larry. at the tender age of ten facebook has by any estimation truly changed the world facebook also has demonstrated that it can be used as a weapon for political change and this social network has shown itself to be a smart investment on the down side to their transparency issues and whether they can survive another desk and. look it was a problem very hard to take

a plunge again come on here a lot has never had sex with her right there knowing. only. woman of the american . muslim. of a. hello

and welcome to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle at the tender age of ten facebook has by any estimation truly changed the world it has made it a little smaller and closer facebook also has demonstrated it can be used as a weapon for political change and this social network has shown itself to be a smart investment on the downside there are transparency issues and whether it can survive another decade. to cross-talk facebook's anniversary i'm joined by my guest clive thompson in new york he is a technology journalist for wired and the new york times magazine and author of smarter than you think how technology is changing our minds for the better also in new york we have he is an associate editor at reason twenty four seven and in

washington we cross to austin peterson he is the c.e.o. of stone gate in editor of the libertarian republican dot com hi gentlemen crosstalk rules and if that means you can jump in anytime you want clive you know i think over the last few days celebrating and remembering the startup of facebook we all know a lot about its accomplishments in the end there are many of them in a couple of stumbles here but it will go into your crystal ball for me can they repeat the same thing during the next the course of the next decade. you know i don't think they're ever going to be as big as they were maybe a year or two ago they're sort of they're almost like a utility for the internet now everyone sort of has to use it to get certain things done you know party organizing whatnot but i don't think people find it an exciting thing to use anymore it's not fresh and new all the the action is starting to move over to these chat services like snap chat or what's app or what not that's where kids are going these days so i think it sort of established itself as this kind of extremely useful tool it will hang around for those useful purposes but i think the

air will slowly leak out of the balloon over the next ten years what do you think about that because i can't i think it's also getting it's very it's a reliable let's put it that way but it's not nearly as exciting in and i think i've more or less met all my old friends from the past i mean it's off quite a bit tapered off quite a bit. well personally i am a facebook bull i do see a positive future for facebook and the reason is because it's such a great tool for businesses my small business actually runs mostly on facebook where you eighty percent of our profits do come from derived from facebook traffic and princeton university actually did a study recently that showed compared facebook to a disease like a virus and how it spreads and then it dies but i actually disagreed with it because facebook then turned around and slapped down princeton showing a study that showed that princeton's numbers are declining according to their own formula and they used it to show that the growth of facebook will continue and consider this only two billion of the five billion people in the world are actually

on the internet right now so as the internet continues to grow and we have more people in the world who will be on the internet i think facebook will continue to grow as more people are getting connected that's a very good point and if i can go to you i kind i use facebook very much like austin does i use it to promote myself in this program and you know what it is effective ok i do get it because people's the sharing thing is the one i like most because i find my myself in the in the in places i never could have imagined it all because it was because someone shared it from facebook so i mean from again a utility for people like me it is very very useful though at the same time i have to put up with a lot of people that i don't really call friend i think i think often when they are in the head there i think as long as it's as long as it's profitable for people use it as long as there's ways that people can use it that works for them it's going to be continue to be popular you know friendster still exists my space still exists so and these things don't have nearly the user base that facebook does but even my space it still helps certain artists sell their music and so it still exists and so

facebook will always exist and so whether the not always maybe but i think it will last longer than this princeton study. i think what the younger kids are using it is going to be so different from what facebook is and i think that's part of getting old you know and i know you guys like austin we don't like to think that we're getting old but we're going to have you know like i don't even know if that is i know it's going to hurt by the rand paul. that's. so important ok you're only on this i'm finished with this program is not known for much laughing ok clive if i could show it to you i think you know ed really brought up a point that i wanted to bring up anyway on this program is demographics and there's something that says there's something very much interesting about that because when i first got on iowa i decided it was for these kids you know and i resisted getting on in the beginning because i thought well this is for teenagers right and now i realize it's for baby boomers because it's baby boomers telling about their life in more and more so in that case now if we can take that if we

