Mark Zuckerberg on Trial: Facebook is Damaging Society

Mark Zuckerberg sucks according to his critics Mark Zuckerberg CEO Facebook presides over a company which is undermining our basic freedoms it is damaging democracy and pumping out fake news it is an unethical business and the buck stops with Zack hang on say Zuckerberg offenders Facebook has connected 2.2 billion people a third of the world allowing them to share their lives and stay in touch for free it was vital to the Arab Spring and Barack Obama's election campaign don't turn Mark Zuckerberg into a scapegoat those are the terms of the debate tonight Mark Zuckerberg on trial is Facebook damaging Society you will have fan on your seats a little card like this this is your voting card after my panelists have made their opening arguments we will come round with ballot boxes simply tear this in two and put the half that represents your opinion into the ballot box if you are terminally indecisive put both hands in well then find out whether or not our speakers tonight have managed to change your mind they will first of all all make an initial speech from the podium there won't be any interruptions then then I'll encourage them to take on each other and then I'll encourage you to take them on and after that we'll have our voting anyway first up I have damien collins conservative MP for folk stone and hive and share the house of commons digital culture median sport committee who has paid a key role in parliamentary scrutiny of Facebook's activities including invoking a rare parliamentary mechanism to seize internal Facebook documents over the Cambridge analytical scandal he will be proposing the motion Facebook is damaging Society Damien thank you very much well I noticed from the billing excuse me for tonight's event that it was Mark Zuckerberg on trial Facebook is bad for society and so my first inclination certainly as chair of the Select Committee would be to say that if Mark Zuckerberg is on trial we should call him as a witness but I doubt that he would come Mark Zuckerberg has not been very good at making himself available to society certainly not in the form of its democratically elected parliament he did give evidence to the United States Congress and what I think were imperfect formats which didn't allow sustained questioning and scrutiny and then also to the European Parliament in a closed meeting where in the unique format all the questions the question has had to ask all their questions in one go upfront and mr. Zuckerberg could just choose the ones he wanted to reply to and then they moved on so I think if Facebook really wanted to demonstrate its commitment to society it should make itself open to the Parliament societies elected that at the heart of our democracy the chair said in her opening remarks as well that Facebook on a good side you might say is connects people around the world that it connects 2.2 billion regular users of the platform well we don't really know that we don't know how many of those accounts are real we don't know how many of them are duplicate we only have Facebook's word for it that's the number of people that they serve there is no independent auditing or scrutiny of this platform unlike almost any other media channel it connects people around the world but that connection can be used for bad as well as good and so I think the motion tonight is not a motion to say Facebook is evil or Facebook has bad intentions or that Facebook is run by people to get up in the morning and think about the harm that they can do but nevertheless it's a company whose creators are causing harm to society it's a harm that they are aware of it is being amplified by their systems it is something that they could do something about and they choose not to and that is my principal contention with the company and the way that is being run the first thing we have to consider when looking at social media platforms like Facebook is that they are not truly platforms in the sense of the word they've built there on the basis they claim to be neutral platforms that it is a platform where other people share content and if there's bad content out there it's because bad people have put it there but when you go onto your Facebook newsfeed you don't see an organic feed of the last thing your friends posted you see a mixture of all sorts of things you see a mixture of advertising targeted by people micro targeting you with information they want you to see you see posts coming directly from facebook groups straitens at the top of your newsfeed maybe groups that you didn't know you joined or forgotten you joined or maybe you've changed their name since you first joined them and they're sharing with you political content and other content they think you might find interesting you will also see content that is selected for you by Facebook curated for you by Facebook based on what it thinks you're interested in and the sole purpose of the newsfeed is to keep you on the platform for as long as possible now if this was just a place where people shared relatively benign anecdotes and fun pieces of information then that would be one thing but these are also tools that have been laid open to political campaigning by hidden actors as part of the inquiry my select committee ran we were concerned the political communications through Facebook run without people knowing the information they're receiving we live in a democracy but there's a lot more to a democracy than holding elections and having votes people vote in Russia but I would challenge the panel to argue that Russia is a free and open democracy in the way that we would know it to be a true democracy to be a true healthy society depends on people being informed making informed choices casting votes holding debates based on information that they know if people's principle gateway where they gain their information and social media platforms like Facebook in Europe are are we're about a third of people further citizens regularly get their news in other countries that percentage is far higher and yet the information they see can be gained by external actors run influenced by campaigns of disinformation that is something that we should be concerned about it is far too easy for people to be targeted based on their political opinions through sites like Facebook and I would even question not only the ethics of but the legality of it to the fact that if you choose not to disclose your political affiliations and beliefs when you create your Facebook profile but nevertheless the platform can guess what they are and sell that information to an advertiser I think is a complete breach of the European data protection laws that were put in place to protect data and information about people's religious beliefs their ethnicity their sexual orientation but yet that information is being guessed every day by platforms like Facebook and sold to advertisers Facebook has also been found in recent investigations not just to be selling advertising in that way based on a deep data analysis and profile or view as a user but it is also making information available to advertisers based on topics you might be interested in now I'm a Manchester United supporter if I want to receive advertising from people that want to sell me Manchester United products I wouldn't have a problem with that but you know was it right that the LA Times in its investigation found that there was an advertising category based on people that have an interest in high-ranking Nazis that you could advertise to people on Facebook are interesting gurbles that after the Pittsburgh synagogue attack there was an advertising category on Facebook where you could target people who believed there was a genocide against white people in America now why are these categories there why is that every time they're identified the company says they shouldn't be there and apologizes and takes them down there is a failure to police the site properly and the activities of people who use the site and its systems and its tools to reach their audiences there was considerable concern about the Cambridge analytic scandal and it was a scandal because the company used data gathered by an academic to help micro targeting and profiling of electors in America and in other countries as well people who have given their data to Facebook never realized that data could be gathered by other people and used for intentions they'd never given their consent for and to target messaging out them and try and influence the way they think about the world and the way they vote in elections it's even more egregious that it's not just being done by consultancies in countries like the UK or the USA but being done by foreign governments as well and many of you will be familiar with the investigation into the ads run by the Russians targeting voters in America during the 2016 presidential elections but let's remember that these were adverts paid for in rubles run through Facebook supposedly approved by the Facebook and Czech team using facebook advertising targeting tools committing a federal offense in America which was to use foreign money to target American voters in an election when Facebook was initially asked to investigate whether there had been Russian interference on the platform by the US Senate Intelligence Committee it refused to do so and then after pressure did and look for the lowest of low hanging fruit which was the purchasing of ads I remember asking Facebook whether on the back of that investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee they would similarly conduct a review for us to say well if this had taken place in America using Facebook targeting tools and Russian money to contact voters had it happened in the UK had their Russian out had the Russians bought ads in the UK using the same technology and techniques during the brexit referendum and they refused to tell me they said well it's not our job to investigate if you can prove it happened we'll look but we don't have to look for you now if I was running a bank