it up to something terrible will solve all ills. trying to mitigate life itself i just think i was in i was just scared i was a scared little girl i was 24 and like. i didn't have to be so complicated. between the u.s. and moscow for washington comes off for america the expulsion of 10 russian diplomatic personnel well yes and more sanctions are stopped in moscow for what the poison the administration runs election meddling. u.s. president says a symbolic deadline of september the 11th for withdrawing u.s. troops got to stop saying it's time they came home also firmly put the but not

going to labor to achieve a last thing. is a controversial security bill groups fearful threaten to reveal police abuse. because reporters up next for us viewers this news with rick sanchez out of the u.k. specialties with so if you go back and when i was to bring you the latest global headlines again that. knowledge. social media once created to bring millions of people together how to control what we think and how we leave without even knowing it and john. today by tim kandel former facebook director online to zation

ex-president of contrasts and the c.e.o. of moment at. tim kandel former faisal director former president. at great to have you with us and i have so many questions for you where do we start. right so obviously during this pandemic radar screen time on social media is way up i mean do you know that this increase in usage will be permanent or are we going to sort of when else once we're allowed to freely roam again. it's hard to argue predict the future. i mean i think we've seen a surge. in doing this because people don't have alternatives right. they don't leave their houses off and they're clearly not nearly as social as they is that used to be and not by social i mean physically social like going over to each other's houses or meeting up places. so i guess i'm optimistic that i think that it

will it will reduce to some degree once once you get through this craziness of t.v. so this is social dilemma documentary which is dedicated to this threat that is social media says that internet companies are using to knowledge to complete to compete for our attention which they then sell to advertisers but here's a question from someone that has worked on television for most of our life hasn't been doing the same thing for decades now i mean we've heard the same arguments against brainwashing it's manipulating break throw it out isn't social media just. new sort of t.v. . yeah i think it's a great question. there are a couple things that i'd say one is that t.v. is just not as good at being as addictive as social media and that's for that's for

a couple reasons one is it's not interactive and 2 is it's not personalize to us right the content that i see on t.v. is not about my social world it doesn't it doesn't reflect. my popularity and my standing it doesn't it doesn't allow me to compare myself to other friends or colleagues in the way that social media does so social media really allows me it really it really preys on a bunch of things in kind of my animal brain that really get me addicted you know for just hard data you know the fifty's. people watched about 4 hours of t.v. a day and now that stat on average at least in the united states is about the same it's about 4 hours. just to show the difference with social media in

2010 people spent 12 and a half minutes per day on social media in today they spend 2 and a half hours per day and so it's gone up 10 times in 10 years per person well the number of people using social media has grown from about 500000000 to 3000000000 people so it's it's explosive in in that sense and it's addictive and. you know the data the the mental health data on t.v. just looks very different than than social media just in terms of the impact that social media usage has on my mental wellbeing we know that it makes me depressed and we know that it makes me anxious. that you're saying that the average

downer is 2 and a half hours i wish it was that low in my case actually it's much more than that 2 and a half hours well that's nothing compared to what happens to me now like we agree right that this sort of the concept of catching my attention and being by manipulating is really an old concept and old thread but really on steroids like it's sort of sitting right absolutely i mean i think that. you know probably artificial intelligence in fact is already doing this with with netflix netflix not only are their recommendations powered by artificial intelligence but some of the programming some of the show development in creation is now being powered by data that they have about how you and i watch their shows and what what appeals to us and so i think it's kind of a matter of time before traditional television starts becoming so personalized it starts to suck our attention and in those sorts of ways i think traditional t.v.

just isn't nearly as good at it as social media is it kind of stealing our attention. you mentioned before we started this interview about america being poly arise like never before and i said well the world is paul or america here's the thing you also said the political consequences of social media are scary that the way this goes not could lead to a civil war but we once again i'm going to bring up the traditional media like fox news has been around since 1996 and there was no facebook or you tube and the media was already paul arising the landscape because i think style sells in the media more blood to more ratings and moderation and object to they just don't interest people you know that they don't bring grating so why are we saying that tech companies need to change but we're ok with with like fox and n.b.c.