take that premise that well we baby boomers well we're getting on a little bit ok so i mean how do you fit that into the business model. well the truth is i mean it's i'm not i'm jack i'm forty five and there's a ton of people in my cohort in there using facebook they find it useful for all sorts of things again it could be from a promotional like a like what you found for it could be just basically keeping in touch with a large amount of people in the one thing facebook was really valuable for and remains valuable for is that it sort of trained the u.s. and really now the world in this these habits of what psychologists call ambient awareness like you know paying attention to someone by noticing what's going on in the corner of your eye these little drip drip of updates it's actually quite a powerful way to understand what's going on in someone's life you get a lot more detail than you would have got if you tried to talk on the phone you know once every six months or so as i think that's valuable that's definitely valuable one of the reasons why i think you know the old as they call it people like me and you like it is because we don't have as much time on our hands to go

around making those phone calls so we do this now the thing is our presence is part of what chases the young people away they don't want to hang out with the olds around they want they want other young people around so that's why they move off the air they see us are like oh let's get out of here often how do you do that i'm going to jump in here go ahead please yeah but well i just want to save it. you have to remember that like for that you have to look at what demographics matter to what industries you're in the television industry for so for you a different demographic is more valuable because that demographic tends to spend more money or they would be more interested in watching your show snap chat is not going to be a good demographic necessarily for you because younger people are really interested in talking about the sochi olympics or talking about you know some topics like syria for example snap chat also is the type of thing where it gets destroyed immediately and the reason why facebook i think has longevity is because what you put on facebook stays on facebook last week they produced a billion videos for everybody who was on facebook showing a look back at your timeline and that's the kind of thing that creates an endearing

relationship with its users so it's a totally different type of platform it's a totally different type of demographic and if you're looking at what it's used for people like yourself and myself who create higher end content for an older demographic we see a benefit from it but in snap chat they're having trouble monetizing it out of snap chat actually turned down a deal from facebook i think was to something like two billion dollars they were offered to buy snap chat and they turned it down which i think was a big mistake because snap chat is the kind of thing that seems more like a fad because you can't really share a lot of links you can't share u.r.l. is that you can then monetize on the back end it's just something that you can use for fun but facebook is the type of thing that exists it has longevity and it's the type of thinking that can result in long term monetization so from a business standpoint the demographics that facebook incurs are the type of demographics that you and me can make money on. and what what do you think about that i mean again you know we have this these changing demographics here and i mean

i agree a more people can get on the internet but i mean at the same time facebook is a known quantity and it's not the exciting thing it's a great utility don't get me wrong it's a great utility but for most of the world the demographics is very young do you think that they're still going to be attracted to and we and there are political issues we hear gentlemen there are countries that are very careful in dealing with facebook particularly in the in the muslim world and china. well i think i think the big question there is whether the kid accurately. are they going to be using go ahead and go ahead finish if they are going to be using it are the kids are the kids going to be using facebook when they get older you know because snapchat has what they want now but when they get older and when they do become media consumers and they want the stuff that me or all sooner you are putting out then are they going to move to facebook and i think that's a big question too and i think the cultural stuff you know you can kind of gloss over that either because i think in russia we were wrong there's another kind of

they have their own social that we're awaiting is huge in russia called to come to everyone is on a very particular it's very popular but i would say and you know anybody that has made book a penitentiary in the area and it may be facebook is very very competitive in russia. clive let me go to you has facebook redefined what we mean by community. yeah well you know in one sense yes because it is allowed us to to stay in contact with what sociologists call weak links ok so weakly you think about your strong links your strong links the people you know really well that you're you know your b.f. asio the four or five people that you know really well a couple of family homes you know really well those people that you're strong links you talk them a lot you pay really close attention of them historically there's also a thing called weaklings which are people you don't know very well you know maybe you met them at a cocktail party and you see them once a year you know they're weak now here's the thing weaklings turned out to be incredibly valuable in our everyday lives when marshall grant