and I said there's someone there who I think's laundering money but the authorities have not asked me to look for it therefore I'm a no obligation to do so the Matt banker would lose his license he'd be under investigation serious action would be taken but there's no such obligation or responsibility for the technology platforms and that has to change we are facing a technological revolution in the way we consume information but we're not consuming organically or selecting it as we used to it's being targeted at us but to bring in a different company to show I don't have a beef or face book no viewers on YouTube for example only select 30% of the content they see 70% of it is played to them by the platform we are not necessarily exercising free will in what we see it's being played back to us when that can be influenced by people spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in our society turn ethnic groups against each other to give a commit to facilitate the Commission the committing of crimes and atrocities has happened in Miami then we should be concerned about this but also the advances in technology bringing things like deep fake films to the fore where people can create a totally fabricated film of a politician maybe speaking had enough like this saying something they never said obsessing people they never meant to speak to or dress and distribute it online like it was real then we should have a problem with that and that's why I recently took this up with Facebook in terms of the distortion of the film of Nancy Pelosi the third most senior politician in America in a fake film made to appear as if she was incapable of holding the office that she holds now YouTube recognized that that films a distortion seeking to undermine confidence in a major public figure in America and ordered it to be taken down and Facebook said it's a matter of interpretation it's a matter for people to make their own minds up about that we are in the foothills of this technology it will be used to try and influence the outcome of elections very soon if companies like Facebook want to be seen to be responsible and protecting our society they will demonstrate they they will use their unique power to do that and to intervene in these egregious cases rather than sitting back and waiting for the authorities to come to them we cannot afford to wrest democracy in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg we have to take back control of it for ourselves and defend it ourselves because over the last eight years the companies have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to do it by themselves Thank You Damian our first speaker against the motion Facebook is damaging society is Dex toric Barton he's former head of executive communications for facebook over the last decade he has advised some of Silicon Valley's most prominent leaders and companies and he was Mark Zuckerberg speech writer from 2012 to 2016 Dex thanks Aaron for being here I want to begin with a story when you think about a facebook employee or somebody who would have worked at the company a lot of times you're thinking of the caricatures that the media present to you when you think of Mark Zuckerberg you probably think of somebody in their early 20s still from that portrayal in the social network somebody wearing flip-flops in a hoodie somebody who probably doesn't take life too seriously so I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself just to kick start this discussion um I never thought that I'd work at Facebook and I never thought that I worked in the private sector actually because for all my life I was driven by this urge to go and serve communities and to bring people together and I'll tell you why that is I was born in this country in London as an outsider my mother who is over there hi mom she came to this country in the 1970s as an immigrant from Malaysia and she was a NHS nurse for four and a half decades my father was a refugee from Burma who grew up in poverty in India before coming to this country in the 1950s and I vividly remember what it was like growing up in Kent not too far from Damian's constituency in the 1980s and the 1990s dealing with the kind of challenges that somebody who's mixed race coming from that kind of background would face I remember the neo-nazi who live next door yelling at my father go back to Pakistan and my father saying it was India actually I was drawn all my life to work on bringing people together from different cultures and communities and that's why I ended up in 2008 working at the United Nations a place I thought I'd probably spend most of my career but somehow I ended up at Facebook and the reason I went there had nothing to do with making a quick buck trying to make some money out of Facebook stock it was all about finding new ways to bring people together something that is innately rooted in Facebook's culture as a company and its mission of connecting the world and you can scoffer that all you like but that is exactly what brought me there what brings many many people to Facebook we are not the hoodie wearing vandals that the media would like you to believe the value of connectivity is something that all of us have experienced through Facebook if we've used that and I'd like to ask for a show of hands at this point who in this room is on Facebook that's a lot of people I should probably have asked who's not on Facebook but all of you see everyday what that means in your lives it is but friends the family that we're able to connect with it is the more than 90 million businesses around the world using Facebook to grow their businesses it is the more than 1 billion dollars raised on Facebook for nonprofits since 2015 it's the protestors in Sudan who used whatsapp and Facebook to bring down the dictatorship of Omar al-bashir very recently and are now using those platforms to protest against the military dictatorship that has followed it is the more than 20,000 volunteers in the group on Facebook that I joined when I chose to go off and volunteer on the refugee crisis in lesbos in 2015 and every day it is the little moments not even those big moments or the data points which I could rattle off till I run out of time it is the grandparents you can connect with their grandchildren on Facebook if there's the long-lost friends and friends on the other side of the world who we are able to stay connected to it is being able to share baby pictures with our friends or when we've had enough baby trip pictures some puppy videos in my case I follow a number of lovable raccoons there's one called pumpkin I urge everyone to follow pumpkin his videos hilarious and will tell you somebody who really does know the value of Facebook and this is why I brought my friend up on stage Damian Collins Facebook page more than 4,000 followers on Damian's page Damian is a regular poster on Facebook which makes me think that even Damian recognizes the value of participating in Facebook for a democracy I don't think Damon's mad because of Facebook's impact on democracy I think he's max he didn't get enough followers so please follow Damian Damon I'm gonna like your page right now no one forced you to be on Facebook nothing prevents you from leaving that Network at any time the reason you are on it I believe is probably because even if you take it for granted and vote against our side of the motion you recognize that Facebook does something profoundly valuable now of course we know that Facebook has made plenty of mistakes I'm not up here to be some corporate shill I'm here to tell you that we need to solve these things but many of the solutions that you'll hear tonight from the other side are wrong and misinformed Facebook has not done enough on privacy people's expectations have changed over the years and they have kept up absolutely true Facebook were too slow to realize the extent of fake can use a misinformation on their platform in 2016 very true and Facebook even with all the best intentions in the world which truly were best intentions I believe most of the time they definitely had an optimistic view of human nature which didn't fully account for the kind of world that we live in today of course some of the challenges that Facebook faces are literally unprecedented it's a new set of threats that we face online and offline today and very few people including within our political class that I'll get to in a moment saw that coming but no private company has had to do what Facebook does today which is to manage the content that connects 2.2 billion people around the world no company has built a machine like Facebook an unprecedented achievement in human history the sort of thing that a century ago HG Wells would have been hailing the ability to connect in real time that kind of global community or as he wrote about it a century ago a global brain that doesn't excuse their mistakes but it means we should be wary of hindsight I think all of us have made mistakes and I would suggest that very few of us have corrected them in the way that Facebook has done investing billions of dollars in fighting back against disinformation against hate speech and protecting people on their platform when I left Facebook in 2016 there were 9,000 people working at the company now more than 30,000 people have been hired by Facebook to work on protecting but community or Facebook that's almost as many people as the entire home office or the BBC they have commissioned independent research they have hire whole teams to study the effect of Facebook on elections and on democracy could we ask the same of any other company and of course we've seen the results we didn't see widespread election interference on Facebook in the 2018 US elections or the recent EU elections we've made huge progress there Stanford has found that fake news on Facebook has declined by more than 50 percent since 2016 and advertising is now more transferred on Facebook than any other platform every ad you see on Facebook you can see who paid for it and who was targeted at and that's just