that does it for us tonight here on "kasie dc. we'll be back next week from washington up next, msnbc's headliners. an in-depth look at facebook for now good night from washington."headliners". an in-depth look at facebook for now good night from washington \s >> i really think that the best is yet to come. >> mark zuckerberg's quest to connect the planet sparked a to life in a college dorm room. >> it exploded people were signing up left and right. >> the goal was to change the world but i do think it happened faster than anybody could have imagined. >> but the idea that brought together friends and friends ever friends grew to make more dangerous connections. >> it is important to realize

the russian troll factory walked through facebook's front door. >> facebook is the best vehicle for propaganda that ever existed. >> leading to multiple crises over issues of politics and privacy. >> i think it is really important for americans to foe what this company has been doing with their data. >> facebook is not a social media network. facebook is a data mining company. >> if you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the names? >> senator, no i would probably not choose do that publicly here. >> what's wrong with facebook and can it be fixed. >> he moved fast and broke the trust of the american people. >> you are asking engineers to solve humanities problems. >> yeah. ♪ 2018 was a terrible year for facebook with the social media giant rocked by one scandal after another. >> this is actually a concern

that i have. >> from russian trolls using facebook to interfere with the 2016 presidential elections. to critics saying the company put click asks profits above its civic responsibility and took a lax approach to yours users privacy. >> there is a common misconception at facebook that we sell data to advertisers. we do not sale. >> you clearly rent it. >> over time it became more and more apparent to people that what facebook was doing was taking our data and it was mining our data and it was sharing that data with advertisers and then lo and behold is sharing that data with third parties. >> data has been called the oil of the 21st century. and facebook is arguably sitting on top of the most lucrative mine of personal data ever collected by any company in history. >> since facebook was founded in 2004 its grown from an

innovative online directory to a titanic influencer of our daily lives. with 2.2 billion users worldwide. >> facebook has become bigger and more powerful than i think anyone expected. the goal with the whole world on facebook and we all live in facebook. >> and the facebook we all live in has never seen a year like 2018 >> facebook took a major hit on wall street today losing over 40 billion dollars in market value after the revelations that cambridge analytica, a company tied to the trump campaign allegedly collected data from tens of millions of facebook profiles, all in the run up to the 2016 election. >> facebook was expose for how it allowed cambridge analytica, a political consulting firm liqu linked to the trump campaign in an alleged effort to sway votes. >> people were lived because they felt their personal information was used to power

donald trump's campaign. >> but cambridge analytica turned out to be just the beginning. msnbc contributor nicholas spent a year probing how facebook deploys data. >> the fact that this company could get all that data actually was just an illustration of the bigger problem, which is that all of these platforms are basically trafficking in your data and most people have no idea how it is being used. >> more controversy this morning for facebook the "new york times" is reporting that the social network allowing partner companies, microsoft, amazon and netflix greater access to yours data than previously acknowledged. >> facebook was providing access to your list of friends, your phone numbers. sometimes your direct messages political affiliation. your religion. all of the things that would make you attractive to a different advertiser or other company. >> many people don't understand how much facebook requires from

them when they sign up and critics say that's on purpose. >> it goes to the whole premise whether it is facebook, google or twitter, gosh, these are free services they are not free. these companies, and this is all legal, mine enormous amounts of information about us as we use these platforms. >> the more time peoplespend o the site the more facebook can monetize their personal delta. the company developed its news feed algorithm to keep users highly engaged >> facebook knows what you want to read and has developed a very precise system to give you things that you respond to that make you angry or upset or really happy or really engaged and that is the same feature that gets exploited by foreign governments. by people who do fake news they are using this feature of facebook to get you to respond to things that are not true,

that are wrong, that are lies. >> propaganda and fake news is proven popular on the site but facebook ceo mark zuckerberg initially dismissed the idea that fake news had an impact on the race as crazy. he reversed that position by the time he faced congress in a contentious hearing in april 2018. >> it is clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well and that goes for fake news. foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. >> zuckerberg addressed russian interference and why the company says it cannot stop all bad content in advance. >> can you guarantee that any of those images that can be attributed or associated with the russian company internet research agency have been purged from your platform >> senator, no i can't guarantee that because this is an ongoing arms race as long as there are people sitting in russia whose job it

