there are values we understand. we owe it to our kids to keep them on the right track even when there are grown ups around them behaving badly. >> she's a great example of what's possible when you believe in yourself, when you believe in your community, when you believe in the power of people. f people facebook is just a website young folks use to help understand our world better. i really think that the best is yet to come. >> mark zuckerberg's quest to connect the planet sparked 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 of 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 know 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. >> when went 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 clicks and profits above its civic responsibility and took a lax approach to users' privacy. >> there is a common misconception at facebook that we sell data to advertisers. we do not sellida data to advertisers. >> 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 exposed for how it allowed cambridge analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the trump campaign, to harvest data of tens of millions of americans to an alleged effort to sway their votes. >> people were livid 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 allowed partner companies, microsoft, amazon and netflix greater access to user 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 people spend on 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 execs delayed public action to 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. what that means is they try to find information in the public record that might look bad for their targets if reporters write about it. >> facebook has always touted 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 dates back to zuckerberg's original corporate model. >> it's a saying they used to have plastered all over the walls there, which is move fast and break things. you think about that and you understand a lot about facebook. >> coming up, the dorm room where it all began. >> a socially awkward guy wanted to create a world where people lived and dated and socialized on the computer. d dated and socd on the computer. juice. now no fruit is forbidden. nexium 24hr stops acid before it starts for all-day, all-night protection. can you imagine 24 hours without heartburn? for all-day, all-night protection. howdoing great dad!r does this thing got? looking good babe! are you filming. at booking.com, we can't guarantee you'll be any good at that water jet thingy...

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what is the facebook exactly? >> it is an online directory that connects people through universities and colleges through their social networks there. >> before the global domination there was a college connection. >> so mark and i met our 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 hot or not style site that let students rate each other's looks. harvard almost expelled him over it. his next project was an electronic version of the student directories on campuses called 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 he 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 person's 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 saying the news feed was a total violation of the promise of privacy that they'd been given because it showed people their information in ways that they hadn't expected, predicting other things we'd see later. >> in response to the up roar zuckerberg issued the firsts of what would be many apologies. >> i think what he said, calm down, breathe.

i 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, entertainment, sensationalism or outreach. >> 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 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 photos, 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 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

to make facebook more engaging they kind of let these app developers have an open door to user data. this included things like likes, your ridging, political information, your name, your e-mail. opened all kind of stuff up to random app developers. >> coming up, without knowing it facebook members give up their personal data and the data of their friends. their personal data and the data of their friends. ♪ ♪ and everywhere i go ♪ there's always something to remind me ♪ ♪ of another place and time ♪ ♪

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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. no kidney land, 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 hero to a generation of entrepreneurs. >> 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 into facebook, you may still visit a website that has a little facebook icon on it 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 you're sending.

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 like 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, the placement of ads pivot, too. in the mobile version of facebook zuckerberg embedded advertising right into news feed. >> the web has issue with typically a product and ads to the side. that doesn't fly on mobile. you have to ent great into the experience and we think there is an opportunity to create 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

whatsapp. >> he was brilliant to acquire these services. it was a hedging strategy that has worked because the core platform is beginning to decline in developed countries like the united states even as instagram and whatsapp 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 not just people in the richest most developed countries could get free and 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. >> facebook's business is also

international. that brings big business opportunities 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 rohingya 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 cultural expertise. >> the company's also been criticized for propaganda and hateful content in countries like ukraine, the philippines and sri lanka. facebook says it now has more than 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're beginning to do that, but they're coming from behind a bit, so it's going to take some time. and they have to rush this because it's urgent. >> coming up -- calls to reform

facebook's policies hit closer to home. >> do you think there could be other breaches like the one we saw in cambridge analytica, where tens of millions of people's data was accessed improperly? well, we're doing a thorough look. improperly well, we're doing a thorough look thief... what?! i'm here to steal your car because, well, that's my job. what? what?? what?! (laughing) what?? what?! what?! [crash] what?! haha, it happens. and if you've got cut-rate car insurance, paying for this could feel like getting robbed twice. so get allstate... and be better protected from mayhem... like me. ♪ - want to take your next vacation to new heights? tripadvisor now lets you book over 100,000 tours, attractions, and experiences in destinations around the world like new york, from bus tours to breathtaking adventures. tripadvisor makes it easy to find and book amazing things to do.

