The Facebook Files Part 1 | Risque Business News
guys welcome back to risque business news i'm your host may and i'm laura and we have a really insane story i know we always say it's a hot one but this is in fact a spicy one we are talking about the facebook files which is the series of investigative reports that came out last week from the wall street journal basically talking about facebook you know human trafficking and doing all sorts of crazy [ __ ] not facebook directly but like enabling human traffickers that could be a hell of a story totally yeah mark zuckerberg's just like the head of all that i mean i guess technically i mean he's certainly involved spoiler alert not the best person yeah things have really escalated since uh the social network that was like act one act one was uh him raiding girls online so anyway all right enjoy where's the money i don't understand how you make money hold on two stand-up comics in new york city just learned a lot of this stuff i'm gonna ask all the stupid questions that you might be thinking at home but are afraid to ask people making it to where you feel like you're too stupid to be able to ever engage in it they win why the [ __ ] are they doing this it's make money it's risque business news all right so what's up with you how you live in how are you feeling how are you vibing well i got back from kentucky which is why i am kind of tan you could probably tell it was outdoor so i didn't expect to like have like a little beach vacay in louisville wow kentucky yeah and a swim clinic i did a swim clinic there so i was outside in uh kentucky for for two full days teaching little kids how to swim got my reviews back on that had a pretty uh pretty i i might let's just read this let's read this review okay so to give you guys more context she does these swim clinics yeah she teaches little kids how to swim right yes and then uh it's it's more like refined it's like technical so they bring me in because i was like good or something whatever and then i mentioned it she was a swimmer yeah i was a swimmer i hate that that's my full [ __ ] identity for 20 years of my life super cool um but i so i now i go around the country on occasion and i will teach little kids how to get better at specific strokes so it's not just like swim lessons it's like a very technical exercise and in this case so there's a bunch of teams in kentucky and these kids will drive like an hour to whatever to come in you know it's it's a vibe okay how old what's the age range uh it's there's younger kids in the the morning and older kids at night and that's the problem is i don't know which version okay that we have here boys and girls or just girls yeah it's a mix [Laughter] so starts out pretty complimentary you know really appreciated the work they were clearly very knowledgeable and no doubt my daughter would learn something new okay so it was a daughter however the choice of bathing suit that exposed the instructor me butt cheeks was highly all capital inappropriate around children what are you supposed to wear pants i mean how bad was it was it a thong no dude it's a standard ass swimsuit it's not done okay i am so glad my son was not there ma'am he'd be more into swimming let me tell you you want to get your kid involved in sports there you go like what do you think he doesn't look at like girls are there like this is ridiculous i also do not want my daughter thinking it is okay to show her private areas ass cheeks please consider she put in parentheses no she didn't i'm just clarifying what a private region is it's not like my vagina was out i wasn't like hey what if i just i mean here though that's patreon here that's fine please consider being modest during these sessions as that made many adults and children uncomfortable i think this lady wants to [ __ ] me i think so too all of this is translation i am highly insecure and the instructor had a dumb truck ass i have a dump truck ass i don't know what to say yeah we've discussed the dump truck and it's not it's a genetic thing i was a breast stroker which works the dump truck it's a it's it's a it's a well established muscle of truckin if i was wearing the same bathing suit you were there would be no complaints they'd be like the only complaint is that this instructor doesn't know what she's doing but she's a flat ass it's actually an inverted triangle note to instructor wear ass at that is so funny that reminds me of a time that's so funny but you're wearing a [ __ ] bathing suit what are you supposed to do about your ass truly also it's like it's a standard arena swimsuit yeah i just it's very ableist of her actually listen i can't help it no but i am well perfect i'm like also lady listen i know that i've gained a few pounds over covid and that has made my dump truck a little extra dumpy you're like and i am very yeah you should be like i'm a i'm pissed at you for saying my bathing suit was too small yeah how [ __ ] bear you're fat shaming me meanwhile you've like a beautiful body and a perfect dump truck ass it is pretty large it could it could all right so noted lady i'll go on a diet and i'm gonna blame it on you that's very kentucky though kentucky really i have one mother's story from kentucky well actually wait what you were gonna tell a story oh i was gonna say it it made me re it reminded me of this time that i was on coney i was at coney island did i tell you the story in the pot already where i was um high on shrooms at coney island because of perfect ones and why which else would you why else would i be there and i was walking on the um the sidewalk what's called the boardwalk and so i'm walking along the boardwalk and i'm in this like mini dress with a bathing suit on underneath and my sandal um undoes itself so i bend over to tie my sandals oh boy and like my butt cheeks were out sure my dress was like a small like sundress but i was wearing a bathing suit and out of nowhere this hasidic mother and her son come and they're [ __ ] screaming at me and yiddish it's like the bat signal for them they're like go yell at the ass and they were screaming at me and like i kept being like cuz you're on shrooms and you're just like over thinking were they in there where were they in the garb of course oh my god that's so scary on shrooms it was so scary and then so uh they're like screaming at me i don't understand anything they're saying i'm assuming they're calling me a [ __ ] and stuff and then um and then i kept saying to mark i was like did i have to do something wrong because like i just so it was so jarring and he was like no and if you were 10 feet that way on the beach you could have been totally in your bathing suit yeah so like why are they screaming at you but well in this case like this ladies like swimming clinic exactly i am demonstrating a like stop sexualizing my body it's crazy but also what did she want you to do she wants to [ __ ] me and if you were and if you were on the beach like if you were on the beach with her son and daughter and your butt cheeks were showing as much as they were showing would she yell at you then listen they moved to kentucky to stay far away from those coastal elite beaches no beaches for them god bless i hope those kids study abroad and they go to france oh my god if you are her kid and you're listening to this first of all just hi like get out this is like a get out scenario i'm like you need help the other thing that happened is on saturday night i went out um not like we went to dinner and i was at dinner and i was like i'm gonna have like a low-key night like do some work