a better sociologist did a study about twenty years ago he asked people how did you get your job and he found of the people who got the best jobs the ones that pay the best ones that they enjoyed the most but they came from weak links they came from people they didn't know very well and that's because you know if you ask your friends your family members you know what jobs do you know you're strong links they know the same stuff you do they're not bringing any new information into the mix the new information the cool stuff comes from people that are far away from you now used to be that was really really hard to keep in contact with weaklings because you weren't going to pick up the phone and call these people that you only met at a cocktail party year ago nowadays facebook and tools like facebook make it a lot easier to pay attention to what those weak links are doing and so it's in the sense that it's changed community the sense that it's a great lee expanded the amount of these weak links that we're in contact with that we're hearing from and so it's expanded the amount of new novel information that comes into our lives and it makes it easier to solve problems to you know everyone's got that experience where you're at your warning about something you have a question i ask you throw it on facebook throw it on twitter whatever and like someone

you barely know turns out to be the one who has an amazing answer to that question and that's how it's changed community. before going to the break i think there's another category on weak links is really good but there are other people i want to do in iowa and i want to see what they're doing ok and there are other people in journalism for example i want to see if they're going to say something about me. or how they take a spin on something it's a very interesting intelligence utility as well well absolutely and you know as an outspoken advocate for limited government that i am and also someone who does a lot of deep bunking of conspiracy theories the united states i have a big enemies list and that is people who you have used facebook to seek out my personal information they publish my personal information and out in public and i bet i've been all right when you go back to our point here james we have to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on facebook state with our team.

well. it's technology innovation all the developments from around russia we've got this huge you're covered. well if you're going to come armed like. the face you. like to have you with us here on t.v.

today i'm sure. welcome back to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle were discussing facebook's tenth anniversary. ok i don't have to go to you i'm going to i'm going to pour some cold water on the tenth anniversary here of facebook i mean if you have too many friends on facebook

ends up being a waste of time because you just can't keep up with it but you know that notification i have on my phone i have to turn it off because it's always going off one after another after another after another particularly when somebody tags me in something which happens to me every single day on issues that i have no idea what they're talking about there's a downside here you have to put a lot of time investment into it if you want to make it work. yeah i mean i think i think facebook's always working on that stuff too i think you have a good point with the spam and spam to be even bigger problem with facebook and spam kind of what killed my space in a way so i think that's facebook tries to become more and more of a communications center they're going to have to figure out how i can not be tagged in the promo for the friday night party at the club that i've never been to because a friend of a friend of mine tagged me but i think it's utility in what we were talking about before and keeping weaklings around for when you might need them even in ensuring

that strong these don't become weak links just because you're moving out of that same circle that you might have been you know i consider myself still close friends with people i mean i've seen in a year or two even but i know what they're doing because i follow them on facebook you know and i talk to them on facebook and it has become in a way a way of augmenting our our social networks our real life social networks and so we're able to keep these people. in our network even though we may not be able to see them on a daily basis or even be bothered to pick up the phone and talk because who talks these days anymore anyway it's like a maze whatever all our friends like why don't you call what do you. facebook use an exactly what i'm doing now. i mean it's like twenty four to. five i mean again this tagging thing really gets irritates me because i people want me to support a cause ok you know every single cause you can imagine they think that you know maybe i can help them out here however to be fair remarkably enough facebook is turning into a unpaid producer of this program because there are people that write to me and

asked me to appear on this program we don't have to look for them they come to us now again it's a tool i have really good things to say about it except for i get those notifications just way too often i'm going to turn it on after this program a little disco one after another after another go ahead yeah i think i think this sort of social overload thing a lot of people deal with there's this current of engagement you know like when people are or were new. to facebook or when they start into almost any news service whether it's you know you know twitter whatsapp whatever at first it's really exciting because it offers you this kind of new way of seeing the world seeing people around you and so people get really excited in the end they load on the friends and they load on the contacts and they get this very big feed going and then after a little while it starts to become kind of oh my god can i manage all this and it feels like a bit of a onerous burden and this is a funny thing you know i've read all these papers that have looked at as facebook is mature and you look at the people's attitudes towards it even as they even as