not possible with TV print radio or billboards so why do we hate Facebook well it's what happens when you connect 2.2 billion people we have a network that represents a massive portion of humanity and we don't always like the reflection that we see there now the media would like you to think that Facebook caused all these problems but I promise you that before Facebook existed we did not all live in complete peace and harmony we did not all believe that the European Union was a fantastic thing everyone did not believe that vaccination was a great idea everyone did not believe in gun control there are huge divisions in our society society is a mess and that is a key feature of democracy I absolutely agree with you Damien that democracy is not just about elections it's the kind of society that we live in and we live in a society that is in many ways in chaos now the part that politicians completely leave out is their responsibility and their role in dividing the people just tonight of course we have the latest round of the conservative leadership election as if to remind us of the role of a certain set of folks in dividing this country more than ever we have had a whole generation of feckless technocrats and populist politicians who have worked to exploit those divisions in society and to fuel them Carol cut wallowing to be on the other side of this motion until she pulled out a few days ago and I was really disappointed because I was looking forward to challenging Carol's recent TED talk where she went to a room full of billionaires at Ted and said that the first thing she thought about is when she went back to her hometown and her home communities after brexit realized that people had voted with brexit and the first thing she thought was it was Facebook's fault really Carol I'm a huge remainer but the idea that Facebook was the real factor that swung that thing that shows exactly how out of touch our elites are and of course they love to leave out the role of traditional media in any other institutions in my day fake news used to be called the Daily Mail what about the politicians like Boris who were able to get away apparently with no consequences of saying that every day we were sending 350 million pounds to the European Union which couldn't better spend on the NHS isn't that the responsibility of us to deal with the source of fake news the lying politicians who lie to us that's a real source of faking news and of course when we think about the recent Christchurch videos everyone remembers the controversy around the live video that was shared on Facebook of the shooting Facebook took that down with an hour after it was exposed to a few hundred people the Daily Mail and the mirror put it up almost immediately allowing people to redownload that video without any watermarks and off it went into the Internet to be chased around what is the role and the of the media and where is the outrage from the media in monitoring that content so if this is a trial then I submit to you tonight that facts matter let us question how amazingly Plutus our elites are when it comes to technology a few weeks ago I was on Radio 4 and I remember talking to a member of parliament before I went on who admitted that until a couple of years ago he had never thought about Facebook interesting Damien just criticized the fact that we have algorithmic feeds on Facebook algorithmic feeds are essential to actually allow us to see anything we care about on Facebook because most of us have lots of friends in content and if you didn't see the things are actually prioritize you wouldn't probably see anything you cared about whatsoever so I submit to you tonight do not give in to the simplistic arguments of politicians who would blame Facebook and blame the tech industry for all of the ills of society Facebook did not start the fire they may well have provided some combustible material but they've been trying to put the damn thing out ever since let us talk about the shared responsibility of our politicians and our elites to go about solving these things and stop talking about this as a trial or calling the opposition digital gangsters we are here to fix the problems of society together thank you [Music] Thank You Dex I enjoyed your bold inveighing against politicians while sitting next to one on or to our third speaker for the motion is Nina Schick she as a technology expert whose work focuses on how artificial intelligence is reshaping democracy and geopolitics her research has focused on the next generation of disinformation in the form of AI generated deep fakes and Russian election interference Nina thanks move fast and break things that was literally the motto that Mark Zuckerberg drilled into his employees as he built the monolith that is now Facebook and old boy has Facebook move fast and it's broken a lot of things and this is due to Facebook's true nature as a fundamentally unethical business and it uses you you all of you as its product in combination these two factors collide to break things very quickly and at scale when you understand this the case that Facebook is damaging society becomes irrefutable so first let's look at Facebook's business what is it well we've heard it from Dex it's a benign wonderful social network it connects the world you know a third of us are on Facebook the kumbaya version absolutely not no don't be fooled by Facebook's Hallmark branding Facebook is not for your benefit and despite all the free services it provides it does not serve you Facebook is a company that relies on ad revenue it is designed to make cold hard cash dollar and it's super super good at it it's become one of the most successful companies in the world at doing that in the space of only 15 years nothing wrong with a successful business right absolutely the problem is that Facebook's business model is completely unethical and it like it relies on denying lying and obfuscating no where can we see this better than in Facebook's relationship with you Facebook has fine-tuned advertising to an exact and automated science and the way that it does this is completely new and powered by the revolutions in data science and artificial intelligence which are only basically about twenty years old it does this by watching you by learning everything about you and the subconscious psychological drivers that drive you and influence your behavior it uses this information not only to influence you like traditional advertising has done but to actually change your behavior so Facebook has moved beyond the power of suggestion to drive their ad revenue to the power of mind control and to do this it needs data lots and lots of data and guess where that data comes from well the data comes from you and it comes from you without you your consent their surveillance goes deep it has unilaterally built a one-way mirror to glimpse constantly and unrelentingly into the innermost sanctum of your private life this includes and we saw how many Facebook users there were when Dex asked earlier every message you've ever sent every message that's ever been sent to you access to your microphone access to your camera your contacts your email your call history your browsing history even when you closed Facebook it continues to track your movements through the internet and there's so so so much more in terms of how it tracks your data and surveil you is there anybody here who doesn't have one of the key Facebook products I'm talking about Facebook Instagram and what's up okay so do you guys think you're safe yeah well you're wrong because Facebook tracks even those people who don't use their services and they do this by creating non user profiles on you each one with a unique number so they can identify you even when you leave as I have done they reserve the right to continue to use your data so forget the spiel about all the free stuff you get and how connected we are you're a commodity for Facebook Facebook monitors controls and experiments on you like lab rats our private data is taken to those who Facebook really serves the people that generate their revenue their clients and sold so that they can get you to do what they want you to do and these clients can be anyone advertisers foreign governments propagandists campaigners whoever pays to get in so remember you are not the user you are the product and this is where Facebook's unethical business practice collides with mass behavioral control to break things I work in politics and I have seen this spectacular breaking of things for his hand found it really interesting how Dex tried to blame politicians for it and absolve all of facebook's responsibility this is something that zach is very very good at doing himself so first I saw this through my work in brexit simply put the leave side were better at understanding how data could be used to manipulate voters intentions and it might be hard to believe now but in 2015 before the referendum people really didn't care about Europe less than 10 percent of the public said it was a top concern for them well the leave campaign made them care and they did run their campaign predominantly through Facebook data and learn how to use voters emotional drivers to make them feel that it was actually riskier to stay in the EU than to leave it and that's how they got their core messages which would impact the mindset of the electorate the first that Turkey was soon gonna join the European Union and a second that the EU is sent 350 million pounds every week which would be better spent on the NHS both of those claims are untrue but that didn't matter these messages were served over and over and over again via Facebook ads which were able to specifically target exactly those who would be most susceptible and the result was come hell or high water did those voters go out on the day and get to the poll we don't even have full clarity on how this was done his Facebook doesn't need to tell us everything and I really have to commend the work done by my fellow panelists Damian in trying to shed some light on what exactly happened