is is to try to interfere with elections around the world, this is going to be an ongoing conflict >> the russia controversy got new attention in november with yet another expos in the "new york times" alleging the company tried to bury what they knew. >> they delayed telling the world what they knew about russian activity on their platform they denied it after other people figured it out. and they deflected blame for the problem when people started to criticize them. >> facebook's former security chief alex stamos now an nbc analyst. >> and that information -- >> argues company kpeks delayed public action the avoid getting any deep entire a partisan political issueexecs delayed public action the avoid getting any deep entire a partisan political issue. >> there was a constant tension between people on safety teams that wanted to talk about it and policy teams whom did not want to insert the company into the controversy after trump's

election. >> in addition to the deliberate lack of transparency facebook hired a d.c. lobbying firm to target some critics. >> a republican-leaning pr firm. they do opposition research. they try to find information in the public record that might look bad for their targets if reporters write about it. >> facebook's always toutedite as th itself as a company acting for the source of good for the world and now getting down in the dirt. >> i don't think they have handled the communication component well. >> the weight of the scandals led to an historic drop in facebook stock. >> no company's ever lost a hundred billion dollars market value in just one day. just the latest hit for the company's billionaire founder mark zuckerberg. >> the company must also contend with new privacy laws in europe and calls for action from american lawmakers >> there is probably more talk about regulation right now than

at any point in over a decade. >> until recently, facebook long argued against federal regulation of its product. kara swisher an nbc news technology contributor says that way of thinking dapts back to zuckerberg's original corporate model. >> a saying they have they used to have plastered all over the wall there is which is move fast and break things think about that saying very hard and you understand a lot about facebook. >> coming up, the dorm room where it all began >> a socially awkward guy wanted to make a world where people communicated and lived and dated and socialized on the computer ♪ ♪ memories.

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freshman year. and he was probably what a lot of people would expect bit of a recluse who was spending a lot of his time coding but he was actually quite interested in the way people were interacting both at school, and in general. >> a socially awkward guy who was happier in front of a computer wanted to make a world where people communicated and lived and dated and socialized on the computer. >> zuckerberg's belief in moving fast and breaking things started with face smash. a site that let students rate each other's looks harvard almost expelled him over it his next project was an electronic version of facebooks. >> the idea was a single place where people would say this is who i am, this is what i'm interested in, this is what i'm up to and see what their friends were doing at the same time. >> february 4th, 2004 they sent

out invites asking harvard students to join. >> it exploded people were signing up left and right. >> when we first launched we were hoping for maybe 400, 500 people. >> over the course of the first three weeks we had 6,000 accounts started just at harvard. and the entire undergraduate student body at 6400. >> david kirkpatrick who wrote "a history of facebook". >> you had privacy on facebook. >> says users have always shared a lot about themselves on the site but they felt safe doing it. >> people put their photo, their cell phone number. their e-mail address and a lot of personal information on the service because the only people who could see it were their friends. it was the first service that worked that way. >> there was nothing else on the internet that really allowed people to share information about themselves in a trusted environment with the people they already knew >> from harvard the site expanded other ivy league school, within

two month, 20,000 users at twenty colleges by 2006, 2,000 colleges and 25,000 high schools. fresh from dropping out of harvard zuckerberg had a big dream. >> the goal was to change the world. >> move fast and break things. we're the geeks that should and will control the world >> facebook kept evolving. and its designers believed in imposing new experiments directly on users and then watching the impact. that was the approach for a wildly successful and controversial feature that launched in september 2006 >> that was the dawn of news feed you could just go to one place and read all about everything that was happening and that is why its become, you know, so powerful in our lives >> news feed changed the site from a place you could go look

up a specific appearance business to a hub where everyone's business was shared with everyone else it was a fundamental shift >> so by displaying what's going on as soon as the person logs in, it is helping people tap into all the information that's available that people want to share with them very easily. >> many users protested what felt like a bait and switch. facebook took their personal information for one reason, then distributed it widely for a whole different purpose. the change was radical and overnight. the users were revolting -- >> the users were revolting saying the news fooed was a total violation of the privacy they have been given because it showed people their information in ways they haven't expected, predicting other things we'd see later. >> in response zuckerberg issued the first of what would be many apologies. >> i think what he said, calm down, breathe. wii hear you it was taken as condescending. but the reason he was so certain