tonight because it's like you know it's like a work weekend for me and then i'm at dinner and this girl that i'm there with told me that she has two uteruses oh my god how does that even work exactly i was like okay so i'm getting [ __ ] up that's what's happening right now like i'm gonna get drunk with a girl who has two uteruses in kentucky i have a lot of questions yeah i did too which i got all of them done first question is so you have one should you still have one cervix well that was apparently the problem is she did have one cervix and then the other one she kept going to the doctor and being like ow like something feels weird and they were like you're a woman so like you know standard standard action for you right and she was like like okay and then eventually they did a scan and her [ __ ] other uterus didn't have a cervix so that couldn't and it was getting its period yes so how old and i was like cheers let's go so was she like 14 i would imagine something in that range or whatever and so they had to go and do a surgery and like get the whole period out i'm so sorry i'm so sorry guys poor girl poor girl and then they had to give her like a fake thing or whatever they couldn't just remove it because like the walls were attached either way i was like kentucky has been a wild ride that's crazy yeah and that's such a hard age to like getting your period in general sucks absolutely and then going forward and weird and then like and then being like i'm different and i have more double i'm double the woman yeah she is superwoman everyone i'm actually twice every woman she is a woman she is a lady so let me ask you another question so now it's still in there and it's attached so it like lets the the blood i would imagine yeah so i was drunk let's remember when like this is not like a i didn't read her medical history got it i got the like i got two uteruses i was like [ __ ] yeah you do let's go cheers so um question number two that i have is can she get pregnant with two different babies not twins at one time i hypothetically i think so though i would imagine the second uterus with the the kind of [ __ ] up one probably wouldn't recommend throwing a baby in it got it right yeah because it feels like if you have like a fake cervix or whatever like maybe don't maybe don't give birth through the fake cervix yeah i don't know i'm not a doctor but it feels like oh that's scary yeah absolutely so she was super cool we had a great night and then i went and showed my ass to a bunch of kids and uh that was my weekend in kentucky i can't believe you literally um showed your bare naked body to all these children i know my my also butt cheeks aren't even exciting like no they're not like like i mean they're just large swaths of skin yeah you know this woman was just feeling insecure and she's like that's a young big smooth non-cellulite ass she's just like like you want to touch it yeah what do you want what do you want from my workout routine yeah it's it's i'm actually showing your kid my workout routine right now laura is actually higher than me on this couch not because she's taller than me but because her ass holds her up that's good two feet so it's it's a blessing and a curse anyway so what did you were in colorado i was in colorado we didn't get to talk about this on the last pod but i actually went to colorado um which was so fun i went to the red rocks for the first time it's like a bucket list item for me it was sick it was i mean it's incredible right so i had actually never even heard of this place before because i'm just very east coast so i just don't know many people that have gone there and then everybody that i told i was going there they were like what the [ __ ] so if the red rocks if you don't know it's this like open-air amphitheater and it's like in between these two natural red rocks in colorado um and then they just like put in seating but it's like this natural amphitheater that's so colorado's like beautiful they have this place called garden of the gods and i'm like honestly really aptly named it's beautiful gorgeous yeah i mean and we still did mark bomb what if he did he's just deafening silence in the red rocks you're like oh so it was so cool so we were there because mark was mark normand um new here yeah friend of the pod fiance of the pod beyonce the pod um he was opening for bert kreischer on at the red rocks which is so cool incredible that's so cool and first of all it's so cool because for so many reasons but like bert is like you know sort of like this independent guy he just like builds a following and blah blah and yeah so much respect for him and he um sold out the red rock that's so cool dude on a wednesday night i think it was or a thursday night and it was 10 000 people were there to see bert that's amazing lee [ __ ] good for him yeah guys go follow berkeley yeah but it was really really fun and what was he what was he like did you hang out yeah we hung out pretty much like the whole time so it was like bert his wife mark's management um like mark's manager her husband um and a few other people from uta that were hanging out and it was like just non-stop fun non-stop fun like we were having so much fun i think bert bert by the way is like the most generous kind like sweet soul he's such a good person his wife is such a good person and it was so nice to like be around people like that and they're just so sincere and so genuinely something they're incredibly generous it's like unbelievable we had i think i had three ivs in this space oh my god that's that that those are not cheap i know yeah bert told me earlier you don't know what we're talking about yeah so ivs are like when people come like because you know this is this is not many people know about these and really no i don't think so like every one of my friends who have told about them they're always like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you so if you're really hungover or you're really dehydrated for some reason you can have a nurse come and give you an iv and you just sit there and then you just become like superman afterwards do you feel well because that's my main thing for being hungover is dehydration right so they give you vitamins and fluids obviously via intravenously and um funny story about this [ __ ] ryan lochte did that once really yeah understandably right yeah he i think he was just getting vitamins but he posts a picture i think it like they gave it to him for free because he's ryan lochte yeah something like that post a picture on twitter with a picture of him on the bag u.s anti-doping agency gives him a ring and is like hey that is a violation you're not allowed to get more than 50 milliliters intravenously oh and if you do you're suspended so he got [ __ ] suspended for like a year what i mean i feel so bad but i'm also like you're so stupid my god you weren't even doing drugs it was just like fluids and some b vitamins and you just posted a picture online it's really fun that's quite a mistake it's really funny though like the thing is that we're it's not like he didn't know better like right right we know we know the rule damn that sucks um but it just makes me laugh every guy poor guy highly recommend getting them there it clearly works it totally works and also i have like really bad um altitude sickness typically and i like didn't have any altitude i felt great the whole time because of the ivs i assume yeah and um yeah so it was awesome we had just like an absolute blast like day of the show it was mark it was this other guy drew and his wife um that