As for whether that organized voice ever tells an incomplete story—well, that’s kind of inherent in the job. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t have the airtime to tell a complete story. But I should say, that cuts both ways. Journalists also tell stories about our products, and their stories aren’t complete, either. They start with some truths, and inevitably tell their own kind of compelling story.But isn’t there a difference between journalists who may not have all the information but are trying to ascertain the truth as best they can, and companies who are deliberately spinning a story in a particular way?
Look, I would never diminish the value of journalism. Obviously, we need to have journalists out there holding corporations and governments accountable. But every institution has its incentives. And the news media is incentivized for engagement. They need people to click.
One could argue that the tech industry itself is responsible for making the business model of news so focused on engagement. I would say that the dynamic predated the rise of the big platforms, and that the platforms simply accelerated a trend that was already taking place.
Who is Howard Dean? I think about this a lot. Howard Dean is a person who did a lot of stuff. But the only thing that anyone remembers about that guy is that he screamed once. Like, a mic was too loud and it sounded like he was yelling, and his campaign was completely derailed.
Now we live in a media environment where we have a new Dean scream every few minutes. It’s an attention economy. The news is designed to attract people’s attention and keep it. And what does that well is scandal, controversy, conflict, House of Cards–style intrigue. Those are more exciting reads than unadorned facts stitched together to form a much less dramatic reality.What’s the reality?
First off, when things go well, you don’t hear about it. When a company launches a feature that’s good for users, that nobody finds controversial, it’s not covered very widely. That happens all the time.
And when things go wrong, the media narrative doesn’t typically capture the complexity of what’s happening internally, or the amount of work that’s happening behind the scenes. I think journalists sometimes assume that these companies are full of young people who don’t understand the seriousness of what they’re doing. They’re playing Ping-Pong, they’re bringing their dogs to work. It’s all fun and games.
But in my experience, the challenges that these companies face are not taken lightly at all. The people who work at them, and the executives who run them, are deeply interested in getting it right. The mood is somber, serious.I’m not sure that the media thinks that the main problem in Silicon Valley is neglect. More often, it seems like the issue is greed—that tech companies are just trying to squeeze out as much profit as they can, no matter what the consequences are.
Perhaps that is how things work at young companies. But at a larger enterprise, nobody wants a short-term gain at the expense of damaging user trust. It’s just not worth it.
As humans, we love a good story. And a good story needs heroes and villains. So I understand why the media, and the public more broadly, can be quick to assign malicious motives when a problem arises. But that simply doesn’t accord with what I’ve seen from the inside.
Balancing ActsYou said that the people who work at these companies and the executives who run them understand the seriousness of the issues and what’s at stake. Was this always the case? Or has that understanding emerged more recently, since the various scandals around the 2016 election?
I take umbrage at the idea that Silicon Valley didn’t face scrutiny before 2016. When I joined this particular company in 2013, there was already a ton of public attention. And the stakes and the significance of what we were doing were quite clear. That struck me very early on.
To my mind, the techlash has been more a difference of degree than of kind. The scrutiny isn’t new. It just became more intense. The stakes became even higher. The year 2016 was clearly an inflection point because tech got bound up with big political issues, with the integrity of a national election, which is a subject that people are very justifiably passionate about.Let’s talk more about that. What’s your perspective on the controversies around Russian influence operations during the 2016 election? How do you think the platforms handled it?
People made mistakes. But things that seem obvious now in retrospect just weren’t obvious at the time. Or maybe there weren’t the right incentives for people to be thinking about the right problems.
Fundamentally, the products were misused. A sovereign nation wanted to interfere with another sovereign nation’s elections, and used these platforms to do it. It was cyberwar, basically. These platforms were the weapons, but they were hijacked. Let’s say you’re an arms manufacturer and your shipment gets hijacked by a hostile country and used to start a war. That’s what happened.But is that really a fair comparison? These platforms make their money from ads, which means they need to maximize engagement. So the business model means they have to prioritize whatever content users find engaging, whether that’s Russian disinformation or alt-right propaganda.
With perfect foresight, you could have stopped the Russia stuff from happening—but not without controversy. Those campaigns adopted the idiom of our politically divided country and exaggerated it. So any effort to combat them would have been interpreted as ideological. Let’s imagine that the platforms took down a bunch of pro-Trump memes, claiming the Russians put them there. How would Republicans or the Trump campaign have reacted? Critics of misinformation forget that conservatives often accused tech companies of censoring their views before 2016.
It’s all about trade-offs. These are the kinds of conversations