that he would win this argument with his users was because he noticed that effectively the way they were learning from one another about the protests against the news feed was via the news feed. >> critics said news feed was designed to give facebook more control over users the algorithms kept them logged into the site by delivering connection, sensation lism or outrage. >> might be 1500 things happening in your facebook life with all your friends. facebook showed you all those. you would run to the hills so instead facebook has to work hard to show you the 150, 300 things that you care about. >> facebook decide what is goes in your news feed base on what you click on, what you like, what you spend time reading. and it is hard to know how it works because facebook doesn't share the mechanics of that exactly. >> we don't know what is in the algorithm in its detail.

but we do know that facebook's incentive is to continue rebroadcasting the most popular content. and the most popular content is often content based on fear or anger. >> exactly 10 years later after the 2016 race, the algorithms uncanny ability to maximize traffic would cause facebook's largest problems yet and some would say major dilemmas for democracy news feed is key to facebook's success. the average user spends 50 minutes on the site every day. often scrolling the feed for photo, discussion and the ads that come along the way. potential for big ad revenue was one reason yahoo made a huge buy out offer to facebook in 2006. >> i got asked about that billion dollar offer true, not true >> oh, those things are all just rumors but i mean we don't really try to get distracted by

stuff like that. we're very focussed on what we're doing and building a website that's helping people communicate in a completely different way. >> zuckerberg wanted to be the one to make facebook for everyone literally everyone >> zuckerberg said no to yahoo's offer as he continued to follow his vision by this time facebook took the site off campus welcoming non students and grew to 12 million active users zuckerberg took the next big step in 2007 opening the platform up to outside developers and encouraging them to build apps for facebook. >> in retrospect one might say it was not a good idea to have a made facebook an open platform but from zuckerberg's point of view open platforms seemed to have the most growth potential, the ability to have the most impact on the world. >> zuckerberg's decision had far reaching jen reaching consequences for the company and for the millions who'd come to depend on it. >> in exchange for creating these apps and games and stuff the make facebook more engaging

they kind of let these app developers have an open door to user data. likes, political information religion name, e-mail opened all kind of stuff up to random app develop zwlers coming up without knowing it facebook members give up their personal data and the data of their friends. >> and hundreds of millions of people were potentially effected by this. and just chow down midday? -you mean, like, lunch? -come on. voted "most likely to help people save $668 when they switch." -at this school? -didn't you get caught in the laminating machine? -ha. [ sighs ] -"box, have a great summer. danielle." ooh. danielle, control yourself. i'd like to slow it down here with a special discount for a special girl. danielle, this one's for you.

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on . the rise of mark zuckerberg and the phenomenon he created made it to the big screen in 2010 when columbia pictures released "the social network." >> clean and simple not. disneyland no live nude girls >> -- >> relationship status. >> based on the book "the accidental billionaires". >> it is the mythology of facebook every great company needs this

mythology. the movie made mark a her to a generation. >> finally today facebook is sharing its fortunes >> two years later with more than 900 million active users, zuckerberg took the company public >> so let's do this. but facebook remains zuckerberg's company he would be ceo, chairman of the board and control nearly 60% of voting stock. >> he was a pioneer in the extreme way that he structured facebook stock so that nobody could ever really tell him what to do about anything which remains the case today >> the job of monetizing the network's users went to chief operating officer cheryl sandberg who came to facebook in 2008 from the advertising team at google after a stint in the clinton administration she had a reputation as a disciplined detail oriented manager. >> she was in that sense the

perfect pairing for mark because he was the product centric visionary. it is difficult to imagine facebook without one or the other. >> sandberg began building the ad platform that would transform facebook at the time the company lacked the data it needed to steer the right ads to the right people. sandberg oversaw the creation of new software to follow users as they surf the web. >> even when you are not logged in you may visit a website with a facebook icon or like button on it. these icons that link back are also a way facebook can track you across the web even when you are not on the website itself. >> companies like google used a similar program but facebook was using its dominance across the web to track users, when many thought they were off the site >> they know where you are, what you are doing, where you are going. what e-mails your ending

