Kevin Roose

In the summer of 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And for weeks —

Archived Recording

I said indict, convict! Send that killer cop to jail!

Kevin Roose

— there were protests in Ferguson and across the country. And social media really became the primary organizing tool for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Archived Recording

Hands up! Don’t shoot! Hands up! Don’t shoot!

Kevin Roose

And back in 2014, if you remember, like, you would go on Twitter or Facebook and almost every post in your feed, or most of the posts in your feed, would be some sort of call to action.

Archived Recording

Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.

Kevin Roose

People posting the Black Lives Matter hashtag, people organizing support and supplies and financial donations for this emerging civil rights movement.

Archived Recording

Black Lives Matter.

Michael Barbaro

Right, and it feels like we’re in a very similar moment right now. So what do things look like on a Facebook, for instance, at this moment?

Kevin Roose

Well, they look a little different.

Archived Recording

All lives matter.

Michael Barbaro

It’s overwhelmingly posts that oppose Black Lives Matter.

Archived Recording

You got to explain this to people? All lives matter.

Kevin Roose

Calling it a racist movement.

Archived Recording

The Black Lives Matter foundation is apparently preparing for a quote, “war on police.”

Kevin Roose

Black Lives Matter is the Khan of the century and a sham.

Archived Recording 1

We gonna find out how many liberals have contributed. Some could have possibly orchestrated and manufactured a lot of stuff —

Archived Recording 2

A lot of stuff.

Archived Recording 3

— that we see today.

Kevin Roose

About how Black Lives Matter is not a social justice movement. It is something far darker and more dangerous.

Michael Barbaro

I mean, Kevin, how do you explain that? Because how did #BlackLivesMatter go from being a very powerful organizing tool that helped give birth to a movement, to something that’s now being used to undermine and even hijack it?

Kevin Roose

Well, I think it’s important to remember that a majority of Americans support Black Lives Matter. You know, the data we have suggests that Black Lives Matter is actually much more popular among Americans than it was in 2014. I think the thing that has changed is social media.

Michael Barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: Facebook and Twitter are publicly voicing support for Black Lives Matter and its mission in this moment. But my colleague, Kevin Roose, took a close look at what’s actually happened on their platforms.

It’s Monday, June 22.

Kevin, you just spent the past few months making a series about the rise of extremism on the internet — “Rabbit Hole.”

Kevin Roose

Right.

Michael Barbaro

But the last time you and I talked here on “The Daily” it was back in the fall. And the two biggest names in social media, Facebook and Twitter, were under fire for the huge amount of misinformation on their platforms. And Congress brought the heads of those companies — Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Jack Dorsey from Twitter — out to testify. And it felt like a pretty defining moment for them when it comes to this question of, what is the role of a social media company in our civic discourse? So what has happened since then?

Kevin Roose

Well, I think these social networks have continued to grapple with these questions of responsibility and free speech and what’s allowed and what’s not allowed on their platforms.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety and democracy.

Kevin Roose

And I think every social media company has realized that they dropped the ball in 2016.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

Kevin Roose

They allowed their platforms to be hijacked, not just by Russia, but by dishonest actors inside America, by partisan media outlets and clickbait factories.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.

Kevin Roose

So they’re basically in this grappling moment. Like, they realize that what happens in November is pretty existential for them.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

Overall, I would say that we’re going through a broader philosophical shift in how we —

Kevin Roose

They will be either seen as helping the democratic process and free and fair elections in the U.S. Or they will be seen as they were in 2016, as having, in some ways, undermined it.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

I started Facebook. I run it. And I’m responsible for what happens here.

Kevin Roose

And they have committed to getting it right, or more right in 2020.

Michael Barbaro

And do we see these companies start to take action eventually after this period of grappling?

Kevin Roose

Yeah, so the first hint that these companies were going to be somewhat different from one another, when it came to enforcing these new rules, happened last year —

Archived Recording

Twitter is going to stop accepting political ads on the platform. Jack Dorsey has just tweeted it out.

Kevin Roose

— when Twitter decided to ban all political advertisements.

Archived Recording

And he says while internet advertising is an incredibly powerful and very effective tool for commercial advertisers, the power brings significant risk to politics, where it can be used to influence votes that affect the lives of millions.

Kevin Roose

So if you’re a politician or a super PAC or a lobbying organization, you cannot take out a political ad on Twitter. They said these sort of targeted ads distort democracy. We don’t feel like we can responsibly administer them. And so they just said, we don’t want any part of it when it comes to political ads.

Michael Barbaro

And what about Facebook?