they say yeah you know i get value out of this this is useful for x. y. and z. in the question there it's shifted to becoming filling the holes like tending a garden it's like it's like a duty or a or a task and now it's about something delightful or it's kind of run into the way email back in the ninety's and all the exciting and fresh like oh my god i've got an email this is kind of fun that's great when you're getting that ten emails a day when you're getting a three hundred a day suddenly it becomes a bit of a slaw get so that there's always this tension with facebook where it's you know and told that they're fun they're useful but they also can become kind of a bit of a slog if you don't want to talk about the privacy issue and this a in the sharing of user's information and this is something that is a concern we've finally had facebook and google and others admit that they give information upon request and then in the face in the case of facebook make eighty percent of all. requests to the u.s.

government in the united states not other countries but in the united states how do you see how do you deal with that there because that's a chilling effect here i think all of us in the back of our head know somebody could be watching but we have evidence now that some are. all right so it all comes down to personal choice i don't agree with the government coming in and creating these surveillance programs in the first place but what people have to understand is that we are voluntarily choosing to create this information. and what americans and indeed everybody around the world needs to understand is that if you choose to get on a social network and you choose to put content up there you are putting yourself at risk and so everyone needs to understand the risks that are inherent in this and certainly i have actually been burned by this before personally where information that i had put online was shared with people in a and used in a malicious manner so that people do need to understand that there are security risk inherent with using the social networks but again it's not as if the government is coming in and saying you all need to be on the social network and you need to give us this information people need to use common sense and they have to

understand that what they put out there could possibly be used but you should assume even if your privacy settings are set to private and people outside of your friends can see it you should assume that anyone can see it and they might copy it download it share it with their friends so the security problem really isn't necessarily even in the government so much as the person the owner is the owner should be on the person who is creating that information and you have to understand if you choose to use those selectively there is a security risk inherently involved ok ed do you think that facebook if the government requests to donation on your account do you think that facebook should tell you that the government has requested information because there are things that are on the face of it on your page are not seen by everyone ok you can hide things you can put things in folders and things like that i mean it's not everything there is seen by everyone but you can have more information there i mean don't you think it's incumbent upon the provider to say hey someone's making some inquiries here i think would be great i think that's something that wants to do i

think they want to be able to tell us that i think the government would not let them and that's kind of what the fight right now is about i think more importantly though if i did something on my facebook account is going to get me in trouble with the government and i'm an idiot because i'm going to put something on the internet it's a day or. would you consider this a private you can send it to whatever you want there are people out there who fish private photobucket account things that are a lot more private than facebook and people will grab everything out of there you know so i don't. stand whether it's something that the and we don't want the n.s.a. to know about or that it's chris christie and about shutting down a bridge it's ridiculous it's the idea that any of this stuff is private we have to fight for the privacy of the we have to understand if you're putting it on facebook you're putting it out there for the world whether you like whether you understand that or not and i think the younger people do understand that and that's why they're on the snapchat because it's not like we said is is not permanent it disappears as soon as you finished reading the game so you're saying that because they're going to have it so i think they are going to because you can take a screen capture of it ok that's true but i was just saying that we've got some

exactly that's true but the difference between the generations is that the baby boomers want everything saved for ever ok that's the difference here clive how do you how do you feel about that did the what kind of relationship should facebook have with the u.s. government because i think that you know i don't see facebook being malicious here i see them being weak and i think that they should stand up more for their users because i think all of us go to facebook for good reasons and most of us anyway not . for malicious reasons but just to be what it's all about friends. well i mean here's the thing there's two issues here this one about i don't even a week i mean when the government comes out with a with a national security letter you know you pretty much have to comply or tweeter said no. no really we don't said no though you keep that you know that's true yeah yeah no no you're right but the point is the point is the problem begins at the level of bad legislation that's created an environment where dragnet spying becomes the