what things you are using. what times of day. where you are physically a treasure trove of information. >> as users pivoted from desk top to mobile technology in 2012, zuckerberg moved with them. >> in every product meeting he would ask what the mobile version of that product looked liked and if they weren't showing him that first he would stop the meeting until they could show him the mobile product. >> and key to the company's bottom line t placement off ads pivoted too. in the mobile version of facebook zuckerberg embedded 'tissing right into news feed. >> the web has issue with typically a product and ads to the side that doesn't fly on mobile off the integrate into the experience and we think there is an opportunity to great great advertising opportunities through that make a great business. >> over the next few years zuckerberg began a round of future proof, spending billions to acquire instagram and later

what's app. >> he was brilliant to acquire these services a hedging strategy that worked because the core platform is beginning to decline in developed countries like the united states even as instagram and what's app are in no way declining anywhere. >> 1.4 billion active users and the company valued at $200 billion. zuckerberg pushed the company to expand in developing countries part of his long time plan to connect the world. >> only about a third of the people in the world have any access to the internet at all. so last summer we started this group internet.org to make it so everyone could get free and affordable "acces affordable access to the internet. >> facebook is just one site but in some places in the world it is so ubiquitous that it is the internet. >> international

brings big business opportunity but also complications you have an american company populated in great measure by americans who probably don't understand what's going on >> zuckerberg's vision seemed to be working in some places. sites like facebook gave voice to dissidents and protesters in the arab spring of 2011. facebook's advocates argued the internet was now a counterweight to dictators. >> facebook is a spectacularly useful tool for spontaneous organization and it ended up being used in all the countries of the middle east during that time with extraordinary effectiveness. generally with young people as the leading vanguard in the movement >> but facebook was soon faced with the other side of the coin. how to address repressive governments using the site against their citizens or people using facebook to spread hate. >> in myanmar for five years, beginning around 2014 the military used the social network

to spread propaganda about the minority ro hinia population u.n. investigators found facebook allowed posts that helped support the military's mission of ethnic genocide. >> they basically decided they wanted to be the world system, which meant they wanted to go into literally every country and they didn't stop for a minute to ask themselves what did it mean that they had no local language or culturally expertise. >> the company's also been criticized for propaganda and hateful content in countries like ukraine, the philippines and sri lanka. facebook now has 15,000 people working worldwide to monitor and evaluate any content flagged as hate speech. >> it is vital that facebook hire more smart local people in each of the markets. they ever they are beginning to do that but they are coming from behind and it is going take some time but they have to rush this because it is urgent.

>> coming up calls to reform policies hit closer to home. >> do you think there could be other breeches like the one we saw in the cambridge analytica where tens of millions of people's data was accessed improperly. >> well we're doing a thorough look approximat kp to make you everybody else... ♪ ♪ means to fight the hardest battle, which any human being can fight and never stop. does this sound dismal? it isn't. ♪ ♪ it's the most wonderful life on earth. ♪ ♪ it's the most wonderful life on earth. if your moderate to severeor crohn's symptoms

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active white house chief of staff nick mulvaney says president trump is prepared for another government shut down if he doesn't get the border wall money that he wants from congress an agreement needs to be reached by february 15th to avoid another shut down. in california senator kamala harris kicked off her 2020 ga campaign as facebook exploded into a global phenomenon, with

literally billions of users, critics sounded the alarm about the company's approach to their user privacy. >> facebook is not a social media network. facebook is a data mining company. it takes your data and it uses your data to turn a profit, to grow bigger. to gain more influence around the world. >> facebook promised the ftc in 2011 it would stop sharing customer' data without explicit permission but three years after when people played games on facebook the company still allowed their friends data to be harvested. >> so many people who go to take a quiz and they hit a little button that says do you agree, do not understand they were giving away the data of their friends and of their friends, friends. >> if you are a friends of somebody who took this quiz, then your data was siphoned up too and you didn't consent to that