one thing that is clear is that leave held back the majority of their budget and dumped dumped it on these type of Facebook ads in the final ten days before the referendum they targeted about seven million people in the final stretch and in my mind this is what gave them the decisive edge second I saw also how profoundly Facebook can break things through my work on Russian Election interference I was working with a group of global leaders until earlier this year to understand Facebook's role in this affront to democracy first thing to note is that there was a coordinated and systemic attack on the u.s. election by the Russians even though the useful idiot who's in the White House as the Russians like to call him still denies this this included targeted influence operations on Facebook and Instagram it was called Project lacta and it started in 2015 Russian agents saturated the US political discourse building fake pages communities and personas that were designed to look authentic and American their well thought out strategy was to grow an entrenched tribalism on all sides of the political debate and they would do this by buying ads and pushing content on Facebook and Instagram to instill pride in these distinct identities and it didn't matter what your identity was you know he could be black and proud latina and proud feminist and proud the Russians had a group for you these groups were then dripped fed with political messages that exploited real grievances so that these people would feel angry and that society was not working for them the idea was to increase people's feelings of isolation and the scary thing is that no one was immune although the conventional narrative says oh it's all about dumb Trump voters it was the entire political spectrum that was targeted and not all the content was Pro Trump it was universally however anti-hillary and how that actually worked out is that there was a huge drive to suppress voter off voter turnout on the Left I know that's laughed about you know Facebook swung the referendum or the election but Facebook has actually before they were faced with all these troubles done its own psychological experiments on its users showing how they can pretty easily manipulate voters to carry off me to attack deaths later ok so one final sentence final sentence remember Facebook would I be here tonight Facebook is unethical you are their product and this means that it breaks things don't let it break our democracy thank you thank you [Music] our last speaker against the motion Facebook is damaging society is Ed Vaizey the Conservative MP for Wantage and did cut he served as Minister for culture communications and creative industries from 2010 to 2016 Edie thanks very much so I want to thank you all for coming to this event advertised on Facebook and I wonder what the hell I'm doing here you know I've just been insulted by my colleague it's meant to be on my side as a lying politician who's come to lie to you and I don't think it's gonna be good for my career either last week you know I really want to be Secretary of State for culture under the next conservative prime minister it's my dream job but I defended the BBC last week and now I'm defending Facebook I don't think I'm going to get this job I think it's gonna go to Boris backing Facebook bashing Damien Collins I want to be the first to congratulate you for that but I also don't know why I'm here because I've obviously won this debate already because I've been watching you I've been learning everything about you I'm exercising mind control over you that's what Nina said Facebook was doing and she's right you know in the last week Dex and I in concert with Mark Zuckerberg have pumped out adverts that none of you have really registered pointing out how marvelous Facebook is pictures of Mark Zuckerberg cuddling kittens and the like and so I know that you're all going to vote in favor because you're all on Facebook and therefore you've lost the power to think and the power of free will that is the case against Facebook and I hope you forgive me if I say it's a little exaggerated the reauthorize I wonder why I'm here is because when I agreed to do this the person who brokered my introduction to intelligence squared said did you agree to do this and I said yes and she laughed and said I'm so pleased nobody else would do it because I totally accept that Facebook is the scapegoat for everything it's the scapegoat for the fact that your kids wouldn't go to bed tonight through to the fact that Damian Collins candidate Boris Johnson is going to be our next prime minister but it's just too easy to blame Facebook for everything it's absurd and it's lazy as Dex acknowledged Facebook has its faults no one will claim a company of that size is perfect but we know why Facebook is being targeted it's a big hairy beast in the middle of our lives in the 1990s it was Microsoft that was targeted now Microsoft can do no wrong IBM was targeted when I first started doing the media brief I couldn't go out to an event without the BBC getting the blame for absolutely everything it is the biggest target out there and it's going to get the blame for everything but let's look at the charges against it Damien at least unlike say members of the US Senate does at least understand Facebook's business model the reason people use Facebook and I do have a MPs Facebook page but I don't use it personally I personally think it's an absolutely terrible user experience but I do I admit the love Instagram and you can't be a Conservative MP given the number of plots going on in the party at the moment without being a member of at least 25 whatsapp groups but we know we like the business model he's advertising guess what when you go on Facebook you see adverts targeted at you this has never been done before welcome to the Tesco Clubcard the people who invented that got OBEs in the Queen's Birthday Honours this year the Tesco Clubcard apparently was able to tell you a year beforehand whether you were gonna get divorced it was able to tell you all sorts of things based on the stuff you were buying in Tesco but Tesco wasn't didn't have 2.2 billion customers and it wasn't accused of watching you learning everything about you and exercising mind control Damon didn't bring up the election saga but Nina did and I'm glad she did Facebook apparently is to blame for Trump and it's to blame for brexit I mean Cambridge analytic your first solve their data to Ted Cruz he didn't do too well they apparently sold it to Trump he actually lost the election in terms of the public vote the mind control that was exercised meant that three million people more people voted for Hillary Clinton a far duller candidate than President Trump and I'm not endorsing President Trump but when it comes to entertainment value during an election Trump was pretty far ahead but the point is Alex Cogan was a Cambridge academic doing research he paid the people who filled in his data questionnaires he contacted them on Facebook but he paid them to supply him with data because he was doing research and he solved that data to Cambridge analytically I'm not here to defend them snake oil salesmen who oversold their product to the politicians who was stupid enough to buy it but Alex Cogan is an innocent party and let me say that thing that all middle aged men now say at an evening event can I just recommend a really good podcast Michael Lewis liars poker the Big Short not a man to be afraid of taking on big business has a brilliant podcast about the death of the referee in u.s. society but he has a brilliant podcast with Alex Cogan in that series which I urge you to listen to where he defends Alex Cogan and points out that his data analysis was perfectly legitimate but it is too easy and frankly astonishingly patronizing and I hasten to say I am a firm remainer but astonishingly patronizing to say to the people that voted brexit that they were so stupid they could only have voted brexit because they were targeted by Facebook advertising what absolute nonsense they were targeted by a bus they were targeted by Michael Gove they were targeted by Boris Johnson but they were targeted by 25 years of relentless attacks on Europe but maybe also they just didn't want to be members of the European Union and people like me have to accept that but the idea that they were manipulated by Facebook is nonsense and as for fake news have you read The Daily Telegraph recently we worry now about the fake anti-vaccine x' on social media where did they originate 10 years ago accepted our mainstream media we're really worrying about fake news let's look closer to home perhaps at some of our newspapers what is Facebook good for well when our guys are winning Facebook is a hero President Obama was fated and applauded for his use of Facebook and indeed for doing something very similar to what Alex Cogan did which is to collect data from people and analyze it and sell them targeted Obama adverts he was hailed as a genius and a seer because he was our guy and therefore Facebook was a good thing and his Facebook's stuffed at the moment with terrible and evil campaigns these are the top campaigns on Facebook at the moment in terms of how much is being paid to run these campaigns the need to impeach guess who act now on Climate Planned Parenthood and progressive Turner the three politicians spending the most on Facebook tell us which party they're from Liz Warren Joe Biden Kamla Harris the top trending themes on Facebook last year International Women's Day March for our lives and the World Cup and in here in little old brexit Britain the Royal Wedding 2.2 billion users are using Facebook 2 million UK businesses use Facebook and half of them claim that Facebook has improved their business 1 million nonprofits around the world use Facebook to raise money and a billion dollars has been spent on training people with digital with digital training Facebook faces a huge amount of issues it is I accept a company the like of which we have never seen before and it is growing up with