Kevin Roose

Facebook took a much different tack. They basically said, we will continue to allow political advertisements, campaigns, outside groups will be able to spend millions of dollars on political ads. And even more so, we will not fact check politicians’ ads. But outside of this political advertising decision, the policies that Facebook and Twitter have — with respect to what is and isn’t allowed on their platforms — they’re very similar, except when it comes to one particular user: President Trump.

Michael Barbaro

What do you mean?

Kevin Roose

So Twitter, in recent weeks, has become much more aggressive in confronting President Trump over some of his tweets that they say violate their rules.

Archived Recording

Twitter, for the very first time is fact checking the president.

Kevin Roose

The first one was this tweet about mail-in ballots that President Trump had that had some misleading and false information about voting.

Archived Recording

He claimed, without evidence, that voting by mail leads to fraud. Twitter says that the tweets are potentially misleading.

Kevin Roose

And that, Twitter said, was a clear violation of its policies around voting misinformation. So they put a sort of fact-checking label on those tweets, and Facebook did not.

Michael Barbaro

And, Kevin, this fact-checking label essentially says to anyone who looks at this, hey, there’s some issues here, and you shouldn’t take this at face value.

Kevin Roose

Right, so Twitter applies this fact-checking label to President Trump’s tweets. And then the very next day —

Archived Recording

We’ve been sharing with you President Donald Trump’s recent tweets about the unrest in Minnesota.

Kevin Roose

President Trump put out this statement, which he posted to Twitter and also to Facebook.

Archived Recording

Here’s a quote — “These thugs are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to governor Tim Walls and told him that the military is with him all the way.” — any difficulty, and we will assume control.

Kevin Roose

“But when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Archived Recording

“The shooting starts,” the words of the president.

Michael Barbaro

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” What does that mean?

Kevin Roose

It’s a phrase with a very long history. It was fused by a police chief in Miami in the late 1960s. And he was referring to violence against protesters. And so in this context, it was clear that the president was threatening violence against protesters.

Michael Barbaro

Which would make this a real test of Facebook and Twitter’s social media policy?

Kevin Roose

Right, both these networks have policies prohibiting violent incitement, posts that could create imminent harm to people. And this clearly fell under that category.

Michael Barbaro

And so what did the companies decide to do?

Kevin Roose

So Twitter decided to put basically a warning label on this tweet saying that it had violated their rules about glorifying violence, but that it would stay up because it was in the public’s interest to know about it. And they also made it so that you couldn’t retweet it.

Michael Barbaro

And how big of a deal is it that Twitter took those steps?

Kevin Roose

Well, I think practically, it didn’t do much. I mean, I think people still heard about this tweet. They still saw it. But I think, symbolically it was a very big deal. It was the first time that Twitter had ever applied this label to President Trump. And it was sort of a moment where they were saying like, this is a line that even President Trump cannot cross.

Michael Barbaro

And how does Facebook handle this very same post from President Trump?

Kevin Roose

So Facebook sort of waits awhile, and then they announce that they’re just going to leave it up. They’re not going to label it. They’re not going to take it down. This post will just stay up.

Michael Barbaro

And Kevin, why is the reaction by these two giant social media companies so completely different?

Kevin Roose

Well, part of it, I think, has to do with who’s running these companies.

Archived Recording

The founder of San Francisco-based Twitter is getting involved in the protest in Ferguson. Jack Dorsey is from St. Louis, just 12 miles from Ferguson.

Kevin Roose

Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, he’s been very vocal about his support for Black Lives Matter and for sort of Twitter’s role in helping these movements be heard.

Archived Recording

The billionaire was on the streets of Ferguson last week and has been marching, posting vines and tweets about all that’s going there.

Kevin Roose

But he also knows his users pretty well. I mean, Twitter is a place where a lot of activists and journalists hang out. It’s also got like a robust and vibrant black community on Twitter. And I think he just understands that many of his users are going to feel pretty good about this decision to take on the president.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’re going to catch all bad content in our system.

Kevin Roose

But Mark Zuckerberg on the other hand, he doesn’t want to be the referee.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

We don’t check what people say before they say it. And frankly, I don’t think society should want us to.

Kevin Roose

He doesn’t want to be an arbiter of civil conversation.

Archived Recording (Mark Zuckerberg)

Freedom means you don’t have to ask for permission first. And that by default, you can say what you want.

Kevin Roose

When it comes to politicians, he wants to do as little moderation as possible. And in some ways, that lines up better with what Facebook users want. They tend to be a little older, potentially more conservative.

Michael Barbaro

Right, so therefore, Mark Zuckerberg would be very reluctant to label the president’s tweet as factually inaccurate, or label it as potentially inciting violence, because that may very quickly alienate Facebook users.