>> in early2014 with a new presidential campaign on the horizon, political consulting firm cambridge analytica set out to take established facebook user behavior and turn it into a weapon >> a small firm principally funded by conservative billionaire in the u.s. robert mercer who wanted to control the information that campaigns used to find voterss a way to have influence over candidates. >> cambridge told the trump campaign and others it could use facebook data to identify and influence american voters in the 2016 election. >> what he sold was the idea that they could actually bailed psychological portrait of voter and predict how they would emotionally respond to different kinds of ads, different kind of messages and that this would be a uniquely powerful tool in the political marketplace. >> cambridge contracted with psychology professor alexander

koegen to harvest data for them through a facebook personality quiz. >> we collected a very specific type of data so we collected people's demographic details. like their birthday, their location, their gender and then we collected and then we collected page likes. >> what some failed to understand from the fine print was the app also took their friends information. >> the average person at that point i think had about 300 friends. so we collected the user and the 300 friends. so from just the 200,000 times 300 you get 60 million. >> taking redundant user profiles in account he estimated he obtained data from a staggering 30 million people which he shared with cambridge analytica. the massive information grab might never have been public knowledge had it not been for

one of cambridge's former employees blowing the whistle in march 2016. >> i think it is really important for americans to know what this company has been doing with data and really important i think to find out was this data used to help elect donald trump. >> although there is no evidence that the facebook data did help elect president trump. his leaks made headlines around the world and exposed facebook to renewed criticism. >> they have not put in the kind of infrastructure necessary to actually protect consumer data they have not done anything to vet the people grabbing the tough. >> there is so much ciout there and facebook has no real way of clawing it back. >> move fast and break things. he moved fast and broke the trust of the american people and the people around the world that are on the platform. >> exposed the fact that fibr s facebook's hold was not secure on data and snot not being responsible. just threw open the doors on everything that could go wrong with facebook and everything it seemed had been going wrong the

with facebook they had not been telling us about. >> by the end of 2015, facebook no longer allowed developers to take information about users friends. and it asked kogan wiley of cambridge analytica to get raid of the data they had obtained. but facebook did not warn users or publicly admit what happened until wiley blue the whiels two years later leaking to britain's guardian newspaper and the "new york times." >> do you think there could be other breeches like the ones we saw in cambridge analytica where tens of millions of people's data was accessed improperly. >> well we're doing a thorough look that is only one app there are many apps on the platform. >> what the executives were hesitant to say was that all that data that was taken could be anywhere. >> one of the things to keep in mind about the data harvested is we don't know what happened to it once data escapes a platform there is no putting the tooth paste back in the tube you can't clean up a data spill.

>> coming up, a foreign power uses facebook to interfere in the 2016 election. >> so they will create a persona that pretends to be a -- and then they will create a competing persona pro. and they will both be in the same city. and they will ramp up the rhetoric still, we never stopped making it stronger. faster. smarter. because to be the best, is to never ever stop making it better. the new 2019 c-class family. lease the c 300 sport sedan for $429 a month at your local mercedes-benz dealer. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing. coaching means making tough choices. jim! you're in! but when you have high blood pressure and need cold medicine that works fast, the choice is simple. coricidin hbp is the #1 brand that gives powerful cold symptom relief without raising your blood pressure. coricidin hbp.

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not long ago, ronda started here. and then, more jobs began to appear. these techs in a lab. this builder in a hardhat... ...the welders and electricians who do all of that.

the diner staffed up 'cause they all needed lunch. teachers... doctors... jobs grew a bunch. what started with one job spread all around. because each job in energy creates many more in this town. energy lives here. facebook's key role in many americans' daily lives made it a target for russia's operation to shape americans minds in 2016. and by 2017 it was clear that facebook was not just a target it was also, even if unwittingly an ad partner. >> today we got actual data from people in a position to know officials at facebook that a

russian backed entity was in fact buying issue ads during the 2016 campaign. >> almost a year after donald trump was elected, facebook disclosed that russian operatives bent on interfering in the election bought more than 3,000 ads focussed on divisive social issues. the ads were linked to fake accounts created by the internet research entity. a russian entity that the u.s. department of justice indicted in 2019 for a conspiracy to defraud the united states. >> facebook is designed so anybody can use it anybody can create a business page anybody can create a political page or a political group. it is important to realize that the internet research agency, the russian troll factory walked through facebook's front door. >> the russian trolls were the first known state sponsored group to use facebook to reach voters in the u.s. >> notebook was looking for is there a broad campaign where individuals are lying about who they are as part of a big attempt to manipulate.