us with this new technology but you heard already about the Christchurch massacre and how Facebook did its best to take stuff down only to see it pop up on newspaper sites and then other people cut the video to stop Facebook taking down recut videos it's fighting terrific battles it's up to us as politicians me as a politician not to simply say that is Facebook's fault but to come into the public square and debate what we do about it so yes let's regulate political advertising we regulate it on television we regulate it on Billboard's and newspapers let's regulate it on Facebook let's have a duty of care so that companies like Facebook do act it appropriately to take down bad content let's combat extremism let's do our best to stop our children accessing adult content let's make the terms and conditions of how you use Facebook clearer but don't be lazy don't take a shortcut and don't say everything that's wrong with our country is because of Facebook there are plenty of other people ahead of Facebook in the queue thank you very much to all our speakers in what I'm afraid will probably be a deeply triggering moment for both ed and Amy and I've got some results from a ballot to read out these are were taken before the debate so the motion we have in front of us not this not this one not this time Facebook is damaging Society as you came in you voted for 52% you voted against 21% and 27% of you were undecided so this will be the biggest upset since I guess will restrict winning the Tory leadership if these guys manage to overtake it but maybe their speeches have impressed you in a minute the ballot boxes will come around you'll get a chance to vote again but I first of all I just want to ask a few questions Damian I'm gonna start with you because we do have to deal with this everybody in the audience no matter what they feel about Facebook most people are on it you're on it if it's so bad why you want it well like many politicians I use Facebook and principies as a tool to connect with my constituents I must admit after the Cambridge analytics kind of like deleted the Facebook app from my smartphone and the Instagram app as well because I was worried about the huge amount of data it was gathering I think before the Cambridge analytic a scandal and no one knew that if you had an Android phone Facebook was keeping a wreck or a metadata record of every phone call you made and every text message that you sent and I think the I think dexon and erred grossed over massively what the Cal came jhinezka scandal was about it aleksander Cogan was using a special privilege he had Facebook to gather data not just about people that used his app but all of their friends as well who'd never given their consent for that data to be used he was using that data to create psychological profiles of the people that had engaged with the survey and all all of their friends they believed at Cambridge at the Cambridge psychometric sensitive this data made it easier to predict how someone will be react to a given scenario or could be influenced in debate that asking their closest friend what they thought about an issue it came at analytical believed that it increased voter turnout and supported voter suppression in elections and the difference between what Barack Obama was doing and what Cambridge onalaska was doing it has been demonstrated in the and Harvard Kennedy School survey of the 2016 election Obama when he was doing data profiling had about six target groups that he used for the Cruz campaign of the Iowa caucus alone they had over 150 different profile groups people receiving different communications based on their psychological profile and this is the power of these tools power but also lack of consent and that is why there needs to be proper supervision of this so yeah I have a Facebook page with a small number of users I have far more follow me on Twitter than fill my facebook page and I use it as a utility for my constituents to engage me through Facebook but I've deleted it from my phone because I think it gathers too much data it doesn't need well let me put that across the decks because you said you couldn't defend Cambridge analytic on what they were doing but there's plenty of things that are happening internally to Facebook that have been questioned for example being able to target and excluding certain racial groups for example that when that was found out at Facebook went hands up won't do that again but they were still letting people do it in the first place is there not been a massive massive overreach in terms of what Facebook lets itself do Facebook has absolutely made mistakes plenty of them it's built an advertising platform that is unlike anything in history and some of the errors they may have been utterly boneheaded and that speaks to the complexities of building that kind of system which has never been done before but the question is out of all of that and by the way both the breaches that led to carriage analytical and that specific instance you mentioned have been fixed Facebook has massively changed its policies to respond to that what happens after that has Facebook built some sort of magic machine in its basement that changes all of our minds that gives us mind control if that were true Facebook will be the most popular company on earth and a whole room of people wouldn't have turned up in London on a Tuesday night to debate whether it's damaging Society so the idea that this thing that has been built at Facebook is this nefarious machine that asana tapped into your life is a control annoyed behavior it's just nonsense Nino you talked about mind control and I want to put it to you do you see Facebook as a car or a cigarette is this something that can kill people you know has damaging effects but also has uses as well or is this something that even used as it is intended is dangerous which is it sure of course the some positive effects using Facebook but the biggest problem is that Facebook executives always spin this narrative that somehow their platform is this unalloyed good for the world and they don't engage with the very very serious criticisms tonight I mean everybody on this side has said there have been big problem fair enough but I would then also argue that the risks that Facebook poses are much much greater than the benefits and because this is so unprecedented DAX has already pointed out they've built you know the most sophisticated marketing and ad machine that the world has ever seen they have more data than has ever been known this is not your Tesco Clubcard you know this is as I said Facebook if you go and try and download the information that Facebook has on you which you can't do you'll find that maybe you'll have about they'll have about 500,000 pages of info on you okay so it's not the club card so when I say mind control I know that the opposition has kind of lofted off chortle chortle isn't this ridiculous conspiracy theory but this is something that Facebook has admitted themselves before they got into loads of trouble about fakes kid the whole Cambridge analytical scandal they used to be quite proud of these experiments that they would run on their users and they would publish them in academic journals so government you say they've admitted them but in isn't it more safe to say they've claimed them because they are an advertising run business and they're selling a product to advertisers so of course they'll say spend money in our platform and we can make people buy your goods we can make them do this and that why should we take their claims about what they can do to people at face value because I would suggest that from my experience of working both on Russian interference and in the brexit campaign that Facebook definitely had a major role to play and if you say that Facebook didn't really have a role in this and isn't it so ridiculous let's laugh at it then you're not fundamentally engaging with a very serious question and the big problem with Facebook is that it basically has the opportunity to act with impunity because this is so unprecedented that we don't even realize how we should start regulating it so people are looking at antitrust regulating ads but it's so much bigger than that by the way the the model that Facebook operates on it's what I argue is an unethical business model which relies on your data you're the product it isn't only Facebook Google does the same thing so this is a much much bigger problem actually what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this to air because you ended up your speech by saying a list of things I think probably this side of the room would also agree with the things that could be done to tackle Facebook where is the evidence that Facebook will do anything without being kicked and dragged kicked and screaming through the courts by the European Union by who is big enough to regulate Facebook and frankly aren't they arrogant enough to not don't do anything unless they are forced to well most of us might be arrogant enough not to do anything and let's be forced in to a certain extent it depends on who's forcing you to do that I mean I've made the point that Facebook is one of the big tech companies and therefore is a target and one of the categories that are targeting obviously the newspapers because Facebook has taken a lot of business from them but I don't see why you should say that Facebook is arrogant and won't do anything unless it's regulated when we regulate broadcasters like the BBC ITV in Channel four and we regulate Tesco in fact we regulate food and you know food was famously food regulation famously started on the Teddy Roosevelt when he read an article he read that famous book about the meat industry it's quite obvious to me that you know Facebook and indeed Google and indeed Twitter are all putting out content and we are all used to content regulation and when I was a minister I was always in favor of tech regulation and I would get people like Dex in fact they wouldn't call me a lying politician but they call me an ignorant politician