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with the hour's top stories. senat senator amy klobuchar officially kicks off or 2020 campaign. and we are approaching four days until the next funding deadline, and this comes as both sides continue to clash over border wall funding. the white house says there could be at least a partial government shutdown if a deal isn't reached. now back to headliners, facebook. 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 that 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 bitten and say do you agree and 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 early 2014 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 voters as 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 cambridge sold was the idea that they could actually build a psychological portrait of a voter and predict how they would emotionally respond to different kinds of ads, different kinds of messages and that this would be a uniquely powerful tool in the political marketplace. >> cambridge contracted with psychology professor alexander

kogan 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 the page likes. >> 270,000 people were paid a nominal fee to take the quiz and provide their data for academic purposes. but what some users failed to understand from the fine print is that the app also took their friend's 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 kogan estimates 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 actually vet the people who have been grabbing the stuff. >> there is so much data out there and facebook has no real way of clawing the information 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 facebook's hold on our data was not secure and not being responsible with user privacy. 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 rid of the data they had obtained. but facebook did not warn users or publicly admit what happened until wily blue the whistle 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 black lives matter activist, and then they'll compete a competing persona that is pro-cop and they'll both be in the same sitty and they'll ramp up the rhetoric. e in the same sitty and they'll ramp up the rhetoric when i say, "drivers who switched from geico to esurance saved an average of $412," you probably won't believe me. but you can believe this, real esurance employee nancy abraham. look her up online. esurance, it's surprisingly painless.

take your razor, yup. up and down, never side to side, shaquem, you got it? come on stay focused. hard work baby, it gonna pay off. 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 focused on divisive social issues. the ads were linked to fake accounts created by the internet research agency. a russian entity that the u.s. department of justice indicted in 2019 for a conspiracy to defraud the u.s. >> facebook is designed so anybody can use it. anybody can design 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. >> no one was looking for is there a broad campaign where individuals were 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 competing persona that is pro-cop, and they'll both be in the same city, and they'll ramp up the rhetoric and create memes and create messages. >> and get everybody else involved. the point is you can create discord by creating fake finding. >> 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 pit the these two groups against each other. >> in one case russian trolls

who created fake pro and anti-islamic groups actually organized real life rallies across the street from each other in houston, texas. stamos said the russian conspirators knew exactly how to exploit facebook's viral nature. people who liked the russian ads were fed more and more content which they shared more with their 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 built perfectly for this. >> does allow people to reshare and put that in front of more people. the crazy uncle sal problem. everybody has the crazy you think with conspiracy theories. 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 advertising for 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 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 gaming facebook but also americans 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 influences voters. >> the idea that, you know, fake news on facebook, which, you know, it's a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way i think is a pretty crazy idea.

>> what did you think when he said that in. >> i think you've got to be careful saying anything is crazy on facebook. there is a little bit of everything. >> after the election, alex stamos's security team. he put together a report in 2017 but first needed to brief a committee of facebook's board. >> i kind of explained to them everything we found up to that point. >> right. >> got these bad ads. >> got these bad ads, we have all this bad content, everything we know about russian activity and what we're about to announce. and part of it they ask is this over, and my answer is no. i don't have confidence that we have all of it. >> the board then had a tense meeting with mark zuckerberg and ce cheryl sandberg. >> i'm not part of this discussion but apparently they

got pretty angry at cheryl. and she got angry the next day because she felt i was not going to tell them. and chews me out in a conference call of 20 something people which many annoy have leaked 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. owert vacation. but we can guarantee the best price on that thar rental cabin

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facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. for most of our existence, we focused 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. [ laughter ] >> one month after the cambridge analytica scandal broke senators sounded the alarm on facebook's role concerning everything from elections to personal privacy. >> mr. zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? >> um -- no. >> if you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the names of the people you messaged? >> senator, no, i would probably not choose to do that publicly