destroying journalism in america and completely polarizing the country as well yeah i think that the beginning of all of this was cable t.v. it was in 1906 when fox and c.n.n. and b.c. started fracturing us into different groups that had a different set of facts. i think what we're what we're saying is that social media is just that on steroids because instead of there being 3 versions of the truth in united states there are 100000000 versions of the truth i mean you see this you see this even on the left or on the right which is that republicans can't even align and neither can democrats right they're completely fractured and part of the reason that they're fractured is that the facts there is not in they talk about this in

the film we don't there's no concept anymore of of truths there's no concept of a shared truth but i don't. i think i am i blame i blame cable t.v. is for starting this whole big in terms of polarization so i think you're right that that is a problem social media by virtue of the technology in the ability to make to to create your own c.n.n. right you know your personal news network makes it even worse. but i'm trying to pinpoint something care help me out because i'm talking about whether was should be targeting in this case. tech giants or something more narrow and particular for instance we've heard accusations in facebook on the date offline ethnic cleansing in myanmar right like an old fashioned radio program has funded as legit graver genocide in rwanda for instance and with broadcasters being held

responsible not the radio technology what is the argument for treating the top companies of today differently you know what i mean. well the argument in the united states and i testified in front of congress about this very issue the army united states back in 1906 around the same time coincidentally that cable was you know fracturing us there is a there's a law called section $230.00 and what it does is it allows these tech companies to propagate and publish any content they want and they're not liable for it it's simply freedom of freedom of information decency act. i may be getting that name wrong but it's section 230 and that the testimony that i gave basically suggested that that needs to be made to look at 230 and they need to

amend to 30 because you're right news organizations are liable. if you say something that's you know is you know libel factually incorrect etc you you have a liability you are held accountable if anyone can say anything and anyone can propagate anything that's popular in inflammatory. we can create some really serious societal problems. here is that question turned from the other side for instance to co-creator of the facebook like button tells us in the silm that his team just wanted to create something that will be good that would will foster good will enable people to reassure each other and those he didn't expect depression or the like addiction to come out of it right but addiction is being like one way or another and once again nothing to do with instagram it's human nature right. so i'm just wondering are we serve of scapegoating the big tech

because we're just too embarrassed to admit that our behavior is ugly at times urges blaming our ages old vanity and facebook. i think it's a good i think it's a good point i mean my takeaway from the film is is twofold one is that maybe 3 feel the companies need to take more responsibility and accountability the governments may need to step in if they don't do that quickly enough in in we as individuals are responsible to we are making choices that are not in our best interests and we've lost control of our fans and. we know it for a number of the reasons that you mentioned right we've lost control of our phones because we've let them prey on our vanity our need our need to be right our need

for recognition our need for other people to inflate our reputation all of these things are sort of human tendencies that on social media get really tapped into and we have we have personal responsibility to make i think different choices if we conclude that these things have taken over our lives in the same way that i response ability if i drink too much to figure out a path to get that back in control because i don't like the consequences it's creating in my life i think the same the same is true of cigarettes the same is true of of eating too much sugar so i agree with you i don't think i think it's silly and i don't agree with people who just say look at some my fault social media company there they're the ones are making me pick this thing up to talk about cigarettes or facebook's head of monkeys ation and you've admitted in the documentary that you helped make facebook as addictive as cigarettes that said

quote so sunday is it a figure of speech or are those 2 addictions and they're driven by same processes in a brain the point that i was trying to make is just that there's a there's a there's a threshold at which big tobacco realized what they were doing and that they continued to do it they continued to put more and more things into cigarettes that made them more addictive and made me want to smoke more of them and the point i'm trying to make is that social media and in particular these artificially intelligent algorithms are doing the same thing. they are moving along looking for new additives to inject into social media so that you and i want to use it more because the algorithms being told get more of tim's attention tomorrow and then he goes off and thinks can't do that

