or congress or what is the solution? what can they do? >> there are two threads to look at. what is incredible about the whistleblower is she's not only incredibly courageous, she's unbelievably authoritative and incredibly convincing. for congress and for the court system, they no longer have an excuse for inaction.

congress needs to pass laws and three areas. first, safety. we need to look at this the same way we look at the food industry when we passed the pure food and drug act. food was an unsafe thing, drugs were unsafe, so we mandated safety and created the fda. we did the same thing with the chemicals industry in the 60's and we need to do it with tech platforms. second, we need laws for privacy. we need to protect people from the use of personal data to influence their choices and behavior. humans have no rights and that's insane. we've forgotten people are part of the equation and have rights. third, we need to update the antitrust laws for the 21st century. that's going to take several years minimum. the thing that can happen is the whistleblower and others have provided evidence that facebook and other companies forgot where the lines are in the law and may

have committed felonies. the whistleblower stuff, there's explicit data about human trafficking. that's a felony punishable by time in jail. there is a case in texas that talks about price-fixing in digital advertising. that's a felony under federal law. there's the insurrection -- aiding and abetting and insurrection, which facebook clearly has done. the degree needs to be investigated but they clearly did it. that's also a felony and that's not the limit stop there's a case for insider trading that needs to go before the security and exchange commission. there is a lot of stuff out there. the key thing is the whistleblower has made this so clear because there's so much evidence that there is no wet -- there's no more excuses for an action. kristen: i hear what you are saying that she has given government agencies stuff to work with. when we come back, i want to talk about the teen girl self-esteem thing with instagram

and whether google is doing tha

kristen: we are back with an early facebook investor and a book waking up to the facebook catastrophe. one thing that was outlined was how much facebook new about many things and what grabbed headlines the past few days was they knew the product was hurting teen girls self-esteem and took no action. can you talk about the took no action part? there -- what did their internal data show that they ignored? >> the problem, and this is just as true of facebook and instagram and youtube is the underlying business model. because it is dependent on attention, the algorithms are naturally going to promote the most engaging content. the simple truth of human psychology is things that make us angry or make us afraid are

going to be the most engaging because they trigger our self-preservation instincts. that is what is going on here. it's not like they are saying we want to hurt teenage girls. what they are saying is we value our profits so highly that we are going to find ways to create an illusion we are solving the problem without actually fixing it. because if you fix it, their profits are going to be much lower than they are now in the evidence is so damming -- the internal stuff said 3% of the people are experiencing extreme psychological problems. there are a billion users on instagram. that means 30 million people are experiencing these worst-case outcomes. they say one in three teenage girls as having a significant problem -- that millions and millions of people who are being harmed just to protect a business model that seriously -- you could do a really good

version of instagram without hurting people. the problem is, from day one. kristen: facebook is the one the really under the spotlight, but last year's docudrama the social to lumbar -- social dilemma warns that with google searches, there's a problem with that in that we may type in the same things but could get different results because they know so much about us already. talk about what the danger is there. we think of doing a google search as a neutral thing like it is just facts and information. >> the problem with google searches that it's really easy to manipulate the results. so people do that. the same kind of people who want to undermine the pandemic response with disinformation on facebook or instagram can do a version of that on google search and have done so very successfully. you see this in things like auto complete where it will all be things that are really horrible. i would also point out youtube,

which is owned by google, has done almost nothing to prevent harm and have pushed growth at all cost in spite of a lot of bad things related to terrorism, medical disinformation and many other things. this is a problem with the business model and that is why we need new legislation for safety and privacy because we need to legislate rules that event that business model from continuing. these companies are going to have to be a lot as profitable and that's a good thing. kristen: hindsight is 20/20, but maybe there's something that can be done. you talked about the brilliant engineers and you fund them early on. should they have had people who are social scientists or philosophers or psychologists at the table as the infrastructure was being built? >> this is a really great question. i think that would have helped but more important, beginning in

about 1980, the united states as a country decided it was no longer going to regulate business they were going to let the market allocate resources. so in googles -- when google came along 20 years later, we were in a world with few regulations and very little enforcement of the few that were left. it has been the wild west, and anarchic situation. they've never had any kind of constraint for what they do and that is the real problem. there's some point where every business has two be a good citizen and we never put these rules up for these companies. kristen: thank yo

i d d so my y quesonons eouout hicacase.y y son, cacalledhehe bars s fi i d d soit was the best call eouout hii could've made. call the barnes firm and find out what your case all could be worth.uld've made. ♪ call one eight hundred, eight million ♪

kristen: thank you for joining us today on this interactive show -- world tonight, several breaking he headleans as we come on the air. the major outage for hours affecting millions of facebook, instagram and whatsapp. what the kcompany is saying tonight. what we're learning at this hour. and it comes after the facebook whistleblower revealed herself on "60 minutes," revealing thousands of pages of internal documents. what she says facebook knowingly does involving its users. facebook responding tonight. terry moran with late reporting. also tonight, the massive oil leak worsening ag long the california coast. up to 130,000 gallons of oil from an underwater pipeline. oil washing onshore, killing

wildlife, beaches closed. matt gutman out on the