>> which is what happened. >> which is what happened, yeah. >> nbc news interviewed the former facebook security chief and current msnbc analyst about how the russians infiltrated facebook to exploit fault lines in american society, create chaos and alienate voters. >> they will create a persona that pretends to be a black lives matter activist and then a pro cop both in the same city and ramp up rhetoric and create memes and messages >> the whole point is you can create discord by creating fake fighting >> creating fake fighting yeah and pull real americans in behind and try to incentivize them to do it themselves. >> there would be a far right site in texas advocating anti-immigrant, anti-muslim behavior and a similar site created that would be called united muslims and hit the these two groups against each other. >> in one case russian troll whose created fake pro and

anti-islamic groups actually organized real life rallies across the street from each other in houston, texas. stam's said the russian conspirators were -- fed more and more divisive content which they shared with tear friends. >> the key part of the incite is there are a small number of people if you can get them ideologically motivated they will amplify this content over and over again for free. >> and facebook is bit perfectly for this. >> does allow them to reshare and put that in front of more people the crazy uncle sal problem. everybody has the crazy you thinkle with conspiracy theories and enough the russians want to find those crazy uncles and put them in one place and motivate them to share this content over and over. >> the facebook paid political

advertise big the russians was relatively small but the total volume of fake accounts and the number of americans that it touched was over a 120 million >> facebook was also inundated with fake news from other sources. in the home stretch of the 2016 election u.s. facebook users engaged more with fake news stories about the race than all the top stories from actual news outlets like the washington post or the the "new york times." critics said if you got your election news from facebook you probably weren't getting news at all. >> it wasn't just russia that was gaming facebook. it was also americans and domestically >> speaking at the economy conference just days of the election, zuckerberg dismissed the idea that fake news was all over the site or could have influenced vote zplers the idea that, you know, fake news on facebook of which, you know, it is a very small amount of the content influenced the election

in any way i think is a pretty crazy idea. >> wouldn't you think when he said that. >> i think you have got to be saying that anything is crazy on facebook the truth is two something billion people there is a little bit of everything. >> after the election, alex stamos's security team he put together a report in september 2017 but first needed to brief a committee of facebook's board. >> part of it they ask is this over and my answer is no. i -- you know, i don't have confidence that we have all of it. >> the board then had a tense meeting with mark zuckerberg and coo sheryl sandberg. >> i'm not part but apparently

they get pretty angry. and cheryl got angry with me the next day she felt -- and chews me out in a conference call of 20 something people which many now have linked apparently to the "new york times." >> many in congress thought facebook was initially in denial. >> it took us almost until the fall of 2017 before facebook got fully engaged. >> mark zuckerberg specifically is unwilling to take full responsibility for what he has unleashed unto the world i don't doubt that he at the end of the day thinks that facebook is a force for good. but at some point he's going to have to wake up to the fact that facebook has a litany of problems and those problems are very, very real. >> coming up, will the one-time wonder kid become a pariah >> he's the potential dictator he has all power

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facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company for most of our existence we focus on all the good that connecting people can do. >> mark zuckerberg appeared before congress in april 2018. to answer tough questions about the series of scandals rocking facebook. >> i say this gently your user agreement sucks. >> one month after the scandal broke. concerning everything from elections to personal privacy. >> mr. zuckerberg, would you share with us the name of the hoe tole you stayed in last night? >> no. >> if you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the

names of the people you messaged >> no, i would not choose to do that publicly here. >> what information facebook is collecting, who they're sending it to and whether they asked me in advance my permission to do that is that a fair thing to expect >> yes, senator. everyone should have control over how their information is used. >> maybe social medianeeds stronger oversight in washington. >> i believe we need to have laws and rules that are sophisticated as the brilliant products that you have developed here we haven't done that yet. >> in the past many colleagues on both sides have been willing to detefr tech company efforts to regulate themselves this maybe changing. >> in the months after the hear, congress has done little to regular facebook or social