not you Dex obviously personally you know the tech industry is very very bad and engaging but because you want to regulate something appropriately so for example if you're abused on Twitter you get a proper response at a certain time line and you go to an independent adjudicator to decide say on the abuse your suffering is perfectly appropriate but doesn't necessarily mean that in and of itself it's a bad medium or is damaging society and that's why I decided to defend Facebook because there are lots of things I would like to see in terms of tech regulation just as I would like to see in car regulation food regulation and so on and so forth but doesn't mean it's inherently a bad thing all that it's damaging our society okay in that case we'll go to audience questions so there are microphones coming around to the room if you can see everybody I would like to take the first question for from a woman just to make up for the pay gap really so please volunteer if you'd like to speak can I get some number three hi we were just one thing that we thought was really unclear with what you've spoken about is at no point was the psychological impact ever discussed on Facebook particularly considering that anxiety and depression is rising and well there is a lot of increased knowledge on these things that could mean that's why it's more show still Facebook Instagram sure we have something to answer for here brilliant thank you very much it's there some one by one hello hi I'm Dex my question is for you how unbiased would you say Facebook is and I'm not just talking about politics I'm talk about everything because I saw Mark Zuckerberg you know we took of his first shot in that interview he's got that Illuminati symbolism there's obviously a hidden agenda so would you say they're unbiased or biased thank you it's a big question and then we got another one over on this side of the room number two hi so I found out that I'm not actually millennial I'm a generation down and I got my Facebook account in 2009 when I was 13 years old and the first post I put on there was me asking a girl to go and get an ice-cream and that's how I'm women and all my friends found out I wasn't entirely straight did I make a meaningful choice at 13 to come out to everybody I knew and our network social it was always the best option for people who don't can't always make choices for themselves and how do we protect people who's an entire lives are lived online can I just ask you a follow-up question which was what was the was there any fallout from that for you I I think it was I never I never got a chance to actually talk about the fact that I wasn't stroking my mom like we just agreed that it happened we didn't talk about it again it's a nothing it was a mixed experience not neither positive nor negative it's just you want to have a question about the choice and the and the risk for age of responsibility yeah great thank you much well let's start with this this question the psychological impact I want to throw it to you guys because facebook did his famous study as Nina said published where it found out that it could essentially manipulate users emotionally could put lots of things in their faith timeline that kind of made them sad and actually isn't that a big problem if there is a social network that can do that to you so the fascinating thing about this research and we are in the infancy of this research this is an area that academics have been scrambling to get more data on really we actually don't yet know the full impact of online tools on people's well-being we do know that there are some studies which show that yes people get more anxious or data shows that people are correlated as being more anxious when they're using social media it of course doesn't say that that is causation that's correlation can be a different thing that the media likes to report it differently do people who are already incredibly anxious spend more time sitting on their computers using Facebook rather than interacting with other people we don't know enough about that there's been a wealth of research which shows the opposite actually though which is that people who are going through social crises who are in need of support actually get a ton of emotional support and solidarity from being connected with their friends and loved ones on Facebook so actually this is a legitimate area which deserves more research but there is in fact a shoe on both sides on this point that should you want to continue oh no I'm and I'm gonna throw it aside because I think we need to talk about the flip side of this which is that we know we have a loneliness epidemic in this country actually there are a lot of people who take the older people who use Facebook to stay in touch with people was gonna at my house is you know is you all signed the argument taking into account there's positive psychological effects at Facebook can have so what I'm saying is not that everybody who uses Facebook becomes more depressed what I'm saying is that Facebook has the power to tweak your emotional response so that means you can either be made to feel happier or you can be made to feel more depressed and there is a study you can find it does it's published in an academic journal Facebook put this out back in the day before it got very very touchy about this kind of psychological experiment where they played with the data of the news feeds of millions of its users and so can they influence them to make them sadder and more anxious and more depressed or can they influence them to make them happier and feel more positive about life and what they found is absolutely they can do that so the point is but in order to not only that it can manipulate your emotional state but also that they run these kind of experiments on you without your consent none of the people who were in this study had any idea that this was going on you can you imagine a scientific researcher trying to do something like that there's all kinds of ethical frameworks there's peer review but Facebook just does this willy-nilly and just because they don't publish their research anymore doesn't mean that they don't continue to do it and if you talk to X product designers who've since left Facebook all of them say that if you've ever been a member of Facebook then unbeknownst to you you have definitely been some part of some psychological experiments I mean I think you wanted to come in on this just two things when you first used X is point about data study in the Facebook data Facebook doesn't allow itself to me to face outside scrutiny her plenty of universities institutions that for years have been saying they would like to understand more about the sort of data Facebook gathers and what it says and what the impacts of all those harms could be of excessive use of social media and that data's just not made available so it's partial because we're not allowed to see and I think even this is effectively utility that connects there's a large number of people there should be more scrutiny second thing I'll say about depression I'm concerned as nothing many people are you see stories of sickly teenage girls and other young wonderful people sharing images or self-harm and interesting in categories that could be construct construed as harmful and we say well why don't the social media companies do more to identify those users and we discussed this with Instagram and they gave evidence to the Select Committee if I was a charity and I went to Facebook and said I've got a list of Facebook profiles here of people that have come to us and needed help I want to use that list to create an advertising audience of other people that are a data match for those people who might share the same characteristics then Facebook would sell me that audience so if they can use that technology to run ads and help other people run ads why can't they use that technology to more proactively identify people that need help and steer them away from the content that could cause them harm but I'm gonna I'm gonna come to ED on this one as well because I think it relates to the woman over there's question about how young is too young to be able to make these choices for yourself to reveal very personal things about yourself in what is essentially a semi public forum well I agree I agree and I that is a very unfortunate example and no one is saying that you you know we're all as I said earlier we're all growing up with this technology and people going onto Facebook in 2009 are very different from the people who go onto Facebook in 2019 you know my kids are 12 and 11 and they're pretty I suspect digitally literate because they have grown up with these devices all their lives and the interesting thing about Facebook at the moment anyway is that most of these kids are not using Facebook they're all on platforms like twitch for example because they're all playing a lot of playing video games for example so I accept that Facebook can become a metaphor for how we as a society deal with an always-on digital culture Damon and I had a meeting earlier today with Common Sense Media which campaigns on tech issues but their last leg flying to Paris to get an award for a campaign that was targeted at adults tell him to put their phone down during dinner so we're all learning to live with his stuff but I don't accept what neither says you know we've got to get away we've got to grow up a bit and get away from this image of kind of Mark Zuckerberg whether he's wearing a hoodie or he's got a white cat on his kind of flicking a switch and throwing us all into a depression I mean it's just complete nonsense there are lots of that there is no doubt at all that companies like Facebook have a wealth of data and that is very attractive to academics in today let me cut you off very quickly in The Times today there is a pro Facebook piece saying Facebook you can use Facebook data to spot people with depression help them or indeed with diabetes God knows how but apparently yes okay well let's take some questions from your news because I