Kevin Roose

Right, but I think an even bigger risk is that it could alienate President Trump and Republican lawmakers in Washington.

Archived Recording (Elizabeth Warren)

The giant tech companies right now are eating up little tiny businesses, startups, and competing unfairly.

Kevin Roose

In this election cycle, Facebook has become sort of a target for Democrats.

Archived Recording (Elizabeth Warren)

So what I’m saying is we got to break these guys apart. You want to run a platform? That’s fine. You don’t get to run a whole bunch of the businesses as well.

Kevin Roose

But Facebook has been criticized by both Democrats and Republicans who have said that they should be broken up or more heavily regulated.

Archived Recording (Josh Hawley)

So quit harvesting people’s data, sell off these companies that you’re using to create a monopoly, and do a third-party audit.

Kevin Roose

I think Facebook knows that Democrats in some ways have turned against them. And if Republicans also turn against them, it will be that much harder for them to stop new regulation for them to avoid being broken up. And I think that it’s in their interest to keep President Trump and his allies happy.

Michael Barbaro

That’s really interesting, because I feel like the dominant conservative view — at least as I understand it and have read about it — is that Facebook has not been hospitable to conservatives, that it has taken steps to censor them or limit what they say. And from what you’re describing, Facebook very much needs conservatives and is showing a lot of restraint when it comes to conservatives.

Kevin Roose

Yeah, I mean, their outreach to Republicans is, in some ways, an attempt to sort of correct this impression that conservatives have, that they are biased against the right, which is not reflected in any of the data. And I’ve actually been looking at this pretty regularly for the past few weeks. There’s this tool called CrowdTangle that you can basically use to pull up the most popular and talked about Facebook posts from across all of Facebook.

So yeah, just looking at the most engaged posts from the last 24 hours on Facebook, the first one is from Trump. It’s the video of his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Number two, also by Trump, another picture from his rally. And then you’ve got Franklin Graham, this right-wing evangelist and activist taking issue with Dr. Fauci.

You’ve got Hugh Jackman wishing his dad a happy father’s day. That one’s not political. And you’ve got Terrence Williams, who’s a pro-Trump activist. Breitbart has a video of Trump’s rally. The vast majority of these top 10 stories are usually from right-wing media outlets and right-wing politicians.

Michael Barbaro

Is there anything that might be characterized as Democratic, liberal or progressive in that list of the top 10 or so?

Kevin Roose

Almost every day there are one or two posts in the top 10 from more liberal outlets or politicians. But it is predominated by Fox News, by Breitbart, by right-wing news outlets and by President Trump himself.

Michael Barbaro

So it looks like what you just went through makes clear that Facebook’s users, and maybe its most active users are conservatives, right? It’s not a question of an algorithm that puts those things at the top. It’s what’s being most discussed, engaged, commented on.

Kevin Roose

Yeah, there’s clearly a large audience for conservative media, conservative posts, conservative activism on Facebook.

Michael Barbaro

We’ll be right back.

Kevin, what you’re describing is a very fascinating dynamic. Facebook fears a backlash from conservatives. But in some ways, it doesn’t need to fear a backlash from conservatives, because it has made itself a very hospitable place for conservatives. But that fear means it has no incentive to do anything to crack down on conservative viewpoints, no matter how extreme or factually inaccurate.

Kevin Roose

In some ways that’s right. Except there’s one complicating factor, which is that Facebook own employees are increasingly speaking out.

Archived Recording

We are following a developing story out of Facebook. Employees staging a virtual walkout today in protest of the company’s policies toward some of President Trump’s posts. Let’s get to Julie —

Kevin Roose

There was a virtual walkout recently where a bunch of employees sort of protested these decisions by sort of logging off for the day.

Archived Recording

Meantime, you’ve got Facebook employees resigning today, publicly resigning because of this decision.

Kevin Roose

There have even been employees who have resigned over Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions to essentially let Trump get away with things that other users wouldn’t be able to. Facebook’s employees, you know, many of them — they live in Silicon Valley. They tend to be more liberal. They don’t like the idea that the product that they spend their days and nights building is being used to put out propaganda and misinformation.

Archived Recording

Employees like Andrew Crow, head of design for Facebook’s portal product, have taken to Twitter, writing comments such as, quote, “Giving a platform to incite violence and spread disinformation is unacceptable.”

Kevin Roose

And they have started vocally objecting to Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions.

Archived Recording

While Jason Toff, identified as director of product management wrote, quote, “I work at Facebook, and I am not proud of how we’re showing up.”