opened for bert and it was like it was amazing that sounds so funny [ __ ] amazing and everybody was having such a good time we like partied into the night we were staying at this really cool place that had like little like um like bungalows so yeah couple had a bungalow like i walked in there i was like camp truly i wish the place that me and mark were staying at was like our apartment it was gorgeous like you know when like places in the woods kind of have that smell when you walk in and it's like it smells like a fire but like even just like a little bit tiny like a hint of like cologne you know what i mean yeah i know i know what you mean it was we've done a lot of i spent a lot of time in colorado and then we would go to breckenridge and i feel like we'd always get an airbnb like that yeah and it would be like oh it's so fun put like 15 people in a house and i don't know if i have the stamina for it anymore 15 people in a house it was like one of those where you just go ski and then you come back and drink and then you fall asleep by 10 and then you wake up and ski and yeah it's just great no that sounds amazing it's so fun um and then the second night so that the second night was probably the best part no offense burton uh mark because your show was really fun too but the second part the second day we were there jimmy buffett of all people was playing the red rocks when you posted those pictures i was like i'm gonna kill myself i i want to go to margaritaville oh my god it was so fun okay first of all big fan boomer energy but i don't give a [ __ ] dude it was just everyone there was having like such a good time we were on shrooms because apparently i do shrooms very often i don't know yeah what um and so i've mentioned shrooms twice in this podcast alone but that's like not even like your like real i don't know it's not really your energy normally no i guess i mean i probably do streams probably like once a year exactly so twice in a pod is yeah that's a lot but i was doing so we did shrooms at this jimmy buffett concert and i was like could there be a funner thing like it was yeah that's so fun such good vibes such good people watching like every absolutely just like ready to hang out and like they're all like lit famously down to chill that's his whole thing that is wasting away again in margaritaville and i really like i really needed it because i was like this just like puts things into perspective like things are just not that serious like jimmy buffett's just vibe and everyone's just buying jimmy buffett is building an empire oh he's the best he's he's a podcast you know that oh my god no but i want to go listen to that it's like the margaritaville podcast because hell yeah it's so like a community and there's all these like parrots parrotheads they just built one in times square margaritaville okay by the way um kelly taylor friend of the pod and her boyfriend joe gorman also a friend of the pod they went there ironically and probably had a blast yeah she goes i've never had more fun on a date yeah she goes they had a sick rooftop and i had a really sugary fat ass drink hell yeah and uh like egg roll appetizer and the first time of my life i bet the vibes are go also to be to be able to bring chill margarita vibes into times square is well done jimmy buffett you are a legend so we got really good seats um because bert's management sort of like hooked it up it was [ __ ] amazing and um so we are in these like pretty good seats so you can like really see the band and the person next to jimmy was his son and he like he's just like playing the keyboard and he was like involved in the band and whatever and i was how how old are we talking here probably like our age maybe oh okay okay it's not like a little like kid no no no no yeah like he was like contributing to that he's like good okay like there's a you know he's should be i mean it's not like oh cute yeah yeah i'm up there little jimmy jr um jj and anyway so we're like watching this and like in my shroom head i'm like that is so nice and i'm like this little kid like this little kid this kid in my [ __ ] age yeah but i'm like you know he's getting he gets these moments with his dad like he gets to play his dad's music at the red rocks with his dad like oh yeah that's so that's a pretty iconic father-son moment it's unbelievable [ __ ] catching balls idiots i had a great time oh i am a parrothead okay all right well let's keep an eye on his tours follow jimmy buffet like and subscribe to margaritaville media well that's a pretty good segue into another thing boomers love which is boomers and comedians love facebook what is the deal with that when i first started dating matthew i was like you realize no one normal is on facebook right now first of all no one normal is on facebook or twitter yeah it's just it's just comics and mentally ill come in yelling at each other and you're like is this fun like what's happening and creating facebook groups they love facebook groups yeah there's a bunch of like tattletail facebook groups yeah that are like comedy complaints yeah lady comics of whatever and it's like this guy looked at me once yeah passing and i'm like okay you are mentally unstable for sure like okay i mean i basically stay in those groups just to like clock who's crazy a hundred percent it's actually pretty fun it is yeah it's pretty good time anyway but anyway so i figured we could start this off with like a very brief history of facebook it's probably worth its own discussion just like how it all came about at some point but just to get us started i just wanted to like you know get back to our roots of why boomers love this [ __ ] oh yeah so if you remember this all started in 2003 which is shockingly not that long ago like every time i think about that i'm like it's only in 18 years that facebook's around that's crazy oh god that is [ __ ] depressing how quickly society has like totally just take it just we're like let's go yeah yeah it's like a disaster yeah probably the worst thing that's ever happened to any of us it's nuts without overstating things it is literally the greatest tragedy that's ever happened to humankind okay hot takes from risk okay um and i'm actually lying it actually started in 2004 because in 2003 mark zuckerberg was a heard of him a second-year student at harvard where he wrote the web the software for a website called facemash so what he did is he went into harvard's security network and he pulled all the student id images from all the dorms and then he populated a website where people could put two student photos next to one another presumably the women and determine who was hot and who was not so mark zuckerberg starting off strong starting strong great morals super strong moral compass just not a piece of [ __ ] enough not not a huge dick yep just right out the gate literally a couple days later the harvard executives were like no no obviously not this is so many problems top to bottom question so correct me if i'm wrong uh and maybe you're gonna get to this but i also understood maybe i made this up in my brain but i i haven't it's been a while since i watched uh what's the thing the social social network but i thought that you could also say like how good or bad they were in bed oh maybe i i i looked up like the history i don't but that sounds right maybe i'm making that it's possible i'm making that up but let's just roll with it well you should check out when we eventually and whatever however many months do a review of facebook we'll circle back on that okay we'll still go back as yeah exactly