media. california has pushed ahead with privacy protection the european parliament passed a broader privacy law that went into effect in 2018. >> they accumulated an incredible amount of power it can change an election. are we comfortable with this one company having all of the power? and no regulation. >> i don't want to under mine innovation or kneecap facebook twitter or google. to have them replaced by chinese companies. the current model is not working. >> without tougher regulation, critics say facebook will continue business as usual with the occasional apology tour. >> facebook believes they are in a sense above the law. that if they hire the right people from the white house and the right democrats skb republicans they can insulate themselves from government

pay their way out of any fines situation. >> what government ought to do is begin a process of evaluating whether the four main parts of facebook ought to be split up into pieces. facebook, instra gram, what's app and messenger. they could be run separately. >> columbia professor, argues that innovation like social mode ya can easily get mhijacked by big monopoly player. and make the industry accountable. >> it reduces power and forces them to be accountable in a real way. opposed to an apology tour. >> i know for a fact that is the thing that facebook is most terrified of >> facebook argues its challenges stem from the real world. challenges that any platform connecting that world would face executives say they're making fixes so the government won't

have to. >> that's something it's hard for people on the outside to really understand the massive scale and investment we're making it will impact the profitability. we're willing to make that level of investment. >> in response to fact news and russian interference it removes millions of fake accounts a day and added rules for election ads. >> anybody who sees a political ad on facebook can see who is behind the ad and who paid for it that creates a trustworthy environment for political discourse on the platform. >> leaders in congress do say the company combatted foreign interference better in the 2018 midterm. >> the 2018 elections went better in terms of disinformation campaigns based upon what we know about the internet research. >> there's still battling fake news >> they have been working hard to make the platform better and make political conversation healthier. it's worked to some extent this is always a game of whack a

mole. >> this is an arms race of information manipulators and technology and people at facebook facebook trying to move faster and faster to stay ahead. >> facebook news feed maybe open to manipulation. in 2018, the "new york times" reported on how some democratic web operatives in the u.s. took tactics from the russian play book to under mine republican senate candidate roy moor facebook continues to take down content that violates rules while engineers are workingto build artificial intelligence programs that might root out hate speech. >> artificial intelligence can be helpful in finding some things hate speech is very hard for any sort of a.i. to be come close to monitor that it's not there yet it's going to be years >> facebook proactive stance

raises another question. should a for profit american tech company get to decide what speech is acceptable all over the world? >> they are taking down accounts based on their own internal company rules and regulations. >> they can and do change the rule ls all the time as they see fit. and the question is whether we can really afford to let them make all the rules >> alex who left facebook in 2018, favors fundamentally reforming the way news feed operates. >> i think for too long facebook treated the issues as communication public policy issues and not core product issues. if you really want to fix the problems tough change how the product works. >> real reform requires going beyond a sales pitch to rethink the goals of your product itself >> in the valley we love to think the products we build are positive we measure whether people like

use of the product enjoying their time on it. people enjoy heroin, right they enjoy sugar foods you can't give only people what they want. you have to give them what's good for them and society. that's a harder thing. >> zuckerberg says he always thought connecting people was a good thing by definition his coo was seen as the broader manager of the business. >> now both executives face a test on leading facebook beyond a damage control approach. to the critiques of its role in the world. >> she was the first adult in the room she was the person taking over the issues of management that mark zuckerberg couldn't handle the problem is what we have learned especially in recent months is that she might not be the right adult in the room. >> unlike most companies of its size, big decisions about the future rest almost entirely with its founder. >> mark zuckerberg has voting

control of the company what he says goes. and if he wants to stay he can stay and if he wants cheryl to stay she can stay >> if he wants facebook to be profitable, his job is already done if he wants it to be something more, a platform with values and civic responsibility his work may just be beginning >> thank you so much for coming out here today. it's been 15 years of frustration, of tears, and fighting for what we wanted. how long can you keep reliving your sister's murder >> reporter: it all began when this bestselling author married this elegant executive >> they brought us together. they made us a family.