know we've got lots of people one at the front there hello I just want to ask a question to the people on the left stage right do you think that social networks online social networks that connect up billions of people are inherently bad or do you think that they only become bad when then they're used in conjunction with advertising as a revenue model great at number one and I'm just wondering what you would respond to the like shift that Facebook is making towards privacy so and to end encryption of all private messages and also the clear history button that zach has promised which essentially means that it's going to clear all data so and I guess a more broad point that I'd like to make is that I think we have to be a society that allows room for forgiveness if people make mistakes I think we should encourage repentance and if you know if they show that they're sorry and they change thank you very much yeah a very good point number four would it help or hinder if Facebook and other social media platforms but Facebook in this instance was classified as a publisher in the same way that traditional media such as the Daily Telegraph and so on are and I'm just gonna take number three while we're there hi yeah this is the Dex um you accused politicians of being quite out of touch with society and I certainly don't disagree with that but sorry guys I would say that at least we can vote our MPs out how can we be guaranteed that Facebook executives are equally out of touch and yet there's no accountability for them well let's start with that if we accept the premise that whether or not we accept that Facebook is biased in any particular political direction any religious direction any of those other things nonetheless it is an enormous amount of power for one individual to have where is our ability to hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable Dex delete your Facebook right now you're on Facebook we all made informed choices to that wire on there you've come to a debate to debate whether Facebook is damaging of society if you truly believe that Facebook is damaging Society you are part of that it is amazing in all of these debates over and over again we completely ignore the personal responsibility that all of us have over our choices and this is not a point to say that we let facebook off the hook far from it in many ways this reminds me of the kind of debate that has been taking place in the field of climate change over the last couple of decades there have been a bunch of nihilists who've said because China opens a new coal-fired power plant every two days there's no point any of us doing a damn thing you can keep driving your gas guzzler you can keep polluting you can not bother doing any recycling none of us have a role to play in the change and it's ridiculous if you truly believe that Mark Zuckerberg is so villainous that he needs to be held to account delete your Facebook tell your friends to delete it to against us I mean I'm gonna cover you because isn't your analogy a little bit like saying the answer to climate change is for me to stop driving a car yes it's part of it I mean a part of it but it is really not that transport no substitute for wide pan governmental action absolutely it's both but that is your path to holding Facebook accountable and it's in your hands right now okay Lina are you at all convinced by Facebook's shift of privacy this idea about talking up I mean they had it was a big speech by Zuckerberg about the fact that it platforms like whatsapp that offer greater privacy this idea with clear history button his Facebook changing so that's what Zuckerberg says right and he also went in front of the US Senate committee and said I didn't know the Russians were hacking the election whilst the Facebook Ads team was literally being paid in rubles so the point is there is no accountability and every time something comes up and this has happened continuously time and time and time again Zuckerberg says his apology he does me a coppa and he says I'm gonna be better I'm gonna change things now it's about privacy he's saying privacy is at the heart of Facebook well he's also launching I don't know if you guys know this but Facebook's new project is to launch a cryptocurrency write a global clip cryptocurrency so that could cut out the banks and have the information on all of your financial transactions so they have even more data on you so take it with a pinch of salt as for social networks being inherently bad they're not because that the technology is net neutral it's how it's applied that makes it either good or bad and that's my argument against Facebook they have an unethical business product you're the product and that's what makes them very very dangerous and it's even more dangerous because they're not liable to any accountability okay let me throw that into you and it's why this idea you were very stirring in your speech about the failures of the traditional media which I particularly appreciated and I just want to know should we be treating Facebook more like a a publisher yeah I've never shied away from that I think there's a perfectly legitimate argument along those lines I mean my view in with all sorts of technology whether you're talking about uber or delivery or the gig economy and so on is that it presents new regulatory challenges and it's I think it's a mistake to try and force a comment like Facebook into a sort of analogue regulation and climate equal it's a mistake to leave it completely unregulated but something akin to publishing I talked earlier about the duty of care which is in the government's white paper that you are you hold facebook responsible for the content on its site in the sense that if it's content that's flagged up as illegal or dangerous or unacceptable within the norms of the society in which Facebook is operating then Facebook should use all reasonable endeavors to that content down and should be scrutinized about whether it did so so I think that is I think that is a fair point but in terms of Zuckerberg being accountable I mean Facebook is has a lot of different competitors I mean I mentioned twitch earlier we haven't talked about Google or Twitter or numerous other snap and numerous other social media companies that you can use and although I thought Dex put it perhaps a little harshly he is right in the sense that everyone is a customer of Facebook and I see what Nina is doing and it's very very clever manipulation of the audience and I've seen it in many other political debates but say you are the product is just complete and utter nonsense you don't go in and I'm sorry to keep bringing Tesco back and I know that Nima fixed SPO isn't a relevant bumbling small UK company not worthy of her attention now that you are the product when you go to Tesco or otherwise the customer and you're the customer of Facebook and as with any organization to which you give your customer you can walk away Damien I want to say if is there a point when you've done your hearings you've investigated that at the end you say there is a version of Facebook that I now agree with and is a good thing it's comes back tidy about social networks are they inherently badly is there a good version of Facebook out there well no they're not inherently bad and the fact that technology can connect people is a wonderful thing but the question is has it gone too far this is largely what Facebook is is a massive data collection business which stores huge quantities of data to sell advertising it is an advertising company they know it is different from Apple and other tech that way of being there's nothing wrong with being an advertising company but let's let's be really clear on what its core function is its core function is to sell surprise so Mark Zuckerberg does not get out of bed in the morning and worry about the user experience more than he worries about the advertising revenue and that's why we question is it necessary to gather data about people that don't use Facebook is it necessary to gather data about people when they're not on Facebook is necessary to gather data about all the phone calls people make and all the text messages people send it is it necessary to monitor the smartphone devices of people to see what other apps they're using so they can assess which apps they should buy and which apps they should crush now these are the sorts of commercial decisions Facebook make all the time and it's excessive and it's unnecessary now why was it the Facebook was allowing developers not just to gather data about the people using their tools but all of their friends as well without their consent now why is it that they use data to guess what you think guess what your beliefs are see and sell that to advertisers to this is not facilitating grandparents in sharing images of their grandchildren this is a massive surveillance exercise designed to sell advertising and we're right to question whether or not let me put a challenge to you because you may object to the business model but doesn't meet the threshold for damaging Society there are a lot of advertiser funded businesses and there's a lot of advertising out there is it inherently damaging Society does it meet that threshold well it depends what the tools are used for and I think we've heard consistently from Facebook index a bit this evening as well to say that principally the the problems are created not by Facebook but the people that use the tools is the people that do the advertising their political elites the decks referred to or it's the way that people engage with the content it's not inherently Facebook's fault I thought Dex is answer that if you want to hold Mark Zuckerberg to account to these Facebook was a brilliant source inked answer that I really thought Shauna I think but I think is a very true reflection of what people in facebook think he took a different industry imagine you lived in a town near an oil refinery and the oil refinery was ploy to polluting the river and you said how do we hold the owner of the refinery to account