so they they were obviously like you can't hack so many problems it closed that down and they closed it down he almost got expelled but then eventually uh they were like eh whatever this is harvard our kids get up to weird [ __ ] and they char they dropped all the charges on him so a few months later february 4th 2004 he launched a new website kind of after seeing how successful face mash was and he called this one the facebook and he named it after the directories that were handed out to university students um which is what boomers still call it yeah the facebook um he as we all know got in trouble with the winklevosses et cetera but point being it started like where you could only you needed to have a harvard edu website or email address in order to i was clearly not involved like you needed to have your own website and it's like the raya for back then okay only harvard students were able to join this it grew really quickly and they eventually added other ivy league schools blah blah very basic back then you could post like you know some text or some [ __ ] and check out people's pages so obviously things escalated as we are acutely aware that's its own story but now let's kind of do a snapshot on what facebook is up to they have 58 000 employees also it's big wow also if you're saying oh i don't use facebook it's for old people well they also own instagram and i was surprised by this whatsapp oh i didn't know that i didn't know that either which is whatsapp is supposed to be the secure one yeah and i'm kind of like wait what oh so that's why i know i love when people like i have a friend uh who's like i'm not i just like can't get behind like facebook being so morally corrupt and whatever so i deleted my facebook i'm like okay but you still have your instagram yeah it's the same [ __ ] it's the same people like literally in new york the facebook office is one level and then we go downward level and it's instagram exactly it's the same so i don't want to hear it um just to put this in perspective in terms of how much money they are raking in it's extensive the revenue for 12 months ending in december 2021 was um or 2020 i guess was 85 billion okay pretty good holy [ __ ] rookie number in 2020 they had an annual growth rate of 57 which is terrifying actually that's insane 57 i know wait a minute that's probably because of i guess the pandemic i don't know i mean a lot of reasons you have to remember expansion into additional countries so like it's global at this point so if you just like oh we support morocco now yeah yeah there you go there's millions of additional users facebook aloud i assume no in china i don't believe so okay i'm sure china's [ __ ] that i definitely know china's like wechat forever man yep yeah which that's yeah we'll talk about that later 56 of people visit facebook to get information the source on that one was facebook so i don't know if i trust that but point is people are using it extensively um and obviously a ton of their i mean almost all of their revenue comes from ads so how do you get ads engagement people being on the platform people viewing the ads and ultimately buying [ __ ] the average annual per user um revenue nine dollars hmm and that freaked me the [ __ ] out yeah that means like have you bought stuff off the ads on instagram or facebook um on instagram yeah instagram yes i have two i did so recently yeah so i guess i mean it's kind of great nine dollars annually per user that's insane i know yeah like they're really raking it in yeah so they're huge obviously they have a really big reach globally they're all around the world and last week the wall street journal decided to go after them and they released this very dramatic website and podcast series which i do recommend it's very serious like if you're this is a very different energy than you'll get over there called the facebook files um we're only going to be really talking about the first one because i found it super [ __ ] interesting okay um yeah i might listen to this but basically what happened is it had research reports online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management including zuckerberg uh so it wasn't like this was just like rumors that they heard from random employees this was formal documents that an internal whistleblower leaked to them and that whistleblower has now filed for whistleblower status with like the federal government oh it's like a whole [ __ ] it's like some fun [ __ ] so he's like he's like worried about being in trouble for what he revealed in a lot of or she or she or they i don't care this person someone human being i assume holy crap so insane so there's a team of four reporters and these i watched this live q a that they did and they're the most tired looking people i've ever seen they look like they've looked the devil in the soul the bags they're just so funny oh so so tired so tired have been reviewing all of these documents have been writing up this very well put together i got it like obviously you know wall street journal is a media company so in here yeah but i mean yeah these so the the reporters let's just give them shout outs justin scheck georgia wells jeff horwitz who kind of ran the whole thing and deepa sitharaman i'm sorry deepa i probably [ __ ] that up and they went into it the first story that they kind of discussed well first of all in the live q a they were like hey how did you get these documents right and they were really like we can obviously not tell you that okay so yeah which i'm always like that's cool that is cool that's pretty cool yeah you got some secret [ __ ] love that wow so they have access to these so they i'm sorry these people are reporters for the wall street journal okay investigative reporters and they've been working on it just to give you context like jeff has been on this assignment for like two and a half years got it okay like it's not it's not like they it's not like our podcast is like last weekend we're like uh you heard about facebook yeah right when i like when i learn a new thing i'm like okay uh give me like one hour but i was dying when we texted each other the the drug cartel one oh that was fun that's this yeah that's the story okay we're not going to talk about the drug cartel in this one but spoiler alert the the cartel gets involved in this story which is pretty iconic pretty amazing file number one cross check which is a review of ac priv or the white list problem documents internal to facebook that described their cross check program which is extremely controversial cross-check for i'll explain facts or what do you mean no i'll explain okay so mark zuckerberg obviously like one of the big things about facebook is that it there's three billion users by the way which jesus christ allows them to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics culture and journalism and that its standard of behavior apply to everyone no matter who you are okay i've heard about these yep yeah so basically their whole they're saying like hey yeah i can post on facebook and so can password the cat and so can you and so can like i don't know aoc like all of us can just you know do whatever we like can contribute whatever content we want so obviously with three billion users they're going to use elements of automation all over the platform but specifically here because they have um company rules against like you know your normal standards of conduct against bullying sexual content hate speech and incitements to violence bad things which we clearly are like you know if i'm saying hey meet up at times