Kevin Roose

And that’s a real pressure, because Silicon Valley is a very interesting place in that the employees of these companies wield a ton of power. It’s a very competitive labor market. And if you’re Facebook, you can’t afford to have your employees be walking out and resigning. It’s not right for your business long-term.

Michael Barbaro

Kevin, from everything you’ve just said, Twitter is being proactive here. Facebook, much less so. But I just want to make sure that we’re not oversimplifying this. Because yes, we know Twitter has chosen to label certain tweets, at least by the president, as violating their terms, fact-check them. We know that they have taken a pass on political ads, and that Facebook has not done any of those. But in reality, is what Twitter is doing meaningfully different and better than what Facebook is doing?

Kevin Roose

I mean, Twitter still has a lot of work to do to ensure that people are not threatening and harassing and using hate speech against each other. But the thing that I think is really starting to differentiate these companies from one another is how they’re responding to this moment, you know, this historic movement for civil rights, this historic election where in some ways, you know, a lot of people feel like that the future of, not just the next four years, but of democracy is on the line. And I think these companies are understanding that they will be judged by history, in some ways, for the decisions that they make right now.

Michael Barbaro

And what could they be doing that neither of them are doing?

Kevin Roose

Well, there’s plenty of things that they could do to kind of take down the temperature of the overall conversation on their platforms. They could change the way that their systems rank information. So instead of showing you the stuff that is most engaging, they could more heavily curate the information that comes onto people’s feeds.

They could put a cap on like how viral posts can go to sort of keep bad actors from hijacking these conversations and undermining these movements. There’s a lot that they could tweak about the basic structures of their platforms. But that could cut pretty deeply into their business models.

And ultimately, like, I think the bigger thing that they’re realizing is that they have to pick a side. There is no such thing as a neutral platform. And all these decisions that they make about how their tools are designed, how they’re used, what policies they have, they are all pushing in one direction or the other. And in this moment, this national moment of reckoning, of activism, of people speaking out against injustice, they have to decide whether that’s something that they want to support or whether they want to stand on the sidelines.

Michael Barbaro

Right, because if you don’t pick a side as a social media platform, then a side will be picked by your users.

Kevin Roose

Exactly, I mean I think a pretty vivid illustration of this happened the other day, when Mark Zuckerberg came out with this long, heartfelt Facebook post about how he supported Black Lives Matter, how Facebook was going to donate millions of dollars to racial justice causes, how he stood with Facebook’s black employees and with the movement for racial justice. And that same day —

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

Hello, Facebook family —

Kevin Roose

— on Facebook —

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

— I have decided to do this video —

Kevin Roose

— the post that was going the most viral —

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

— it has been weighing very heavily on my heart —

Kevin Roose

— was this video by this conservative activist Candace Owens —

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

So in my opinion, George Floyd was a criminal. He was a criminal. And just because he was a criminal doesn’t mean he deserved to die at the knee of a police officer. But it does mean that I am not going to play a part of the broken black culture that always wants to martyr criminals.

Kevin Roose

— who made an entire video essentially saying that Black Lives Matter was a liberal hoax.

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

And there’s certainly no excuse to accept the democrat narrative, OK, that black people are being disproportionately hunted down by police officers because of the color of their skin.

Kevin Roose

That George Floyd was a horrible person, that his death should not be mourned as a tragedy, and essentially saying that this whole movement is based on a false premise.

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

Police brutality, racially-motivated police brutality is a myth.

Kevin Roose

That there is no bias in policing in America.

Archived Recording (Candace Owens)

I have — you know, I have no apologies here to make. George Floyd is not my martyr. He can be yours. And that’s all I have to say to black America.

Kevin Roose

So Mark Zuckerberg is out there saying I believe in Black Lives Matter. I want to support this movement. And on his platform, the thing that he built, the thing that he oversees and controls every day, a very different message was winning.

Michael Barbaro

Kevin, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Kevin Roose

Thank you for having me.

Michael Barbaro

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

The Times reports that over the past week, the number of new daily infections of the coronavirus has hit a record high in 12 states, most in the Southwest and Midwest, but that the death rate is falling dramatically. Overall, fatalities from the virus have dropped 42 percent over the past two weeks, in part it is believed, because the virus is infecting younger and healthier Americans.

And President Trump has fired the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has overseen multiple investigations into conduct by the president, the president’s lawyers, and the president’s allies. The U.S. attorney, Geoffrey Berman, initially rejected a recommendation from the attorney General, Bill Barr to resign, prompting Barr to announce his resignation and for Berman to publicly deny that he was resigning. Berman eventually agreed to step aside after learning that one of his deputies would fill his role for the foreseeable future.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Via The New York Times.