week he spent 2 and a half hours on it yesterday how can we get him to spend 3 hours on it today and set up what he thought i was making was that these algorithms are going off and finding new additives like the cigarette companies used to do right it started with if we were 1000 years ago it started with as i said earlier popularity in comparison and now we're in a different realm of misinformation conspiracy theory polarized content right we're we're stepping up the ladder of things that. really trigger any gauge the most primal part of my brain so that i spend more time and i'm more engaged to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to team kandel former facebook director online to zation ex-president of contrasts and the c l's

moment app stay with us. it's been decades since the fall of spain's fascist regime but old wounds still haven't healed. into the i'm talking with. me from the go queue up. on the bus at us is mean older than just the same question which we know. of newborn babies were torn from their mothers and given away and forced adoption that only. to this day mothers still

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we're back with tim kandel former facebook director of lantus ation next president of contrasts and c.e.o. of mom and app team so tell me so that we know what are the most sophisticated tills stat keep users on the hill i mean are engineers in a big tech consciously using your scientific knowledge to keep us in gauged. no i i i mean i think part of what is scary is that there really are cumin beings on the other side of the of of these services right it's really an algorithm that's not very well in my opinion not very well supervised that is being given an instruction which is make him spend more time on the service tomorrow you have this universe of billions of pieces of content he's got a couple 100 friends they're publishing content let's figure out what to put in front of him that's going to get him sucked in and we also have

push notifications and we can play with the time of day that we send those push notifications to him and if things get really bad we have his phone number so we can text message him and what really bad i mean he hasn't come back for a few days when i go off a spot for several days or week i get a text message from that was sunk was something that really tries to pull me back so those are the tracks right it's it's it's and it's preying on i mean one of the most effective things that they spoke figured out to 15 years ago was a big censure an e-mail that said hey there's a new photo of you on facebook. i don't send you the photo. i don't know why they don't why don't we send you photo won't they send you the photo because they want you to come come to the service see the photo which by the way 100 percent of people do and then once you're there you stay longer and when

you stay longer they can show you more ads and they show you more ads they make more money. you know not so long ago i spoke to father of modern marketing economist cutler i don't know if you've heard of it ellen talked about how commercials are to blame for our growing dissatisfaction with our lives in a way that they see it as the idea that the product they're offering is what we need and without it our lives are just incomplete is social media working in a same way or are its ways more complex than that i think it's more complex i think it used to work in that way and only along those dimensions which was which was that great they tapped into our natural tendency to compare and that's right i mean that was that was kind of early commercial commercials and and marketing was the global look at your life it could be better if you bought

this product. and look that's it that's a very effective way to to manipulate someone and change their mind to get them to spend money and now i think it's gone even further in that in that it's really starting to tap into whether you are right or wrong whether your view of the world is right or wrong whether it and by the way these services really help convince you that you're right. because that's good for business and they make you angry at the other side because they put information in front of you that proves that the other side is wrong and it's doing the inverse to the other side. and that's what's that's what's that's what's so scary you know i think tristan harris who is in the film you know recently has said something that i think is really helpful which is

a system magine that you picked up there for your phone and there were 2 options there was a feed of information that it showed you things it basically validated your world feel busy showed you that you were right there firm of the things that that you believed and then there was another feed that actually challenge to put information in front of you that challenge the views that you helped so if you believe the earth the earth is round in this feed it would actually show you data but that it illustrates how the world might be flat people don't want to read that 2nd feed that 2nd feed is not that engaging people don't want to be told that they're wrong they want to be validated and so.