square to do some shady [ __ ] facebook is gonna say you can't do that okay okay no so they have automation and that worked for some time they would had it in place um the automated systems would delete or bury content suspected of rules violation without a human review occasionally material would be flagged and content moderators employed outside the company would come and review it okay sure yeah pretty straightforward like campos nipples they'll take it down yeah sure so in 2018 can you post your butt cheeks though not in kentucky not in kentucky not in kentucky you just get reported i know i'm like guys sorry sorry i'm sorry for the dump um so in 2018 zuckerberg estimated that 10 of the content removal decisions were wrong by the system and depending on the enforcement action taken users might not be able to tell what happened like what they violated or get an appeal and that happens a lot to comics yeah because they're always up to some shady [ __ ] yeah but like there's a lot of things that are like why i don't know why i got this got taken down and it's right you know the most benign thing in the world is just a joke exactly whatever so yeah he's right there are some things that are like doesn't make sense so that was going on and obviously as we've we need the jokes from the comics so there were there are problems with this so 10 that's a pretty decent amount and in 2014 this is when things started to change when rihanna got involved plot twist what okay she literally was the reason this whole program started which is pretty crazy wow she's got so many things going on she's so busy yeah she's with the lvmh yeah she's doing uh very facebook coops yeah like she's like completely unbeknownst to her by the way this is just she was the the reason that they got involved so what happened is her account on instagram as we know owned by facebook was temporarily shut down in 2014 after she posted a topless photo of herself on the cover of louis which is a french magazine okay so the mistake was like all over the news whatever and facebook had to publicly backtrack um i this is the picture you're ready to see something there's multiple yeah okay so two nips i see yes exactly she looks fantastic she looks amazing facebook was like oh we're not gonna kick rihanna off for looking like a smoke show right right and we're posting like a magazine shoot it is weird because first and foremost they definitely didn't want to ban her account you know what i mean they were definitely like no rihanna please stay on instagram we can't stress this enough we would like her to be on instagram thank you thank you so much please and thank you please and thank you yeah so but they the system had automatically been like nipple and kicked that bad boy out and a lot of the times what it'll do is also ban your account if you post nip oh i guess i don't know i haven't tested the system so they created a new system called with butt cheeks they created a new system called cross checking or rather at this point it was called shielding the first iteration of this program was called shielding which is genuinely the worst name you could come up with for a system that is going to shield celebrities from the rules truly basically what it was supposed to do was take sensitive accounts and perform or prevent enforcement actions from just taking effect immediately so athletes movie stars politicians mayors academics like anyone who politicians oh yeah like anyone who could get a lot of attention they didn't want to [ __ ] up and accidentally you know do some sort of automated deletion or ban when it was somewhat important so for thee but not for me you can see where this is going starts out being called shielded shielding and then they were like that's probably the worst name we could have come up with so they changed the name to cross check and um this is all back in 2014 so at that point they're like no problem we'll throw rihanna on the list we'll throw drake on the list we'll throw people like neymar donald trump donald trump jr mark zuckerberg himself elizabeth warren dan scavino candace owens and then for some reason the wall street journal kept bringing up doug the pug which like relax yeah it's a it's a pug that's famous i guess i mean i guess the reason why they did those just to show they don't really care about who the person is or what they stand for they simply care about the engagement and the fame and the yeah anyway i learned way more about doug the pug than i anticipated ever reading on a wall street journal article here we are so the people in this program are treated with more you know deference or more care which is interesting if facebook systems conclude that one of these accounts these special accounts might have break and broken its rules they don't remove the content anymore or at least not right away instead there is a separate system which is staffed by better trained full-time employees for additional layers of review so that's how it started but obviously like everything it grew quite a bit and as the years went on more and more people could basically like any random facebook employee could add people to this cross-check system so there were 58 000 employees yeah so there was uh 5.8 million accounts were added to this cross-check or white list so what that means is depending on the depth they were on the list they were either having human review or complete freedom on the platform so they were completely exempt from facebook rules oh boy and it became to the point where it was like so um like with code and stuff like that the years of like the layers and stuff like that like it was almost hard-coded in the fact that these accounts were you know within the cross-check and weren't going to have um the the scrutiny or even the ability to remove things right that really came into light with a really notable story about the brazilian soccer player neymar i think i've heard the name yeah yeah he's very famous okay he's on the 30 under 30. so yeah go [ __ ] yourself right now like you think you've heard the name yeah he's been on the list of 100 most influential people very hot brazilian soccer player super famous super rich i guess also upon reviewing this a little bit he's been getting into some [ __ ] like really yeah this isn't a podcast about him but brazilians get wild yeah well yeah is he the one that married his niece no okay well maybe i don't know i didn't i did a couple like i was like i'm worried about facebook right now and then i like googled neymar a little bit and i was like he i mean i'll just talk about it uh there was a story in april where a nike employee said that he sexually assaulted her and they terminated his contract as a result like that's pretty legit then i mean i don't know i don't know the other thing is who's to say he's 29 years old and the reason that i think that that's unfortunately that's not the only account of nonsense occurring okay which you know fool me once here we are sure so he uh but either way like he's he's obviously very you know he slays he gets some get some good puss okay yeah and in 2019 how can i say this politely yeah he [ __ ] a lot yeah he cleans up he gets it wet if i may i don't know yeah right we already talked okay we talked about two uteruses or whatever cervix is and all right it's just a lot so in 2019 unfortunately he was accused of rape there we go from a new york times article on neymar honestly at this point yeah a lot of people but um he was accused of raping a brazilian model najila trinidad who he had flown to paris they had had consensual