let's ask former facebook insider alex stamos, the company's chief security officer from 2015 to 2018so a cyber security analyst for nbc news alex, thanks for joining me. >> thank you >> in india specifically, is this a preview of what we could be talking about here? huge reliance on messaging apps, private communications, in a way, there's no way to police or is there >> there's two complications in india that did not apply to what the social media companies have done to protect the united states election in the 2018 midterms the first is that what's app is encrypted. made the decision to put the content of people's discussions outside of the reach of facebook and governments. which makes it very difficult to know what people are talking about, what they're passing along. and the second complication is the people who are posting this information are legitimately indian citizens. when it came to the 2016 election, talking about russian trolls, there was a pretty god case for the social media companies to take down that content and to take down those accounts but in this case, figuring

so we entitled it "the facebook dilemma," and we had a great conversation with alex stamos, who's the former chief of security for the company. and basically wing better than anyone, he laid out a lot of the dilemmas about, okay, be careful what you wish for, right? you have an incredible powerful internet platform here. you have other incredibly powerful internet platforms. and what happens if you draw out a scenario where they become proactive now in kind of regular regulating speech and what happens further down the line when there are ai tools to detect speech and take it down before it's even posted. and you could end up with an orwellian scenario when it comes to speech. and also the main question of thinking about leadership with these companies. you know, as critical as the film may have been or comes across when it comes to mark zuckerberg, with someone else in charge further down the line, who may not -- who is under no obligation to keep it a quote/unquote neutral political platform, what could happen if there were internally decisions to be made that were, in fact, biased.

alex stamos, my co-author, can go into more detail.o there are some very basic things that aren't going to involve a lot of complexity, but we just haven't been doing it. >> alex, you can add on to that, but also talk about what kinds of risks we're facing right now, how close our elections are to being infiltrated. >> so one of the things we've got to be concerned about is that the russian play bok book t there. they played us in 2016 and did their multiple strings of attack. it was effective in at least disrupting our conversation about the election. now that that playbook is out there, it's available to many, many other potential american ald ver saers. just this morning about an hour ago my colleagues at facebook announced they took down another 500 fake accounts and pages that look like they belong to the government of iran. so we can't just worry about the russians. we need to act now. what we've telegraphed to the world is that the united states democracy has these weaknesses and that we will not heavily punish those who take ad

joining me now, alex stamos, former chief security officer.ow. >> thanks. >> i'm told you were not part of this group but perhaps you have some insight into what it was -- why would one be in this group? help, please. explain. >> sure. i was not part of cdc and a little too young to be part of it. this was one of several groups in the late '80s and '90s part of the collection of teenagers and college students interested in hacking and exploring computers online and would get together online and eventually physically events like def con, what cdc was families for. if you look at the alumni of these groups from '80s and '90s, tech founder, ceos, tech security officers and ceos and apparently a presidential candidate. >> what does the fact he was part of this group tell you about him as a person? what should we read into it when we're thinking if she should be president of the united states. >> all of us in this age part of this, the internet was not a normal part of our lives. beto had the experience that indicated to me the apple 2e and mine wa