and you were told we'll stop driving a car now you will find that a ludicrous situation the idea that Facebook creates these products you've got no right to hold them to account for how they use those products or what they do with it all you can do is stop using them you're gonna chance to say this in your closing statements to answer a question okay all right you can ask him one question his facebook calls the brexit referendum result i wouldn't say in isolation that they did I think it was I think political communications through Facebook are a very important tool in both voter turnout and voter suppression and I think they're being used massively in America and around the world to do that and I think that is a disappointingly nuanced answer so I'm gonna go to finally I will ask you to keep them very tight please Edie you have two minutes to make your final case well I am starting my last speech by pointing out that thanks to the last week of manipulation I had won this debate and I want to start this speech by saying I've lost this debate I'm not only lost it because Helen announced the initial result was an eerie 52 percent a brick City style Breck's book results but uh judging from the audience reaction to my incredibly perceptive points and Damien's really clumsy you know blunt crude points I think I pretty much worked out that we've lost but I did it partly as an intellectual exercise but I've become convinced by who case because I do think genuinely that Facebook is like all big companies it has become a metaphor for the things that we don't like going on in our own country or elsewhere I mean a lot of us I suspect in this room did not like the referendum result so Facebook is to blame a lot of us don't really like advertising we don't really feel like to feel that we're being targeted or in any way manipulated so we can blame Facebook but I think when push comes to shove we all most of us use Facebook or users to Graham or use whatsapp find them useful products that fit seamlessly into our lives it does not mean that Facebook gets a free pass and that we shouldn't look at regulation and constantly adapt and look at how we regulate big companies just as we regulate everything else in our society and unlike most stories or meat I'm not opposed to good and sensible regulation [Music] Nina shake so I would make the case that Facebook is not only damaging Society but that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy arguing against the motion we literally had someone who's worked and pee her hand comes for Facebook and Google and somebody who served in high office who as a politician I think frankly should know better given the grunt democracy and the role that Facebook had both in the brexit referendum campaign and in the u.s. 2020 election it's not the time to kind of laugh it off in chortle chortle and say this is ridiculous no some very very serious things are happening these are very different times and that's largely to do with the huge advance in technology we see in the world all around us what we see happening with Facebook is not technological inevitability technology itself is neutral it's not good or bad but it's the way in which it is applied that can be damaging to society so I mean literally in the world the words of Dax the company has built a machine like the world has never seen before and I work in artificial intelligence so I understand the power of artificial intelligence this is not just your random advertising company artificial intelligence gathers all the data about you things that you don't even know about yourself to predict how not only how you're gonna feel today tomorrow but also what you might do in a year's time so I want you to understand this you are being tracked and monitored and for all of the people who laugh about this mind control or how you being manipulated you are also being manipulated so despite its fluffy experience exterior appearance I want you to know that Facebook at its heart has an unethical business model second you are the product forget all the free stuff they give you your data is being mined and harvested constantly without your consent and knowledge even if you walk away they have your data so finally it breaks things and it is not compatible with democracy Thank You Nina [Music] thanks toach bomb Facebook is a tool and if you think of it like a hammer it's something that you can use to build a house well we can use the Bosch tone in the head where it can be used for immense good or it can use for immense evil but we know that the things that Facebook has done for billions of people around the world have mostly been incredibly good it has built the most powerful home of all it has built a global community of 2.2 billion people we take that power for granted every single day all of us have got used to carrying supercomputers around in our pockets all of us have got used to the ability to connect with our friends and loved ones whenever we choose all of us have got used to the ability to find an interesting event to go to on a rainy Tuesday night in London like this debate but that is something that is revolutionary it is something it is profoundly good yes Facebook has made mistakes yes there are huge challenges that play out on Facebook every day but the criticisms that you hear over and over again are based on so much terrible magical technologically illiterate thinking I was taking copious notes as Nina and Damien criticized Facebook in a way it was almost overwhelming to take notes of all the things that were wrong everything from the notion that Facebook has a data model or an adze model that is unethical as sells your data Facebook doesn't sell your data the idea that Facebook is busy concealing all its research literally a few minutes after we are told that Facebook have been putting out research and academic study you can go to research FB comm and look at all their research it's publicly accessible along with applications to invite for academic partnerships you can actually do both Facebook so there's a whole bunch of things that Facebook is doing and the critics hope that you won't notice what they're actually doing so you will listen to that line of magical thinking which is that Facebook is involved in mind control and that all of us have lost the agency to make decisions about what we're doing Facebook is not the root of all evil our society it does not make all your Turin anxious it did not lead to the Russians attacking us in 2016 our society is in chaos Facebook is part of the solution to those problems by connecting us but it doesn't solve all those things on our own that is up to us thank you Damien Collins there was a question earlier on which as a panel we didn't really address where someone put is sort of is there paraphrase finally is there redemption for Mark Zuckerberg is that is that possible and it is possible but I think it starts with an acceptance of the problems that the company has got itself into and the problems therefore I think it's cause society you know for example it would be good to get a straight answer about when Mark Zuckerberg was first told about the Cambridge analytic a data breach it would be good to get a straight exact answer for the company about which other apps are under investigation which other companies took data in the way came journalistic I did what happened to that data I have users been notified about it we still don't know basic things like that the Facebook research is largely commissioned by itself or it doesn't allow itself open to external investigators to come in so if for example we wanted to know with the Christchurch terror attack why did it take 17 minutes for someone to detect the Facebook live feed was being used in this way that what were the key knows that we use to distribute that content through the platform what action has been taken against the accounts that did it we don't know the answers to those questions we've got no right to get the answers to those questions even though some people might say these things are quite important to society Facebook has become and companies like Facebook have become a massive utility that connects all our lives they've been allowed to expand by acquiring other companies like Instagram and whatsapp which give them a massive leadership and advantage in this category they are an effective monopoly within it and therefore it's right that we challenge them about whether they use the huge amount of power or wealth they've accrued ethically and responsibly and every time we try and push back and every time we try and ask questions and every time we invite them to come to Parliament they consistently give the minimum amount of information that they can and withhold a lot of other areas of information and deliberately exclude themselves some questioning if Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook want Redemption if they want what they see is this unceasing tide of criticism to stop there's a very easy way to do it we just make yourself accessible make yourself accountable and answer the questions people are put into you [Music] I have the results of the final vote you may learn that going into it our motion about whether or not Facebook is damaging Society for was 52% against was 21% and 27% of you were undecided the most exciting result is the fact that far from 27% of you being undecided only 1% know our so we have at least brought some clarity so they debate whether it's the way that our panelists would like we all say the results are Facebook is damaging Society for 59% and against 40% [Music] I think both sites can go home with their heads held high only means to me to thank intelligence squared and all of our speakers good night [Applause] you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 16,738

Keywords: mark zuckerberg, privacy, data, helen lewis, dex torricke barton, ed vaizey, damian collins, nina schick, ads, politics, trump russia

Id: 9VS87Y3Z0Xg

Length: 83min 55sec (5035 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019