sex and then um he published and then things escalated i i don't know all the details of like the the nitty-gritty what's important is there was she says that he raped her he was like i didn't he published a number of explicit messages that he had exchanged with her on social media oh my god that's so why would he do that that's so [ __ ] horrible he posted all it it gets worse he posted all of his messages with her to prove his innocence but in the process he posted x-rated images of her god damn she did on his facebook account that's horrific it's it's revenge porn is what it is there's a term for that there there is like if you think that something is going to you know exonerate you or whatever there bring her to court and show the court show the judge yeah that do not put it on your facebook that's so evil you hear that neymar don't put that on your facebook that is so so evil it was really bad so obviously facebook normally if i posted revenge porn of my ex which is like and if i did that i would have my account banned immediately like their system would pick it up and it would be like no why and it's they're very strict about it the um they say that not only should unauthorized nude photos be deleted but that people who post them will have their accounts deleted yes period yep and i think that's a pretty solid you know stance agreed they do not [ __ ] with revenge porn right but neymar remember 30 under 30 top 100 he's on the cross check program so the internal facebook documents say that a facebook employee actually tried to manually delete the post on saturday when it went up but the facebook system blocked them from doing it oh so they could not remove this point it stayed up for like i think it was something like 48 hours it was seen like 56 million people saw it oh i feel so bad for her it was reposted over 6 000 times they there was i think in the podcast they said there was like 2 500 fake accounts made of her it was so mean it was horrifying it was really [ __ ] horrible it was rotten hell this guy neymar neymar you better kick the [ __ ] out of those soccer balls my guy you [ __ ] idiot i hate him well horrible that's truly that is psychological torture in like it's craziest way it's really really bad obviously and not only did it take them a while to remove it after that they didn't do anything to him they didn't delete his account which is their policy they left the account he basically got away scot-free wow [ __ ] that's [ __ ] and then i feel like uh i mean there should be like legal ramifications for posting somebody's nude photos without what's weird i don't think there are you know what though we should do one we should do an episode on the revenge porn guy yeah and i don't know him so so there's a guy who did the revenge porn website and then people would post things like their exes and stuff and he went to prison for what he did so wait was that recently this was in 2017 he went to prison okay so yeah that's interesting um i don't know he's also brazilian which i'm not sure how laws like would kind of i'm not a [ __ ] lawyer yeah there's something different about brazil well it was actually i mean i didn't look too much into this but she was um he denied the rape allegation no charges are filed against him but the woman was charged with slander extortion and fraud the first two charges were dropped and then she was eventually acquitted of the third but basically there was a lot of speculation that you know the brazilian police were like we like really [ __ ] with neymar so they're never going to take a allegation against him seriously hey neymar what's going on dude yeah either way this is not an article about neymar it is an article though about the fact that facebook couldn't like not even they like didn't do anything couldn't do anything right because of this system yeah that's insane it's bad and there's like some girl like that is like i mean this poor woman i'm sure she's but like and then beyond her just think about the implications of that way beyond that neymar can essentially post anything and he's one of the most influential people like he's extremely influential that's why he's on this list right so it automatically puts these people who are by definition high influence in a position where they're not being reviewed they're not being reviewed yeah or and so you can say whatever you want you can say any percentages that you want it's gospel like you know donald trump can say some crazy ass [ __ ] [ __ ] and it's gospel why do you think we got where are we [ __ ] exactly yep so random facebook employees could add you to this program for a long time it grew which like first of all [ __ ] you all my friends who work there and i certainly can't maybe i can post nip i don't think i can i'm pretty sure neither of us are on the cross check system i'll post nip i don't care post it for the patreon um and the funniest part about this is that because of the the way this thing worked on the back end the it didn't stop promoting those posts that were violating the rules [Laughter] it's so [ __ ] this poor girl i would be way more embarrassed by the things that i said when i was horny versus the actual oh yeah you know what i mean like the things that you say when you're like sexting somebody are [ __ ] humiliating stupid stupid they're really dumb they're like looking back you're like wait oh my god it's when you read them back i'm like who was that person you're drinking like your morning coffee and you're like it's disgusting i am disgusted by myself disgusted cracks me up but it's just so funny to me like that you can like if me and marks were posted it would be like him backstage somewhere and he just texting like drink my jizz and you're like yummy yeah like oh cup of milk emoji that is [ __ ] foul but man this poor girl that is so humiliating and so so like this man just has no empathy no sympathy this man is a psychopath but based on that action i don't know him i don't know anything about him beyond beyond trans beyond neymar i mean it goes way further obviously we just mentioned trump like can you imagine like them promoting the the facebook event for the insurrection yeah they're like you might also want to attend this little little event i don't know a really fun get-together um wear red white and blue we all share you know similar ideas you might you might also like that's hilarious oh man so [Laughter] they found um so they did a review of this obviously after a while they were like get after after the insurrection they were like we should probably keep a keep a [ __ ] eye on what's going on here and they did a review and they found that in 2020 uh there was north of 16 billion billion views on content which clearly violated the rules so again hate speech racism revenge porn graphic violence the number again as we kind of mentioned is so large because these are high profile accounts with huge numbers of followers so when they post like if trump posts it instantly would reach millions millions of people so when he's posting there was one specifically that was called out in june 2020 he had said in a post or maybe something around there they were talking about in june 2020 when the looting starts the shooting starts right right i remember yeah and like people thought it had a racist um connotation or just an openly violent yeah yeah yeah i mean it's yeah it's bad it's not it's like dr seuss but just for like racist racism racist violent stuff yeah the point is if i post when the leading shark starts the shooting charts sharding shoots i don't know yeah