here. >> i think that maybe what this is all about, what information facebook's collecting, who they're sending it to and whether they asked me in advance my permission to do that, is that a fair thing for a user facebook to expect. >> yes, senator, i think everyone should have control over how their information is used. >> some senators floated an approach that was not mainstream a few years ago, maybe social media needs stronger oversight in washington. >> i believe we need to have laws and rule that is are sophisticated as the brilliant products that you've developed here and we just haven't done that yet. >> in the past many of my colleagues on both sides have been willing to defer to tech companies' efforts to regulate themselves but this may be changing. >> reporter: but in the months after the hearing congress has done little to regulate facebook or social media. the state of california has pushed ahead with privacy protections while the european

parliament passed a broader internet privacy law that went that effect in 2018. >> facebook is a company that has accumulated an incredible amount of power. facebook can change an election. so, the question for both parties i think has become like are we comfortable with this one company having all this power and no regulation? >> i don't want to undermine innovation. i don't want to kneecap facebook, twitter or google to be replaced by chinese companies but the current model is not working. >> without tougher regulation critics say facebook will continue business as usual with the occasional apology tour. >> i think facebook right now believes they are in a sense above the law that if they hire the right people from the white house and the right democrats and republicans that they can insulate themselves from government, pay their way out of any fine 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, instagram, whatsapp and messenger. >> tim wu, a former senior adviser to the u.s. federal trade commission argues that innovations like social media can easily get highjacked by a big monopoly player. and breaking up the empire can rescue competition and make the industry more accountable. >> i think it reduces their power and forces them to be more accountable to their users in a real way as opposed to an apology tour kind of way. >> i know for a fact that that is the thing that facebook is most terrified of. >> facebook argues its challenges stem from the real world, challenges that any platform connecting to that world would face. executives say they're making fixes so the government won't have to. >> i think that's something that is hard for people on the outside to really understand the

massive scale and investment we're making. it's going to impact our profitability because we take our responsibility so seriously that we're willing to make that level of investment. >> in response to fake news and russian interference facebook says it now removes millions of fake accounts a day and added its own new rules for election ads. >> we're making it so that anybody who sees a political ad on facebook can see who is behind that ad and who paid for that ad so i think that helps create a much more trustworthy environment. >> leaders in congress do say the company combated foreign interference better in the 2018 midterms. >> the 2018 elections went better in terms of disinformation campaigns based upon what we know point internet research agency. >> but they're still battling fake news. >> they've been working hard to make the platform better and make political conversations healthier and i think it's worked to some extent but this is always going to be a game of whac-a-mole. >> this is an arms race of the

information manipulators and technology and people at facebook. with facebook trying to move faster and faster to stay ahead. >> and facebook's news feed pay still be 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 playbook to undermine republican senate candidate roy moore. facebook continues to take down incendiary content that violates its rules while engineers are working to build artificial intelligence programs that might root out hate speech. >> artificial intelligence can be helpful in finding some things but hate speech is incredibly cultural contextualized and will be very hard for any ai they build to come close to being able to monitor that. ai is just not there yet. it's going to be years. >> and facebook's proactive stance raises another thorny 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 upon their own internal company rules and regulations. >> they can and do change the rules all the time as they see fit. and the question is whether we can really afford to let them make all the rules. >> alex stamos who left in 2018 -- >> i do think for too long facebook treated these issues as communications and public policy issues and not as core product issues. if you really want to fix these problems you have to change how the product works. >> he argues real reform requires going beyond a sales pitch to rethink the goals of the product itself. >> in the valley we love to think the products we build are only positive and measure whether people like using the product, whether they're enjoying their time on it but people also enjoy heroin, right? meme enjoy eating sugary foods.

you can't only give people what they want. you have to give to them what is good for them and good for society overall and that's a much harder thing. >> zuckerberg says he always thought connecting people was a good thing by definition while his coo sheryl sandberg 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. >> sheryl was that first adult in the room. she was the person who was sort of going to take over the issues of management that mark zuckerberg couldn't handle. the problem is what we've 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 facebook's future rest almost entirely with its founder. >> mark zuckerberg has voting control of the company. so really what he says goes. and if he wants to stay, he can

stay and if he wants sheryl to stay, she can stay. >> if zuckerberg wants facebook to be profitable his job is already done. but 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. the flynn memo came out. michael flynn sentencing memo has been released. >> michael flynn, donald trump's national security adviser for just 24 days -- >> we learned he was an all-star cooperator and working with robert mueller for a year. i don't believe the trump team knows what he's provided. >> it's what's underneath that black magic marker t