official policy of the government the three letter agencies bad laws created the situation it's only better laws are going to remove that pressure that's going to going to affect at least say on a policy level we don't think dragnet spying i.e. collecting a massive haystack and then trying to find little needles and is the way to go and the truth is you know all the all the stuff that's come out suggests that dragnet spying is not actually being that effective that whenever they've actually you know busted a serious plot of serious terrorist plot it's been through you know old fashioned contacts and leaks not through this this big dragnet stuff that doesn't even look like it's very effective so i think i think we definitely need better laws and if you have better laws then the environment for sharing online becomes less dangerous and less toxic i quite agree that if there's something you really don't want the public to know don't put it online the one area where i would give facebook some culpability here is that they have regularly and constantly change the terms of

service the way they work over time so that stuff that used to be used to think was only being shared with a small private circle of friends becomes much more and more and more public if you look at the way they've they've changed their settings over time they're constantly pushing open open open so one of the things that you find out when you talk to a lot of young people as i do is that they simply don't trust that stuff they put up now that is supposed to be for just x. y. and close friends won't wake up one day now everyone seeing it they don't they want they want a service center where i lived only a good way of. getting to and where to go but i gotta tell you something about is going to go ahead and going to jump in. well i just i well i want to i wrote i want to remind everyone that facebook being a private company doesn't mean that they have necessarily have the public interest in good i mean there was a quote from mark zuckerberg that came out several years ago where he said that his users worse quote effing idiots for giving them all their data so and remember back

in december there was a major push by facebook to restrict the amount of organic traffic that can go to certain pages and facebook in effect shows winners and losers by deciding which publications wouldn't be allowed to maintain a large amount of organic reach which is how many people you can essentially have visit your page for free or exceed your post for free now they didn't they they restricted my page they restricted the libertarian republic but they didn't restrict some of my competitors pages based on what they deemed as quality content and some of the terms that they said for the reason for why they did it were actually false they said they were going to restrict the amount of posts that were going to be seen and then it turns out that they weren't they said we're going to restrict the amount of memes that can be seen by people which actually wasn't true because memes still have the same amount of organic reach so people need to read the terms of service they need to understand that a private company does have their own agenda and they need to use caution i would say tour when it comes to the use of social networks all right gentlemen we're fast

and running out of time i'm going to ask my viewers a favor here please go to my facebook page and look at the video that facebook made for me during my time on facebook and tell me if it reflects what you think you see on this program many thanks to my guests in new york and washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here darkie see you next time and remember crosstalk. i've got a quote for you. that's pretty tough. stay with substory. let's get this guy like you would smear that guy in stead of working for the people to

choose the mainstream media for each other bribery station and. they did rather well. we're. i would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question for.

the b.o.'s you don't know if you don't think carlos norris plans to release. most everyone in my life that i cared about their government and that. i came askin well . i was national champion in track and field and also was able to go in qualify for the olympic games. you know nine hundred eighty eight i started to experiment with other drugs i had lost all the financial means that i . was really on the street. black market can't. get a great. interest. what's

up guys i'm abby martin and this is breaking the set of all assistant secretary of state victoria no one's taken a flak this week after saying f. the european union and reference to the e.u. is an action on ukraine's political crisis well speaking of geoffrey pyatt u.s. ambassador to ukraine on the phone granted it was supposed to be off the record but actually the f. the e.u. part of the scandal the least interesting part of the conversation see during that phone call the two diplomats are overheard discussing what the role of ukraine's opposition leader should be and the need to solidify regime change in the country while talking about ukrainian opposition leader vitaly klitschko no one says i don't think that klitschko should go into government i don't think it's a good idea which.