point being should not have been allowed to stay up but the facebook manager noted that an automated system designed by the company you know to do to detect this stuff scored this post 90 out of 100 in indicating a high likelihood it violated the platform's rules which like no [ __ ] [ __ ] what do you need for the other 10 points like a slur a racial slur in there yeah knocking it that's not gonna hurt it no he's gonna get a hundred percent on his test hundred out of a hundred on this is hard word he's cool with a hard r so obviously for a normal person if you said that it would get removed what was really crazy about this one mr zuckerberg himself publicly acknowledged that he personally made the call to leave that post up oh my god [ __ ] you dude wow what is wrong with you yeah wall street journal is wild and like wall street journal is like let's go so but like when the looting starts the shooting stars i feel like i've seen things from like people that are regular people like you know comics or whatever that are definitely not protected by this thing saying worse things than that i can't think of a specific example but like maybe that was his argument like okay if we're gonna like take this away then we have to look at other things perhaps i really don't know obviously you can get into each individual example is going to have so many different factors that go into it but in this case it clearly incited violence yeah you know what i mean true true so um not great and mr zuckerberg decided to make the call so making a manual decision this manager who is um like whistleblowing or reporting this making a manual decision like this seems less defensible than the algorithmic scoring and actioning like the point is that whatever happened in this one it got 90 out of 100 which normally would kick it out yeah the automated thing and instead they decided to leave it in specifically so okay you know i mean like in this specific context that if you or i had written the exact same thing we would have been kicked out i understand mr zuckerberg was like why do i keep calling him mr zuck i don't know zuckerberg i need to call him [ __ ] but i don't know if i believe that i think i could write something like that on twitter on uh let's find out go right now everyone's like it's me okay when the money starts the shooting starts and it's me drinking [Laughter] she's [ __ ] crazy okay okay so obviously to be fair like facebook employees were not excited about any of this they were they were raising like the internal like they kept being like yeah we don't love some stinks revenge porn yeah i don't understand it's not thrilled about what's going on yeah in an internal comment in response to the memo oh my god sameed chakra tab oh god i'm sorry guys sameed we're trying chakrabarty um who was one of the executives on their civic team uh you know so he focuses on political and social discourse which sounds like the worst [ __ ] job in the world truly oh how exhausting so tiring yeah he voiced go ahead yeah that's why those folks are so exhausted he voiced his discomfort with the fact that there were these exemptions occurring he goes one of the fundamental reasons i joined um is that i believe its potential will be a facebook's you know potential to be a profoundly democratizing force that enables everyone to have an equal civic voice so having different rules of speech for different people is very troubling to me correct so like and i just want to point this out like if you work at facebook i get that like it's a huge company like it's it's not like each you know there are a lot of wonderful people who work there there are also apparently a couple people with bad moral judgment who made choices along the way here we are it doesn't matter it's true i will say like the idea that everybody has a platform and has a voice like i don't know i feel like you should have to like put up your history of lying it's clearly it's what's interesting because this is the first time that technology has ever actually allowed that i know and and it's a good thing and it's a really bad thing i feel like there should be some sort of like okay it's like i'm saying this but i also lied about xy like the fact you know like underneath it's like cdc says yeah yeah yeah yeah there's a guideline more about all the other things i lied about what's interesting though is that kind of is more along the lines of what china has with wechat where you have your like social ranking which the problem is the second you start doing that thing starts getting weird on the other side it does like you're supposed to be perfect all the [ __ ] it's just it's so there's no there's no good answer but you know what's definitely not great just giving a random group of influential people carte blanche to just post whatever wild out comments they may have including porn and objectively bad let's not do that absolutely so they created the facebook oversight board this is a panel of about 20 former political leaders human rights activists and journalists picked by facebook to deliberate the company's content decisions it began a few years ago based in london mark zuckerberg conceived the idea in 2018 so this like kind of all came around in 2019 right around this time that a lot of this was occurring and this was partially in response to all the employees being kind of mad about it there was you've probably seen other stories of facebook getting in random trouble always yeah um so the point of this thing was that idea for the public to have a way to appeal decisions by facebook to remove content that violates its policies against harmful and hateful posts so it was this kind of like supreme court of facebook which i don't know man this is like so supreme court did you get it that's pretty cute pretty cute huh um it's also really weird to me like facebook is just a company and like we're giving it so not we're giving it like they've they've weirdly gotten themselves in this position of having so much power so much power truly and like so much like they they twist people's minds and like after watching uh what was the um documentary that came out a few months ago oh uh this dilemma yeah the social dilemma social dilemma it's like we are now we're go watch it yeah go watch it it's so good i actually had to watch it twice because i was on my phone the first time around i'm not even [ __ ] joking i'm literally like i was on facebook [ __ ] but um it really is twisted how they keep you coming back for more i say this all the time and i'm sure i've said this on the pod before but i think that social media is the same like and your phone in general is the cigarettes of our generation yeah like we're gonna look back on this and be like you tweeted when you were pregnant yeah like you can't you understand what that does to your brain yeah exactly like you're a kid on the dopamine rush so so so bad for you and i don't know i think that there's more to come out about like it's oh yeah unbelievably bad for you to be on your phone well that's part two they talk about um i don't know if i'll do a fully extensive review of it because basically the entire component of part two was facebook knows how bad it is for you and they have studies where they showed how harmful especially for teenage girls for some yeah yep like it's really bad yeah a bunch of suicides right suicides tons of body image issues like especially from instagram that they know like there's definitive like research that they've done that was the results and they've instead of revealing that to the public to allow like