i think it's gone one step further then just you know convincing you that your life is is could be better if you buy a product it's almost a further it's convincing you that you're right and the other is wrong and not only wrong they're bad. so another scare is saying that i gathered from the documentaries on to her and you say that despite the fact that you helped architect all those manipulative till's you yourself solve pray to them yourself what does it mean for the rest of us i mean does that mean that being aware of all those things social media duty is just not enough. i think it's pretty. i think like a lot of things that are ticked of it's not very helpful to know how bad they are. i mean i think 15 or 20 percent of people still smoke

and i mean i think the biggest reason people don't smoke now has less to do with the fact that it kills them more to do with the fact that it's socially just not acceptable that that's that's at least my experience the united states. and so i don't know that it's so helpful necessarily to know that it's bad for you in that in the medium to long term what what i think can be really helpful is for everybody and this is how you know we build tools and focus on apps at my new company moment is that there are if you're aware sort of 3 things that we say it at moment and the whole idea of moment is we're trying to help you get back control of this thing and how you use it the whole idea is basically it's to help you develop awareness for how much you spend how much time you spend on your phone most

people spend this is an aggregate so this is social media long everything else most people spend for 4 half hours on their phone a day but if you ask all those people most of them say 2 hours so there's a disconnect between reality and perception and pointing that out can be really useful because it shows the loss of control right there is sort of this moment that happens like oh my gosh i really don't have control because i'm not even correctly perceiving reality and then the 2nd thing that we suggest and this does this in our app moment is just a bunch of ways of tweaking habits. the most useful and basic one and it actually like moves the needle the most in terms of social media usage is don't bring your phone into the room where you sleep just set a rule. yes yourself done ok i know that stuff. you don't want to talk to

journalists really are but it is this is let us know our warrant is done on a phone yeah all our work is done on phone i mean especially now that we're all working you know. online because we don't go to record in person interviews or we don't travel that much to do reports that everything's happening in our sun own i guess i get it by the way like i work on this all day long and i you should see my phone usage especially since this film has come out what so here is c.e.o. of moment now an app which according to the description of sad helps people build healthier relationships with their phones. so if i delete all social networks from my cell and how will my relationship with it become healthier exactly i mean because you know i can really just check twitter on desktop yeah. well 1st

of all i wouldn't recommend it julie we don't we don't actually think the leading social media is is realistic or the or the best thing necessarily i just think that we want to help people be more deliberate about how often they use it we all had this experience of going to our phones to send an e-mail or look at the weather for a few minutes and then we we we come to about 45 minutes later and we've been screaming instagram. we need to get on our phones to go on instagram so 45 minutes passes i'm going to gram i don't feel any better for it i actually feel worse i feel a little bit guilty and i don't feel like i've accomplished a whole lot. i've looked at pictures of my friends. presumably having a more interesting life than me this is a path that is of bad experience in so but i can't really help myself and

so i think what we suggest are ways of setting limits or think for experiences like that so that hey it's ok if you spend a few minutes on an instagram but we let people go through a process of trial and error when they realize that yeah when i just limit myself to 10 or 15 minutes on instagram i feel better how exactly do you do them it's a great idea but how does that work when applied yeah yeah well so there are 2 things 11 is that in general i think i think reducing your phone limit phone usage overall is helpful and so that's what we really help people do because this gets insists you know that how do you how would you help a journalist like myself how to reduce the risk we give you the tips to set some limits and then here's the most important part and this is the newest part of the

experience we have you create a group on moment with several friends. and they all have moments and then you go through a mold tie day guide that helps you develop an awareness and helps you play with certain things as a group to try to reduce your usage and that whole time we show you in your friends how much everyone is using their phone so the idea is that and this is true of a lot of behavioral addiction in terms of how people sustainably change behavior is if they commit with a group of people. and that's how we came up and developed the feature was look you you probably have talked about this with colleagues of yours you've probably talked about this issue with friends of yours agree that you're going to even at the very least just show each other how much you use your faults that in and of

itself we see can help reduce usage definitely delaunay you know top today good good thanks a lot and good luck with everything yes thank you talking to you.