Do you believe those laws will come?
Will we get the laws we need in the next two years? Very unlikely. But I think we’ll get the laws we need in the next five to 10 years.
Meanwhile, Meta has refocused on the metaverse and generative AI.
I’m concerned about its emergence. Don’t joke about virtual reality. Because all the problems that people are pointing out – the masks are too heavy, the images are grainy, the batteries don’t last long enough – will be solved in five to 10 years. I’m afraid we’re going to put grandma in a VR headset, or if you have a really disruptive kid in school, instead of a health assistant, you just digitally numb them. I think we should start those conversations now.
Since your whistleblowing, has Meta addressed the issues you exposed?
I guess it’s probably worse than it was because Mark [Zuckerberg] laid off a lot of people this year. I think maybe things got better the year after I came out. But agree [Twitter CEO] Elon Musk was able to fire his security teams without any repercussions, Mark has said publicly that he thought Elon was showing the value of tearing off the Band-Aid. I think a big part of Facebook’s stock market gains over the past six months has been that if you lay off your security teams, your spending goes down. Meanwhile, many of my favorite researchers within the company are no longer within the company. And not because they left voluntarily.
i spoke to researchers who wrote some of the documents you exposed, and found it fascinating that they stayed with the company for so long.
It’s a really brutal choice. When you leave there is a lesser person working on these issues. You put a huge psychological burden on people because they know that if they leave, the problems won’t go away. They just won’t work on it anymore.
Mark Zuckerberg himself isn’t much of a character in your book, but you do tell a few times when he turns down some initiatives that may have mitigated some misinformation or toxicity on his platform. What do you think of your former boss of bosses?
I feel very sorry for him. He’s been the CEO since he was 19 years old, and he’s 39 now – that’s half his life. All other major founders have stepped down. Imagine someone telling you that what you spent half your life doing is hurting people. It’s almost impossible to believe. He cannot be objective – he has surrounded himself with a very limited number of people who have a vested material interest in keeping him there.
He’s definitely heard about harm directly – from regulators and litigators, and to his face at legislative hearings.
But look at how he frames things in Congress. He always says things like, “We have an inherent tension between freedom of speech and security.” He never says, “We could change our algorithms.” There were heaps of people [inside Facebook] that were developing ways to deal with these problems, but that required a change in the management system. Facebook has a culture that devalues people. It’s tragic. Then he goes to podcasts and says things like, “When I get up in the morning and look at my phone, it feels like I’m going to get punched in the stomach.”