the cdc frankly to make you know guidelines around right they hit it yeah so and it would be kind of helpful like if there's a girl with like a super photoshop body or whatever just like like disclaimer at the bottom like this is photoshopped this is art you used with photoshop yeah girls could say okay like i don't have to i mean you know i don't know if they would have to wear like what every girl when you're a certain age is sort of i know and it's really tough because and that's kind of their argument they're like i mean that's just the way society works like checking out the egg you know what i mean and they're arguing so so the the research that came out was saying that you can't say that because tick-tock doesn't have the same effects or um snapchat doesn't because they're performance-based or they're filter-based like they totally do i i would agree with you that's part of the reason i don't want to do like a whole long thing is i thought that the the second story is absolutely interesting what's interesting is that they hid the research yeah that's what i think is like the most like okay if you actually feel like there isn't an issue with this then why are you being real [ __ ] sketched 100 don't agree yeah completely but anyway going back to this one for a second my favorite part about the oversight board is that they were if you recall from boeing we had a similar scenario here funded with 130 million dollar commitment from facebook how i mean i guess like it is hard like who's going to fund right the board government it's it just feels really exhausting the government can't get involved with like private businesses technically but it feels absolutely bizarre that they are like hey we're gonna fund this group that's going to make the judgments on us very odd how are you going to get like really harsh on the people you know don't bite the hand that feeds you kind of deal how old is zuckerberg he's not that old he's terrifyingly not that much older than us 40 years i want to say something like that okay let's do the math so if it's 2013 or 2003 and he was presumably like 20 years old right so then he's i'm so stupid yeah he's like he's like 39 or 40 yeah like that yeah yeah that's insane right yeah no i mean ish which just goes to show like how many 40 year olds do we know who are still full of [ __ ] true but i mean i mean he's puppeteering this [ __ ] psycho that's why it's absolutely insane that he is i mean he has a board obviously he has people under him so he doesn't have soul like in the case of this trump thing he he personally approved it to stay up he doesn't have he's too robotic i mean he doesn't have a soul no he's diagnosing people but you'd see what i mean by now he's certainly i mean i would imagine he has a power complex and i would argue rightfully so i mean kind of a little bit of a god complex with reason i mean he changed the world we can say that whether or not it's for the better that's debatable but he definitely changed the world and that's kind of been his whole thing is that he's saying like neither he nor the company wants to have final decision on speech that is being put up there they he doesn't want to have the power to be like the moral arbitrator on these cases but it's still like he's really into a bind he's still a psycho don't get me wrong but he is in a bind like it's i don't know the answer i'm just saying whatever you're doing not that sure sure and and yeah i mean facebook shouldn't be the moral should just be i don't even know i don't know who should be the moral like who the government but no idea i feel like if we knew we'd probably get hired by facebook point is not what you're doing mark fix it but i don't know and like twitter for example like they like the more the morality is so interesting to me because obviously there's that anecdote going around that's so fascinating that like donald trump doesn't have a twitter but the taliban does and so it's like what criteria is everybody working on and it's incredibly interesting and we're going to get into that unfortunately then the third and the fourth episode of this which we'll talk about in part two are about the um differences and application of resources and rule sets to geographic locations presumab like obviously facebook is a us-based company so what they're doing here in the united states is uh by the books at least according their best efforts what they're doing in the middle east what they're doing in asian countries is purely just falcon throwing [ __ ] at the walls which unfortunately involves cartels and human trafficking pretty common good great so we'll talk we're not going to talk about that right now because it's kind of a bummer but what we will um just to kind of you know finish up a little bit about what's going on here with this white listing practice um they're aware of it and they apparently had set the goal of eliminating the total immunity for high severity violations so basically taking that upper right quadrant of like the one like the neymar scenario they said that they were going to get rid of that by the first half of 2021 mark a march update reported that they had not done that so far so it is now whatever september still not we just released this i mean this thing just came out last week so probably not i would imagine that would have been the first thing facebook would have come back with true um and in fact apparently the vip lists are continuing to grow uh they keep trying to stop it and it's almost like gotten out of their control um they because the employees can do it why they just shut that off well i think they've shut down various components of it but there's it it's so big like yeah i don't know i have a very very very tiny understanding of how coding and all that [ __ ] works it's hard it's true and it's it's almost like a little city that they built yeah line by line very challenging and also like think about how many people we know personally that have a blue check like you don't have to be anybody to have a blue chick right and and i mean like think of that just being like being on their cross check program where you can just kind of wild out exactly what are they gonna just delete all of them if you have a blue check then fine whatever it's like so many people have a blue check it's also just not like one database that's feeding all this stuff right it's been around for about 19 years and let me just tell you iteration was written in a dorm right it's not like it came out of like hey we have a very methodical it was also written when like a lot of this technology was new yeah so it's not like they built this ground up with like the resources we have now for developing programming and stuff like that it was built like this crazy ass old house with like weird layers and layers of concrete from bones or some [ __ ] but it's like when does that all collapse i don't even know i don't know well maybe i don't know you know we have no idea are we when we're 90 years old is there still going to be a facebook is there going to be a record and that's what i did when i was 19.
that was one of the things they talked about in the q a is like they were like facebook is operating under this like infinity premise of this point like where they they can't imagine a world in which they don't exist which is interesting because you're you're a company you're not you're not god you're not the government you're not god like you are you could hypothetically leave right we could ixnay you exactly and that's what's so interesting like people that think
2021-09-28 07:18
